Why Gruppo Espresso built a publishing 'playground'

Video is important at La Repubblica. The jewel in the crown of Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, an Italian media conglomerate, the news organisation has more than 400 journalists, a television channel, a regional network and a growing range of sister titles.

But at the start of October a new site launched without any fanfare, staffed by La Repubblica's visual desk, to highlight the most 'viral' videos and stories from around the web.

"First of all we noticed that there is space for an editorial project devoted to virality," explains Alessio Balbi, the publisher's head of audience development and product development in the digital division.
 
"Here at Gruppo Espresso, across our brands, we noticed in many cases that there is an audience that comes to our websites from parts that we didn't have until a few months ago."

Now nearing the end of its second month, 3nz.it (pronounced 'trends') has already received 1.8 million unique browsers for November, 90 per cent of which are from social and 50 per cent from mobile.
Impressive stats for a small project launched by a team responsible for multimedia content across the publisher as a whole, but the main reason for launching the site, one more relevant to the group's interests, is as a "playground", said Balbi, "to experiment – almost in vitro, in a small scale – models and ideas that could be difficult to explore in our established brands.

"It is a very complex scenario because when you're a leading publisher with a lot of successful websites you are somehow forced to focus on immediate results," he added.

"For example, you have to focus every day on your performance in terms of page impressions and the obsession to not lose [pace] with your competitors. And that's good obviously, but they deny you that degree of freedom that you need to experiment and also to make mistakes."



Screenshot from 3nz.it

The most recent addition is a WhatsApp service, popular among news organisations this year as a free and direct mobile distribution service.

Instead of diving headfirst and blindfolded into a new way of reaching readers with its main brands, Gruppo Espresso can test out the "workflow, the user experience, the registration process," at 3nz, "and we can collect data on metrics such as click through rate".

Other experiments include "the internal development of tools to measure real-time performances," Balbi continued, "not only in terms of traditional metrics such as page impressions but also in terms of audience engagement."

And he sees understanding audience habits and preferences on different social networks as vital here.

But why the need to experiment at all?

"We are trying to understand how much it could be important to focus on audience engagement and and how audience engagement is fundamental to audience development," he said, "particularly in the social environment.

"You can see it is not so important to have an immediate result in terms of unique page impressions or browsers, but it is important to have a community around an engaged audience that can bring a result in terms of traditional metrics."

Although Balbi did not identify it as such, there are parallels with Trinity Mirror's UsVsTh3m, a site launched last May for 'topical, funny stuff' that has seen experiments and lessons passed back to other publications.

It is time for us to learn a new language – the language of social networksAlessio Balbi, Gruppo Espresso

And as was with the thinking that launched UsVsTh3m, Balbi recognises the need for publishers to approach the social web differently.

"The same, identical content can achieve a completely different performance if you write the right title for the right platform or upload the right image," he said.

"And this is true in particular in the social media environment, I think, because what people see when they scroll their Facebook feed is an image and a title.

"So you have to invest a large amount of time and curation to create the right title and to assign the right image."

This is not necessarily news for internet publishers and new media start-ups though. The founders of BuzzFeed have built a digital behemoth on the habits of social-media savvy twenty-somethings, championing a new funding model – native advertising – along with sites like Gawker and The Huffington Post in the process.

Balbi sees "great potential" in native ads and sponsored content, an area UsVsTh3m has also dabbled in, and said two of the most shared stories had  been created by companies for that very purpose.

The point though, is in speaking the language of social media, he said, a practice that prescribes a shift in how publishers and journalists understand and produce their work, similar to previous changes in publishing online and still all too lacking in some areas.

All the lessons can and somehow will feedback into our other publicationsAlessio Balbi, Gruppo Espresso

"We had to re-learn from scratch to write titles for search engines," continues Balbi. "So now, again, it is time for us to learn a new language – the language of social networks.

"The challenge is to do this without forgetting what we learned so far and without losing our focus on our main mission. That is for La Reppublica to provide the best real-time news and the best news analysis. So [we need] to intersect these [new] aspects with the core of our work, which is obviously always journalism."

Trinity Mirror's Mirror.co.uk is now the 10th biggest publisher on Facebook, according to recent figures from Newswhip, and digital director Malcolm Coles has previously attributed the publisher's growth in social media audience to lessons from his experimental sites.

Balbi hopes to achieve the same, but in the way other news organisations – the BBC with NewsLabs, The Times with its digital development team – continue to test the digital water themselves.

"All the lessons can and somehow will feedback into our other publications," he said. "The fact is when you are launching on a website for virality, speaking a certain language can be easier.

"Now our challenge will be to succeed in exporting these lessons to a bunch of brands covering completely different areas."

• The next news:rewired digital journalism conference will feature a session on experimenting in the newsroom, including Malcolm Coles discussing lessons learned at Trinity Mirror.

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