Sophia Smith Galer: We need radical transparency from journalists online
For our fourth episode, we’re joined by the digital journalist, content creator, and author Sophia Smith Galer. Along with her impressively varied reporting career at the BBC and Vice, Sophia founded her social media consultancy Viralect and has an upcoming book on linguicide.
A true expert in all things social media journalism, Sophia discusses the current challenges facing news brands across platforms. With our hosts, Freya Shaw and Marine Saint, we also learn about the creation and launch of her brand new video scripting app, Sophiana.
You’ll hear Sophia urging journalists today to future-proof themselves with a multimedia skill set – tune in to hear how journalism should be catching up with the digital sphere.
You can learn more about Sophiana and Sophia’s upcoming book here:
https://www.womeninjournalism.co.uk/updates/introducing-sophiana-by-sophia-smith-galer
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/sophiana-script-video-maker/id6742998989
Music: John Abbot, City Phases, courtesy of Epidemic Sound
Transcript
Marine Saint
Welcome to Inspire the Women in Journalism podcast, where we speak to the best female voices in the industry, charting their breakthroughs, career triumphs, and challenges. We’re your producers. I'm Marine Saint.
Freya Shaw
And I'm Freya Shaw. Across each episode, you'll hear from a different woman who's making waves in journalism. We ask our guests what has changed in the media industry, their career highs and lows, and how they navigate being a woman in journalism.
Marine Saint
Our show will also feature exclusive round table discussions between inspiring women from every beat and background in the media.
Welcome to episode four of the Women in Journalism podcast. Our guest this week is the Trailblazer for TikTok journalism, Sophia Smith Galer. Sophia is a media multihyphenate as an author, investigative journalist, and content creator with hundreds of millions of views on social media. Her award-winning reporting while on staff at the BBC and Vice News span audio documentaries, films, and in-depth investigations into murky corners of the internet.
Freya Shaw
Alongside her fascinating bylines, Sophia runs a digital consultancy and tech company called Viralect, which has just launched her app named Sophiana.Sophia won Women in Journalism's Georgina Henry Prize last year, which helped support this new app fighting misinformation, and creating an algorithm-ready video script.
Sophia, welcome to the podcast. So like me, you were at City University and did your MA there. How did you transition out of that MA and into becoming a professional journalist?
Sophia Smith Galer
So I would've started that MA in 2016, graduated 2017, and really to rewind and think back to what the ecosystem was like in 2017. It was pretty different. I was applying to loads of different jobs. I got so many rejections when I was first applying. I'd actually received only rejections back when I was a final year undergrad at Durham, which is what motivated me to do a journalism MA, because I was told that I didn't have the requisite skillset for a role in journalism. I didn't have formal journalistic training.
And so anyway, I do this masters at City, the broadcast journalism masters. I get equipped with radio, TV training, media law, journalism ethics, and then I do a job that's neither in radio or tv. So the job that I got, I was lucky to have a couple, like I think I had two offers that I was dancing between, and I went with the role of social media producer at bbc.com.
And I was the social media producer for BBC Future and BBC culture, and these were two verticals that they called them and they covered everything that you'd imagine they would cover. Future was sort of science and tech focused, and culture was about the arts and yeah, cultural goings on in the world with a, with a very much a global audience and a global focus.
Marine Saint
So impressive. I feel like both Freya and I can relate to that anxiety of job application straight out of university, feeling like you have to do a Master's to be qualified as well. I do wonder breaking into the BBC especially, what do you think helped you to get that first job?
Sophia Smith Galer
I know what helped me because my first boss revealed it to a lecture where I was a visiting lecturer. This is Richard Fisher, and he was talking to his students. Uh, he invited me in, to sort of help the lecture that day and he said, I'll tell you why I hired Sophia. And as he said this, I thought Richard's never actually told me why he hired me. So this will be interesting what he's about to reveal to twenty 20 year olds I've never met before.
And Richard said. Sophia was not the most qualified person who had applied to the job. Obviously I wasn't because I was about to be a master's grad. You know, I hadn't had professional experience beyond work experience that I had done, and he said she wasn't the most qualified person to apply, but I thought she had the most potential.
And Richard is an incredible editor and an incredible boss, and I'm not the only person he's managed who said that. And I don't necessarily think every manager hires in that vein or has the freedom to hire in that vein even if they wanted to. But Richard said that he saw things on my CV that essentially helped me stand out and showed that I had potential and the main things that showed that I stood out were my multilingualism and the fact that I had spoken at the UN when I was 22, and those are not normal things to appear on a 22-year-old cv. And I, I had actually gotten that opportunity to speak at the UN because I'd applied to a competition that I'd seen advertised on a website that had opportunities for journalists, ijn.org.
So had I not been a self-starter and applied to that prize in order to stand a chance of winning it, I wouldn't have gotten the BBC job. I don't know. It's all these weird sort of consequences and circumstances that you can't quite plan for. That can mean that someone hires you.
Freya Shaw
Yeah, I always think sometimes getting a job as being in the right place at the right time and luck, and as much as it is sort of having an amazing CV is, there's lots of different parts that sort of go into that. Once you were at the BBC, did you have any sort of trouble establishing yourself within the newsroom? Especially within the sort of social media side of it all?
Sophia Smith Galer
So my first job wasn't in the newsroom, nor was my second. My first job was in the same building that was shared with. The more commercial side of the BBC. Yeah. And our team were very independent 'cause we were a features journalism team, so we were not governed by the news agenda. We were governed by what was interesting. And it was very liberating and interesting to have a job like that because, uh, we did report on goings on. You know, it wasn't that it was totally detached from the news agenda. It was more that we weren't defined or controlled by it, and I was creating social content alongside these formidable video producers and writers. And because the team were really open-minded and eager to let me try new things when I asked them and, and said, I, can I try this? Can I try that?
I got in one year, like a really good portfolio of both writing and video, even though my job was to do the socials, and as I've said, I got that job in 2017, so my job was to put content out on the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram channels of those verticals, and that like simply wouldn't be the case now. I can't speak for what my equivalent these days has to do, but I can predict they have far more social media channels to oversee, and I also believe that they've probably deprioritized Facebook and now X massively compared to the priority that I had to give it back in 2017.
Freya Shaw
Yeah, and probably a lot more focused on the visual side of that as well. With stuff like Instagram, Facebook, it's not just the sort of story getting out there, it's the images that go with it. And I think that also speaks to the shift towards TikTok that then you completely pioneered.
Sophia Smith Galer
And that's what got me newsroom experience. So I did the first job for a year and then I got a job as a video journalist in faith and ethics for the BBC World Service and for a time I moved up to Salford for that, which is where the faith and ethics department for the BBC is. And it was my job to create compelling digital content around a radio strand focused on religion documentaries. For some time before eventually, TikTok would come on the scene and by the time I made my first TikTok and then my second and my third and I started building up a very different portfolio. This was no longer me bylined under the BBC, but this was video content that was under Sophia Smith Galer that was going out on TikTok and that I would be occasionally reposting under my Twitter account as I was doing that.
It didn't take very long for me to realize that I started seeing things on TikTok that shouldn't be happening or could be causing harm? Or were people talking about things that were going on around the world where my news sense was kicking in and I was thinking this is a story. The first scoops I started getting were my news gathering directly from the TikTok for you page, and I was pitching those stories to the BBC tech editor in my own time and I was writing them and conducting the journalism around them in my own time.
And I would sort of scrape and wrangle free moments where I do these stories around my full-time job because I wanted a byline. I wanted to do original, exclusive reporting, and I wanted to, I didn't even necessarily want to be a tech reporter. It was just that things were falling into my lap it sometimes felt like, and I wanted to be the first on it.
Marine Saint
It seems like. A lot of young journalists starting now experience a similar process, maybe not to the same extent that you did, but with juggling different forms of social media, pitching outside of your work hours as well. I wonder when you started to realize that TikTok was something that should be prioritized, you know, not only by newsrooms, but as a career choice for you, moving then into more freelance work and creating your own brand?
Sophia Smith Galer
I had flirted with the idea of going freelance when I was still at the BBC, but I didn't think it was quite the right time, mainly because I thought I had a lot left to learn and I thought I really benefit from being in a team and learning from colleagues and uh, also having the institutional support of a place, which obviously you lose when you go freelance.
And I pretty quickly gathered that my career was not gonna progress at the BBC in the way that I wanted it to. So, it had been a struggle getting support for TikTok journalism and by the time I left it was, I felt like I'd had an identity crisis at the organization. Because I had some people telling me, don't do it.
And I had others, including some of the most senior people at the BBC telling me, please do it. So you find it hard as a young journalist thinking, who do I listen to? Do I listen to the super senior people, or do I listen to the person who actually controls my annual review and my line management? You know, it's a really tricky position to be in, and it was impossible to see what the next job would look like for me.
And I would not be the only person to say that the BBC claims it's a good place for career progression. I can't say amongst a lot of social media journalists there, that has been the case in my generation. And it wasn't clear, the only career path that would've possibly been available in my team was to continue going up the ranks to become a social media editor.
And that's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to do original storytelling and reporting and, and that wasn't quite the strand I wanted to move up in. So I can't remember when, but at some point I thought, well, I want my next job and I don't think my next job's here. So I just started looking for other interesting opportunities and uh, I applied to the Senior News Reportor at Vice News, honestly, thinking I wouldn't get it, and I thought I wouldn't get it because I guess I wasn't being given that similar role at the BBC.
So yeah, I wasn't ever actually really thinking necessarily back to your question, can I make TikTok and can I make content creation, a viable career option? Back then I was still thinking, what's, what's the best thing I can do for me and my skillset and what I want to do and be?
And I thought I had a lot left to learn. And by the time I was getting close to two years at Vice, I was in a very different position. My personal following had grown exponentially. I'd been able to access loads of other opportunities. I was always self-starter, applying for interesting things that came my way.
That's how I became a visiting fellow at Brown, which I, you know, visiting fellow at an Ivy League in the US. I'm the first person in my family to go to uni. These are things that I never thought would happen. And I was realizing that not only can I do interesting storytelling off my own back, under my own name, you know, I don't necessarily need a news brand behind me.
But hey, I can go and be a fellow at this at School of Public Health for a while, or I can do this, I can do that. All these interesting projects that I derive a lot of pleasure and interest from that actually may not be journalism only, but perhaps they are journalism adjacent or perhaps it is work where I can be involved in innovating media or they're kind of just like sort of broader, interesting things, and that's what I'm always drawn to. I'm always drawn to interesting creative projects.
Freya Shaw
Would you say it's that same drive, and innovation that made you want to start Sophiana and Yeah, grow in the sort of AI space?
Sophia Smith Galer
Yeah, I think if you go into media innovation, you are compelled to stay on top of whatever is next. So people sort of came to call me like a TikTok journalist because so few people actually went on to do it. And to this day, there are still not many that you, you become known for it. And it's a bit of like first mover bias that there are plenty of other journalists on TikTok now, but they won't be known as the TikTok journalist in the way that I am.
But it wasn't ever that I really was a TikTok journalist. Like I was the first person to make like an Instagram first documentary at the BBC. I've always been innovative and I've always actually been very platform agnostic. So Instagram became my main platform years ago, but people still know me as a TikTok journalist. And the reality is. I am very passionate about making sure journalism survives. And it's not necessarily about making sure traditional journalism survives, but it's about making sure journalism, however it looks like today, is able to move forward and keep serving audiences from the first job I had to now as a freelancer to whatever job I have next, whether it's someone hires me or I hire myself, right? Whatever comes in my future, the audience is first. It's not me, the journalist, and it's not my boss, the journalism company. It's, it's the audience.
So if you take an audience first, view the media ecosystem changes so rapidly. What you specialize in and what you feel like you have to educate yourself about and the trends that you need to be observing change, change with that 'cause your audiences are changing. So that's, it was, it was very natural.
The minute that AI revealed itself to clearly be something that would become extremely prominent in our lives. That's, that's like an alert to me to say. You need to have a handle on. It doesn't mean I have to be an expert, but it means I have to have a handle on it. And it's really interesting how a lot of the journalists who are agile towards TikTok are being agile towards AI.
I don't think that's a coincidence. It's sort of when there is something new, interesting, and possibly an existential threat to traditional journalism. It is often the same people who per their ears up and go, right, how do we deal with this? Or how do we exploit it? How do we benefit from it? How do we understand the good that can be taken to boost journalism?
And the damage it could cause that we must mitigate against. It's very solutions focused as opposed to, ha no, I'm not gonna deal with that. That sounds like a big problem for tech people and it's far more important that I do this thing that I think is very, very valuable. It's like, yes, I agree with you, it's valuable, but if you don't protect, if you don't future proof yourself, it's gonna lose its value. That's the problem.
Marine Saint
How with newsrooms looking and journalists looking to acquire Sophiana to use it. How does the AI work? How does it help with making these viral scripts? Should we still have some risks about AI? I mean, we hear about the environmental impacts of ChatGPT, the gender bias that's inherent within a lot of large language models.I wonder where does Sophiana fit within that and how are newsroom's going to be applying it?
Sophia Smith Galer
Sure. So I've built Sophiana to primarily be a D two C app, so that means direct to consumer. And a lot of the people who will be using Sophiana are going to be individuals who want to amplify their work and their expertise.
That includes journalists, it also includes doctors. You know, any, anyone who, who produces any kind of written work, and they just need a little headstart. Turning that into a TikTok and Instagram video in the training that I've delivered. Because I've now consulted companies, newsrooms, individuals, for a long time about how to make this kind of content.
The two main obstacles are not volition. It's not 'cause they don't want to make it, it's because they don't have the time and they feel like they lack the video skills because it is, it is something that you train to do. It's easy to forget now, but I was a BBC video journalist when I hopped on the TikTok train.
I was in the perfect environment, with the perfect skillset to give that a go. So with that in mind, I'm very forceful or encouraging around the idea that people are using this app to amplify their own work. It is about turning something that you've already put a lot of effort into. Imagine you're a journalist who's done a three month investigation.
It's about helping you make sure that the audiences who need to find out about that investigation do so 'cause you've been able to put it on video platforms. Currently, a lot of journalists are not able to do that. The journalist would copy and paste their work into Sophiana, and then currently it is an open AI model.
That communicates with my knowledge [ base. They sort of speak to each other and they take that piece of work, that body of work that is at least 200 words long and they turn it into a script. It's then up to this imaginary journalist to have a look at that script, see if they're happy with it, see if it's in the sort of language they're happy with, um, make sure that it does fairly represent the work that they have done.
So it's very easy for them. They get given lots of hook options that are generated to select from, so they can choose what they like. Everything is editable afterwards. They can always slip in, but what they will find is the structure of it and some of the language. Uh, has been coordinated in order to perform well as according to my expertise, or to perform better on a social media algorithm than it would have if they'd had no one helping them.
I have been a victim of AI misuse and creating, Sophiana was even a step to try and protect me from that. I was [there thinking someone is gonna try and use my video script and my expertise to sort of. Cheat other people's way into making content. And I thought, no, I own that data. I have the right to it. I have the right to my expertise. I don't want to gate keep it though. I do want to share it. Is there a way that I can create a tool that can help journalism survive in the online information war we now find ourselves in? That's driven by video.
So that is what's motivated me to make it and a lot of AI tools are being made at the moment that have no human in the loop or no visible human in the loop. And you're like, yeah. And whose work have you trained this off? Who is, whose brain are you mining for this? And they won't be able to name anyone. But with Sophiana you can say it's Sophia Smith Galer. And she consented to all of this and she's helped to develop it. And she's always gonna work hard to make it as ethical and as you know, accurate and all as she possibly can.
Freya Shaw: I think that human element of it is, is really important both in sort of the production side and knowing the ethics behind it, but also knowing that you are putting tho those videos out there, not just you making content, but the people who will use Sophiana are using it for human audiences. So keeping the human in mind throughout AI, it's really important and I think it's a trend that should continue and people shouldn't be scared of using AI. Um, I was gonna ask we had the Reuters digital report that came out today about the future of journalism and that really did put an emphasis on TikTok and individual content creators on sort of social media platforms.
Do you think that's something we're gonna see more of, more news reporters engaging with their own work online and on TikTok?
Sophia Smith Galer
When you realize that your audience awareness about your work is dependent on whether it has a presence on video platforms. I think that's motivation for a lot of people to think, oh, we should be taking these seriously. And I might be used to having a whole crew filming me when I do TV or like lots of producers helping me when I make radio, but when I'm making social video, it's just me.
And that can be quite scary for a lot of people. And that's why I'm trying to come in and be like, it's okay. I've made an app. It's kind of like having me there. It's kind of like having a team and that's the future of, you know, agentic AI and a lot of AI tools that will come out there. It will start giving people the teams that perhaps they otherwise can't get hold of that, that can help them out.
But to your point about the digital news report that's come out. The ongoing increase of social video as a news source and information source for audiences that's been going on for a really, really long time. And it's almost like how many reports like this do they have to put out for, for news media to wake up?
And my, my biggest issue with news publishers and their approach to platforms is that they insist on putting all the efforts into a brand TikTok or Instagram account as opposed to amplifying and coming up with strategies and delivering training that can enable talent presenters, correspondents, reporters to amplify their own work under their own name, and for that to cooperate and coordinate with the brand that they work for.
We see it a little bit at the moment when news brands do like an Instagram collab. With an individual that's sort of as far as it's gone and that's good, but a lot more needs to happen in order to support these journalists because they are simply not on mass competing with online content creators in the way that they need to be.
The report was damning. Frankly, the report represents a massive failure from the news industry to get boots on the ground in the digital sphere and we now have to play a catch up game, and that's okay. Uh, all is not lost, but it is digital territory we should never have seeded. In my opinion, who is better, like no one is better at storytelling online or preserving ethics online than journalists. It's literally our job and our sort of framework and infrastructures to do all of that. So we let online content creators and influencers get there first because they had no hangups about these platforms. But we do need to catch up now.
Marine Saint
Hmm. That's really interesting because some of the reporting you did, you know, five years ago now on the influence of social media on elections in the US is so pertinent. In every election cycle we see people turn to social media for their news and views. I wonder, talking about the talent in newsrooms, being given the training and the platform to share their work on social media.
I wonder if that will help bring trust back to the media? It's a question that we hear about a lot right now. Do people really trust the news? Can social media help with that? I wonder what your stance on that is.
Sophia Smith Galer
There's almost contradictory polling because the digital news report has found that online influencers are as untrustworthy as politicians when it comes to audiences and where they think misinformation comes up online.
On the other hand, other polling has found that on many occasions, audiences trust creators over journalists, or they trust sort of online influencers over traditional news brands. So this isn't a neat and tidy ecosystem. It's extremely messy. It's fragmented and it's increasingly polarized. And different markets around the world are showing us that this isn't even the, these aren't even like global phenomena. We're starting to see different things emerge in different parts of the world. And I always used to see the US as us in five years time, and now I kind of have two visions in my head. I prepare for both scenarios. One where we do become the US in five years time, and another one where, hmm, maybe we follow these other trends that seem to be emerging.
And I'll, I'll bear that possible future UK in mind as well. Uh, one example being that we are very text resilient. So in terms of global markets, we're actually one of the markets that is less interested in vertical video as a new source. I think that's possibly part of the reason behind why it was hard to convince traditional media early in the day that it was valuable because I had all of this global data, but there is a lot of traditional like hierarchizing in British media that would've just poo-pooed it because it doesn't fit in with what we care about. So it's very challenging trying to future proof any kind of news publisher or journalist strategy.
But I am very much still convinced that the future remains social video. It remains more fragmented and, yeah, the challenge that the media has to face is if we better saturate the online space that we have currently seeded to influencers and content creators, will we build up more trust? And I have to be honest, I don't have an answer here. I'm just gonna speculate. Uh, a speculation and a worry that I have is if we don't change some of the delivery and style and focus points that we currently do to audiences, a good example is sort of behind the scenes. A lot of people think that in order to pull the curtain and build trust, we have to show the behind the scenes of journalism, and I always see that as a major red flag for me.
It's a significant cop out because audiences aren't really asking for behind the scenes. They're asking for impartiality and transparency. Showing the behind the scenes while still having to respect and honour extremely rigid editorial guidelines and style guides from a newsroom is not transparency.
Transparency would be to say. Hey, we put that video out yesterday and the comment section was febrile. A lot of people were not happy with how we made that video. I'm going to address it now. That is radical transparency and news brands are not ready for that, but that is the kind of radical transparency that content creators have been putting online for years.
Audiences are used to it. Audiences are used to these like big apology videos. Now, audiences are used to tea. They're used to spilling the tea channels. They are used to dramas unfolding before their eyes. And like news media is strangely alien and sort of above all of that. And as a result, it does not feel like they're transparent.
We actually now want radical transparency around how things are reported. That's different and that's not quite the behind the scenes a lot of people have in mind.
Freya Shaw
Yeah, there's, there's obviously a lot of challenges that come with that, but it seems like there's lots of space to evolve and hopefully grow from that. We're sort of coming towards the end of the episode.
We like to ask each of our guests for a piece of advice, which has really resonated with them throughout their career. So is there any wisdom which you would like to share with our listeners?
Sophia Smith Galer
This is hard, right? Because I mean, I left both of the jobs that I had and I learned the hard way that a permanent job is never permanent.
I'm very fortunate that I left all the jobs I've had on my own terms, and I've left to go on to career progression. Uh, not everyone's careers look like that, and mine probably won't look like that for the entire duration of it, but I learned that even if I was in a permanent job, I can be told the next day it's moving to a completely different city in the UK, which is what happened, uh, for 24 hours at the BBC as an example, I had to really fight to be made permanent at the BBC.
It was a humiliating experience. And I can remember when I finally got the permanent contract, I just went to the toilets and cried because I thought, that's what it took to make me permanent. Even though I'd, I'd done long enough service there to qualify for it. And at Vice, even though nothing changed, weirdly, nothing changed about my job.
We went through bankruptcy and that later would destroy the Vice news business. But thankfully, when I was there, everything was still fine. And I think the best advice I can give is that it's, I don't think news media is going to get more stable. I think some of the things that have happened in my career are signs of how many elements of it are collapsing and the stability of it is collapsing, and I am just very grateful that past Sophia future-proofed herself with a multi-platform skillset. I don't think we fully know what the platforms of even five to 10 years time are gonna look like. All I know is that because of my experience, I'll be ready to pivot to them. And if you are really hyperfocused on doing this one thing and doing it well, that's great. But I would say to you, I reckon you can do that one thing well.
But make sure there are three other ways you can, you can do it too. The other very good advice that I once got is, it's time to leave a job, or it may be time to leave a job when you stop learning something new every day. And I think that's incredibly good advice.
Marine Saint
I think people really look for answers, especially kind of our age group starting out like the future of journalism and what skills they need, and I think it's refreshing also to hear your honesty about when it's the right time to leave a job and what decisions you should be making to find your own agency within the this career space too.
Freya Shaw
Yeah, I've never really considered that. I've just graduated from City with my master's, so it'll definitely be something I take on looking forward. Yeah, thank you so much. It was, like Marine said, very insightful and lots to take away from it.
Sophia Smith Galer
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Marine Saint
We can't thank Sophia enough for her timely observations on the state of social media journalism.
Freya Shaw
Join us next time for more inspiring career journeys and keep an eye out on the Women in Journalism website, socials, and wherever you get your podcasts for future episodes. Thank you.
