MR Round Table: Can “Viral” Content Remain Authentic?

Leandra Medine: Over New Years week I noticed that the The Wall Street Journal’s Off Duty and the New York Times’ Sunday Styles were covered by tech stories. There was almost no style content in either of the sections and it got me wondering about what a style section is. Maybe I’m thinking too laterally about what it’s supposed to contain, maybe this has nothing at all to do with where content is being deposited — style, tech, business, whatever. Or, if the paradigm is actually shifting and as a result of that, begs the question of how much control the public has over what’s placed in a publication, then who controls media output?

Without sounding like a punchline for 2015, is what’s happening to the breadth of new content within different sections the actual manifestation of the democratization of content? Are journalists writing stories based on the public opinion as opposed to what they believe should be covered?

Cosmopolitan.com Editor Amy Odell: I think there’s a lot of that. If you look at what we’re doing at Cosmopolitan.com, so much of it is informed by our audience. We know a lot about our audience because we have live stats, we have daily and monthly traffic reports, Facebook likes and commenters, we have Twitter analytics, Pinterest, Vine; there is just so much data. We have so much feedback from our audience, and I think the big challenge for editors now is to distill that into media. I think that’s what has made us really successful at Cosmo.com, while holding the brand’s value really close to our hearts.

I love Cosmo. It’s an incredible brand, it’s a feminist brand, so how do you take that and how do you apply it to content that young women are interested in? That doesn’t mean that you can’t do things like politics, which we’ve done. I think you just have to be smarter, because why would you want to do a story that you feel really proud of and nobody reads?

I want to feel proud of our stories because we know that they’re great and they’re of great quality, but we also know how to get them out to people. We know how to package them. One example I like to give for content marketing is that if you were going to a table, and there were two packages in the same size box, and one was wrapped in brown paper and the other was wrapped in silver paper with a really pretty bow on it — the same thing is inside both boxes — which one are you going to choose?

LM: How do you strike that balance between producing a story that has the potential to go viral, but still abides by the principles that you’re comfortable standing behind?

AO: I feel like at Cosmo, for example, we believe that every woman has the right to a very happy, fulfilled and empowered life, and that’s going to guide a lot of our content. I also like to describe the site as, “A millennial woman’s smartest, funniest, most insightful friend.” And that’s a starting place for all of our content.

If we see that our readers are more into Miley Cyrus than Charlize Theron, we’re going to cover Miley Cyrus more than Charlize Theron. I don’t think that that’s a particularly big deal. We don’t cover things that feel “off brand” for us. There are things that you might think are a harder sell — we just spend time and we experiment and try things different ways. We’ll think about, What does our audience want on this particular topic? And then we frame stories that way. So if we’re talking about politics for instance, we’re not going to do the same story that the Times is going to do, because that’s not going to resonate with our readers.

They’re less interested in what the conversation is like on Capitol Hill about a specific bill than they are in the woman from Missouri whose life is deeply affected by that bill. They want to hear about that piece of legislation through the woman in Missouri. So we’ll interview her and tell her story.

Amelia Diamond: Different publications treat scenarios differently. A blog like Man Repeller is different from The Cut, and both are different from Cosmo.com. I think what’s interesting about a publication like the Times’ Style section is that it used to be a pretty specific, niche area inside a wider publication. People who didn’t read the Times would go to check up on the Style section. So I think there’s a sense of nostalgia maybe, where people are like, “What happened to my Times?”

LM: What’s kind of frustrating is that with certain fashion publications shifting gears with their content, we’re fed the notion that you can’t write an intellectual fashion story. T Magazine, which is ironically tethered to the Times, is one of the few publications — and Porter actually — that is producing really interesting and smart fashion content.

AO: What about the Business of Fashion?

LM: Right, but that’s the business of fashion. I read BoF for the same reason I read WWD, and not when I’m looking for a creative arc.

AO: Could it be that the fashion industry isn’t as interesting as what’s happening in the technology industry right now?

LM: Well, possibly, but I have a hard time believing that. Fashion will always be interesting, but it depends on who’s delivering the story. We always say that Man Repeller is supposed to feel like a phone call that occurs five times a day where you pick up the phone, call your best friend, have no idea what she’s going to tell you but you know that whatever it is, it’s going to be interesting because you’re hearing it from your buddy who tells the craziest stories. Even if they are about health care reform.

But I don’t even think that this is about style, tech, or fashion so much as it is about this looming sense of content fatigue, right? So tech stories are doing really well; and stories about apps and dating and Tinder and Instagram…they’re commanding such a wide audience, but they’re also getting kind of exhausting because there’s so many of them.

AO: I think that content fatigue is more of an editor’s problem than a consumer’s problem. I always try and remind my team that the way we consume content is completely different from the way most of our readers consume content. You’re probably on Twitter all the time. You’ve probably seen one story five places today and in three places yesterday. But they haven’t.

LM: Do you think virality counts if you’re not running a campaign?

AO: Well of course. You always want to be growing. We don’t just look at the number of people on our site, we look at the amount of time they spend on our site. We look at how many of them are coming back, and we’ve had very good rates not only in terms of monthly uniques, but in people coming back. Troy Young, who runs digital for Hearst and who’s my boss, when I first starting talking to him about this, he wanted to turn Cosmopolitan.com into an “addictive site.” That was one of the first things he asked me about, and that’s a word that I think about all the time. 

LM: That seems so simple, and you can say to anyone, “Oh yeah, addiction! That’s all it takes.” But then to actually produce content, to create that drug is very difficult.

AD: So maybe for the Times, that digital content is what’s addictive for their readers right now.

AO: I read the Times every day. I read it on my phone and that’s where I go to get my overview of the day. So you could say that I’m addicted to the Times since I have to look at it everyday.

AD: But you know what’s so stupid? The Internet will probably never be able to get enough of puppies doing cute things. That type of thing is both addictive and totally overdone. People follow cats everything, and Daily Puppy on Instagram.

AO: Well if it makes you feel any better, our audience is not super into animals.

AD: Really? Your traffic doesn’t spike if you throw a cat in?

AO: Well, we’re all millennial women and I think, are you going to click on that?

AD: I’m the wrong person to ask.

LM: She’s really the wrong person to ask. When she misses a deadline it’s always because she is looking at animals online.

AD: Yesterday there was a crazy hippo that was so scared of all of these birds on it.

AO: Well I’ll be honest with you: I like that stuff too. But what is Cosmo known for? It’s known for its coverage of relationships and sex and beauty, and those stories always perform better. I’m trying to remember a viral animal story that we’ve had but I can’t even think of one.

LM: How do your more tech-heavy digital dating stories do? How much of your content looks like that?

AO: I don’t feel like our most trafficked stories are necessarily about online dating or Tinder, to be honest with you. I feel like the stories that do the best are just sort of commentary on 20-something life. Whether it be about partying or dating or kissing, or just relationships generally. Those stories do super well. I don’t think our readers are necessarily obsessed with the ecosystem on OK Cupid.

LM: I can’t wrap my head around that because it’s become so difficult for me to think about dating without immediately thinking Tinder or Hinge, or a like-minded app.

AO: Right. I mean it’s important for our audience for sure. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet with a lot of our readers, and a lot of them just want to know basic things, like how to meet guys. A lot of them want to meet guys in person, they don’t necessarily want to scroll through Tinder.

AD: I’m curious about when and if it’s going to go away. I mean again, it goes back to editor versus consumer fatigue, but I’m like, what could you possibly still be discovering on there? Nobody needs to write about the parody that Tinder is anymore. Everybody is fucking with everybody else on Tinder now. The next big story is going to be, “I tried this crazy new dating app where I went to a bar and met someone!” 

AO: You’ll never believe how they met! They were set up!

LM: But do you agree that the trajectory of historically “style”-focused sections and maybe otherwise dedicated and targeted sections are changing as a result of the broader conversation? And is that good? Or bad?

AO: I mean, of course the Internet has changed everything. Publications have to embrace that. They might see in their metrics that people are more interested in reading about dating than they are fashion. So many things go into a story and with fashion it can be difficult to cover because the industry is so small, it’s so New York, and if you look at Jenny in Ohio who’s going to grad school at night, does she care about the new designer at such and such Italian label in Milan that you and I might be interested in after having worked in the industry? I’m going to guess not, which is not to say anything bad, I just think that high fashion is a very small community.

Charlotte Fassler: But I do think there’s something to be said for a paper’s style section that acts as this portal for people who may not necessarily be exposed to such a niche world. I feel like they used to do human interest stories, or talk about a really specific designer that maybe someone like my mom had never heard of and she’d send me the article and say, “Wow, this is blowing me away. This is someone I’ve never heard of before and is so interesting to me.” Whereas I feel like now, that is lost.

AO: Jenny in Ohio is looking at Pinterest and seeing street style images and getting inspiration from there. And that’s what she wants from high fashion. She wants to look good in her everyday life, but I think she’s less interested in where it’s coming from. And why is that? Is it because the fashion industry is historically difficult to access? That’s a harder question to answer.

LM: Do you feel like fashion can still be a dominant language through which we connect with women? Because I feel like we use fashion to do exactly that: connect with other women.

AO: I wouldn’t say it’s the dominant way to connect to women, I think women are interested in just about everything. But I think that because you have your foot so firmly planted in fashion, that makes sense for you. And I think that Cosmo has always had its feet in a lot of different things, so we wanted to reach our audience through a lot of different subjects.

AD: It’s interesting, because when people ask me what I do, I used to say “I work in fashion.” Now I say I work for a website or that I’m a writer, but still, when people ask what Man Repeller is I say, “A fashion website.” But it’s become so much more than that.

LM: You should start telling people it’s a nudist colony.

AD: My grandma just assumes we’re a bunch of lesbians.

CF: I always throw the word “humor” in there too, because I feel like that’s the way we connect with our readers.

AO: Humor is incredibly powerful. I think when you write about fashion you can only take it so seriously, and people love to laugh. When I started at Cosmo.com, I knew that I needed to get the funniest writers I could find. And not just “haha” funny, they actually make you laugh and you’re going to want to read them when you’re having a bad day.

I just finished writing my book, Tales from the Back Row, which is going to come out in August or September, and it’s just humorous essays about what it’s like to work in the fashion industry, kind of as a fish out of water. But the concept wouldn’t have worked if it was serious. I think humor is really important. In the book there are stories about relationships and careers and fashion is a really good way to look at broader themes about not fitting in and standing out in order to fit in.

LM: Well, the major hypocrisy about the fashion industry is that once you’ve been initiated, it’s like you’re being initiated into this world of outsiders. We’re outsiders, right? Art school graduates who for the first time are maybe not subject to be made fun of because you’re now “in” — but then you realize that you have to pay dues — that you’re back on the outside. You get to Paris and nobody wants to have dinner with you.

AO: It’s weird, there are so many layers. It’s like, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop? That’s how it is in the fashion industry. It’s kind of like celebrities too; how many people do you have to go through before you get your interview with this person.

AD: It’s funny because considering what you just said, all these all-star tech people, they were the nerds! They were the people who were made fun of in high school and college, and then they graduated and now they’re like, Haha, sucka! Have fun using your iPad without me. 

LM: It’s like waking up one morning post-puberty and realizing your voice has changed.

It’s a boy that has become a man. We should drop the ball there. [To Amy who hasn’t heard Leandra repeat this joke 100 times] We drop the ball on New Year’s Eve because we’re a city of boys becoming men.

Follow Cosmo on Instagram and Twitter, and follow Amy Odell on Twitter here. See more Round Tables here. 

Original image shot by Roxanne Lowit.