Dan Roth, editor-in-chief, LinkedIn, envisions the company as the perfect “utility” for professionals. To achieve this, Roth has hired a team of journalists and empowered them with tools necessary to discover original stories and to make those stories available to the right audience.
“LinkedIn should help you be better at what you do or what you want to do. When you come to LinkedIn, you’re coming with a purpose. It’s not just to waste time or to check in on family,” Roth told CNN Business. “They’re coming here to get something done and everything we do is geared around making sure people are more effective at getting whatever it is they want done, done.”
LinkedIn now has editors in the U.S., Brazil, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Australia, India, Japan, China and Singapore. About 20 editors are based in the US, including its San Francisco office and in New York City.
A metric that tracks how often users are coming to LinkedIn in 30-minute intervals is up about 27 percent from 2018. All this traffic is good for LinkedIn.
Previously, Roth had been working at Fortune. “At Fortune, we were always trying to get the right people to read our stories. You were waving your hand all the time, ‘Hey professionals, look over here. We got the stories.’ I thought if we could design something on LinkedIn where we knew who the people were, we could get them the right headlines,” Roth said.
“I knew I wanted to write for tech professionals and people who cared deeply about the evolution of technology, but I’d get very little information beyond the number of clicks a story got. I’d look to Twitter to see who was talking about it. That was about it,” Jessi Hempel, senior editor, LinkedIn said. “LinkedIn solved that. I could tell much more about my audience based on likes and comments and could talk directly with those reading my stories.”
Roth employs an editorial strategy he calls the three Cs. “Create” involves the development of original content, “Curate” means analyzing the two million posts on LinkedIn every day to see if there are any interesting stories, and, “Cultivate” is when LinkedIn’s editors reach out to users they think could comment about a specific news topic.
“Adopting a tech mindset means accepting that the product is going to change all the time, and, even more, helping to push that change,” Andrew Seaman, news editor, LinkedIn said. “We know that the way our members consume information and news will naturally change overtime. So, we expect our method of delivery to change — sometimes rapidly — while maintaining our mission.”
Also, LinkedIn’s team has a daily editorial meeting like other newsrooms.
“All day long we’re thinking about how we can get people talking,” Roth said. “We used to pick up the phone and ask people, ‘Can you talk?’ Now we reach out to 10,000 people at a time and ask that.”
Further, LinkedIn users also respond to the more than 150 trending news items LinkedIn editors curate every day. “Editors are writing those [headlines]. It’s not a bunch of unknown stories, it’s hand-curated,” said Sneha Keshwani, LinkedIn’s senior product manager of news. “The recency [stamp] shows this is living, breathing, constantly updating.”
LinkedIn is far from the only destination for news on a tech platform while being unique in its focus on news for professionals.
“LinkedIn only thrives if we keep these professional guardrails on what we do,” Roth said. “We have to get the right business and professional related news and information to the right people. If we try to do everything, we don’t serve the mission.”
