Cultural Content with Danny Birchall
Wellcome Collection's Digital Content Manager discusses rolling out their 1000th Story
You can’t get that far thinking about successful examples of web editorial in the sector without referencing Danny Birchall and/or Wellcome’s journalistic approach to online storytelling.
What I love about this piece Danny has written is its quiet paean for not reinventing your content formats every six months. Working in digital we’re constantly aware (and being asked about) the next big thing: who’s doing well on TikTok, what’s the next alternative to Twitter, who’s using ChatGPT in a smart (but also ethical) way.
What’s refreshing about this approach is its commitment to growing a sustainable content format that really speaks to organisational mission. That commitment paves the way for partnerships and growing an audience interested and engaged in storytelling strands that overlap with Wellcome’s mission….
Over to Danny!
Late last year, Wellcome Collection published its 1000th Stories article, a small but significant milestone for a young museum and library.
'Why the Truth is better than a happy ending' by Caroline Butterwick is the kind of story we love to publish: an emerging writer, discussing her complex experiences of mental ill health and disability.
And what we do with Stories is a core part of our museum and library, just like our collecting, exhibiting, public programme and book publishing activity. It's a core part of our vision of a world where everyone's experience of health matters.
This is the story behind our 1000th Story – what we do, how it started and where we go next.
How we work
I manage a small team at Wellcome Collection who look after the content on wellcomecollection.org (editors Lalita Kaplish, Alice White, Helen Babbs and Vanesha Singh; copyeditor Kate Quarry; and picture editors Ben Gilbert, Steven Pocock and Hannah Brown).
As well as maintaining the visitor-focused content on the site, we commission, edit and publish Stories about human health and experience. Each week we publish 2-5 new stories.
Every Wednesday morning, we meet to commission and schedule new pieces. We look at pitches, talk about new writers and guest editors that we'd like to work with, look for new angles on the history of health, and seek new perspectives rooted in writers’ own lived experience of their health, as well as professional expertise.
We then work as editors with the writers to develop their stories, and with our copyeditor to polish their presentation. Our picture editors find artists and photographers, often with their own lived experience of the articles' subjects (like Ghazal Zargar, who illustrated Furaha Asani’s story about social isolation among migrants) to illustrate the stories and give them visual context. We publish standalone articles, guest-edited weeks, six-part serials and webcomics.
From digital layer to scrolly-wolly
Why tell stories at all? Way back in 2014, as we redeveloped our venue and wrestled with what would become our emblematic new Reading Room, we saw a gap for what we originally (and mistakenly) thought of as a ‘digital layer’: a digital equivalent to the physical experience, for online visitors.
Some heavy conceptual smackdowns later, and with the help of our friends at design consultancy Clearleft, we came up with ‘Digital Stories’: chaptered and layered multimedia storytelling experiences. We were influenced by a new mode of storytelling exemplified by the New York Times' Snow Fall: text-based but interactive; making use of new web presentation technology and often going by 'parallax journalism' or simply ‘scrolly-wolly’.
Our two Digital Stories came in six chapters, each exploring their theme (the histories of hypnotism and collecting) deeply, with video, audio, and animation. In an era of 'snackable' digital content, they were a six-course meal, to be eaten at a leisurely pace. But they also came online all at once, when we launched each one.
Later, when we evaluated what we'd done with the folks at Frankly Green + Webb, we discovered that people felt they'd had a Wellcome Collection-quality experience, but once they'd had it, there was no reason to return. We'd built an audience for something that we didn't have the resources to reproduce.
Digital product: less is more
Meanwhile, back at base, we were completely changing the way that we did digital. A new strategy brought together our library and museum, and established a new digital engagement department, with in-house platform development teams, meaning our content team and developers sat side-by-side.
In my boss Tom Scott's words, we started to build "a free and unrestricted digital space where more people than ever can engage, be inspired and challenged to think about what it means to be healthy and human".
When your ambition's that big, you need to concentrate your firepower. For us this meant one website, powered by a single platform, with a single design language and a single brand: Wellcome Collection.
We closed the standalone Wellcome Library site and folded its functions into the main platform. This also meant saying farewell to our blogs, where staff and guests had for many years explored the nooks and crannies of our collections and programme.
We replaced what had been two separate blogs, and turned what had been an old-school 'Explore' section into a new Stories section.
As my colleague Jen Staves wrote, we took "a journalistic approach to storytelling, creating high-quality, regular content with all the parts stories have ... in formats readers know and recognise."
Through research with readers and looking at our usage data, we built a recognisable schedule. Unlike the original two Digital Stories, users could return often to read new stories. And while they lacked the immersive features of their predecessors, they were part of a stable and robust platform that wasn't in danger of becoming obsolete.
Fighting the pandemic, fighting racism and ableism
A lot of things changed in 2020, not only working from homes that rapidly became offices. The police murder of George Floyd sparked a resurgence in the BLM movement, that also turned its focus on museums and cultural heritage, most notably by way of a statue of slaver Edward Colston that found itself at the bottom of Bristol harbour in June.
What did this mean for Stories? It accelerated what we had thought of as 'diversity' in the stories that we published into a more urgent need to explore the nature of racism and ableism through the lived stories of those who experience it. We asked how we build resilience in a racist world, and what autistic togetherness during lockdown looked like.
When Jamie Hale spoke to Deaf rapper Signkid, about his art and activism, we commissioned a BSL version of the article. Our commitment to exploring all sides of the climate crisis was reflected in our collaboration with It's Freezing in LA! We examined the legacy of eugenics in health and medicine.
It also meant thinking about how to better support our writers and artists: for example adjusting the way that we work with technology for disabled writers and artists. Writing about your personal experiences of racism and ableism can be extremely difficult, and we endeavour to give our writers both the emotional space and sensitive editing they need to tell their stories well.
More recently we've brought together our interest in collecting the works of marginalised artists in a six-part serial about the artist and mental health survivor Audrey Amiss, together with three short films about how we catalogued, conserved and photographed her unique and incredible work.
Who reads all this anyway?
As we join the rest of the sector in tumbling off the cliff of our familiar 'Universal' Google Analytics and into the arms of GA4, it's worth reflecting on what we know about our audiences from looking at the data.
Occasionally, Reddit or Hacker News will deliver us a minor viral hit, but the majority of our traffic to new stories comes via social media, either owned channels or through the writers' and artists' own social presence (we ask guest editors and partners to collaborate with us on promotion). Sometimes a social hit takes on a life of its own: Rosie Barnes' photographs of older autistic women became something that people were keen to share, because it reflected their own experiences.
The flipside is that traffic to our long tail or 'evergreen' copy is mostly driven by organic search: some articles (including those on predictably popular subjects such as tattoos, sex and vaccines, but also on subjects that people don’t have access to elsewhere, from skin bleaching to Shakespeare’s humours) have a long interest-driven afterlife.
What drives the transition might be unpredictable, but there are some lessons we have learned about the values of SEO and microcopy: a cheeky headline could drive traffic on social, but a more accurate (if boring) one could bring a larger audience in the long-term.
In it for the long haul
Reading back what I've written (and what you are reading, if you’ve made it this far), it struck me as unusual to be reading (or indeed writing) a story about web content that begins nearly ten years ago. Aren't we supposed to move fast and break things?
Stories doesn’t stand still: we’re always thinking about what new kinds of commissioning and publishing will work: long reads, artist-led stories, and more. We’re looking at how we curate our long-tail content, and how we might schedule things differently. Meanwhile, as the website develops, we gain features from across the site, like a search that leads people to older stories.
But museums also last a long time and look after things. Perhaps digital content teams can too. When your stories are part of a solid product with a strategy and a clear vision of its audience, you get to keep the wins, and build on them. We're in it for the long haul. Perhaps I can persuade Georgina to invite me back for our 2000th article?