Deez Interviews: Sophia Smith Galer, on TikTok fame + the importance of digitizing religion journalism
Happy Friday, Deezers! Today’s interview is with Sophia Smith Galer, a BBC World Service journalist and presenter covering faith and ethics (check out her recent 4-part series on religion in the digital age here!. We talked about her path into journalism, being TikTok famous, and tips for any outlet trying to get serious about the platform. Enjoy!
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You're a trained opera singer and linguist — what got you into journalism, and specifically the religion beat?
Journalism had always been one of the careers that I toyed with growing up, but until I was 22, I was in quite full-on training to become a classical singer because I wanted to sing in operas and travel the world. But I can remember one rehearsal when I was 17 — I was playing Hermia in Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream — where all everyone wanted to talk about was music and boys and I wanted to talk about what had happened that day in the news (obviously, in addition to music and boys).
I was the first to go to university in my family and careers like journalism or opera were both pipe dreams. At the same time, I was trying to work out what to study at university and was already in love with Spanish. That led me to reading some Andalusian poetry from the time of the Moors in Spain in translation, and I thought that this must be a wonderful language to learn.
The Middle East was in the news all the time, and there was so much out there that was deeply critical and vilifying of Islam. And here I was reading beautiful poetry from an Islamic culture. I wanted to find out more and ended up getting a degree in it all. So I lived in Beirut for a year and became a radio DJ at a bar there (you may by now have noticed a hedonistic streak here that didn't quite suit the Olympic rigour of an opera career); then when I got back home I decided to pursue broadcasting because I had so much fun doing it.
I trained in news but I do keep falling into more culture/feature-y/documentary spaces, and got my first break as a social media producer at the BBC. When the BBC World Service were after someone who knew both digital journalism and religion, my very random background with Arabic and singing in church all my life ended up being quite handy.
I love this interview you did last year where you talked about the importance of covering religion specifically via digital storytelling. What’s something you’ve seen that reflects the kind of potential digital has over print for this beat?
For me, it is completely about audiences. I have a very clear remit in my job to originate storytelling that will appeal to under 34s. People under 34 are not sat in front of 24-hour rolling news channels; they're on their phones. If my story isn't somewhere on that phone - on their IG feed, Facebook if they still even use it, or their news app — then they aren't going to encounter it.
This might feel like it's an increasingly secularising world, but that is a deeply Western viewpoint that a) ignores the growing number of people identifying as spiritual and not religious and b) ignores the fact that the average Hindu and Muslim worldwide is in their mid-20s. My films — especially on Instagram — have a reach of well over a million people and healthy engagement times.
Religion journalism is still one of those beats that I don't think has been digitised as quickly as other ones, and I think there are two big reasons for that. One is probably the general age of religion journalists and what they were trained in, and the second is that the gatekeepers of mainstream media tend to keep online video spaces quite secular. I'm really grateful to be working somewhere that is committed to religion coverage, as I don't think other outlets would support me in this way.
Speaking of digital storytelling and targeting a young audience……..you’re also TikTok famous as @sophiasmithgaler! What's the story behind starting your account? Also, do you *feel* TikTok famous?
It all began with a tweet. I asked the Twittersphere if anyone knew about whether the BBC was going to get on TikTok, and a few days later a very brilliant BBC camera journalist called Emma Bentley made a TikTok, saying that I had asked about it, so here was the BBC's first go (albeit unofficial go).
I responded to it with a TikTok I made in the office. I had 0 followers and followed 0 people, and somehow it exploded and got 250k views. I kept going but was conscious that I wasn't allowed to post any editorial news content or anything that could be construed as official BBC content — just like how you see BBC journalists' bios clarifying that they’re expressing personal views, not the BBC's.
So I had to come up with content ideas that were personal; hence the personal takes on journalism, learning Arabic, singing. As a video journalist it's impossible really to ignore a brand new video platform that the world seems to be obsessing over, and from the beginning I've been working out how to use it in the event of having to one day create news content for it. It definitely wasn't in my mind to do my own material really on there, it's all sort of just...happened.
I didn't feel TikTok famous until someone at Heathrow airport came and talked to me because they recognised me, and then someone on the New York subway stopped me to tell me she loved my Arabic videos. What's striking about all of that is how engaged they must have been with the content to recognise my face even though some of these videos are less than 15 seconds. I think that's absolutely nuts.
You post a lot of TikToks about your career and even "how to"s for things like "how to get work experience in journalism." What do you want your followers to get out of it?
The response has been encouraging and there's very little hate that I get on there, which is nice. The amount of DMs that I get every day now is staggering, and I don't have the time to reply to them all, which is sad and when I find spare moments, I try to go through a few. A lot are teenagers telling me they want to pursue a career in journalism but have no idea where to start; a lot saying that they want to learn or improve languages but, again, have no idea where to start — and then I get your usual influx of chat up lines, the best being that “our 11/10 eyebrows could unite and rule the world.”
Finally, what advice do you have for other journalists and outlets who are trying to succeed on the platform?
It needs to be at least one person's job in the newsroom; producing video for TikTok won't fit into the traditional newsroom flow like Instagram has, for example. A high production value on Instagram has allowed for news outlets to quite seamlessly reversion horizontal digital content or even TV packages into IG-friendly vertical video and in terms of video-editing that's an hour or two's process.
But to engender TikToks it's totally different; a reversioned news package doesn't do well unless a TikToker is doing a commentary on it. People are filming in their bathrooms and bedrooms, they don't want to see your swish TV studio unless it's behind the scenes content that's funny, which Max Foster at CNN does a really good job with.
I see inspiring stories perform outrageously well — my most viral videos have been 'wholesome plot twist' ones — which mirrors the sort of video content we've seen flourish on Facebook and Instagram. So we already know how to find the right subject material for TikTok — it's the way we produce it that has to be different.
It is talent driven; by that I don't mean celebrity-driven or presenter-driven, I mean it's driven by people who are either awe-inspiring or hilarious. You need a team that has on-camera AND off-camera experience to loop all of that together. Viral content also bounces off current trends — that's trending hashtags, trending songs, trending topics in the news.
If you haven't got someone dedicated to the role who can spend hours a day watching other people's TikToks, you aren't going to be on trend and you're going to miss out on those crucial growth opportunities. And I haven't even gotten onto TikTok's abundant copyright and music issues here because, well, I enjoy sleeping at night and it will probably give you nightmares.
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Don’t forget to follow Sophia on Twitter and TikTok, duh, and take care out there!!
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