Why LinkedIn wants to produce its own journalism

Cameron Clarke of The Drum reports about how LinkedIn wants to produce more original content for its business-oriented readers.

Clarke writes, “The Microsoft-owned company, which started life as a social network for professionals 15 years ago, has been metamorphosing into an increasingly sophisticated publishing platform and is today home to a 50-strong and growing team of professional journalists spread across five continents.

“Alumni of distinguished publishers such as Reuters, The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal, it is their job to sprinkle editorial credibility on top of the mountains of user-generated content – of varying degrees of quality – posted into LinkedIn news feeds every day by legions of ‘thought leaders’.

“LinkedIn’s original content includes the Daily Rundown digest of business news sent direct to users each morning, video interviews with corporate heavyweights produced in studios in New York and Bangalore and a podcast examining people’s working lives dubbed Work in Progress. Most interesting, though, are the news stories the editorial team are beginning to mine from LinkedIn’s ‘Economic Graph’, its dataset of 560 million members, 50,000 skills, 20m companies, 15m open jobs and 60,000 schools.

“‘We’re doing more and more of our own journalism,’ says director and senior managing editor Isabelle Roughol. ‘One of the sweet spots for our original reporting is illuminating trends in the economy thanks to the Economic Graph and the data we have at LinkedIn.'”

Read more here.