Rethinking Journalism Part II: An Explainer On How Digital Content Distribution Works.
Journalism isn’t dead.
It is hurting though, and the reason outlets like CNN or FOX have to manipulate and create clickbait is because the old system isn’t working.
The content heavy website isn’t as viable as a medium of publication anymore, with Facebooks Instant articles keeping the main source of traffic for most news outlets on Zuck’s platform. I wouldn’t be surprised if most social channels didn’t follow suit with their own native article readers.
Many news professionals might lament that “unfortunately this is the way it is” when talking about Facebook and how we drive traffic to the paper. This act like Facebook is out to get them.
That is simply not true on both accounts – both meaning that it is not “unfortunate” that social distribution is the norm. If anything, it allows you to better serve you readers by sending them content that is relative to their situation instead of blasting them with everything you got. An come on, Facebook isn’t out to get you.
When I visited the Facebook campus for a tour and workshop I learned that their mission was clear:
They (Facebook) want to enable the system of Journalism. That is why they make so many changes to their product.
You can complain about algorithm changes all you want, but lets be honest, Facebook isn’t malicious in it’s intentions, it is improving it’s product so newspapers and magazines can improve theirs.
Think of it: wouldn’t it be a better world once we get back to what journalism was intended to be? We can stop manipulating people and optimizing for clicks, and actually work on telling better stories. And in order to do that, we need to be on top of the very young and growing infrastructure of Facebook. It isn’t that old (five years as a mainstream channel to be exact), and their teams are still shaving off the quirks every day to make the best platform that someone can use to consume and distribute relevant content.
How do you teach that to current industry pros? || The Process
In this article, I want to share an interactive infographic that I made solely for that purpose.
This is an interactive Tumult Hype element that will be included in a Mag+ constructed digital magazine. So it is meant to be consumed longer than a blog post, which gives me room for longer form copy and in depth explanations.
So after initially sketching scenes I had an idea for the function of the app. The lesson in this infographic is taken from the world of digital marketing, which I have certifications in.
The sales funnel as a common visualization when explaining a customer flow in paid customer acquisition.
How it works is you tailor the experience of your brand to warm up leads so they eventually become customers. This model translates very well to most industries, but isn’t heavily utilized to distribute content of news outlets.
Using tools found in the Facebook business manager, you can create custom audiences that reflect certain stages of the customer journey. It is an advanced technique and will grow ever more complex as we run people through the funnel, but the starting out point would be three main audiences. The cold that consisted of people who are associated with the general subject matter of the paper. (In my case students, their parents and faculty from the university), the warm that contains anyone who has engaged with our content in any way so we can retarget them with relevant content and the hot audience that consumes the entirety of our content.
So the visual will be a funnel that explains how the sales funnel applies to digital publishing using this basic framework.
The Build
The interaction would be as follows: the section covers I would use would cover the sections and hide the parts of the funnel. This would allow for the reader to progressively disclose each chunk of information at their own pace, and eventually get the big picture on how all of it worked.
I know I criticized in a former post about the use of “tap here” and “scroll here” UI prompts, but I still wasn’t sure how to make it intuitive. Maybe I was wrong to through the prompts out the window, maybe they are still necessary. Feel free to share any ideas in the comments down below.
So I opened up Hype and used at least a 12 scenes to navigate to by touch:
A big problem I considered with user flow was what if the user clicked on “Hot” first? That would trigger a new branch in navigation. So I had to make scenes and navigation that would allow the reader to uncover the funnel in any order.
This way, no matter what, they always ended up at the final slide. I kept the scenes organized by naming them “cold/hot” if the user clicked on cold first and hot second or “hot/warm” if the picked hot first and warm second. This needed to feel seamless as not to break the educational illusion I was trying to maintain.
The Final Product
The final product would have this animated machine that would be activated when you uncover all the sections. The thought process behind this was they would take the time to read every section as they progressed, and then they would see it it action with an established understanding. On the final frame I added a reset button so they could go show their friends or coworkers.
Conclusion
I get it, the news industry is struggling. But we shouldn’t poo poo how things are. What will define how an publication thrives is having people inside the organization willing to learn how social tech works. Newspapers should have an R&D department or employee who’s job is to keep things current.
Thanks for reading. As most technology professionals it’s impossible to have it all figured out. If you have any good ideas that I missed, comment on this post. If you liked the ideas here, give me some clap love :)
Originally published at CadenD Studios.
