News disengagement tsunami loading

a quick hello from the internet

Hi, team. Just writing with a quick hello, and also some thoughts on how to stop the frantic news cycle from destroying your relationship with your audience, a report with unpleasant realities about product strategy in news orgs, and of course the recurring feature in which an audience journalist asks a question we all have and I’ve found someone to provide some real, actionable thoughts on it. A note: I’m out of questions for that feature for now, so if you’ve got one, ask it!

I’ve skipped the SearchGPT news this week so as not to be redundant to the last two newsletters, but let’s just put it this way: Every development like it makes it more urgent that your newsroom is laser-focused on audience loyalty. Do you have an audience journalist that needs backup? Do you have a plan that you just haven’t quite gotten around to implementing yet?

… do you need a new plan?

ONLY YOU CAN HELP YOUR READERS TOUCH GRASS

I was out of the country for two wildly newsy weeks. Even so, I could feel the ramping-up of the national news addiction that many people get ahead of a presidential election. It feels more like 2016/17 than like 2020/21 and to my mind, it’s basically an information economy housing bubble, complete with a rush for real estate, speculation and (probable) overinvestment with no regard for the coming burst.

A major backlash against news consumption will arrive again at the end of this calendar year. Hyping audiences up at this pace is just not sustainable.

Smart people I know had mixed opinions of the NYT going all-in on essentially liveblogging the downfall of the Biden campaign (suffice it to say some found it responsive to a core audience need and some would disagree strongly with an omg-look-what-happened-over-there headline like “One Night of TV Canceled a President”). But even that pace and and breathlessness is nothing compared to what we’re seeing on social media and every smart-ish device now — we’ve loaded our collective wellbeing into a meme cannon and lit the fuse. You can inoculate yourself and your audiences against the coming crash. To fight fire with fire, let’s use the now-aged (ā-jəd) command/wisdom to “touch grass.”

• It’s more important than ever to ground your coverage in physical locations, physical descriptions and good photography. Your August-September-October challenge from me, Dave Burdick: Don’t let even a single policy story hit your site without an address in it. Get people out of their heads to see the actual world — in places they recognize as real and relevant to them — impacted not by the gaffe or electoral talking point du jour but by developments in systems that are more immediately relevant to their daily lives. As a side benefit, Google Discover loves this stuff if you’re consistent, and you’ll give specific communities more reason to share your work.

• This is de rigueur for B2B or niche publications, but for locals: Don’t forget to lump yourself into the category of “information” rather than “news” sometimes. The more you help people solve their problems, the less likely they are to think of you in the same bucket as CNN or whatever. Also: Serve their other human needs, like companionship, connection, validation, entertainment, enrichment … in other words, serve parts of their brain other than the panicked part. (Think it’s a coincidence that NYT invests a bunch in its Cooking and Games content? Or that the Guardian is now copying that strategy?)

• Just to emphasize it again, pay for good photography. It’s worth it for search and social, but more than that it’s worth it in engendering trust — people can see that you went to a place they know. That makes a difference over time.

• This quick guide for marketers, our neighbors on the internet, on how to handle content strategy during the election is pretty interesting. Maybe you and your team should read it and have a mini lunchtime book club meeting about it. How does it apply to sharing your features stories on social? Your email subject lines? What else does it spark for you?

INSTANT STRATEGY DOC

You could paraphrase this brief report on product and publishers from former Digiday chief Brian Morrissey for your own product strategy memo, whether your product team is a dozen people or just a quarter of one person’s brain.

• Is it going too far to say I may have shed a tear when I read that product pros report deprioritizing big, flashy projects in favor of “smaller wins throughout the year”?

• One more hit: “The winds of change in the industry have shifted from chasing shiny objects and the fleeting sugar-high of social traffic to building sturdier foundations based on deeply understanding audiences through loyalty.”

• And some of you might have enough seniority or institutional leverage to use this information, while others might just find some validation: Kevin Anderson built on the above report with some context from interviews he’s conducted with product managers (some of whom have left journalism): “At best this left product managers with a feeling that they lacked agency. ‘You are at the center of decision making, when you often don't actually have the power to make the decision,’ said a product manager at a small digital news outlet. This lack of agency raised issues for product leaders. ‘How can we motivate people to continue even working on this, if you know they see their colleagues not understanding the value?’ a product manager at a small broadcaster said. This is leading to retention issues.

MILDLY INTERESTING

Stack Overflow and Reddit are two of the platforms best at answering users’ questions — one of the oldest, funniest stories about misuse of generative AI is centered on using it to squeeze Reddit for content juice — and so I’m quite interested to know more about Reddit’s new lead generation ads and whether they might be effective for news orgs. Let me know if you test them out!

• Here’s the official Reddit page on the lead-gen ads.

a pain point that might seem familiar

This is the part of the newsletter where I invite readers — that’s you! — to submit an anonymous pain point or tactical or strategic question, so that I can share it with people elsewhere in the industry to offer validation and solutions. We’re all in this together! Send me your questions right here! Also, I would love for some of you to volunteer to answer these. Raise your hands! You’re experts!

On to the pain point:

Here’s the full question:

“I know every newsroom struggles with this but has anyone figured out how to get stories turned in at a reasonable time? We regularly have stories coming in after the digital team is already off. The result is stories publishing with bad headlines, production and SEO. Whenever we push for stories earlier, editors act like they either have no control over the reporters or that creating deadlines is unrealistic. How can the digital team successfully push for a culture change?”

The question about culture change is exactly the right one; the job journalists do isn’t to report, write and publish stories, it’s to inform people. Therefore we need to reach people. 

You need a newsroom culture that is driven by reaching and informing people which, surprise, doesn’t magically happen because of the innate gravity of an Important Fact you buried nine grafs deep in a story you published at 7:09 p.m. on a Friday. I recognize that flipping that switch isn’t easy. For this to really stick, people have to be hired for it. Not just hired with this in mind, but hired for it, i.e., hired because they’ve made the case to the hiring manager that they know their value as a journalist is in surfacing important facts, contextualizing them and then distributing them effectively.

You wouldn’t hire a plumber who was great at identifying which pipes you need and then skillfully stacked them just inside your house. There’s a whole other step, without which the other steps are meaningless. You might even argue that such a person was not a plumber.

When we talk about culture change, we need to include in that our hiring culture and of course our culture of evaluation and praise and accountability.

For some practical approaches, I asked Danya Henninger, editorial director at Technical.ly, how she’d approach this one. Danya is very solution-oriented and hit me — in like half an hour — with this one-shot text message.

Good luck — that’s a tough one, but do recognize that it’s not something entirely within your control. It requires buy-in and follow-through elsewhere in your newsroom, from serious-minded people.

A FINAL THOUGHT

My mind is on goal-setting right now. I’d love to hear what personal, team and organizational goals you’ve got, or you’re working on formulating right now. Reply to this newsletter to tell me!

That’s it for me. Tell your friends about the newsletter that gives you actionable next steps but also knows you can’t do this stuff all by your lonesome. See you in a few weeks!