The audience is right
In this guest post, ninemsn’s Hal Crawford argues that online sites should respect readers’ choice in the news they consume
One thing I find surprising, after a decade in online news and a few years in print, is that the longer I remain a journalist the more my respect for the readers grows. Increasingly the correct attitude to adopt towards the audience seems to be one of respect rather than arrogance.
Perhaps it is the daily exposure to their reading habits. Perhaps this kind of humility is the natural consequence of experience. But every year it gets stronger: the audience is right.
The audience knows the best stories. The audience can smell the thing that matters. The audience will not take it on trust, but can somehow collectively bypass the speculative and hit on the real.
This is clearer in online news than in traditional media. At ninemsn, the Omniture analytical suite is used to track things like page views, unique browsers and time online. It’s an industry standard, and works by having tracking codes in pages that are activated by the browser. Data is sent to Omniture’s servers and then rendered in dashboards for producers to view on-demand.
You can use Omniture data to track story performance in real time. ninemsn uses an in-house system on top of Omniture, called “the Oracle”. This is a simple tool that uses page view data over five minutes to show performance by article. The editor uses the Oracle to weed out underperformers, indicate when to retire “tired” stories, and show up any blind spots in his or her judgment. It is not a replacement for editorial experience but primarily prevents complacency and assists in knowing how the site is travelling. Without it, you are flying blind.
This is not automatic news. As an editor, you’re faced with hundreds of stories to commission or select, you need to get the right mix and you need to know how to pitch. The Oracle won’t help with that – but it will let you know when you have a stinker on your hands. Selecting and pitching stories are key skills for an online news editor, the cardinal sins being on the one hand a dull page, and on the other a misleading headline which leads to a disappointing story. It is also vital to be able to balance short-term gain and long-term credibility in creating a story mix that suits your voice and mission as a news service.
A consequence of sitting on the analytical tools in real time is that you get a very thorough view of what people want to read or watch. The curtain is torn away – there’s nothing between you and the naked truth. Here is the page view “heartbeat” for Nine News online over the past 12 months:
The peaks in the first six months of the year correspond to, respectively, the Queensland floods, Cyclone Yasi, the Christchurch earthquake, the Japanese tsunami, and the killing of Osama bin Laden.
A lot that is being said about online news assumes that this new-found sensitivity to reader behaviour is creating a “race to the bottom”. That’s not what I see in this data. These stories are big and important and this importance is reflected in the massive page view spikes as hundreds of thousands of Australians come online to find out what is happening.
When I wrote a piece for Mumbrella a while back arguing that to subsidise any kind of “quality journalism” would be a bad idea, News Limited’s David Higgins took me to task. As a counter-example, he used the idea of adding up all the traffic the Walkley Award winning articles would have had online over the past few years:
I’m sure it would make for depressing reading if you judged the value of a decade’s worth of the best Australian journalism against their PIs (page impressions) alone.
Higgins is an insightful thinker – but this particular example sheds light on the negative attitudes of many in legacy media companies to digital audiences. There’s no reason to assume a brilliant and award-winning story wouldn’t generate a good-sized audience online. You’d have to assume, in the absence of other evidence, that it would because people love new and relevant information.
Recognition of this in digital newsrooms attached to moribund print organisations is difficult: relatively few are writing or creating only for the web, so no one is adapting their judgment for the medium; exclusives are held and, at a deeper level, these organisations are still gauging performance by old criteria. It is the model of a classically “disrupted” business: how can the achievements of the digital seedling be recognised in the shade of the print behemoth?
Fairfax’s Greg Hywood has talked about restructuring his company to make digital work – but shifting organisational values is exceedingly difficult. When Hywood mentions ceding control of Fairfax sites to newspaper editors, you know the project is doomed: people who don’t understand online news publishing stories they don’t believe in to audiences they don’t respect. And all the time making less money than they used to. Unless Hywood can pull off a miracle, the structures that create value in digital will be missing.
The keystone in this value creation is understanding the audience. What we have found at ninemsn is that speculative or conditional stories, such as experts warning about something or politicians speaking, generally do very poorly no matter how “important”. It was probably always the case that these stories were the least-read in a newspaper, but the lack of public interest was disguised by the fact that when you picked up a newspaper you got the lot. Like a television media deal, if you wanted the good stuff you had to take the dross. This is no longer the case.
That cuts out a chunk of traditional political reporting and upsets many journalists and commentators, who have narrow views of how news should be used by an audience and see cherished notions of newsworthiness being modified.
Do article page views correspond absolutely to content quality? No – that’s looking at audience on too granular a scale. But articles that don’t get read should not be written. If a story is important it can be, and should be, made interesting. Any Walkley Award winning story that can’t find an audience online is a discredit not to the medium but to the judges.
- Hal Crawford is founder of Share Wars and head of news at ninemsn
ninemsn’s current lead story:
Kanye flips out over paper. Rapper ejects fan over ‘life-threatening’ business card
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NineMsn gets its traffic via Hotmail. Seriously, who would ever go there for news, let alone original content?
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Hal, you sound way too serious about crafting articles for readers – is that what you believe you do? (alright – you may have a small news team who do exactly that – but the rest of the offerings on the msn homepage are generated for your ad CLIENTS). MSN homepage fodder is actually BRANDED CONTENT that sit within client branded sites – and that Hal is no substitute for news.
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More Australians get their financial news from ninemsn than any other source.
Now that’s fukken scary.
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Great piece, Hal. The media’s contempt for the readers (which you acknowledge right at the beginning) is a key to understanding their problems. I’ll run my theory about why they hold them in contempt past you some other time, but what I wanted to say here was this:
I wonder if your basic idea of ‘respecting’ audience choices via an intimate analysis of traffic flows doesn’t risk you holding them in contempt in another way?
Like politicians who rely on focus groups and polling in order to find out ‘what people want’, doesn’t the media risk narrowing their offering to such an extent that people end up frustrated with the whole thing? Isn’t that in part what is happening to the mainstream now?
People want what they want, but part of the reason we consume news sites etc is to broaden our knowledge. We want to find out new stuff and be offered info we might not have otherwise considered. Media sites won’t be doing that if they over-rely on the sort of statistical analysis you outline here.
In other words, respecting an audience means more than reflecting their choices back at them (just ask the pollies). It means trusting them enough to offer them things that, on first blush (or click) they might not be interested in. Shouldn’t the media, at least in part, challenge their audience rather than coddle them? Shouldn’t they actually respect the audience enough to, occasionally, offer them stuff outside their comfort zone? Doesn’t over-reliance on analytics risk becoming just another form of arrogance/contempt?
I agree with you that following audience choices is not the same thing as a race to the bottom. But surely there has to be more to journalism than following the Oracle heartbeat?
Having said all that, I recognise that you are actually addressing such concerns in the article. I just wonder if your championing of the analytics doesn’t belie a deeper point about respecting audiences?
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Hal, I think one problem here is the assumption that a “story” is innately good or bad when it may in fact be the journalism, ie the telling of the story.
If Computer Says you have a stinker on your hands it may not be because the story is bad – it may be because the journalism is bad… EG national affairs or state politics written from the scalp-taking angle rather than the what-it-means-for-me angle.
The latter is hard work and takes great skill – see pretty much anything written by David Penberthy.
Instead of rewriting a stinker in a way that makes it accessible and relevant to readers, the temptation is to just flick it because the computer says so. More worrying, it’s a self-reinforcing practice.
I’m a fan of the market – as are most journos who move from print to online. I think, for example, when it comes to editing it’s hard to compete with the network effect of Twitter domain experts.
And I agree the old chestnut of the “race to the bottom” is simplistic. (I find it’s usually argued by people seeking to establish their own social position).
But I think it’s equally simplistic to argue that the market will automatically find the good stuff. Imagine the PR industry taking that line.
Good stories are usually the result of good story-telling and that requires an investment in good journalism.
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Who would honestly go to 9msn for news? Come on guys?!!!
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Look now! MSN’s lead story just moved on from Kayne to this:
“Handle with carelessness. Deliveryman filmed throwing computer monitor over fence”
’nuff said.
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I think it’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.
I don’t think publishing something that you don’t think it going to generate stacks of page views is necessarily treating your audience with contempt.
Not every story (not matter how well told) is going to be of equal interest to your whole audience.
There are some stories that have pretty much universal appeal. This doesn’t make them ‘better’ or ‘worse’ stories. It doesn’t make them ‘better’ journalism.
Social media (and search) increasingly mean that the home page isn’t the prime concern anyway. People are using their online networks to filter news. Or they’re searching for specific stories.
I think what we as digital journalists need to do is make sure that when they click through, we’ll telling them the story in an engaging way, using all the tools at our disposal. (And choosing the right tools for the story)
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@Hal, If you knew that the readers of those low pageview articles were highly networked, key influencers or avid sharers would you continue the policy to stop writing them?
For some businesses, the tools they use and the metrics they develop to gauge audience feedback are a source of competitive advantage. How editors in turn choose to respond to that feedback I think is an opportunity for competitor differentiation.
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Everyone, meet reality.
People come to Ninemsn day in, day out, for the junk news they produce and how it is packaged up.
The numbers tell us that and while for me personally I can’t fathom why and might not like it, it’s the way it is and they appeal to their audience well, otherwise they wouldn’t get the 2m people daily.
Hate and comment that it’s not fair, quality journalism, etc but they get the audience and they generate revenue and while those two golden eggs are being hit you’re faff is just…..well……faff.
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I don’t recall spontaneously going to the nineMSN site in the last three years.
Nor does it show up within the top 200 sites in traffic figures for referring sites when articles related to material I have online is published in their site.
I wonder who this audience is they talk about.
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I really hope we’re not going to simply appeal to the masses. Take a leaf from Jobs’ book and educate the customer about what they want. I really hope that the future of news is not driven by celeb goss and cat videos.
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Sorry folks, but Hal is bang on. Firstly, let’s not kid ourselves – the business model for news websites is generating ad serves through page views. If a story doesn’t get page views, it is isn’t earning its place on the site.
It’s nice to talk about ‘educating the audience’ but at the end of the day you cannot force them to click on something they’re not interested in, no matter how prominently you place it. The truth is that the vast majority of stories that run in the newspapers every day haven’t little relevance to people’s lives. It’s the stories that affect them directly that they’ll click on (witness the constant weather and public transport stories on websites). Everything else they click on because it looks interesting or entertaining.
That said, the role of editor is more important with analytics, not less. Because if a story is not generating clicks this is often not the fault of the journalist, but the online editor responsible for writing the headline and precede. These are the only things the audience have to go by when deciding whether to click on a story, so getting these elements right is a crucial skill that can’t be done by a computer.
It’s like the old adage in film-making: show, don’t tell. You need to show the audience why a story is important, not tell them that it is and expect them to click.
And as for the claims about ‘lowest common denominator’ appeal, I got news for you: NineMSN is not a niche publication.
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Good piece. As someone working in customer and audience engagement for a publisher thank you for sharing your thoughts. Same to Tim, good response – you should consider expanding on this for a follow up piece to share your thoughts in more detail.
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Thanks Hal for a great piece (which I have only just discovered). I agree and its about time that the commentariat realised that news media is nothing without readers/consumers. We can produce all the higbrow reports we like, but can’t make the public read it – or pay for it. I wrote a piece on this too http://www.kingstribune.com/cu.....ways-right
Cheers, D
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The purpose of analyticstools like Omniture is to provide insight into what an audience is consuming at a given point in time.
I always thought that part of media’s greater responsibility was to inform impartially on items that matter most. unfortunately for the most part, current mainstream news outlets peddle sensationalist stories aimed at the lowest common denominator. Seeking analytics tools to provide insight in where/how to report news misses thepoint of the greater responsibility to educate and inform. I had hoped news outlets would be guided by this responsibility more than they are by what an analytics system tells them an audience is consuming, especially when what they are consuming is dross.But of course ninemsn are guided more by advertising dollars more than they are journalistic integrity.
Treat the audience with respect…if you report with more integrity and with better journalism I have no doubt you will gain a better quality audience.
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Quality journalism – be appreciated by few and shared by even fewer.
A video of a dog taking a dump inside a restaurant and the waiter slipping on it – appreciated by many and shared by even more.
News sites have the difficult task of attracting and retaining fickle online users. Quality journalism + dog videos must join forces to achieve this.
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