The strategy behind LinkedIn News and its content

Freddy Mayhew of Press Gazette interviewed LinkedIn News editor in chief Daniel Roth about its strategy.

Mayhew writes, “Roth, a seasoned business journalist who worked at Forbes, Wired and spent several years at Fortune Magazine before joining LinkedIn, is currently editor-in-chief and vice president of LinkedIn News.

“Explaining LinkedIn News’ model, he said: ‘The way I think about it is in my past life, when I would do big stories, I would do 100 interviews for an article and I would quote three people in the end.

“‘We want to flip that around – we want to go and ask 100 people to talk and get 100 answers on the platform and then we can take the best of those and put them into a package and put it in front of people to get them talking more.”

Roth added: ‘The [role of the] LinkedIn news team is to get people talking, but we are not a breaking news site, we are not doing big, investigative stories.

“‘We are here to give people this information that will help them navigate the professional world and share their own unique perspectives on it, but what starts those conversations can either come from us doing original content, but 90-95% of the time it’s going to come from publishers. And that’s great, that’s exactly how it should work.'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.