Web Summit: ‘Being right more important than being first’, says Samantha Barry

Having the gift of the gab is far from the only reason Cork native Samantha Barry was chosen to lead CNN’s social media department but when you’re in the driving seat at one of the world’s largest news outlets it’s a local quality that probably can’t hurt either.

Based in New York, the Ballincollig-born journalist whose family now call Bantry home is far from her roots but that ability to tell a yarn, though in in a very different way, is as important as ever.

More than a decade working as a broadcast journalist brought Ms Barry from a master’s degree at Dublin City University all the way to the Big Apple in her current role at CNN, via more than 25 countries.

With three global teams and more than 35 staff working under her direction, it’s a job that brings plenty of responsibility and a little worry from time to time too.

“It’s terrifying but in a good way; in a way that pushes you. It feels like the year has gone by in a heartbeat but it also feels like I’m really happy. I’m so proud of the stages we’ve gotten to within a year; really proud that we have focused our distribution model on social and proud of how we’ve innovated,” Ms Barry said.

Her staff look after all things social from publishing content across platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat to discovering and verifying stories online and driving traffic to CNN’s televised content.

The one thing that binds all those roles together across continents is the need to continuously re-examine the ways in which stories are told and the audience engaged.

Just don’t mention a three- year plan, in this job it’s three months at a time.

“You say three or five years, I don’t think I can even look that far ahead. I’m looking three months, six months down the line because I’m looking at investing in social for a long-term gain.

“We’re playing around with it, experimenting with it — we’re not afraid to fail.

“One of the things we’re doing is playing around with a new app called List. It has a very small audience at the moment but we’re experimenting with it because if it does take off in a huge way we want to be the best people on that.”

Being prepared to fail with an app is one thing but getting it wrong factually is quite another and something Ms Barry doesn’t entertain.

Years spent learning her craft first in the RTÉ newsroom, then Newstalk and finally with the BBC in countries as far afield as Nigeria, Iraq, and Burma made sure being right was always going to be more important than being first — an old quality now being put to good use in a very modern way.