How we manage and support our global newsrooms: An interview with international managing editor Hayley Hudson
Launched as a technology blog nearly 13 years ago, Insider Inc. has grown from a New York City-based skeleton crew of six to a global team publishing 17 international editions in eight languages. We tell stories with local voices and global perspective, and we reach 223 million people worldwide.
On the heels of the launch of our latest international edition, BI Mexico, we sat down with Hayley Hudson, Business Insider’s international managing editor, to learn more about our global editorial strategy. Hayley has been with Insider Inc. for almost seven years, and moved to London eight months ago to work as the editorial liaison for our international newsrooms.
Read on to learn more about her role, how we find consistency across newsrooms in the Business Insider tone and voice, and what makes a great BI international edition.
Take us through your background. How’d you get started at Insider Inc.? How has your role within the company evolved over time?
I started out as an associate editor on the syndication team, where the goal was to supplement the great work that our newsroom was producing with stories from contributors and partner newsrooms where we had content exchange deals. I spent my days reading through what they were publishing and finding the best stuff.
After roughly two years of that, my boss left for another opportunity and I moved into her role leading the syndication desk. I spent more time on calls with our partners, checking in on the progress of the partnerships, looking for new publications to work with, and training our newsroom on how to use their stories.
Because of this partnership focus, I came to mind when the business development team was looking for someone in the newsroom to occasionally give editorial advice to our international newsrooms, which are also partnerships.
So, for a while I was kind of a part-time editorial liaison for the international newsrooms and wondering if it could be a full-time role. I asked our newsroom leadership who said that it would stay a side project. But in that conversation I learned of an open opportunity to work with our editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell on conceptualizing and executing special newsroom series, with an eye toward getting sponsorships. I learned a lot about the business side of the company in that role and am grateful for the experience.
A year later things changed on the international side, and that full-time position that wasn’t there before was created, so I went for it.
You used to be based in NYC and moved to London 8 months ago. How did that move come about?
The international job was going to be based in London from the start because there’s a time-zone advantage to working with our partner newsrooms. Lots of them are in Europe. Traveling to see them is easier and cheaper from London, too.
By the time I moved I had built a good community in New York and had a way-below-market room in a Park Slope brownstone that I shared with two good friends. Those things were hard to leave. It still hurts to think about that apartment! Ultimately, though, I would have regretted not taking the opportunity to live and work abroad.
I had actually asked to go to London back when we first opened the London office, but at that point I was super new to the company and there wasn’t really a reason to send me. They needed reporters who covered our core topics and a more experienced team that could lead a brand new bureau. So it’s funny that I ended up here after all.
What does a typical day at the office look like for you?
A typical day is spent keeping up with what the international sites are doing: reading their stories and sending feedback, responding to questions and requests from the different editorial teams, and preparing for and attending group check-in calls over video chat. With the number of partners we have, it works out to several hour-long calls each week. That face time is important for keeping up the relationships and getting an understanding of everyone’s top priorities.
After those discussions, there are various follow up tasks to do, like sending along more details on a point that we talked about or keeping forward momentum on a new project. Sometimes that means pulling in different people from around the newsroom or wider company to get their expertise. The international team at Insider is me and four others — our vice president of international Roddy Salazar, our business development director Jeff Huang, our UK managing editor Dina Spector, and our syndication editor Kat Chou — so we divide it up. I’m more focused on anything to do with editorial.
I also look for opportunities for the international sites to work together. We’ve done a few reporting projects where we’ve created comparisons of the world’s healthcare systems and gun control laws, and recently, grocery stores during the coronavirus outbreak. We also translate stories from our editions that publish in other languages. Our associate translation editor in London, Ruqayyah Moynihan, knows multiple languages and does the translating work, so I’ll send her suggestions if I see them.
It will change depending on what’s going on at the time. We just launched a new Mexico site, and I visited Mexico City for two weeks and led daily training sessions at the office there. Before the visit I was really focused on preparing the agenda and making presentations.
How often do you travel to our international newsrooms?
Since moving to London, I’ve visited every team in Europe, which meant traveling to Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, and Milan. Most of it I did in a three week stretch where I didn’t return to London at all. Then I went to Mexico a couple months later ahead of their launch. Next will probably be Japan or Australia.
How do we maintain consistency between our international editions in tone, voice, coverage areas, etc.?
When we launch a site, the new team gets a crash course in the Business Insider brand where we cover all those areas. After that, we’re in constant contact, so any glaring inconsistencies can be addressed pretty easily. There are some differences between the sites because local nuance does come into play. But we welcome that if it means that an international edition is more relevant or relatable to their local audience.
We’re really focused on serving the readers in each area, and with these sites we’re not doing the foreign correspondent thing of sending US reporters somewhere else and having them report stories for a mostly US audience. That’s not to say that we never get US stories through the global network. We do, and it’s a benefit of working with them. It’s just not the primary goal.
So essentially we trust the local teams to know their readers better than we ever could. But at the same time we make sure we’re reminding them of our mission and editorial standards as often as we can so that they can apply those things to what they’re doing. In addition to checking in often on video chat, we host an international partner summit at our New York headquarters every year so that we can see each other in person and do more training and workshopping.
What makes a great BI international edition?
In general, and probably the most obvious answer, is that a great editor makes for a great edition. When we have people in charge of the project who understand BI, who maybe were fans before they were hired, who are creative, and who can lead their team effectively.
Otherwise, a few of the editions have made it to the No. 1 position in their market for a business news site, in terms of rankings from comScore or similar, which is one measure of success, but not the only measure.
The BI Germany team recently hired some investigative reporters who since they started have been doing great work on the Volkswagen diesel scandal as it plays out in the German courts. Their focus on investigative work aligns with our initiatives in the US, where John Cook is leading a growing investigations team.
It’s also fun to see a BI edition get international attention. A few months ago, BI Japan published a story about local companies who banned glasses at work for female employees. It was a trend in lots of different industries there, and their story got picked up by major outlets around the world.
How much content do our international editions take from BI’s flagship site vs. how much is self published?
It varies depending on the edition. Some sites like South Africa are publishing in English, so they syndicate quite a few of our stories, but it’s usually their own original stuff that performs the best because it’s more closely tied to the news cycle there, or it’s about a company or brand that’s big there.
Our foreign language editions have to translate our US and UK content, so those editions tend to use less from us and write more themselves since translation can be time-consuming. Germany and Italy don’t do a lot of translation, but it depends. In Japan, it’s a pretty even split between original and translated.
What’s next in your world? Any new projects on the horizon?
Refining our translation process is an ongoing process, and recently, expanding translation beyond articles and videos. We want to coordinate internationally on projects like the recent comic about Trump’s impeachment and make things like that available in other languages.