As is the nature of social media sites with sharing capabilities, Microsoft owned LinkedIn is evolving into something beyond its founding principle. Aside from being a business-oriented community of job seekers and prominent employers, LinkedIn has slowly been cultivating a community as a journalistic repository by adding tools monthly for individuals to publish more and varied content.
The move to accumulate more published content has been so successful that the site is now the resting place for a 50 man team of professional journalists who have worked at heavy hitters such as Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press and The Daily Beast, who intermingle their journalistic talents among the daily barrage of user-generated thought pieces.
LinkedIn’s foray into journalism thus far has charted a slightly different course than its counterparts such as Facebook, where LinkedIn employs human journalists and curators versus relying on algorithms to serve up content.
Based on remarks reported by The Drum, LinkedIn looks to avoid similar content controversy as Facebook by adhering to more curated standards for now.
Previously foreign desk news editor at France’s venerable Le Figaro, Roughol joined LinkedIn seven years ago this month to build its editorial team outside the US, hiring regional news editors and specialists to cover sectors such as finance and tech. “Everyone here is a journalist,” she says. “We adhere to the same values and exercise the same judgment – always thinking, what does the reader need to know? [We hire] journalists who have that mix of strong news judgment and editorial background and training as well as that entrepreneurial sense that is needed in a tech company.
LinkedIn’s editorial team now has access to the company’s Economic Graph which holds a dataset of 560 million members, 20 million company profiles, 60,000 school listings, 50,000 job skill titles, and 15 million job opening listings to mine content from and produces for.
Authors too are being rewarded for their efforts with 2 to 4 times the growth quarter over quarter on the LinkedIn platform and seeing their follower count increase in year over year metrics, according to LinkedIn’s internal data.
In the wake of Facebook’s Russian bot and data theft incidents, LinkendIn’s alternative method to publish content could be the opportunity the company can seize to cement its efforts as a destination for professional networking as well as professional journalism in comparison to the unfiltered spam pushed along by friends and family with less journalistic credentials.