Headlines, listicles, and why newsrooms must keep experimenting

Behind Local News
Jun 2, 2018 · 10 min read
Luke Bailey and Ceri Gould on stage at Behind Local News

At the Behind Local News conference, Ceri Gould, editor in chief for Reach’s South East newsrooms, and Luke Bailey from the i, talked about the different strategies they’d used to get readers to spend more time on their sites. Here’s their conversation, which is packed with ideas which can be used in any newsroom:

Ceri Gould: What do you think regional media can learn from a digital pureplay? What advantages do such sites have?

Luke Bailey: I think that saying that it’s better or superior or anything like that is kind of missing the point. It was superior then wrong when four months ago Facebook changed. I

It still obviously has a lot of advantages in that it basically allows people to have their own relationship with the newspaper rather than buying a newspaper and reading the whole thing.

People are essentially editing their own newspaper just by consuming in a certain way, whether that’s through Facebook, or just sections, and the articles they click on which means that your brand is becomes much more diverse.

Basically it becomes a more personal relationship with your readers on digital which is a really good advantage for local news, where trust from readers is so important.

The way that people interact with those brands and you basically build their own newspapers as opposed to newspapers being trying to be all things to all people.

CG: We tried to translate that from newspapers to websites at first, so we were at a disadvantage from the start?

LB: Yes and no because people do still do that to a certain extent.

I think what digital really revealed was that what people are interested in isn’t necessarily what we thought people may have been interested in.

We pretty much found out that people are really interested in weather and transport news and crime and variety of other things and Sport obviously is a big one.

But it also revealed that people people didn’t necessarily read all of the stuff on the website.

So the challenge then becomes like figuring out how to present those stories that maybe people don’t click on, that they skip over, and then they don’t build into their own version of your brand in a way that they actually will engage with.

Many of the stories people skip over are really important and many people care about the issues in them even if they’re not actually clicking reading on it.

CG: So how helpful was it that BuzzFeed introduced, and owned, the listicle format and then shoehorned much of its coverage into that format?

Luke Bailey

LB: So the list format was big really big between 2013 and 2016 and then it went out a little bit at Buzzfeed and I think other are following that.

I think what the list did was we make people understand how people consume things on the Internet differently, but also meant we looked at presenting stories differently.

Instead of doing just a straight news write, we would say ‘what if we did this as a list? Is there a way that we do it differently?’

We can then try to pull out different points, or target a different users. Even if you don’t write it up as a list or a quiz or as a long-form piece, or a video of the information, just thinking about like what is the right format for this opens up new formats for telling a story before you write it.

Even if the piece ends up being a straight news piece, you can take that information and will have worked out who the target person to read it is.

CG: I think that writing for the digital and pausing before you write something and talk about and think about how you want it to be presented can actually help stop your writing the things that nobody’s reading.

LB: I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing things that no-one reads. I think there’s a problem with writing them five times.

But I’m a big fan of the idea of learning from stuff no-one reads amd learning from that. Eventually you’re going to do one article which 10,000 people are going to read it and you can be totally unexpected.

Making sure you stay with that experimentation and that coming out it and figuring out new ways to look at the thing that maybe usually 10 people to read. and finding a way to get 10,000 people to read it.

It is a huge opportunity for newsrooms just keep experimenting and never be too scared to find try new ways to get people to read things.

CG: And so what do you say to the people who say you listcle isn’t journalism?

LB: Well the Ten Commandments was a listicle. The list has been around in news for a long time and there’s a reason. It’s a very simple way to present information and more people would benefit from doing it, but it doesn’t mean everything has to be a list.

The list is simple, and gets the information to people. People know exactly what they are going to get when they see the page and aren’t going to be disappointed.

That’s the secret behind why lists work. People say ‘Oh I know there are 18 things in this list which means that it’s going to get. I’m going to read 18 things.’

CG: And also I think there’s a misconception that writing stories as a list is is somehow easy and throw away and actually it’s all about the authentic voice and ringing true. Nobody should be able to speak about the local area in this authoritative way as we should.

Ceri Gould, who edited WalesOnline in her previous role

LB: WalesOnline lent off list as well. Why did you end up doing less lists?

CG: When I took over, it was effectively the receptacle for the for the print titles and what we tried to do as a team was to say ‘well actually could it not be its own thing? Could it not have its own voice and personality?’

And we started by doing it from the premise: ‘Well if you live in Cardiff and Swansea, you might not like everyone who lives in Cardiff or Swansea but we all love Wales’ and we went from there. That was the guiding principle of it and then we realised BuzzFeed, it was 2015, we did our first list.

We actually introduced list to regional journalism and and it went from there and we discovered we could do it better for our local areas than anyone else.

LB: Why did you start doing them less on WalesOnline? Was it because people got bored of the format, or because you felt it needed to be used more specifically?

CG:I think it’s got to be one of the tools we use. So in the south east, where I work now, what we’re trying to do is get readers to expect they’ll see stories presented in one of five ways.

One is the listicle, another is the lean-back read, or the data download, and video is very important too.

At WalesOnline, everything we identified was effectively what worked well when I was on Wales On Sunday five years previously, so there is an idea that nothing’s new and the opinion, the fun and the personality was already well-used in print.

LB: Yeah I mean people have done lists for thousands of years but I think that Through experimentation, we find that any many things work. Finding a way to support some of the stuff where maybe you don’t get the traffic on it initially, so it can go from 10 views to 2,000, is important.

CG: You have interesting views on Chartbeat I think?

LB: I’m not a huge fan of Chartbeat. I think it makes people respond to it too quickly. It has real benefits for certain things, the quick break in news, or sport for example it’s great for.

But I think for a lot of stories you’re going to have stuff that takes two or three days to develop or takes a week to develop. So watching your Chartbeat and saying ‘oh this didn’t immediately blow up the Internet’ is ok. Maybe it’ll work over the next month. So you shouldn’t always make hard decisions based on sudden spikes.

CG: I’m going to read out two headlines with the same story. One that you did recently and one from one of our websites, So lets see if you can tell which is which. First is “A restaurant tried to name and shame a reservation no show and it had to apologise instead.”

The other is “A restaurant tweets out the personal details of a customer who didn’t turn up.”

Now my analysis is that they’re both very good. They’re both fresh, very clean, that sort of clean journalism which is the trend at the moment and which the i is making a name for. But what would you say is the difference between one or two?

LB: Well the difference I think is marginal. I’m a big proponent of conversational headlines as I think the best way to tell a story is probably the way you explain to your editor why the story written is a good story.

It’s saying ‘Yeah this this restaurant tried to shame someone and it totally backfired on them.’ It’s the most effective way to tell the story, then moving around the language to make sure it’s the most readable version.

I think we’d had another couple of posts where restaurants naming and shaming of customers and reservations had done really well and people clearly were really into this idea.

There’s the politics around restaurants dealing with no shows, and people who work in restaurants who know this is a major issue. But at the same time there’s a question of maybe this goes too far.

So it’s really tapping into that like what are the politics and morals of a story are, and it provokes a lot of discussion.

CG: I have here an overnight list which we get reporters to file. Lets have a a look at a couple of headlines. ‘My life of hell living on a council estate.’

LB: Well I’d be cautious about using council estate as I worry it plays into a stereotype a little bit and ‘life of hell’ is an overdramatising phrase too.

I’m kind of curious what the hell is thought. I’d rather click on something which explains the hell. Is it people driving cars up and down? Is there loud music? Is it a satanic cult?

Bringing that to the front and saying ‘here’s the weird thing’ is important. Doing that means I think more people will click on the story and then more people will share it which I think is the double.

Part of what you’re trying to do here is firstly get people into your story and then secondly get people to engage with it beyond just the story itself, whether that’s arguing in the comments, or sharing it or sending it to a friend. Whichever version of that is helpful for both for both SEO and social algorithms.

CG: I want one more then. “Woman open quotes ‘hanging from X peer holding a life ring.’ Close quote. Saved by rescue crews (just need to wising up.)”

I would generally go again with more conversation. The interesting part of that is that someone’s hanging on means they’ve actually fallen off. That seems like a missing piece. And how long for? A minute might not be as interesting a story, but 3 hours. So I’d like to figure out the numbers in the headline too.

People really like the idea of specific numbers and headlines whether it’s prices or times or whatever because it helps them contextualise it in their own lives which makes brings the headline home

CG: Could you share with us what the differences between writing for i and for BuzzFeed?

LB: Well at BuzzFeed the headlines cold be ‘OMG something happened and I’m laughing’ or whatever. We wouldn’t really use that in the i because the i has a slightly different brand.

But I think that’s probably as far as it goes that way.

The other way, at the i we’re trying to find a way to to build kind of trust News brand which obviously is what everyone’s trying to do. We have a slight advantage in that we don’t have the same legacy of history. We’re not hated in Liverpool like the Sun. We’re not hated outside of London like the Guardian. we can really maintain balance by making sure headlines are conversations that people can understand without going into the sort of hyperbole that other outlets might do.

CG: Clean Journalism? I think you are the clean eating answer for journalism!

LB: Slightly more enjoyable than that I hope.

CG: Could we end by asking you for some tips on what you think local journalists should be doing every day?

LB: While I said I’m not a huge fan of the Chartbeat model of watching traffic, I do think data is is super important but the importance of data is very much not looking at just views, because there’s not going to be a golden metric.

It’s not gonna be views, it’s not unique visitors. But what you do want to do is look at essentially mix of metrics so it’s time on site. It’s number of pages looked to afterwards, it’s returning visitors and all these things come together. Look at the overview.

And even if you do have a piece that maybe has 10 views on it, that again is also useful information.

Following on from that I would say read the comments, you can learn so much about them. You see what people actually care about and pick out the important bits from from whatever you’re writing which means that maybe what you think is actually the important point, everyones actually picking up on something you put in paragraph five and maybe thats the thing that you can follow up in the future to find the new thing.