The Weekly Bulletin | October 24, 2023

Hi SODP community,

Let’s recap on what’s been happening last week, the new content, industry updates, tips, and more.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Between information abundance and falling attention spans, how should publishers prepare to engage future audiences?

This is a pressing question as technologically driven changes in media habits become increasingly apparent.

Social media and mobile devices now deliver an endless buffet of bite-sized content, leading users to compulsively scroll through their feeds for hours.

Many publishers simply don't have a plan to cater to "grazers", who are challenging long-held industry notions of what readers want from content. And the tools publishers have relied on to identify website performance issues can’t pinpoint engagement issues at a foundational level.

Two US academics' study on engaged journalism — a decades-old concept that advocates for news outlets to consult with audiences on story coverage to foster greater engagement — underscores this challenge.

Mixed Results

The six-month experiment, published in July, involved 20 local news sites in the US of varying sizes, with half serving as the control group. The 10 participating newsrooms asked their audiences to submit questions for coverage, which they then put to a public vote, with the winning question reported on.

The study's authors — Professor Natalie Jomini Stroud at the University of Texas at Austin and Assistant Professor Emily Van Duyn at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — found that while involving audiences created an uptick in new subscriptions, newsrooms saw no impact on their subscription renewals, pageviews or return visits.

The results showed that while engaged journalism can convert anonymous audiences into paying customers, it won't necessarily improve subscriber churn rates or engagement levels.

The results surprised me at first before I considered that audience consumption patterns have shifted significantly since the concept of engaged journalism first appeared in the 1990s under the title public journalism.

The idea of reading stories proposed by their fellow readers doesn’t excite audiences when social media has already created an ocean of bloggers, vloggers and citizen journalists producing an endless stream of content.

Is Brevity the Key?

Like it or not, the amount of time available to hook an audience has dramatically decreased. Increased competition for mindshare and evolving media habits will likely shorten that window further.

The answer? Be competitive and embrace the classics. Shakespeare famously wrote that "brevity is the soul of wit", but in this case it might also be the soul of engagement.

Axios has made a name for itself on the back of the smart brevity concept, which takes the mantra "all killer, no filler" to a new level. Indeed, co-founder, CEO, and chairman Jim VandeHei contests the idea that "long text equals depth and relevance".

While he believes "long-form journalism will always be important", he argues that publishers need to "adapt quickly to fast-changing audience needs and habits".

It’s important to remember that railing against short attention spans isn’t going to put that particular genie back in the bottle. A quick look at the technological landscape only suggests this trend will continue and that finding new ways to package existing information can only help publishers thrive.

SODP POSTS

JOB BOARD

➡️ The 74 is seeking a Director of Audience and Growth to lead its efforts in expanding our newsroom’s reach, following and impact. (NYC/Remote, US). SEE MORE

➡️ News Corp Australia is looking for a Social Media Specialist (Bowen Hills, Queensland, Australia). SEE MORE

COMMUNITY BUZZ

Industry News

➡️ Google's John Mueller provides answers about why Search Console URL Inspection Tool fails to index submitted URLs. READ MORE

➡️ Here’s a look at how the newly up-to-date ChatGPT reports the latest news. READ MORE

Social Media Discussions

➡️ Bernard Huang on LinkedIn:

Google mentions in the Helpful Content Update press release that "this classifier process is entirely automated, using a machine-learning model". I believe that the machine-learning model is likely comprised of two big components — Information Gain and Manual Search Evaluators.

Do you know what Information Gain is? Are you adding the relevant entities to your content to ensure that your content is adding to Google's knowledge graph for the topic?

Let's dissect how to beat competitors in SERPs moving forward with the slides below!

tl;dr

1. Information gain refers to entities you mention within your content that are relevant to the topic.
2. Beat competitors for high similarity SERPs by adding more relevant information gain
3. 100% AI generated content is likely to skew towards not adding any relevant information gain because AI content is trying to minimize inaccuracies / hallucinations.

SEE THE FULL POST

These are the highlights for last week.

Until next!

Andrew Kemp and the editorial team at SODP