- A Quick Hello from the Internet
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- Things to do in your funnel this week
Things to do in your funnel this week
Funnel weather. Funnel news. Funnel updates. Funnel scores.
Dave Burdick
July 02, 2024
OMG a BRB SUV!
a quick hello from the internet
Hi, team. Just writing with a quick hello, and also some thoughts about the top of the funnel, the big AI moment that will happen as millions of Americans watch Simone Biles, Gretchen Walsh and other Olympians this month, and an audience journalist’s scream into the void about analytics and leadership (where smart people emerge from the void to respond calmly with validation and suggestions).
BEST THINGS TO DO IN YOUR FUNNEL THIS WEEK
I’m thinking about the top of the audience funnel for local news right now and I saved some of the better things I’ve read to share with you! (Return the favor by sending me your own top-of-funnel ideas and projects, please!)
Here’s a Medill study published in May on how and why people in Chicago get their news.
When someone publishes a credible study with a subheading like “Reasons respondents consume local news,” it’s free actionable advice. Top reason here? “It helps me save or manage my money.” That’s not unique to Chicago. What’s on your editorial calendar that reflects that motivation?
This truism is still true but I don’t love the margin: “About half (53%) trust local news media to get things right, a higher portion than found nationally (41%).”
More actionable stuff: What are people in your area always interested in and how might you leverage your archives and “How can we create these rabbit holes of content that people can get lost down?”
Here’s a quick case study of a very small newsroom using specific tactics to grow reach on Instagram.
👉️ As for farther down the funnel, Blue Engine Collaborative and Google News Initiative just announced a reader loyalty and retention lab. Apps close July 21. If I was still full-time somewhere, this is the part that would have made me close all my other tabs and start my application: “designed to transform major news events — like election cycles, sporting events, extreme weather, etc. — into a foundation of lifelong loyalists.”
POSSIBLE HORSEMAN OF THE AIPOCALYPSE
Legendary sports broadcaster Al Michaels greenlit using an artificial intelligence version of his voice for Olympics summaries in part because he was so impressed by it.
I don’t know where this would fall on the spectrum from text to video, but I can tell you that a Reuters survey with analysis published a couple weeks ago says that video is the medium with which there is the least user comfort with stuff being generated by AI.
“[T]hey are most strongly opposed to the use of AI for creating realistic-looking photographs and especially video, even if disclosed. Past research shows that people often rely on images and videos as ‘mental shortcuts’ when trying to discern what to trust online, with many expressing the idea that ‘seeing is believing’ (e.g., Ross Arguedas et al. 2023). This crucial function of images, often serving as proof of what is being reported, helps explain why synthetic imagery disrupting that logic would cause greater uneasiness.”
One more audience insight from that Reuters analysis: “While comfort levels are low across the board, audiences express greater discomfort with the use of AI to generate content about more consequential topics, such as politics, relative to less consequential topics such as sports.”1
🤔 I wonder where some of the America Amplified election work would fit — it’s content about a topic considered “consequential,” but it feels like a different category somehow, in that it’s responding directly to user questions, and as far as I know it’s not newsy so much as informationy. Thoughts?
The Olympics might be an enormous profile-raiser for AI-generated voice at least, depending on how it’s handled. I’m setting the lowest possible bar: I think it’ll be received slightly more positively than hologram Tupac (which was, wait, twelve years ago, oh no oh no oh no).
a pain point that might seem familiar
you’re told that your value and goal as an audience journalist is to develop loyalty and hedge against all kinds of Google and social volatility, but ultimately your performance is still tracked against traffic/revenue goals
The person who shared this pain point with me added: “In newsletters this usually manifests as [leadership] saying it values newsletters as loyalty products, and accepting your stated goals of improved CTR and open rate, but being unhappy with the pace of the kind of organic list growth that earns you a loyal audience. Idk maybe I’m bad at my job!”
So (a) I know who you are and you’re good at your job, and (b) I shared your challenge with two people who get up close and personal with this kind of thing as a matter of course. Here’s what came to mind for them. First up, Ariel Zirulnick, director of news experimentation at LAist, with a great, specific example:
Every newsroom has these topline goals that map to the funnel: reach, loyalty, conversion. (They probably have others, too, but they almost certainly have these.) Newsroom leadership has to understand every stage of the funnel, how they interact with each other, what products and tactics serve each stage of the funnel, and what metrics are used to measure success for each of those. Then they have to think about how that maps against the organization’s biggest challenge at the moment, as well as whatever curveball the platforms have thrown most recently.
Then they have to communicate how all of that fits together. They need to be able to tell a story about how the organization is doing that takes all that into account. That’s… a lot. Nuance and complexity can fall by the wayside as they try to find a crisp, concise, and accessible way to talk about where the newsroom is headed.
In contrast, traffic is easy to understand and easy to communicate about.
The challenge your reader is facing came up not that long ago at LAist.
For the primary election we launched a limited-run, post-election newsletter for the brief but confusing period between the closing of the polls and the finalization of election results. Hundreds of thousands of people use our voter guides every election but don’t engage with us at all between elections. We created this newsletter, called Make It Make Sense, to try to convert a slice of these election-only audience members into newsletter subscribers.
We didn’t optimize for click-through – the voter guides were the top of the funnel and we knew that sending the subscriber back to the voter guides or election results page would be frustrating to them.
Instead, we would build a product for a distinct, civically engaged audience segment that could be appealing to potential sponsors heading into the general election (we’ll resume the newsletter in September). In the end about 4,400 people signed up for Make It Make Sense. About 3,000 of those email addresses were new to LAist. (Read more about Make It Make Sense in this American Press Institute case study.)
When we held the retro on the newsletter, the first question we got was, “If we have these monthly active user goals, why didn’t we optimize it for click-through?” The answer, of course, is that we also have newsletter subscriber goals and digital membership goals that rely on us adding to our email database. People who want a newsletter want a newsletter – not being driven to the website.
Because the question came up in a retro, we had a good conversation about the different topline goals and what products and tactics are mapped to each. But most of the time there isn’t an opportunity for that discussion because the communication is happening via email or an organization-wide meeting.
To sum it all up: different products have different jobs for a newsroom. Part of managing up is reminding your leadership team of why a product exists and what it’s supposed to do for your organization – and how that job is measured. Organizations need to be able to hold space for different teams and products to have different goals than the core newsroom operation and to be able to have good, open, meaningful conversations about that.
And, for a leadership perspective, here’s Tanner Curl, executive director at MinnPost. I met Tanner when we were in a membership accelerator program several years ago (a bond forged in the fires of the funnel):
It's frustrating to be misaligned on strategy or goals and get mixed messages from leadership. Not knowing the details of your organization, I can say it's usually in everyone's interest to be driving toward more revenue (having jobs is nice!) and a focus on loyalty drives toward audience revenue. If loyalty is the focus, there will be trade-offs in terms of top-of-the-funnel volume and ad revenue.
Here's what I would do (and, fwiw, what I'd want my team to do) in your situation. Reach out to leadership to ask to regroup on audience strategy. Be direct that you're getting mixed messages and that you also know that everyone wants to see your organization grow and thrive, you just want to make sure everyone is aligned on how.
In the conversation itself, I'd start with reaffirming that your audience focus should be engagement/loyalty. Sure, maybe everyone knows that, but let's just say it out loud and remind ourselves that that's our North Star. From there, I'd frame the conversation around questions: what goals drive toward our strategy and how do we measure progress toward those goals? How can these metrics keep us aligned as a team? When the temptation to shift or spread our audience focus, how can we hold ourselves and each other accountable? I think it's valuable to dig into the trade-offs of your strategy. If leadership is concerned about CPMs, having a deeper, more loyal audience can be a premium for sponsorship (more revenue!).
It takes discipline to stay focused on a strategy and the goals that flow from it, particularly as our industry faces quickly-evolving pressures. Everyone needs to be on the boat and rowing in the same direction, no matter where they are in the org chart. Good luck!
No, really: Tell me what challenges you’re facing — maybe you’ll be the validation someone else needs. Or: Do you have expertise to share?
A FINAL THOUGHT
“We have asked journalists very quickly to come up with a solution, an answer to artificial intelligence and the use of generative artificial intelligence in particular. I feel like we didn’t give a lot of time to a lot of people before we put them under the microscope.”
— Tomás Dodds in a presentation to the JournalismAI community on how journalists can avoid AI hype. He and colleagues analyzed several of the earliest newsroom AI guidelines.
I just share this because somebody researched people like you and was like, “whoa, you guys are under a bunch of pressure.” It’s not just you!
That’s it. Tell your friends about your new funneliest newsletter! Next one of these won’t land for at least three weeks, I imagine. Have a great month.
1 As an aside, the money, power and motivation pouring into AI right now will not be stopping for users’ discomfort in any case. Venture capitalist and renowned analyst Mary Meeker published a report on AI and higher education, the introduction of which was call-to-armsy enough to put me in mind of the seasonally-appropriate Independence Day speech from “Independence Day”: “We are in an intelligence arms race for hearts, minds, and power. For the sake of democratic values, it’s crucial for those who uphold these principles to lead not lose.”