"My remit is just that I reach people.”

Q&A with Sophia Smith Galer, Independent News Creator

Alexandra Borchardt: What do media organizations need to know if they want to reach young people today? 

Sophia Smith Galer: They need to understand young people's viewing habits and reading habits and where they feel overserved and underserved. 

Is there something like “the younger audience”, or how would you segment it? 

Young people are not one monolith. Their habits vary depending on every demographic mix. Proper audience needs research would reveal those differences in detail. But it takes a lot of time of being on these platforms to figure out how to give audiences what they want. For example, young men can be reached more easily on YouTube, female audiences on Instagram. But ever since I left my BBC job, I never had the remit of reaching young people. My remit is just that I reach people.

Some media brands have experienced that: If they aim to reach young people, they discover they reach broader audiences.  

A lot of people will say that if they grow on platforms associated with young audiences like TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, they will find growth, discoverability and awareness rising amongst audience far older. If you grow, you grow.

You worked for the BBC and Vice and turned to be an independent journalist creator in 2023. What do you know about the audiences you are reaching? 

To take Instagram where I'm the most active, my audiences are primarily in the 25 to 34 age bracket. That makes sense: I am 31 years old, a lot of creators tend to reach their own age group. But there are factors beyond one’s control. I’m British, but Americans are my biggest audience on Instagram, even though I spent just a few weeks of my life in America. So, it's a great tool for discoverability across borders. 

You left the BBC in 2021 to get more creative freedom. These days you are advising Belgium-based Mediahuis on their Future Insights Board. What do you think about the ability of legacy media to advance with younger audiences?

A lot of the newsrooms that are making high-quality social media content on places like Instagram and TikTok are halfway there. That is if they have prioritized vertical video which is the growth engine right now. The big but is that publisher accounts simply do not have the reach or appeal that individual accounts have on these platforms. Audiences are drawn to influential expert individuals, and I think that more journalists should be occupying those roles and disseminating information themselves. 

So, it is key for legacy organizations to empower their individual journalists?

Definitely. Many journalists have to rely on a small, very underresourced video team in their newsroom that is in charge of the newsroom’s entire digital presence. That's simply not how social media works. Social media is a peer-to-peer network of individuals. 

Do you see examples of organizations doing a good job at this?

In the marketing and commercial worlds, you're seeing companies taking advantage of concepts like EGC – employee-generated content. Some offer staff incentives and training to be better ambassadors of their work. And to do that safely and freely and have fun with it and get benefits from it, staff need to have the freedom to post without being micromanaged. In fact, journalists could be very good at this because they are used to standing up for their work. A print journalist may appear on broadcast media to represent their work, for example. This is not different from representing your work on a platform like TikTok.

But even that is challenging for many journalists who have been trained to keep a low profile as individuals and disappear behind their reporting and their brand. 

A lot of journalists I have trained or surveyed say they don’t have the video skills, and they don’t have the time. But if they have too many obstacles to become ambassadors of their work, they will remain invisible online. And if they are invisible, their work will be invisible. That's what really worries me, even more because a lot of the information on Instagram and TikTok is not good. It could really be improved if we had better storytellers there.

You just published a report on a sample of 526 UK journalists, revealing that the majority lacks a strong following on the platforms that matter with the public. They hang out among themselves on X when they could be reaching audiences on Insta, TikTok and YouTube. Is that because they don’t want to or because they don’t get the opportunity by their publishers? 

There are two groups: those who want to do this but haven't been able to and those who really don't want to do this. They do not think it is the job of a journalist today to amplify their work on social media. Obviously, I disagree with that personally. But I do come from a public service journalism background where it was really drummed into me that if I do journalism, the whole point is that as many people as physically possible can see it. If you're not a public service journalist, maybe you can afford to not want to upskill yourself to put your journalism on social media.

Is it also because many journalists still expect people to come to them rather than the other way round?

They may possess quite hierarchical views of the newsroom. In the UK, we're still seeing an environment where the output of the social media teams may not be seen as prestigious as the output of other teams. We need to stop talking about vertical video as innovation and start talking about it as platform risk mitigation. We need to make sure that we remain visible in an increasingly fragmenting online space where video is getting more important and where a lot of us are digitally homeless following the exodus from X.

What would you advise editors-in-chief to do? 

Newsrooms get the best results if they work with reporter talent who do original, distinctive journalism that is connected to the signature content of the newsroom and wins paying subscribers. This is a way to really amplify not only what you stand for, what you write or film or publish about, but what's why you're worth being paid. Identifying that talent and nurturing them and keeping hold of them is its own art, but there are plenty of frameworks from existing journalism structures to rely on. It isn't reinventing the wheel, but it does take a bit of digital ambition and newsroom culture shift around what it means to be a reporter. It is not just you publish the story and that's that, and you have nothing to do with the impact or discourse that is created around it. 

What are the major mistakes you have been observing in the media industry?

If a newsroom is making demands, but has not bothered to invest in resources and training for the staff to meet them. Also, in many newsrooms pioneering new formats or taking an interest in the sustainability of the organization does not figure in somebody's career progression. What’s needed is a cultural shift: The entire workforce should have a vested interest in the future of the company that they're working for. Everyone should be required to do something to innovate every year. But many senior journalists can't see the crisis I can see because I am so chronically online. And for junior staff, it can be quite hard to translate that to those who have the power and decision-making abilities. Senior decision makers must become better listeners. This would retain junior staff because they would feel they were having a greater impact on the company's future. Also, there has always been this church and state separation in newsrooms between commercial and editorial. But there is not a single content creator who divides church and state. They all have to be very editorially and commercially minded.

Is there anything on the content and format sides that could be improved?

 At the moment we're seeing a lot of high-quality vertical video explainers that look identical to each other. I don't think it's sustainable because ultimately, you're not building communities around your work. It's within those communities that you're going to do those important conversions that everyone in the business side of your newsroom is desperate to win over.

You have been very successful as a female creator. But there is a huge gender gap in the creator economy. In a study published by the Reuters Institute, 83 percent of the creators that were mentioned by those surveyed were male. One major reason seems to be that women shy away from online harassment – they are way more exposed to it than men.

That worries me, too. In the data set of my study, the highest profile women are individuals who have big jobs in TV. They've had strong backing from the traditional television industry and were famous pre-social media, they entered the race with a big following. As social media platforms may have become increasingly toxic or dangerous experiences, these women have a lot of institutional power and real-life resources and money that can help keep them safe. Whereas it's the people who are yet to acquire these jobs and sort of fame who have to navigate this toxic environment without these resources. Many will not be able to make it because of how awful an experience they're going to have online. 

You have embraced the AI age decisively by creating the Sophiana App that helps journalists to get proficient on TikTok. Could you explain your thinking behind this?

From the work I've done, I identified a clear need for a tool that could help journalists make vertical video more quickly and at a higher quality. And we know from research that news audiences are happier with journalists using AI tools if it keeps the human in the loop. Sophiana helps translate the written work into a TikTok friendly script that the journalist would have otherwise not been able to do at all or to the quality I expect. It includes a teleprompter so they can film it quickly. The tool centres the journalists' work, helps them translate it, amplify it, keeping them front and centre and in total editorial control.

How do you think the AI environment will shape the way we all consume news? 

The most pressing change is the decline in website traffic. People are getting answers from speaking to AI agents, but where will the newsroom stand to make money in that new environment? I don't see a lot of people who are worried about AI misinformation and AI slop. Audiences are really annoyed about all of that, that’s why they are on our side already. A bigger problem is audiences knowing who we are and how to support creative industries in this time of flux. They're not going to know about it unless we talk to them about it.  

Data suggests social media usage peaked in 2022 and has been declining. Is this just a post-pandemic effect, or could there be more to it?

I think a lot of social media platforms have become less pleasant to use because of how much advertising is forced on people and how changes to what appears on a feed can put you off spending loads of time on it. I agree that there's going to be a dip because people want to get back to real life. But I don't think a decline in social media use is going to be an issue we have to deal with in the next three years minimum. 

Context

This interview was conducted as part of our study titled “A miss is as good as a mile: A qualitative study on Gen Z and journalism in Austria, featuring perspectives from users, media professionals, and international experts.”

You can find more information and the full study here.