Some of their biggest hits have been about the economy, bullying and, recently, as displayed in her talk, funding cancer research after a young musician died of pancreatic cancer.Ĭritchfield says she encourages her curators to have huge vision for their posts. The vast majority of Upworthy’s traffic comes from social media sites, where Critchfield says conversation is more valuable to the reader anyway. There will be big current events, and if someone on staff feels really passionate about it, then we cover it. “We don’t really force people, we don’t let an editorial calendar dictate what we do. “I tell my writers, ‘If you’re not feeling it, don’t write it.’,” says Critchfield. In other words, Critchfield builds the element of genuine emotional response into her team by hiring people who were never trained to worry about what’s news, and what isn’t. “To be honest, it’s sometimes difficult for folks who have professional background to come into Upworthy and have success.” So we focus almost exclusively on hiring non-professionally trained writers,” she says. We reject the idea that the media elite or people who have been trained in a certain way somehow have the monopoly on editorial judgment, what matters or should matter. “Of the things we curate at Upworthy, I think our editorial staff is what we pride ourselves the most on curating. The people who do that are Critchfield’s handpicked team of curators. So you can have a piece of media with the exact same nutritional value in it with different packaging and the consumer is going to choose the one that appeals to them most,” she said.īut before you can package content, you have to create it - or at least, select it from out of the vastness of the Internet. “If you watch people shop in a grocery store, 95% of the time they are scanning the shelves for the packaging, making the choices on that before they turn the bottle around and look at the nutrition information. When I spoke with Critchfield after her talk, she underscored the way in which packaging content is Upworthy’s bread and butter (most likely WonderBread and Land o’ Lakes ). A slide from Critchfield’s PDF presentation.Ĭritchfield emphasized that using emotional input in editorial planning isn’t about making ad hoc decisions, it’s about making space for that data in the workflow, or “making it a bullet point.”
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