Why LinkedIn is creating editorial content

Peter Kafka of Recode spoke with Jessi Hempel of LinkedIn about why the social media site is creating more original editorial content.

Here is an excerpt of what Hempel said:

LinkedIn is working on building up anything that connects people to opportunity. And to do that better, what it needs is for the people who are coming to the service to spend more time getting things they need from the service. Now, both of those things are important. Spend more time on the service, yes, but specifically, spend more time getting things they need from the service.

LinkedIn has always believed, and I think it is because, going back to the CEO, Jeff Weiner, I mean, I first met him in 2008 when he still at Yahoo, before he’d even come to LinkedIn. He’s always really understood content and understood news in particular and believed in it.

I think that LinkedIn believed that news has the ability to make professionals smarter and, more important, to get them talking to each other across boundaries and borders around who you know and who you don’t, around things that matter to them in their professional lives.

So that was the mandate. That is part of what I’m doing there too, Peter. I mean, my work hopefully helps the people on LinkedIn get smarter about their work. I don’t think that I probably need to tell you, as somebody who works in media, that user-generated content is great, but it is not as great as carefully crafted content by somebody who has studied the field for, in my case, 17 years.

To read the entire transcript, go here.