All posts by Steven Wilson-Beales

About Steven Wilson-Beales

I'm Head of Editorial at Global Radio, London looking after a fantastic range of websites including Capital FM, Capital Xtra, Heart, XFM, LBC, Classic FM and Smooth. Find me on and Twitter. Please feel free to email me here.

WANTED: Senior Editor

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here but…I’m hiring!

Applications can be sent here: https://jobs.global.com/gb/en/job/R0007431/Senior-Editor

Job Description

Senior Editor

Reporting of the Role

This role reports to the Head of SEO & Editorial Product
Overview of job

Global is recruiting a Senior Editor role to drive digital audience growth for our award-winning news and politics podcasts.

The role combines both strategic and hands-on leadership as you’ll be responsible for the day-to-day digital output of the brand including formats such as news articles, evergreen SEO features and social media posts.

You will take an active role in defining and targeting areas of digital growth as well as demonstrating a passion for identifying and publishing the kind of stories that can hook online news junkies and news avoiders alike.

You need to be a great communicator and highly collaborative as you will be working with multiple partners, including a small digital content team, as well as liaising with teams in audio production, video and social.

This is a senior role in our content team, so you will have proven experience of working in a digital newsroom and driving audience loyalty through online initiatives. You will be expected to contribute to planning and writing of online features.

3 best things about the job

  • Working with our award-winning podcast team.
  • Being able to harness your digital skills to execute a brilliant audience growth strategy
  • Work with the content team to react to the latest, breaking news stories

Measures of success – 

In the first few months, you would have:

  • Defined and executed a digital audience growth strategy to include both SMO and SEO
  • Produced an editorial calendar with article ideas to guide team
  • Started to work with key Global partners to ensure your content strategy is supported

Responsibilities of the role

  • Increase the reach and impact of our news podcasts brand by delivering an effective digital content strategy that taps into topics discussed in-show and identifying additional topics ripe for coverage.
  • Manage the news podcast writers to generate and prioritize ideas; co-ordinate the launching of stories and content; and develop best practices for social, search and other platforms.

What you will need

The ideal candidate will be proactive and willing to develop and implement innovative solutions, capable of the following:

  • Able to deliver a well-rounded digital growth strategy.
  • Excellent writer that can inspire others to write to the best of their abilities.
  • Passionate about working with multiple partners to deliver their content strategy.
  • Strong editorial experience and flair, with a passion for storytelling and a deep understanding of digital media, including broadcast, digital publishing and audio.
  • Demonstrable experience of running a busy newsroom or news desk
  • Proven experience in people management and effective communication.
  • Able to bring people together and lead a team.
  • Ability to forge relationships with internal and external partners.
  • Outstanding journalist on their subject matter – passionate and authoritative.
  • The ability to juggle multiple deadlines.
  • Great planner and creative thinker – able to operate across multiple brands and platforms.
  • Strong understanding of user needs.

My interview with Media Masters podcast

I was recently interviewed on the Media Masters podcast which was great fun. I’ve been a fan of the podcast series for a while now as they always have some fantastic interviews with editorial leads so it’s a great way to find out how brands pitch the uniqueness of their output. Hopefully, this will give listeners an insight into how I do SEO at Global, and how I got into the role in the first place.

One thing – this interview as recorded just before the final rollout of Google Helpful Content Update. At the time, it had a lot of SEOs flustered because of the ironically unhelpful post that Google released with that update. Just another example of the work we do to try and interpret what Google intends, and what may actually happen in the serps.

Anyway, there’s lots of points I raise in the interview, and you’ll get an insight into my slightly chaotic career path.

You can listen to the the podcast interview with Steven Wilson-Beales here.



An update from the digital wilderness. Also – synthesizers.

In September I also went to the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester. Excellent fun. Here’s an early computer but my son wasn’t interested as it didn’t have Roblox.

Well it’s taken a year to post anything on this blog – so that’s probably a good indication I should probably downgrade my masterplan of filling the digital void with my #content brilliance in favour of far less overhead. But as U-turns are all the fashion these days , let’s just keep calm and carry on!

I could say it’s been an exceptionally busy year – and in a way it has. At the beginning of Jan I took on Product Owner responsibilities to upgrade our in-house Content Management System. This has meant working more closely than ever with our fantastic dev team which has been really insightful. ‘Learning the language’ of Product Ownership has been really interesting, particularly as an SEO who often pitched technical SEO upgrades to dev teams from behind the ’email wall.’ Now that I have breached enemy defences, my path to world SEO domination is only a stone’s throw away. Mwahahaha!

The Queen’s funeral was a true test of our capability as a news organisation to meet the requirements of the day – and as any technical teams within news brands will know, there is no single button you can press to cover everything you need so you are heavily reliant on the brilliance of staff to ‘turn things up to eleven’ as one of the video producers said on the day. A momentous occasion and one I’m sure will stay in people’s memories in years to come.

It’s also been a busy period as I’ve finally decided to ‘stick my head above the parapet’ (as someone else once said to me) and be visible at a few more conferences and networking events. In October, I’ll be hosting the AOP’s Tech Talk on Personalisation – there are some great presentations lined up as part of this, and a great discussion to be had on the panel itself. I’ve also managed to grab an interview slot on the magical Media Masters podcast which I’ve been a fan of for many years. Paul and I had a great conversation on the podcast and it was great opportunity to try and remember what the hell I’ve been up to for all these years.

Lastly, I did make a promise to myself during lockdown that I would spent more time noddling on my synthesizers. I can confirm the noddling has continued and I’ve teamed up with a few of my ‘ol pals a few tracks which will be launched into the digital universe very soon. I’ve never had so much fun installing faulty soundcards and resolving latency issues – it’s just like 2002 all over again!

Until next time!