A content strategy for lazy news consumers

Apparently I’m pretty lazy when it comes to consuming news. After following my consumption over two days, logging each interaction with content on a spreadsheet, I found that spreadsheet emptier than I’d like it to be.

There are a lot of reasons for this. On a normal week I would be doing a lot of newsgathering throughout the day and scrolling through Facebook in my downtime. But I spent the two days I logged training students and planning for inauguration later that week.

But this exercise has also showed me that I’ve formed a habit of not looking hard for news.

Based on what I logged over two days, my news consumption looks something like this:

1. I wake up and scroll through everything that popped up on my iPhone lock screen while I was sleeping: emails, texts and push notifications from AP, CNN, L.A. Times, NBCLA and ABC7.

2. While I’m drinking my first cup of coffee, I read through two email newsletters: California Today (NYT) and Essential California (LAT).

3. I’ll eat breakfast, drink a few more cups of coffee and watch at least 30 minutes of Today in LA on NBC4.

4. Throughout the day I’ll read at push notifications on my phone.

The only time I actively look for news is in the morning, to get caught up on what happened while I was asleep, see what the morning’s major local story is and look ahead to the rest of the day.

But after that, I’m not looking for news as much — I’m relying on it to come to me, via push notifications on my lock screen.

An important note here: if your app sends me a push notification, I always read it, but I rarely engage with it. I almost never follow pushes to the apps they come from, because I don’t like the clunky experience of entering an app, only to be taken to its home page instead of the story I’m looking for (looking at you, AP). If I want more information, I’m more likely to go to that organization’s homepage from my laptop than go into their app.

The first way news organizations can better serve me, the lazy and impatient consumer, is by improving that experience from push to app. Make it faster, and take me to what I came to you for, not your homepage.

The next thing they can do is treat pushes like content instead of teases for a broadcast, a frequent sin of TV-centric news organizations — don’t tease the lead story in your show or use broadcast language to do it, just tell me the story there in the push.

Then, they can expand their push notification strategy to include more content. Organizations like The Guardian and Mic are already experimenting with this. The Guardian has used big events like the first presidential debate, election day and Inauguration day to experiment with richer push notifications — on Inauguration day they included a live stream in their pushes. Mic has started pushing videos — their chief strategy officer called their strategy a “frictionless system” where users don’t have to enter the app to consume content.

That frictionless strategy follows the same logic as posting your articles to social: go where the consumers already are, and they’ll find you. If your lock screen consumers aren’t making it to social, give them all the content they need in a place they only have to press a button to access.

Maybe that’s just enabling my bad habits. But it’s also making news more immediate and accessible.