Getting readers to love your news site so much they come back

It ain’t easy. But it can be done.

By Matthew Carroll

Journalists want you to read their stories; that’s a given. It’s why they write in the first place, after all. Even more, they hope you like their story so much you come back to their news site — often, and for days, months, and years to come.

That’s engagement, the building of long-term relationships with readers and viewers. Unfortunately for newsrooms, engagement has taken a bigger pounding than whack-a-mole.

What’s changed is how readers consume news. Readers used to read a newspaper or watch a news station over a long period, developing a sense for its quality and its usefulness to their own lives. Now they often follow links to individual stories from social sites. At least 20 percent of news readership comes from Facebook; a third of people get their news from the site.

People on social or aggregator sites often have no idea where they read a story. Asked where they spotted a particular article, people reply: “I read it on Facebook.”

Umm… not really. You followed a friend’s link to a news site where a reporter sweat blood to report and write a wonderful investigative piece or feature, and now the credit for that amazing story goes to … Mark Zuckerberg.

The end result is a blurring of brands. Reader loyalty and the influence of news sites has been eroded. It’s quick and easy to read 15 stories from 15 sites that vary widely in the quality and depth of their reporting. If people don’t know where they read a story, how can they develop any kind of understanding about what the news site is all about? Readers are less able to get a sense of the quality — or lack of quality — of any particular site because they tend not to see the whole site: they’ve read only one story. They may never visit the site again.

It’s also tough financially for news organizations. If people cannot see the importance of a site to their own lives, why should they buy a subscription to get behind the paywall? There’s no point.

The change has fed a perception that news is an interchangeable commodity. What the heck, there are a dozen other sites with exactly the same story. More or less.

It’s an accelerating trend, as more and more traffic to news sites is driven by social, especially Facebook. The rise of social and aggregator sites means newsrooms are losing control of the distribution of their own news. It’s as if Facebook and Twitter own the printing presses and the news trucks. That puts news organizations in the very uncomfortable position of being financially dependent on the whims of another company. That leaves open a lot of questions, such as, What are the long-term policies of Facebook and other social sites toward news publishers?

Who knows? Maybe it’s all good. Maybe nothing will bad will ever happen. Maybe it will be a profitable, long-term relationship for all sides, and everyone will be happy for ever and ever. But putting a large percent of your readership of the hands of an organization whose end goals may be very different than yours means taking an enormous risk.

Engagement not for everyone

As much as engagement is a big deal for many news organizations, it’s not as important to a large number as well. Sites like BuzzFeed are more interested in getting their stories seen by as many eyeballs as possible. Their business model is more akin to tabloid newspapers, who depend on the splashy headlines to drive big sales. They aren’t as concerned with long-term engagement because their traffic is driven by individual stories going viral. Each story builds its own engagement.

Maybe I’m coming across as doomsayer. But I’m actually very optimistic about the future. Many old and new sites are doing great. Buzzfeed and Vox are doing well. The New York Times has 800,000 digital subscribers.

I’m just pointing out some of the problems that need to be solved. And engagement is one of those problems. But it’s an old problem too.

Engagement was solved before — more than a century ago

Newsrooms faced many of the same issue more than a century ago. Now, they’re just dressed up in hipster clothing. Those problems were solved then and can be solved now.

Starting in the 1830s, newsrooms went through a technological revolution that in many ways mirrors what is happening today. The advent of high-speed presses allowed for the cheap, fast distribution of news, wrecking the revenue model of oldline newspaper publishers. (Sound familiar?)

To remain competitive, the brash new news organizations had to solve a multitude of problems ranging from page design to new forms of storytelling, from creating new streams of revenue, to mastering cutting-edge tools for reporters.

It was a time of explosive growth, experimentation, and identity crises: Are we a broadsheet or tabloid? Sensational or factual? How do we sell display advertising? Can the telegraph help our news coverage? And how do we build brand loyalty and influence readers when a competitor’s product is only a penny away?

Here’s what’s next…

So what needs to be done? Solid journalism is still the baseline for what we do. That’s a start. Technology is the next step. Mainline news organizations have embraced technological change, but more and faster progress needs to be made. Digital-only and mobile-only sites, like Circa, have made tremendous progress as well, but it’s a new era and massive, unknown challenges still lay ahead.

Newsrooms need better tools. More newspeople should learn to write code and to speak the language of software developers.

Where does this change start? Look for it first in your newsroom, starting with the people you might least expect it from. That could be a reporter or an intern, who starts a conversation with an editor by saying, “I have this crazy idea for telling a story.…”

Well, maybe it’s not so crazy. Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, told journalists a while back that newsrooms should be alert to creativity that forms organically, perhaps by a few people who informally get coffee together and kick around new ways to tell stories. Change can bubble up from below management. Don’t expect change to come necessarily from the top.

And the culture gap between journalists and engineers who are creating new sites and tools needs to be narrowed, as Emily Bell at the Columbia Journalism school has noted. The two deliver news to the world — their work is inextricably linked. Reporters write stories and engineers create the platforms for delivering the news. But their skills and viewpoints are radically different, leaving a residue of constant tension.

But progress is being made. Groups like Hacks/Hackers bring together technologists and journalists to learn from each other. (Transparency alert: I run the Boston chapter of Hacks/Hackers.) More reporters are learning to code. Developers with an interest in news have found warm welcomes in newsrooms.

No one knows what lies ahead, which is what makes this journey so fascinating. But more people than ever are reading more news from more sources. This a great opportunity for news organizations.

Matthew Carroll is a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab and runs the Future of News initiative there. The former reporter for the Boston Globe can be followed at: @MattatMIT