Content Insights from the Sydney Morning Herald: Think outside the box

Liam Phillips, AM News Director, The Sydney Morning Herald

For the second day in a row, we had more than 100,000 impressions to Daisy Dumas’ Chinese New Year list, which absolutely nailed the target for Google searches on this topic.

As well has having excellent SEO and responding to trending searches, one of the strengths of this piece is in it’s interesting, and unorthodox, presentation. Instead of a standard story, or even a FAQ about Chinese New Year, it was written as a list in an amusing way about the dos and don’ts around this festivity, complete with John Shakespeare cartoons which worked well across all platforms:

It comes together to create a far more engaging package of content — and the stats back this up. Yesterday it notched up almost 350,000 minutes of engagement, proving people were taking their time to read down the list rather than just glancing at the first few pars before clicking off.

Another recent example of unorthodox storytelling was Saskia Mabin’s story about Appin Road, the most dangerous road in Sydney. We would previously have just told a story like this through a narrative story and pictures. Instead, we had words breaking down the issues into sub-headings with embedded pics of the road. At the top was a very simple but very effective video that showed a drive down the length of the road in question — so readers not familiar with it could experience it for themselves. It was capped off by a great interactive by Richard Lama and Matt Teffer that mapped all the recent accidents on this road — which makes the danger really jump out in a way that words can’t:

Another recent example in the past few days showed Digital Editor Stephen Hutcheon back on the tools with an explainer on the Apple error 53 that is shutting down iPhones. It was written in a Q&A style, and did more than 100,000 impressions over the weekend — again with a hefty proportion coming from search traffic.

It’s a very clear reminder to everyone to think outside the box when approaching your stories. Don’t just fall back to the orthodox text-and-photos formula. Mix things up by trying a few of these approaches:

• Video — is it more of a visual story that can be better told through video, with accompanying words?
• Words and pics/embeds — can you combine the two and have your writing talk to the images or posts to weave a narrative together
• Graphics — would a map or other type of data viz really bring the point you are making to life?
• Lists, Q&As — sometimes these are much more readable, and more engaging, than a straight block of text.
• GIFs — particularly if you are working on a lighthearted piece, sometimes nothing can sum up the feeling you are trying to convey like writing interspersed with well-chosen GIFs — amirite?