A manifesto for newsroom decision makers

Focus on how people get to your news site.

Newspaper reporters and editors have been rewarded for decades by focusing on two things:

1. Telling readers what to do. “We decided this story was important enough to write about and put on the front page. Read it.”

2. Delivering content that suited advertisers. Think Travel sections, Food sections, Automotive, etc.

So when advertisers come to (cash-strapped) papers and offer a lot of money to sponsor a video series, of course it’s going to seem like a good idea. That paradigm — we have content, we have an advertiser — it’s always worked before. It’s what they know.

But, as Joshua Benton points out, there were a lot of reasons to question if there was an audience for these videos. And, it turns out, there was not.

Benton’s logic seems pretty obvious, right? And it drives me crazy that newsroom leaders don’t think enough about these kinds of things before judging if it’s worth investing in an enterprise or experiment.

The Internet is 25 years old now and newsroom cultures are still just starting to change. I think they need a better framework for making these decisions and to me, the foundation of that framework is that there are six significant ways that users get to a news site:

• Regular reader (“Typed/Bookmarked”) — People who check a site, usually the homepage, on a regular basis.
• Saw it on social media — It showed up in a Twitter or Facebook feed.
• Saw it on Dark Social — You get an e-mail from Mom, an IM from a friend, that kind of thing.
• Saw it on another site — A blogger wrote about it or it made the front of Drudge.
• Searching for current news — You heard something about Beyonce on the train and want the full story. Or your job is going to be impacted by a new bill or a shutdown, so you google for the latest.
• Searching for reference — A search for a name, a recipe, a review returns an article.

Anyone who is familiar with the analytics of a news site is nodding right now.

Out of those six, the only two types of users with a shot of knowing about the live video are the regular readers and those who see something about it on social media while it is live. From that, you estimate a fairly small subset that’s interested in the topic and available to watch the video while it’s live and you adjust your expectations accordingly.

Once again, seems fairly obvious. But, and I say this sympathetically, for reporters and editors who have built their careers on the front page approval of other reporters and editors, it’s been very hard to understand that it does not matter that your story is important or incredible. It’s been hard for editors and publishers to understand that it does not matter how much advertisers are willing to pay to sponsor a new idea.

All that matters is if users will go to your story in one of those six ways.

Since that seems vaguely important, let us give each of those ways a little more consideration.

Search: There’s little you can do about search around research or breaking news. You don’t have to be clickbaity, but if a famous person dies or gets arrested, it behooves you to have a story on it quickly, wire or not. Your stories should have headlines that are not only search friendly, but clear to the searcher what the story is about. And you should have good keywords and metadata. Yes, everyone has heard this a million times and everyone hates SEO, but optimizing your content is what gets you in the game.

(Yes, I know I’m glossing over a lot things about timing, Google Trends, planning around frequently searched terms. I just don’t want to get too far off course.)

(Other things beyond the scope of this piece, for the purpose of keeping my Medium reading time down: mobile, the value of the page view, connecting traffic to performance reviews.)

Sharing: We know a lot about things like which stories get shared, when to share them, how often to share, etc. (Insert requisite “posts about kitten photos” comment. Yes, yes, very original.)

You might not be able to control if your story is a happy one or if it reflects well on the reader who shares it. But you can control for things like if the headline is optimized for social, if it has a strong photo that will be shared with it and if your site’s main feeds know about. You can push for your organization to have better sharing tools on pages and special projects. You can respond to tweets and Facebook posts about your story. It might be worth your time in more readers and it might not, but at least you know its helping to create more exposure for the piece.

Other sites: Unless your story is an exclusive, a profile, an investigation, preferably about something of broad, national interest, it’s not going to get a ton of discussion on or traffic from other sites or blogs. Though occasionally there is the really quirky or fantastically well-written piece that breaks through. And here’s where being active on social media again benefits you, because where do you think other writers are going to see your story?

Regular readers/the homepage: I think this chart in this post by Brian Abelson about traffic at the New York Times is hugely informative. Go take a look. I’ll wait.

Interesting, huh? One of my major takeaways is that only 6%(!) of the NYT stories got the kind of time on the homepage it appears they needed to attract large amounts of readers. Six percent! And The Times has way more homepage slots than a lot of other news sites.

Yes, the percentage of traffic to homepages is declining on a lot of sites, but it can still be a significant driver of traffic to the to the very limited number of stories it promotes.

I want to make it clear I don’t think a story, a series or a project has to be a great match for one or more of the above traffic sources in order to be worthy of publication.

What I do think is that unless a project fits several of those sources, putting a lot of resources into it is a bad bet. And way too often, newsroom leaders are making bad bets, often for reasons that seem to defy logic, then writing off the results as experimentation or a learning experience.

So what kinds of experiments do I want to see newsrooms try?

I hope that once they start thinking about how people are coming to a site, editors start thinking about why, and look at what service, what value, they are providing to users.

For me, it raises another question: If people are coming to a site for very different reasons, why are they all treated the same?

Maybe each method of arrival should get its own headline and maybe even a different lead or tone. If a user is arriving from social or e-mail, should the share/e-mail buttons on the story be more prominent? What about the widget displaying other most shared or e-mailed stories?

Start thinking about your users as people. That person who clicked on a Facebook link that brought her to your site at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday? That person is bored at work. Display other stories that are funny or touching, rather than about the same topic, to keep them occupied and on your site.

If a user lives across the country and arrives by a trending search term, it’s probably safe to turn off your weather and local real estate widgets and offer them a cleaner, faster-loading experience. And in this case, you should give them more background content on the same topic.

Why do I only have one payment option on your paywall? Can I pay a reduced rate if I just want coverage of the Cowboys or access to your oped page?

You get the idea. Now, it’s unlikely these efforts will win awards or earn a hefty sponsorship. But they at least align your resources with where you know your audience is coming from and maximize your chance to continue growing your site.