The Problems of the News Industry
1. Media crisis - Financial and Ethical
The media is in crisis. Google and Facebook are taking the vast majority of ad revenue, and paying content creators far too little for the value they deliver to users. This puts high-quality creators at a financial disadvantage, and favours publishers of cheap media: fake news, propaganda and conspiracy theories, quickly re-written stories with sensationalistic spin, shady off-shore content farms, algorithmically generated content, and pirated videos.
Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed Founder and CEO
2. Dependence on Social media and Search engines
Facebook has announced plans to fight engagement-bait and push pages and posts that post more authentic content. But another cause of worry for brands is the fact that Facebook is in the process of changing their algorithm to decrease reach of business pages and give more priority to posts by friends and family.
Social media brings in the maximum amount of traffic to news articles. This change resulted in a roughly 50% drop in engagement for media pages. Why be completely dependent on the search and social algorithms to drive traffic on your website, when you can have an option to keep users on your platform instead.
3. The dominance of News aggregators
With the dominating rise of news aggregators and people preferring multiple sources of news, it becomes difficult for a standalone news company app to get users to read & stick on their platform more.
Competitor analysis
The real competitors here are aggregators like Apple News, Google News, etc and social media networks like Facebook who controls algorithms to personalize content for the users. These aggregators are good because they provide an experience which news apps are unable to provide to the end-user despite owning the content.
I downloaded around top 10–15 news apps such as Fox News, Reuters, BBC News, Sky News, Al-Jazeera, NDTV, Times Of India to check out the list of features these apps have and read their reviews for what the user's requirements, requested features and problems were.
The goals
Over 85% of adults check their mobile for news. The goal is:-
- To give personalized news and better experience to the users
- Enhancing user experience so that they stick to the app and keep browsing more news and articles thus increasing app time and usage.
- Fit monetization strategies that actually work with the user experience considering the rise of ad-blockers and provide options beyond paywalls.
- Fit in special features that are unique for different news channels and their apps.
- Boost productivity for the users and give them exactly they are looking out for.
Surveys-Interviews
I took on-call & in-person interviews of 16 people between age 18-52 & asked them questions regarding
- Which news apps they use and why they like it?
- What problems do they face? What is something that annoys them?
- What feature is time-consuming?
- What features do they require if they have something in mind?
- When do they consume their news?
- How many times a day do they check out the news?
- What formats do they prefer?
Also to back this up with views from other people, I checked out reviews on apps and read blog posts & articles regarding the problems of news channels and problems faced by people. I have summarized my findings below.
Results & Conclusions from surveys, competitors and research
Task Flow
Interesting prototype upgrades
Problem
After brainstorming a couple of ideas, there were a few changes related to the placement of the live section and separate newsfeeds being combined into one.
- Live is better if displayed up on the same page rather than opening a separate tab altogether. Making people look at what’s “Live” now is better than saying “ok, something is Live”. We want to make the user more engaged and not waste up their time.
- Combining up separate feeds into one was a better idea than having multiple feeds. The world’s largest social network aka Facebook tried to push multiple feeds to people and it failed miserably.
People tend to scroll more than keep on switching tabs to scroll less on each
“People don’t want two separate feeds”
These insights are drawn from the statistics of facebook’s testing of a “Discover” feed into a separate tab for people to discover new items. You can read in-depth about it here:-
Solution
App Screens
Extras: Onboarding
Try to keep the onboarding short and to the point without any kind of additional information from the users.
- Tutorials or help guide isn't required for such an interface when everything is made to be simple and straight forward without any kind of hidden interactions.
- If your company gives news in multiple languages, allow users to choose the language at the start of what they prefer. I have skipped this as companies tend to keep separate apps for separate languages.
- Just let the users know about the different customization options in your app such as Dark mode & Data saver mode at the start
- If you are personalizing the news section, allow users to select something to follow. Include some topics, some writers, some sections which are pre-followed. Do not have a huge list of options to select as the users may feel overwhelmed. Try to keep it more than 10 and less than 20.
Extras: Business Models
Now let's talk business.
I have already mentioned the different business models on the article page. In addition to that, after reviewing the business models that companies can implement on their own without depending upon social media or any third-party aggregators, I have to summarize the different ways below.
Survey data & targetted Notifications
Allow users to input some data and take surveys from the user. You can sell survey data without actual information about the user.
E.g A new electric car is going to launch in India. Take a survey regarding if users would like to buy the car along with the news. Contact the company after the survey to let them know about the data you have and if they would like to send the notification regarding the car price at the launch/before launch etc. The ads will be generally turn out to be more effective as it is what the user wanted.
Please take user consent about sharing survey data and make sure they know about it well. Ask them about the permissions to show them such notifications else it can backfire with users uninstalling the app altogether due to privacy.
Sponsored articles
Many news channels, while getting paid, do not mention about the sponsored article or partnered with someone.
Write it down if an article is sponsored, so they know about it. Also try to give related articles or genuine help for the users about something, instead of just selling any advertisement.
Advertisements
Ads should focus on being related to a topic or article rather than getting data about the user, push ads around the topic. Show ads related to the article if possible. Focus on the placement of ads and experiment with different methods.
Always depend on the stats and user reviews both after experimenting new features to see what works best for you.
Special articles with subscriptions
Go freemium like medium, providing many free articles but also some special articles. Give them a glimpse of what it is like in the special article or allow them to get a few special articles per month.
Asking for donation
Sometimes you don't want to rely on ads or other methods of earning and rely on donations.
To increase the number of donations, gamify the process of donating. Make the users feel better and make them feel special. Give them special perks and access to insider videos.
Take a look at what Patreon.com is doing. Similar perks can be implemented and used to drive donations on News channel platforms by giving them access to special one to one talks with their favorite journalist or giving them or their business a shoutout within the content.
News industry and free journalism are in a serious crisis and there is no one who can save them except for themselves becoming better at the digital game.
User experience & design can turn around behaviors and how people use others apps everyday.
Play with the working prototype:-
Contact for work:- uiuxyash@gmail.com
Check out my other projects over here:-
