"The success of 20 Minutes and Le Matin is remarkable".

Content gourmets: a Meetup series for people who are into online content and like good food.MK How important is it for news portals today to have a presence on social media?CHRISTOPH HESS It's indispensable for several reasons. First, social media can be used to show whether a news outlet is generating attention online, and there is money to be made from attention. Second, social media helps understand what topics and people are being talked about. And third, social media illustrates how a news portal must operate today: Around the clock, without an editorial deadline, open to dialog and at eye level with the community.MK Which social media platforms are particularly suitable for news portals?HESS Whether a platform is suitable or not depends on what a news portal wants to achieve in terms of output and can invest in terms of input. Twitter is not suitable if you don't have community managers as input who also take care of it outside office hours. On Facebook, it is becoming increasingly clear that the output must be bought in the form of interactions with promotions and ads. Vine may be suitable if a news portal has suitable visuals as input and staff who can produce short videos. The same is true for YouTube and longer videos. The comparisons between input and output cannot be generalized for the different platforms or for the entire industry.MK What should a publisher consider when "teasing" its content via social media?HESS I believe that activities need to go beyond "anteasing" and start before the content is published and distributed. Journalists should stop researching without social media before they start reporting. Otherwise, they miss out on additional perspectives and voices from their own community, among others. After a TV show airs or a news article is published, it's also important to seek dialogue with the community. In this way, journalists can see whether a story is worth pursuing further.MK What are the biggest challenges of social media for news portals?HESS Every news portal that was founded and built offline has to get used to the fact that advertising revenues online will probably be significantly lower for a few more years compared to the revenues that could be generated offline in the past. Despite this limitation, it is necessary to invest in social media for the reasons mentioned above, but it is not necessarily a matter of spending as much money as possible, it is much more important to invest the money efficiently - especially in talented and motivated personnel. In this regard, there is a cultural challenge in addition to the financial one: talent and motivation do not thrive in an offline corporate culture that is focused on maintaining power and status and thus cannot keep up with the pace of the Internet.MK Which Swiss news portals stand out with a particularly successful social media presence and why?HESS In November 2013, our agency teamed up with Farner to launch a platform called Theme pulse.ch which provides answers to this question, among others. Every day, we measure the number of comments, likes and shares on Facebook, tweets on Twitter and +1s on Google+ for each news article from 29 Swiss sources.Our data shows that 20 Minuten, 20 Minutes, Le Matin, Watson and the Newsnet platforms in particular are regularly placed high in the rankings. Their news articles generate many reactions on the social web, which means they have obviously built up a community and know what topics interest these people. The success of 20 Minutes and Le Matin is remarkable because they have a much smaller home market in French-speaking Switzerland than the news portals from German-speaking Switzerland.MK Can you give us an example of a story that was particularly cleverly spread via social media?HESS As I mentioned earlier, I believe that social media should be used before content is published and distributed. A story that comes from the community generates more response there again. An example of this is the radio broadcasts of Magali Philip on RTS: Because she researches with Twitter and her own hashtags, the shows there are also in the conversation.MK Which platforms will become more important for Swiss news portals in the future?HESS In my opinion, it's not platforms that are decisive, but functions. I'm surprised that there is not yet a Swiss news portal that uses Google Hangouts On Air. Starting from Google+, this feature enables livestreams via YouTube, and video content generates more attention.Another feature that platforms like Storify or RebelMouse have made popular is content curation, following Jeff Jarvis' motto: "Cover what you do best. Link to the rest." The extent to which outside content can find a place on news portals is also demonstrated by Gawker or Medium. The two platforms are now referred to as "platisher": They not only publish their own content, but also offer space for third-party user-generated content.Interview: Simon WolaninRead how news portals can benefit from social media here.