The Soup is Getting Cold with Justin Calderón - Issue 5
Justin Calderón is a journalist turned marketer, based in Barcelona, Spain.
Originally from New York, he lived in Asia for nine years before moving to Europe. His reporting has appeared for the BBC, Foreign Policy, CNN, Newsweek, The Bangkok Post and more.
In 2020 Justin used his journalistic training to launch a content marketing agency, Mint Position Media, working with B2B and B2C companies on content strategy, content production and distribution.
Why Read: Justin Calderón’s journey from journalist to marketer is one I personally recognise, largely because it follows a not-too-dissimilar path to my own career.
Over the last 20 years the onset of digital media has wrought significant change to newsrooms, journalism and publishing: a generation of writers and editors have had to find new ways to make a living in the face of challenging commercial pressures.
In the days before the internet many would have led entire careers editing daily newspapers, monthly magazines, writing articles, or managing foreign news desks, confident they could move from one publication to the next – or build successful, well-paying freelance careers - blissfully unencumbered by commercial realities. They could just concentrate on creating great editorial.
As former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger wrote in his book Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now – of being a journalist prior to the internet age …
“The readers handed up the money – and so did advertisers, who had few other ways of reaching our audience. To be a journalist in these times was bliss.”
Those days are long gone for many as more and more people compete for fewer editorial jobs. I’ve written about this previously, and the ways that advertising could reward journalism properly; and I also touch upon it in my book, Native Advertising: The Essential Guide, too.
Paradoxically, while editorial jobs that pay well are few and far between, the skills gained from interviewing, writing and researching are becoming ever popular in marketing.
Hundreds of thousands of careers are thrown into flux. Many, like Justin, are embarking on new hybrid-marketing roles and embracing the commercial opportunities of this brave new world.
Justin’s career arc is, then, one many journalists and editors working today will recognise.
But if you need another incentive to read on ….. what has happened to journalism over the last two decades will happen to other ‘white-collar’ professions imminently, too. Lawyers, designers, accountants, architects, engineers, translators, and many more roles – automation and advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) may render them all redundant, or partially redundant as viable well-paying careers, all within our lifetimes.
With extended working lives, cross-over skills and frequent career changes are likely to be considered normal.
Reading about the pivots editorial people are making is perhaps, then, to glimpse a future all of us may have to navigate in the decades ahead.
How would you describe your career to date?
My career has been a product of persistence, gung-ho curiosity, and simply being in the right place at the right time. To say that I planned for anything I ever built or published would be a lie. My journalistic work, commercial contracts and even the marketing clients I've acquired for my new content marketing agency, Mint Position Media, have all been thanks to an ever-rising benevolent tide of patience, trial and error, courage, and an unashamed dislike for the word 'No.'
Whether it was lust for opportunity or adventure, or both, I have lived in over 14 countries, and now call Barcelona home. These travels brought me to interview cabinet-member politicians, CEOs and subject experts across five continents, publishing articles for CNN, BBC, Newsweek, Foreign Policy and more.
How has the industry changed in the last 10 years?
I got my first bylines in international media in 2009 when I was living in Shanghai, China. I moved there from Taipei a year before the World Expo when a brilliant global spotlight was already beaming down on the city. I had learned Mandarin and was positioned in an envious part of the world that global editors were hungry to hear pitches about. I quickly got articles published in Newsweek, CNN and the Global Post; the New York Times even quoted me on one of my stories.
Since then, print media has continued its spiral of declining revenue and online traffic has now become the all-encompassing means-to-an-end for many media. This journey has had many mutations over the decade, including a shift to an increased - if forced upon - need for sponsored content.
I began working with media agencies in 2014 that produced sponsored country reports for publication in major media, including Foreign Policy, Die Welt, The Guardian, Newsweek, Le Figaro and more. Many editors cringe at this content's blatantly commercial message, but media owners have increasingly said yes to greenlighting them to compensate for the disappearance of old revenue streams.
Today, once-prime media have had to shift from print to a strictly online presence that is only supported by online traffic to build online advertising revenue. This means that SEO has become increasingly important as a journalistic skill. I saw the writing on the wall many years ago, which led me to begin studying online marketing in more earnest.
As a working journalist, what skills did you develop from commercial writing?
Content marketing came as a natural segway from my previous transition into writing advertorial content for companies as part of sponsored country reports.
However, I notice that most of these sponsored reports still relied too heavily on the print distribution model as a means of ROI for their paying clients.
In an increasingly digital world, few and fewer companies were interested in publishing this kind of hard-to-measure vanity publicity. Instead of providing expensive exposure with negligible impact, I wanted to produce content that actually moved the needle, increased the bottom line and -- most importantly -- was measurable.
This desire was manifested through SEO-driven content marketing. Within a few months of training, I had the skills to produce an actionable content strategy for clients that would bring in the right kind of traffic -- that is, website visitors that are most likely to convert to paying customers. This quickly became the ideal way to turn my journalistic background into a service with ultra-high demand and real measurable economic utility.
For a journalist with no advertorial experience, the transition could be jarring - perhaps even upsetting and disheartening.
How have you found the transition to content marketer?
For a journalist with no advertorial experience, the transition could be jarring - perhaps even upsetting and disheartening. But for a journalist with experience in generating sponsored content paid for by government entities and major international corporations, the principle of the transition was already well baked into my psyche.
In essence, a commercially oriented content strategy is ultimately a mission to earn profit for your client. Great content marketing is at its heart educational, informative, and inspiring. When done well, it doesn't feel like marketing. In this way, great content market strategy is based on commercial marketing objectives, but this is not evident in the output.
The real learning curve came in understanding SEO tools, Google Analytics. I have now perfected a content strategy that incorporates editorial, SEO and buyer persona elements, all built on top of journalistic interviews. This document is what most companies are missing when they conduct content marketing work.
Does your journalistic background help you as a marketer?
Without a doubt. Great content is unique in subject and appeal. A veteran journalist knows this instinctively. A stand-out report lives and dies by the quality of its unique sources of experts and observations. Without that, you have simply produced 'churnalism' - a rotation of old information already in existence.
So many companies make this fatal error in their own content marketing work. They hire a writer with a good portfolio, send them out to research a subject and get in return a regurgitated SEO piece that is usually a composition of the top 5 articles of that subject, adding nothing new to the online conversation. A journalist and great content marketer will instead do leg work, reaching out to get unique opinions from subject experts. In my experience, in the case of content marketing, the further down the funnel an article goes, the further into a company my search for expertise will go.
This means that for Bottom of the Funnel (highly qualified leads, ready to purchase) articles, I always prefer to interview subject experts within my clients' company. I feel that few content marketers realize the wealth of valuable knowledge that interviews with in-house experts can contribute to content marketing. Former journalists are, however, always much more likely to notice this value.
What do you think the future of modern newsrooms/editorial teams looks like?
I am currently in discussions with an international travel magazine that is now solely dependent on online advertising. They need what I predict many newsrooms need - an SEO-trained content expert.
SEO drives a consistent passive pipeline of organic traffic that hard news stories can never achieve. Smaller to mid-size media like this will come to depend on SEO-driven articles to help introduce organic traffic to their site to acquire new readers and subscriptions for their brand.
That being said, major mainstream newsrooms will continue to depend on the quality of a hard-hitting story that generates lots of backlinks and shares. This content is much harder to produce these days because it requires intense investigation, travel and extended periods for editing.
Few small or mid-sized newsrooms can afford for journalists to capture those stories today, so they will have to supplement their editorial calendar with a few articles that can generate the traffic they need to keep media owners happy (and their pockets full.)
What do you think the future internet looks like?
Today people typically get information from one of two sources -- social media feeds or a Google search. Social media has proven to be the harbinger of misinformation that has poisoned public debate, while at the same time providing us all the superpower to stay constantly informed at a whim.
Yet, the real source of our education today comes from Google searches.
This is precisely why SEO-driven organic traffic is so valuable -- the searcher is actively searching for the information that you are putting in front of their eyes. There is a good and bad part of this.
Without a doubt, we will have increased volumes of resources at our disposal and in an increasing number of languages. However, the articles we are most likely to read may not be the most informative, but simply those that hired the best SEO content expert.
As with social media, the onus is placed on the reader to fact check sources and be aware of misinformation. More important now than ever, I believe it should be mandatory to take an online fact checking course when starting in high school.
Thanks for Reading.
Past Issues:
Issue 1:The Soup is Getting Cold with Martin Lindstrom, best-selling author, brand expert and TIME magazine’s one of the “world’s 100 most influential people.”
Issue 2: The Soup is Getting Cold with Nick Entwistle, the founder and Creative Director of The Bank of Creativity and One Minute Briefs, a social media phenomenon.
Issue 3: The Soup is Getting Cold with Alon Shtruzman, Hollywood TV producer and CEO of Keshet International, Keshet Media Group's global distribution and production arm.
Issue 4: The Soup is Getting Cold with Sheree Atcheson, Sri Lankan-born Irish computer scientist and world expert on diversity and inclusion, as well as the author of Demanding More, a Financial Times business summer books of 2021 choice.