Legacy Media Companies Need a New Social Playbook
Plus five post format ideas, how brands reacted to election results, and more.
A few days after the election I got an email from a subscriber who works in social for a news organization. They said, “I feel so crazy working in legacy media and regularly being told to just run the old playbook and waste resources trying to translate stories that no one will read anyway. We need to stop engaging with social media like it's 2016. We need to be using social for awareness, not traffic.”
When I worked at a large media company, there was an obsession with using social media to drive traffic back to the site. Social media was and, according to colleagues who are still working in media, is still thought of as a “distribution channel.” Post links. Share photos with headline text. Drive people to the website. Repeat. The “best practices” from corporate newsroom teams were to, I kid you not, schedule at least 40 tweets a day that were just link posts. That was almost five years ago, yet when I look at media organizations today, I see that same strategy being implemented. It isn’t working.
It’s time for legacy media to build a new social media playbook.
Social media platforms don’t want you to click out to read more somewhere else. We know that adding links significantly lowers the reach of a post. When NPR left Twitter altogether almost a year ago they reported doing so had a “minor impact on their referral traffic” and that Twitter had only made up a mere 2% of all of their site traffic to begin with. So why is it that when I scroll any legacy media’s Twitter account, is it littered with links? Almost every single one of the New York Times’ posts on Twitter includes a link. These posts often get around 70 likes, on an account with over 15 million followers—and that is for one of the better performing social presences of major newsrooms. (Twitter did throttle links to the New York Times on the platform in 2023 and it’s unclear if their posts are still being targeted.)
It’s not an accident that accounts that I don’t even follow like @Phil_Lewis_, @Acyn, @jamellebouie, @underthedesknews, and @PopCrave show up on my timeline and For You pages more than the news organizations I do follow. These accounts prioritize on-platform reach over driving site traffic—creating posts with enough information for people to react to and retweet. They also are individuals, with personalities and opinions, allowing for more of themselves to come through in their posts. I see the reporters themselves breaking down their stories in more engaging ways than the organizations that publish them—building threads, screenshotting paragraphs from their articles, and linking after the initial post.
What if legacy news organizations gave their social teams the resources to use social media sites that barely drive traffic to do something other than drive traffic?
I asked the subscriber who emailed me their frustrations to expand more on what specifically wasn’t working within social at their news organization. They said, “I think there is a desire to blanket social media feeds with links and headline cards because it’s a simple way to showcase the written product on the sites. This is wrong. Social media should be viewed as another product of the media company. We need to create closed-loop experiences that satisfy and fulfill the viewer. A fun blog under 800 words? Find a creative way to put the entire thing on social for free. Let them hit the paywall with a feature. The platforms do not want you leaving, so if we can choose to use resources to create meaningful experiences on them that keep users on the platform engaged with our own content, that will create brand awareness and loyalty that will ultimately drive subscriptions and traffic. The links do not add up.”
At a very small scale, I have tested this with my own “media company”—this newsletter. I initially tried promoting it with links across Twitter and LinkedIn. It got embarrassingly low engagement and zero subscription conversions. So I changed my strategy. In a Twitter thread where I broke down a newsletter about Reformation's influencer strategy I didn’t include any links, instead I delivered the insights where people were already scrolling. The thread took off and led to one of my highest newsletter subscriber days ever at the time. People sought me out. Awareness led to conversion. As the saying goes, "fish where the fish are."
Still, there are some legacy media organizations that have adopted more social-first approaches with success.
Building a TikTok presence at The Washington Post is what allowed Dave Jorgenson to call out Jeff Bezos, the owner of the paper, for stopping the paper from endorsing a presidential candidate in a sharp, clever way. I don’t know how they would have done that if they had not created their trusted “multiverse” that operates in effect as its own editorial arm.
I think about the 404 by L.A. Times team who was doing an amazing job translating articles to TikTok, before most of their headcount was cut. Marina Watanabe, who was laid off from the team, tweeted “It’s so funny because the 404 team has been successful by every metric… But the business side continually dropped the ball and refused to do the work to make us profitable… We had the difficult task of making an old ass newspaper accessible to younger generations getting their news from influencers—and we did that.”
When Rolling Stone announced Donald Trump won the presidency, they posted twice: one with flat newsy copy and one with intense voicey copy. The newsy copy tweet got 46 likes while the voicey copy tweet got 242K likes.
The Cut’s content and voice on Instagram feels singular. They understand what will make people share a post.
NPR spun out their podcast Planet Money into its own social accounts with a completely distinct visual and editing style. It makes me wonder why The Daily or The Run-Up don’t have their own TikTok or Instagram accounts? I just got served a video from The Daily via the NY Times TikTok account for the first time ever. Do they not usually record video? Why not? Someone commented, “Okay but on a side note how is this the way I find out what Michael barbaro looks like after years of listening to him 💀”.
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Some new media companies, without the baggage of a printed magazine or newspaper, have also done a good job showing up online in new ways. Puck has built a successful media organization through distinct personalities and conversational email newsletters. I never thought I’d care to read frequent dispatches about the fashion or entertainment worlds but I love hearing from Lauren Sherman and Matthew Belloni. Now I listen to both of their podcasts too. People trust people. Meanwhile, Morning Brew breaks down hard-to-understand finance reporting into clear, entertaining threads and videos should be studied by all media.
I want to acknowledge that the majority of these suggestions are for the leadership at legacy media companies, not the hardworking social teams who are doing the best with what they’ve got. There’s a lot of red tape, both editorially and legally, and in order for these organizations to show up on social in an effective way will require a large shift in thinking around the economics of getting your stories in front of new audiences.
What I do know is that social media can no longer just be thought of as “distribution.” The news needs to happen natively on these platforms, where more and more young people are going for their news already. After all, millions of people watched election night live not on cable television but on Hasan Piker’s Twitch stream or with other livestream content creators. Clipping a podcast or breaking down a full story on a social platform doesn’t devalue journalistic work or cheapen a media company’s brand—it simply meets people where they are. You’re fishing where the fish are. In the New Yorker, Kyle Chayka referred to this as the “creator-ification of journalism” within legacy institutions. I view it as the future of social media relevance for any legacy institution that wants to survive.
When I interviewed The Post’s Dave Jorgenson earlier this year, I asked him about why it’s imperative that legacy media adopt a more social-first approach. This is what he told me:
“People are on TikTok, YouTube, Reels, and all kinds of places. They aren’t necessarily looking for a paper subscription, so why not grow trust with them on platforms where they’re already active?”
There’s a lot of trust to build—and perhaps never a more important time for journalists to reach more and new audiences—and it needs to start now.
Thank you Mitch Goldstein for editing this story!
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Here’s what else is in today’s newsletter:
How brands addressed the election results in social posts
The meeting all social teams should be having this week
Five post formats for your brand to try
The Ogilvy exec who’s going viral on TikTok
5 links, tips, and ideas!
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