Kenny Yum is Managing Editor of The Huffington Post Canada and AOL Canada, which includes the portal AOL.ca and such sites as Spinner.ca, Autoblog Canada and Moviefone. A digital native, Kenny was previously Managing Editor, Digital, for The National Post, an in-depth producer at the CBC and spent eight years at The Globe and Mail, where he helped launch the site in June, 2000. He returned to The Globe in 2009 to be editor of globeandmail.com.
This event starts at 1 p.m. in the TUDOR ROOM on Mezzanine level.
I worked with Kenny the Post, such a talented editor
In the early days of globeandmail.com, the online crew were stuck deep in the belly of the building in a room called The Bubble #caj2012
social media sites emerge out of nowhere to become the only one we use.
Yum: HuffPo is a disruptor in the mediasphere because they package content in a reader-friendly format #caj2012
HuffPo Canada has been running for a year is it the future of journalism?
Yum: How do you run a medium that needs to be updated constantly? time is key.
33 million people in Canada. No news site readership even comes close to that number. What's the deal? #caj2012
Yum: 32 million Canadians are frequent online users. There's still just a fraction being reached by online news.
Yum: Our audience wants the news but they also want everything they're looking for on one site. They also want a social experience.
HuffPo tries to be many things to readers: hard news, politics, dedicated panda coverage - @yumke #caj2012
Yum: Our panda coverage is renowned. But having pandas and puppies along with robocalls and election results puts everything a reader wants on one page. A solid news story with some fun stuff.
HuffPo secret sauce: lists. @yumke even saw a groom give his vows in a top 10 list. #caj2012
Yum: 9 things we do well. First is agregate. Others do it, we do it well. My speech now is an aggregation, as are the people tweeting this talk. But we curate: sift through the noise and find what the story is. We directly link to our competitors. I've seen many stories written that don't reference the source. E.g., robocalls: No one can aggregate that depth of reporting. So we linked to source at start.
huffPo relies on unpaid niche bloggers who are experts in various fields - huge traffic drivers #caj2012
Yum: (counting 9 things backwards) #8 is blogs. Charlie Angus' post on Attawapiskat got lots of social media coverage before mainstream picked it up.
atttawapiskat's state of emergency was ignored by legacy media until a HuffPo Canada's story got enormous feedback #caj2012
Yum: #7 social is in our DNA. Social media everywhere on site, polls, top 10 stories, comments. We want our readers to engage and they love it. 35% of our readers are influencers in their network.
We talk to our readers, which drives engagement (a word @yumke despises) #caj2012
huffPo canada handcrafts each tweet - more than 16,000 of them in their first year #caj2012
Through tweeting pictures, HuffPo started a virtual snowball fight, with people tweeting back. What other news org does that? We engage with our readers.
Yum: We also post pics on Facebook. That gets no ad revenus, but people see it, share it, create engagement with readers. People "liked" us for the pics and started clicking on the links we posted.
Interesting, huffPo's strategy to cover a lot of topics contradicts morning session journos who said don't try to be all things to all people #caj2012
Yum: #6 is we cover a lot of topics. (Screen shows all top pages, including interests, identities, etc.) It's unlike a newspaper section; people do want this content. Plus it's SEO-ready.
The National gets a new theme song every decade. The globe does a redesign every 5 years. huffPo is constantly changing #caj2012
Yum: #5 We iterate. We post on different media, provoke discussion and track which stories do well. We're more than getting the daily edition out. We're checking that it gets on newsstands.
Yum: #4 is tone and personality. (Shows all-caps, colourful, screaming headlines.) We provoke an emotion in readers. We have fun and post things you want to click on.
Yum: #3 investment in original reporting. We decided mainstream was where we wanted to be. Let's write for people and not shareholders. (Shows "Mind The Gap," a splash page on income economy.) Site is still live, whereas NNA-winning articles/series last a week and that's it.
Yum: We invest in CP to have content from people already in the important scrums in Ottawa, whereas we send our people where people aren't.
Kenny Yum is Managing Editor of The Huffington Post Canada and AOL Canada, which includes the portal AOL.ca and such sites as Spinner.ca, Autoblog Canada and Moviefone. A digital native, Kenny was previously Managing Editor, Digital, for The National Post, an in-depth producer at the CBC and spent eight years at The Globe and Mail, where he helped launch the site in June, 2000. He returned to The Globe in 2009 to be editor of globeandmail.com.
