Hi Beth! Thanks again for your time! Firstly, could you tell me about your role as the Social Media Lead for ABC Sport Brisbane? What does your day-to-day look like?
I’ve recently changed roles. After two years with ABC Sport, I’m a social media lead in ABC’s central Social Media Strategy team. Those two roles are a bit of a contrast when it comes to day-to-day.
My time in Sport was a balance of day-to-day news and longer-term planning. Each day would start with editorial meetings to discuss our plan for our channels. Then we would re-assess during the day, as needed. My team and I would collaborate with teams across the ABC to ensure any strong sport stories were distributed as widely as possible. The other key part of my role was planning for and resourcing our live sport coverage with the ABC Sport radio team—mainly for our key focuses of Test cricket, AFL and NRL—and trying to innovate with our coverage, and create bespoke content for social.
Now I’m in a more project-based role that is looking at social media across the ABC (with no more weekend work!), so I’m not focused on the daily news agenda as much. Our team looks after the pan-ABC approach to social media, working a lot with different social teams across the business, and speaking to the platforms themselves. So, I spend a lot of my time looking at data and trends both across the ABC’s social accounts and the broader trends in the ever-changing social media space for reports, and helping individual teams where required.
News seems to rely more and more on social media platforms and channels. How do we communicate often complex information through the somewhat limited spatial and temporal space of social media?
At the core of any content on social media, you’ve got to ask the question: What’s the story we want to tell with this? If you have a clear goal for your content, usually the ‘how’ follows. It’s also about respecting each social media channel as its own medium, rather than just a reproduction factory. Just because you only have 20 carousel slides or a 90-second video within which to tell a story, that doesn’t mean it has less value. News organisations have been distilling complex stories into copy and vision for decades. Social media is just another outlet for that.
How do you anticipate social platforms’ role to change within the news industry? And particularly with the advent of AI, what are some of the challenges you’ve faced in operating in this medium?
I think it’s a bit fraught to predict the future. The platforms and their relationship with news feels like it’s changing all the time. What I think we can be pretty sure of, though, is that social media will continue to play a pivotal role in the distribution of news. Probably, with the continued growth of vertical video, the relationship that audiences form with certain talent and faces will become more critical to that.
That probably follows into the potential complications of AI. AI ultimately makes it more complicated for the individual social media user to discern what’s real and what’s not. The key challenge for publishers is trying to figure out where AI is helpful and where it could be problematic, as the technology continues to evolve. Ultimately for the audience, the proposition comes down to trust. If your audience trusts you, they know they can turn to your accounts for verification and correct information. In this world, that is more complicated to achieve than writing down in an interview, but establishing that trust with your audience is critical.
Could you also tell me about the previous roles you’ve had within the media and how that has helped in your current position? Have you always wanted a career in journalism?
I’ve worked in a whole bunch of different roles across my career but being in a digital-first space has been the constant, and I think that (and being a very online person) has probably helped me find myself into my current role.
As a teenager I was obsessed with Aussie Rules football and I set my sights on becoming a sports journalist. I used to say my dream was to be paid to go to the MCG and write about sport, which is something I’ve been incredibly lucky to be able to do. I’d never really considered any other type of journalism, except as a stepping stone. But once I got into the mainstream industry, I found that it wasn’t just sports writing that I enjoyed. While I loved telling people’s stories as a reporter, I really love the adrenaline rush of working in breaking news but also learning how to understand an audience and how to tell stories to best serve that audience.
I think that led to a natural move into social media. There aren’t many industries where audience feedback is as swift as it is on socials, and I think trying to understand audiences and changing that space has provided a new challenge and fascination for me.
I also want to ask about women media professionals within sports media/reportage. How has this space within the industry changed? How has the male-centredness of sports media coverage affected how women’s sports have/have not been represented?
I have been fortunate in my time in sport as a woman. I always felt supported by my colleagues, bosses and athletes I’ve interviewed. I’ve also been so lucky to meet and work with some incredible female reporters and women in sport, who truly inspired me with their work, and embraced me as a peer.
When I started my full-time career, we were still years away from even a women’s Aussie rules exhibition game, Australia’s women’s Sevens rugby team had barely gone full-time, and Ellyse Perry was still juggling her cricket and football careers. I couldn’t have imagined how far women’s sport, and media coverage, would come in even a decade. Even today, a lot of women’s sports still suffer compared to men’s, due to resourcing. Many media organisations have limited funds for sending reporters to events, which often means covering the women remotely.
I think social media has forced some pressure on mainstream organisations in this respect. There are some great organisations successfully platforming women’s sport and female athletes and that’s forced the traditional media to take notice.
The male-centric view is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy rooted in audience assumptions. Editors commission what they think audiences will read, so more of certain stories are produced and more people read them, and so it goes. There are qualitative decisions when it comes to actively championing women’s sports, which I think most mainstream outlets do consider, but ultimately audiences have the greatest power.
The more people that read about women’s sport, the more those stories will be prominently featured. In my time at ABC Sport, we were always very conscious of promoting female athletes and we saw in the recent Paris Olympics and Paralympics that female athletes provided our strongest content in terms of engagement. You can’t argue with data.
The flipside of this is that sporting organisations need to step up in their treatment of leagues as well. If you want the media to report on your sport as an elite, professional sport, you need to treat your competitions with that same level of respect.
What are some of the stories that you want to feature more of? And what are some misconceptions about the sports media industry?
I think we can always do better when it comes to diverse storytelling and acknowledging our own blind spots in that space.
Something I think a lot of people aren’t prepared for when they start working in sports media—it is such an amazing job—is you will miss out on other parts of your life, just by the nature of the hours. I have had some once-in-a-lifetime experiences that I will treasure but almost all of those have come with a little bit of sacrifice, whether it’s working every weekend during winter or spending extended periods away from home. You can find balance, but I think it’s important to go in with your eyes open about that.
The other misconception, in my experience, is that it is a super cliquey field. Even as a fairly anxious, rookie journo, I always felt welcome, especially in rugby.
Finally, what do you look for in content pitching? How does a pitch to a social media medium differ from other forms of journalism/media?
Two key things: Think about the visuals and think about the platform. A powerful story is a powerful story but social content really has to have the visual element front of mind – that doesn’t necessarily mean photos/videos per se, but if you can’t visualise a way to tell the story then it probably won’t have much impact on social. Secondly, give respect to the platform. Social media should not be an afterthought in presenting stories – the audience on social platforms represents a huge portion of the population and they need to be treated with respect. So when pitching a story for social, think about how and why it will work for that platform in the same way you would for other platforms.
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