It is not the best — or most certain — of times in social and search.
Newsrooms have seen steep declines in traffic from Facebook and Twitter as platforms build higher walls to keep users in-app by deprioritizing news and external links. Search has remained “remarkably consistent” even as social has declined and direct traffic has faded, so news organizations are keeping wary eyes on seismic changes in search and the rise of answer-giving tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.
Google, in particular, continues to experiment with the internet’s most valuable real estate and integrate more AI-generated answers that don’t require clicking through to news websites. (Just this week, Google announced “a feed of real-time information,” powered by the AP, will be added to the Gemini app.) Some publishers have seen search traffic decline already — though the fallout varies widely.
The only certainty seems to be that there will be more changes in the new year. Those looking for a path forward may be interested in an audience approach advanced by Fernanda Braune Brackenrich, U.S. audience engagement editor at the Financial Times, and Tess Jeffers, director of newsroom data and AI for The Wall Street Journal. They presented ideas and examples to help newsrooms refocus on what they can control at the ONA conference in Atlanta last fall. (Here are their slides.)
“In an era of shifting platforms — social platforms and search platforms — it is getting harder and harder to gin up an audience, so we need to be more proactive and more prescriptive about where we are going to find our audiences for our stories,” Jeffers said.
Journalists assume readers are as obsessed with the news as they are. They’re wrong.
If you’re reading Nieman Lab, you’re almost certainly an outlier when it comes to online news consumption. You likely get more news alerts on your phone and read many more news articles online than the average American.
“Journalists have assumptions about their readers,” Brackenrich noted. “One of them that is very common is that they think their readers are as obsessed with the news cycle as they are. They cannot fathom why that explainer — with ‘such basic questions’ — did so well.”
Reporters are surprised when Jeffers tells them that less than 1% of Wall Street Journal readers visit the website every day of the month, she said.
“Journalists assume that our readers are reading just like they do — every morning, every noon, every evening, [and] reading multiple stories per session. That just isn’t true,” Jeffers said. “It really changes the level of detail and the context and the basic facts that are useful for readers who are not following the narrative as closely as we are.”
At the Financial Times, more reporters are asking SEO editors for guidance on what people are searching for during breaking news and what basic questions they should consider answering in their coverage.
👇🏼 a great reminder that news outlets, while summarizing and dissecting the president's speech, should not assume that viewers know everything https://t.co/dG7jNctRrn
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 16, 2025
Use audience insights to reframe coverage
It might be reporters’ most common complaint about audience statistics: “They only care about clicks! They don’t want me to write about [entire topic x].” Audience editors insist it’s about reframing coverage and asking what’s the best way to cover any given topic.
As an example, Brackenrich noted that the FT has historically struggled with readership for earnings reports of consumer brands. The newsroom felt the coverage was too important to cut. Instead of presenting each individually, an editor experimented with wrapping them into one broader story about the U.S. consumer. The piece ended up doing “extremely well” for the FT.
US consumer spending slowdown weighs on travel and leisure groups https://t.co/J9yuGZwv31
— FT Economics (@fteconomics) August 12, 2024
At The Wall Street Journal, a content strategy team reworked climate coverage.
“We — like some of you, I’m sure — have a little bit of difficulty getting readers interested and engaged in our climate change coverage,” Jeffers said. “We think it’s really important and we’re not going to stop coverage.”
Instead, a content strategy team worked on making the stories “less doom and gloom,” “less theoretical,” and less about “multi-decades-out possible solutions that may or may not work,” Jeffers said.
Successful climate stories for the Journal have been “more hopeful, more proximal, and more focused on something that our investors or our technology-focused readers might actually care about.”
A story about a startup looking to harvest lithium to power the rechargeable batteries found in electric vehicles, for example, outperformed one headlined “Cash drying up for locals fighting climate change.”
The Journal was also struggling to find an audience for its e-gambling and online sports betting coverage. (“One insight from our SEO team was that if readers are searching for FanDuel or DraftKings, it’s because they want to build their fantasy football team,” Jeffers noted. “They don’t want to read about what The Wall Street Journal has to say about that company’s earnings statement.”) The content strategy team worked with the beat and found a “person-forward” story that resonated with readers.
A psychiatrist downloaded a gambling app to unwind at night. Gambling companies kept her betting until she lost more than $400,000. “You just can’t get out.” https://t.co/oI3uHhwitq
— WSJ Business News (@WSJbusiness) February 19, 2024
“We can tell the person-forward narrative, but in giving context, we can also tell the very fascinating story about how these companies came to be,” Jeffers said.
Humanize the audience
The goal is to get the newsroom asking certain questions as early as possible in the editorial process. Jeffers reeled them off:
“Who is this story for? Who should I talk to? What context do they need? What format will this work best in? When will they be most receptive? And, finally, how can I find those readers online?”
A not-insignificant part of audience work is making readers more relatable and legible to the newsroom, Brackenrich said.
“The key point here is to humanize the audience inside of your newsroom,” she said. For local news websites, she added, you might have a pretty good idea of who is consuming your content. The bigger and more global the newsroom, however, the more the reader can become just a number.
“The more we can identify and build a narrative around the reader, the easier it’s going to be for the journalists to put themselves in the reader’s shoes,” Brackenrich said. Profiling a reader might start with asking where they live, how they currently get their news, and how your news organization might differentiate from the competition.
“Say I want to grow our audience in Atlanta,” she explained. “We might ask, does the city have a good public transportation system? Because if there’s a lot of people commuting by car, they can’t read during that commute, but they can listen. If they have a good public transportation system — and a lot of people are going to be using a subway or bus or light rail — they’re going to be able to read and maybe you want to look at a morning newsletter.”
Repeat yourself — but know when to gatekeep
“I think it’s very important to be consistent about what success looks like. If your North Star metric is unique readers, why are you calling out a story that didn’t perform well with readers under 35?” Jeffers said. “I think it’s really important to keep your newsroom focused on the strategic goal. You need to spell out what’s essential versus nice to have, because otherwise they’ll forget.”
Audience editors recommend repeating practical insights from audience stats and positive reinforcement over focusing on bad news. (Better to focus on what journalists are doing right than point out the hours-long live blog should have been a short post, for example, or the esoteric pun that flopped in a headline.)
One audience member asked about communicating social media numbers that have fallen off without being “demoralizing” to reporters.
“The more you can remind people [that] we do not have control of what the social platform agenda is and we do not have control of what the SEO platform agenda is but here’s what we can control, the better,” Jeffers said. “We can control going out and talking to individuals in our community, telling the best story that we think is engaging and interesting. That means shifting the narrative of what success looks like, because it’s shifting underneath our feet right now.”
Photo via Pexels by Ketut Subiyanto.
This article was originally published on Nieman Lab and republished here with permission.