Strategies

Use social media

It's tough enough to cover a complicated topic like the economy on the air. How can you do it justice in the even shorter form of social media?

Laura Conway, editor of NPR’s Planet Money, says her approach on the program's blog, Twitter feed and Facebook page is to keep it simple. "We don’t cover everything and we try to make a point with what we do cover," Conway said in a recent briefing for SABEW members.

Her guiding philosophy, Conway says, is to leave room for readers to weigh in. " We let the readers paint the fence," she says, in a nod to Tom Sawyer’s philosophy. "Listeners literally illustrate our blog [with comments] and they also break news for us."

Blog entries tend to run about 700 words, with a news lead, a quote, some links, and as Conway puts it, "some kind of point." For example, this short post about the FDIC "asking banks to bail out the government" ends with this: "True, the FDIC is a government agency, but it always uses bank money to make depositors whole when a bank goes under."

Conway and the rest of the Planet Money staff write between four and seven blog posts daily. She says there's no magic number to make a news blog viable; what's most important is posting regularly, on a predictable schedule.

They're active on Twitter, too, with more than 23,000 followers. Conway's posts, in particular, reflect her personality, and that's by design. "If you talk like a human, people will send their stories." Here's an example:

Planet Money uses social media quite a lot for crowdsourcing stories, Conway says. An "open call" will get several hundred responses, so it takes time to sift through them for something useful, but she believes it's worth the effort.