Spiraling Out of Control: Ordinary People Said They Didn’t Like Breaking News. Here’s Mainstream Media’s Incredible Reaction!
For over a decade, audiences have asked for timeless explanations of the context behind everyday news. Why then did most efforts to create evergreen content by news organizations fail?
By: Per Grankvist
Per Grankvist is alum of the Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership Class of 2023 at the Craig Newmark School of Graduate Journalism at CUNY.
On the 14th of August in 2014, as the effectiveness of clickbait content on social media to drive traffic to websites was both evident and annoying to anyone who logged in on Facebook that day, a blogger named Ishmael (no last name) published a post with a title designed to provoke curiosity. “The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World.” It went viral. It was shared on Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter thousands of times. Eventually, Ishmael’s blog post was included in listicles such as WNYCs “10 Things You Had To See On The Internet 2014”.
I suspect you don’t like clickbait headlines. Neither do I. In 2018 I started a company that set out to provide an audience with explanations without opinions and speculations. We told people we were explaining the news. In our explanations, designed to have an evergreen quality, we only included what we knew and could verify to be facts. I lacked the imagination of what to call this venture and thus settled on “Vad Vi Vet” (”What we know” in Swedish). During the previous years, I had gotten fed up with editors pushing me to offer more opinions and speculations (they called it “elaborating on scenarios”) in my weekly column in a major newspaper and on the regular panel appearances on TV and the radio. I had no desire to offer hot takes or be known as a prominent member of the opinion economy. I wanted my audience to think more for themselves.
The word “Clickbait” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary that same month as Ishmael published his post, in August 2014. The nouns came to be defined as “material put on the internet to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page.” It really had been the year of the clickbait, as had the year before. During 2013, sites like Upworthy rose to popularity using what journalist Ben Smith, then at Upworthy’s competitor Buzzfeed, called the phenomena of clickbait a way of using “tempting, vacuous, ‘curiosity gap’ headlines” that harken back to the “don’t-touch-that-dial antics of television and radio. Because you won’t believe what happens next — after the break.” (He didn’t mention his competitor’s name in his piece.)
By mid-2014, most people had started to realize that clickbait headlines were a problem with many dimensions. To the user, they were just annoying. The headlines you clicked on rarely reflected what the article was about. Josh Benton of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab summarized what many people felt about clickbait as he defined it on Twitter “noun: things I don’t like on the Internet”.
The clicky headlines were also a bit of a headache for some media executives. Clickbait headlines pulled in vast amounts of visitors from social media to their websites, but it also risked quickly eroding the credibility that they had spent decades building. But the headlines did really drive a ton of traffic to them, generating pageviews and ad dollars in large numbers. It was a problem, but it was a very profitable problem.
To media executives who headed organizations without such legacy, publishing clickbait headlines didn’t seem to be a big problem at all. In fact, that was their modus operandi, the way they made money. Publishing stuff that filled people’s feeds with headlines that created buzz seemed to have very few downsides to several media companies that had emerged during the early 2010s. Alongside Upworthy there was Vice, Mashable, Huffington Post and the mentioned Buzzfeed, all apparently doing the same thing.
To the users, that thing felt new and familiar at the same time. When comedian Jon Stewart was asked if he used any of those websites, say Buzzfeed or Vice, he said: “I scroll around, but when I look at the internet, I feel the same as when I’m walking through Coney Island,” Stewart told the New York Magazine. “It’s like carnival barkers, and they all sit out there and go, ‘Come on in here and see a three-legged man!’ So you walk in and it’s a guy with a crutch.”
It was a confusing time. You never really knew if a headline you clicked on would deliver on its promise or not. Another confusing thing was that one of the harshest critics of this practice, Ben Smith, was at the same time working as one of those carnival barkers. As the editor-in-chief at Buzzfeed, he headed a newsroom that more than anyone else had come to symbolize clickbait journalism. Things became even more confusing when they published a piece headlined “Why BuzzFeed Doesn’t Do Clickbait”. Didn’t they? Not, according to Smith. “Clickbait stopped working around 2009,” he claimed.
“Okay, then yeah I guess I don’t know what clickbait is.” wrote James Hamblin in response in the Atlantic. “The idea that nothing you’ve seen on BuzzFeed in the past five years is clickbait seems strange to the publishers who have seen BuzzFeed shoot past them in audience size and dismissed its cat-based listiculations as bait.”
Earlier that summer, a satirical website called the ClickHole was launched to parody online media, especially sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy. It published pieces such as Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point, Spiraling Out Of Control: This Man Spends 90 Minutes A Day Online and We Asked 6 Porn Stars About Their Most Memorable Experience Filming A Sex Scene. However, the parody wasn’t clear to everyone, at least not to all users.
Remember Ishmael’s blog post on his time on a commercial whaling ship? It was published on ClickChole and his 206,052-word blog post was in fact Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”, only with a more alluring headline. (Ishmael is of course the sailor, the main protagonist in the novel.)
Still, Ben Smith argued that BuzzFeed tended not to publish clickbait in the narrow way that he defined it: articles with the sort of headline that purposely withholds information from readers. And by the way, he writes, clicky headlines can’t make a poor post popular. And in this he is right, concludes James Hamblin. “Because distribution is driven by social spread, people have to like something not just enough to click on it, but enough to share it.”
You Won’t Believe What the Audience Said They Wanted. (Mainstream Media Didn’t.)
So what do people like? In-depth explanations of various topics and background information on current events are often high on the list if you ask the audience. And everyone does.
Every media organization tries to understand what people want in order to give it to them. Surveys are done in a variety of ways, from asking people to fill in a form on the website, as the Wall Street Journal is doing, to buying people coffee while talking about their news habits as Swedish news aggregator Omni is doing, to mining data from services like IMDB to make assumptions on what original content to greenlight, like Amazon Prime Video is doing.
In these surveys, the same things tend to come up again and again and again. People say they want to have more context to understand more about what’s happening in the world. And this is something many media companies have written and spoken about. And some even acted on it.
It happened in early 2012 when Markus Gustafsson and Ian Vännman set out to build a news aggregator for the Scandinavian media group Schibsted. This was a time before clickbait headlines became a thing and iPhone 4 was the coolest phone on the planet. They started to buy people coffee to understand their news habits and needs. One of the things people kept telling Gustafsson and Vännman was that they felt they lacked a sense of overview of what was happening in the world. That eventually grew into Omni, the most popular news aggregator in Sweden. Almost a decade later, in 2021, based on surveys that showed people wanting more explanations and background on the news, Gustafsson and Vännman once again started buying people coffee. Those insights grew into a premium offering called Omni Mer (”more” in Swedish).
The Omni audience response is not an exception. When Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s biggest newspaper did an audience survey in 2018, they found that one of the driving forces behind getting a subscription is to improve one’s general knowledge. It made them launch a separate quiz app in 2019, called Snille (”genius” in Swedish.)
The need to get deeper clarity and context to what’s happening seems to surface whenever a news organization is asking their audiences what they want. It was literally at the top of the list when the Atlantic spent two years studying readers’ and listeners’ needs in 2021 and 2022. The difficulties many audiences felt in understanding the world were also among the major reasons behind the Financial Times’ decision to release an inexpensive app in 2023, says Malcolm Moore, a longtime FT editor who was put in charge of “FT Edit”. At a meeting at the Wall Street Journal, I was told, off record, that the same need to understand the background to what’s happening is a constant in their audience surveys.
At the Washington Post, Ezra Klein ran Wonkblog, a blog that was dedicated to domestic policy, economics and politics. It answered the question of what happened in healthcare today, what happened in the financial crisis today and what happened in education today. But when readers emailed Klein they said they didn’t actually need to know that.
“Often times their question had to do with something that happened long ago. How did this thing that was in the bill that got passed a year ago — and we hadn’t covered since then — work? Where did they go to just learn what was in the law itself, not what had just happened,” explained Klein at The Connecticut Forum in March 2017. “ The thing was all of that context needed to understand the newest developments was being lost.”
Klein was reflecting on what led to him leaving the Post to start Vox.com, a site that claimed to give people what they wanted all along; explanations of the news. Freed from the constraints of the physical paper Klein and his two co-founders Matt Yglesias and Melissa Bell set out to “reinvent how you explain the news”.
In a video from the launch, where Klein explained what Vox.com was about to explain, he pointed to what he saw as a central problem in journalism. “We call some of the topics we covered — the vegetables or spinach — as if they’re gross, and people should be reading them, but they’re not going to want to. It’s a terrible attitude! If we can’t take things that are important and meaningful in people’s lives and make them interesting, that failure is 100% on us as writers. That is entirely our fault.” Klein says humbly, looking into the camera.
Their ambitions were not so humble. Matt Yglesias explained in the video that “Success in somewhat grandiose terms is that we want to create the single greatest resources available for people to understand the issues that are in the news.” Vox aimed to be useful, not newsful. The needs of the reader, listener and viewer were to be central to their editorial ambitions. They were betting on evergreen content, the kind of stuff that has a long shelf life and that is good to get a lot of traffic from Google searches.
I know evergreen content sounds a little like those plastic plants that are so popular among a certain kind of old people. People like my neighbour, who wears drawstring pants and eats microwave dinners and buys tabloids because he has always done it. He prefers his things and life to be low maintenance and highly predictable, to hang out with friends he has always known and dislikes things that require too much of him, like buttoning trousers, cooking food and changing opinions.
In a way, we’re all like that. Evergreens can be found in various fields, not only in journalism and the plastic plants section. In books we call evergreen content “classics” and that includes well-known books, be it, Ulysses or Harry Potter. “Gone with the Wind” and “E.T.” are examples of evergreen movies. In art, you have the Mona Lisa, in theatre, it’s anything with Shakespeare, on Broadway, it’s anything Andrew Lloyd Webber has touched. Evergreen content is songs where you know the lyrics and comfort food on the menu of your neighbourhood restaurant. From a commercial perspective, evergreen content is the stuff people never seem to get tired of, long tail items that are in constant demand and thus can be counted on to deliver stable revenues.
I was mesmerized by the Vox launch video, for personal reasons. A few years earlier I worked as an editor on the sustainability desk at the Veckans Affärer, the Swedish version of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and was getting unhappy with editorial decisions to tweak headlines to insinuate tension and conflict. I had managed to convince a friend who had risen to the ranks at H&M to become their newly appointed chief sustainability officer to interview with the magazine. It was the first time they got an opportunity to explain the context of all the innovative efforts the fast fashion giant was doing in the field of sustainability and how that contributed to their bottom line. They were, and are, in fact, a front runner in transforming this global industry into something better.
My colleagues didn’t want me to help them understand the context in preparation for the interview. They felt that whatever they lacked in knowledge of the sustainability field (and that was a lot) they could make up for by being hard-hitting in their questions to her. Somehow the interview didn’t turn out to be a total disaster but the headline did all the damage. They put my friend on the cover of the magazine with a headline in a huge font that claimed that “H&M isn’t doing enough”. Moreover, they refrained from explaining that it was in fact a quote from my friend (!) as she was explaining that she was stepping up H&M’s sustainability ambitions.
When I had pointed out the obvious mistake to the editor-in-chief before he sent the issue to the press, he said that the headline would sell more copies at the newsstand. In doing so, he showed he cared more about profit than principles. The reactions to the article felt devastating to my friend. I tried calling here again and again and again to explain. After a week she finally picked up the phone, told me how disappointed she was and hung up.
Doing explanations was all I was good at, said my colleagues. Whenever there was some news breaking I took too long, included too many nuances and wanted to make sure everything was correct. I was told those things don’t matter as much online, not as much as to be the first to break a story at least. But by then I’ve seen on multiple occasions that it didn’t seem to matter as much in print either. Doing explanations was all I was good at, they said. Fortunately, it also happened to be the only thing I wanted to do.
Watching the Vox founders claim that they were going to go full-in on explanations felt like proof that I wasn’t the only one thinking this way. The audience had of course always told us that too, and the majority of letters (this was a while ago) and emails I ever received either complimented me for my explanations or complained there were not more of them. My boss listened and then insisted that we do more breaking because that is what people really want, he claimed.
But there was one thing that confused me regarding the Vox strategy. In the launch video, sitting on a stool in the middle of a buzzy newsroom in Washington D.C. Melissa Bell is looking into the camera. “I can’t wait to see if what we think people need is actually what they need,” she says in the launch video. And then she adds: “If it’s not, we’ll change it. We want to have the ability to move fast.” It reminds me of the Groucho Marx saying of how he has principles but if people don’t like them, he will change his mind.
Nevermind. The point I want to make here is that over and over again, audiences have been saying they want more context, more background. But what have they gotten? More news.
Practicing Self-Love: How To Tell Yourself You Know What People Want
As I’ve seen over the past decade, in survey after survey, audiences have said they want more context and yet, whenever news organizations launch new ambitions, they seem to be giving their audience more news rather than context. How can this be? People want to know the background to what’s happening and to understand nuances and what they are served is breaking news and overstated notifications. It’s like ordering a salad and being served a steak. How can there be such a blatant disregard for what the customer wants?
Another central problem in journalism may be that it acts as if it’s something else than a consumer business. Reading news is like washing your hands, you feel better if you use it but your life doesn’t depend on it. While it may be true that democracy dies in darkness, it doesn’t automatically make the Washington Post vital to democracy as its slogan implies. Maybe the media take themselves too seriously?
Let me be clear: while journalism is important, journalists are not. Understanding and doing the craft of journalism well is important to help the public be well informed, but it’s not important who is doing the actual work, as long as the craft is done and the public is better informed as a result of it.
It’s not that people don’t like breaking news per se, they just don’t want to be served only that. Investigative reporting has always been a popular part of the news diet. The public does appreciate — no matter what they think of the media — the watchdog role. As aspiring as the Post slogan is, they are covering the White House among other things, not fighting the death star! As the Posts editor Marty Baron once put it, “We’re not at war, we’re at work”
I’d argue that at its heart, there’s no difference if you sell subscriptions or soap, you’re still in the consumer business. And if people want evergreen content, why don’t we give them evergreen content? I can’t imagine a soap manufacturer refusing to adapt to consumer demands — if for no other reason than that it’s simply good business.
As I’ve been talking to people across the media industry for this piece to understand why everyone prioritizes news and views rather than providing the evergreen explanations people are asking for, I’ve been told various versions of what is in essence a single argument. “That’s what people really want — that’s why we’re going to give it to them.”
How anyone can be sure what other people want as opposed to, let’s say, what they respond to in audience surveys, is something special. When I asked how one can know the inner forces of others, a few seasoned executives described it to me as something you can only pick up after being fully immersed in this industry. It made me think of the strength Obelix gets when he accidentally falls into a large vessel filled with the magic potion as a child. A few described the capacity to know what the audience wants as something like a gift or an inner voice. One day, they just knew.
Most people I asked, however, answered something much less spiritual. They said they relied on usage patterns derived from big data analysis. They referred to the tons of data they’ve collected on what kinds of headlines and articles that people are most likely to capture people’s attention. “First you look at the data, then you know.” No magic is involved. Simple logic, that’s all.
But what if we have accidentally gotten ourselves into a classic chicken and a hen situation? For it is true that if one day, we decide to start using clickbait headlines, for spiritual or logical reasons, it should be no surprise to find in our data that people will be clicking on those headlines.
Who wouldn’t want to know “31 Things You Need When You Have A Ton Of Stuff To Do But Not A Ton Of Time”? Or read 17 Celebs’ Former Classmates Shared What They Were REALLY Like In School? Both are trending on Buzzfeed at the time of writing. Thinking of it, what insane amount of self-control you need to have to resist some headlines is just astonishing. I’d argue that it’s almost humanly impossible to resist the temptation to get a glimpse of the celebrity butt promised in a Buzzfeed article headlined Kate Hudson Caused Some Family Drama After Posting Her Cheeks On The Gram”?
I shall admit I clicked even before I had finished writing that last sentence. In my defence, I wanted to check if Buzzfeed is still not doing clickbait according to Ben Smith’s narrow definition. Maybe, the headline didn’t lie. If it made you expect flesh, that’s what you got. Hudson did show her cheeks on Instagram, posing in a dark orange string tanga by a pool. Her tanga did what Smith claimed Buzzfeed headlines would never do. Hudson wasn’t completely naked. The tanga withheld some information from the audience.
Recently, on the 9th of April 2023, Vox turned 9. Nine years in, explanatory journalism is still as core to their mission as ever, according to a celebratory post asking for reader suggestions of what to explain. Is it? Sure, there’s some explanation in the article “The Supreme Court deals another blow to labour unions” and in the one explaining why “Ron DeSantis wants voters to know he’s not like Trump”. Even though the piece “The Aubrey Plaza ad for Big Dairy that may have violated federal law, explained” includes the word “explained” in the headline, does it qualify as explanatory journalism?
Maybe. There’s no clear definition of what explanatory journalism is and what it’s not. The articles linked on Vox’s front page are in all circumstances a different kind of explanatory journalism than what they started with in 2014. The site now puts less emphasis on “explaining” than on “the news”. The headlines are intended to get us to click on them. They are not cheeky on the level of get-a-glimpse-of-Kate-Hudsons-ass, but they are not like the dry, factual headlines on APs wire service either. What happened to the grandiose ambition to create the single greatest resources available for people to understand the issues that are in the news?
Nine years ago, Vox talked a lot about how they would help the public understand the news through “stacks”, a modern version of the fact boxes that used to accompany articles in newspapers. These stacks would be evergreen and updated continuously by editorial staff, allegedly powered by their constantly renewable curiosity. In the early days, Vox did attract and cultivate a lot of talent. Profiles such as Phil Edwards, Cleo Abram, Johnny Harris and Carlos Maza all quickly became my heroes with their incredibly interesting and tightly edited videos that were put on Vox’s YouTube channel. They still do, even though all but Edwards have since left Vox to start their own ventures.
The question is then why Vox no longer is betting on explanations in the same way they used to? Whatever happened to their ambition of creating evergreen content?
Can You Do THAT? Watch These Media Bosses Flexing Their Principles.
I put the question to a sales executive at Vox Media, Vox.com’s parent company, who had worked on the commercial side of the business for more than five years. “Why did Vox pivot away from the evergreen strategy?”, I asked. Her answers were a little confusing and somewhat contradictory. She spoke off the record.
Before I asked the question, she had told me that Vox.com early on realized that they didn’t want to be dependent on Google’s algorithms to deliver traffic to the site. Instead, they diversified into launching podcasts, newsletters and other monetizable assets. “To have a more stable flow of revenue,” she explained.
Yet, most flows still have the same source; advertising. In some form or another, that’s where all the money comes from. (Subscriptions are still “a substantially smaller part” than advertising, according to the sales executive.) This dependency on ad dollars will motivate Vox to embrace any idea that can deliver more pageviews, listeners and viewers.
The sales executive went on to say that the Vox brand actually never was about evergreen content, but about “explaining the news”. It might accurately describe Vox's position on the market today, but it’s a mischaracterisation of the initial strategy.
At the time of the launch, Ezra Klein said he hoped to avoid incrementalism — “the biggest source of waste is everything the journalist has written before today,” he said. Instead, he wanted Vox journalists to be responsible for constantly updating pages that are the ultimate resource on a topic: evergreen explanations.
In the launch video, Ezra Klein explains that “Digital articles, at least in principle, last forever as web archives. That’s something some people are taking advantage of today. But we don’t think that people are really writing articles with that in mind.” He’s clearly talking about their evergreen ambition. He’s also talking about the importance of explanations in regular news articles without being afraid people won’t like them. In the video, he later goes on to say “There is no such thing here as the vegetables of journalism.” Vox set out to make all explanations of important topics as meaningful and interesting as the best vegetarian dishes you’ve ever had. If not, that failure would be 100 % on Vox. It would be “entirely our fault” as he puts it.
Unless, of course, people didn’t want vegetables. Remember how Melissa Bell put it in the launch video? She talked about how excited she was to find out if what they thought people needed was what they needed. “If it’s not, we’ll change it. We want to have the ability to move fast.” Bell is saying something to the effect of “Let us serve people spinach, and we will put all our efforts into making that spinach as tasty and delicious as we possibly can because we think spinach is good for you. But if you don’t like it, we will get you Big Macs.”
So when the sales executive told me Vox was explaining the news, I could see her point. They are — but in a fast food newsy kind of way, rather than the slow-food explanatory cooking they started with. At the same time, she seemed to acknowledge that there had been a refocus, or pivot when she went on to say that that decision “was an editorial decision, not a commercial one” as if she wanted to have no blame for it. Anyway, it seemed the Vox founders and the editorial team at some point concluded that people didn’t want to be served as many greens. Distribution problems might be blamed for that.
Read All About It: Things You Didn’t Know About Clickbaiting!
The idea behind the clickbait is nothing new to the media industry, nothing either Buzzfeed or Upworthy invented. Using attention-grabbing headlines to get people to buy a copy of a newspaper has been the standard for more than a century. Clickbaiting is older than fact-checking since the latter rose to importance as a reaction to the former. That’s how many newspapers started to build up the credibility they have today.
One of the first things I learned in the newsroom was that “If it bleeds, it leads.” An article about an accident or a violent crime is always higher up on the front page than an analysis of the recent development in a foreign policy issue. With this logic, a lengthy article describing the ins and outs of a new piece of legislation and why it came to be, will never lead on the front page. That place is reserved for bleeding, or breaking. By their very nature, news articles are more urgent than evergreen articles. That’s why some editors and journalists don’t even consider evergreen stories to be news, but we’ll get back to that.
Moreover, the higher up in the news feed something is, the more traffic it will get. That’s why I was always pushing for my explanatory pieces, hoping that the editor would give them a little lift. It rarely succeeded. I suspect Vox’s journalists have felt the same way. Evergreen articles always have a distribution problem on a news website.
In addition, there was an even bigger distribution problem on the platforms Vox didn’t own: social media. Initially Vox not only envisioned making evergreen content more interesting, but they also wanted to present it in a different way using stacks and embedded multimedia features. As they tried to get a broad distribution on Facebook for that content, it quickly became embarrassingly clear that the formats they envisioned for the web weren’t supported on social platforms.
I’m told this by a source who had some insight into the process and who spoke on conditions of anonymity. It wasn’t that Facebook didn’t drive a lot of traffic to vox.com, he tells me. It did. At least for the kinds of content that had headlines that were attention-grabbing enough to compete with the clickbait headlines that by 2014 were everywhere. This may even have supported the later realization that they needed to adjust their strategy.
Lobbying Facebook was of no use. By 2014 Facebook set the terms for the entire content industrial complex. They were as focused on the customer as Vox were but from a much broader perspective. Vox envisioned something that would give them an edge by offering millions of news consumers a better experience on a particular website: vox.com. At the same time, Facebook tried to enforce several standards on their platform to level the playing field for all content creators in a way they felt would enhance the user experience to more than a billion average users on their platform. In short, “Vox’s messages didn’t fit the way media was distributed on Facebook”, says my source.
Vox did everything it promised from the start. The explanations and the evergreens they quickly became known for were really, really good. It was only that not enough people wanted them. At least compared to other, more urgent, entertaining or speculative content. People were not eating their greens.
According to my source, the lack of internal and external distribution made the editorial team gradually realize they needed to make adjustments to their initial assumptions. Melissa Bell had said that they wanted to have the ability to move fast.
It wasn’t a total failure. Far from it. Explanatory journalism worked in the video format, and more resources were poured into that, eventually landing Vox a deal with Netflix to make the series “Explained” in 2018. Every episode was a roughly 15-minute dive into a topic that drives our lives or our world. The first three covered DNA editing, monogamy, and the racial wealth gap. Juicy stuff of course, but also vegetables. Netflix went on ordering three seasons, as well as asking Vox to do mini-series spin-offs such as “The Mind, Explained”, “Money, explained’’ and, of course, the clickbaity “Sex, explained.” The last one is as exciting as clicking on a headline to see Kate Hudson’s butt.
Explanations also seemed to work as podcasts. In 2018, a full two years before the Times launched their massive hit The Daily, Vox launched “Today, Explained” which does exactly that. Every weekday at 4 pm, host Sean Rameswaram took listeners on a deep dive through the most important stories of the day “to make sense of these fascinating and rapidly changing times”. It’s still as great as when it started.
The key problem was that explanations didn’t seem to work for the web or social. This is not a problem that was or is, unique to Vox. All over the news industry, evergreen content has always fallen short of competing with the attention and traction that news content is getting. This is obvious to anyone who has access to analytic reports, often updated by the hour, sometimes in real-time. And by 2014, more and more people were getting access to that data.
Forward-thinking news organizations began to put analytics at the heart of their news operations around 2014. A few years later, most others followed. Recently, at a visit to the Wall Street Journal newsroom in the News Corp Building on Sixth Avenue, I got to see this being manifested by the sheer fact that a giant screen with usage behaviour data dominates the central atrium in their newsroom.
Two things struck me that day. The first was Kellyanne Conway who bumped into me in the lobby as the former advisor to Donald Trump was making her way towards the elevator. The second thing to hit me was the figures indicating the time that visitors at wsj.com spent on the best-performing articles, clearly visible on the analytics board. According to my notes, paid subscribers spend on average something like a minute and a half on each of the most popular articles. Non-paid subscribers spent less than a minute, some as short as 30 seconds.
My hosts were a little hesitant to answer my questions on the board and the purpose of my meeting had nothing to do with that, but they did want to start the meeting with a tour of the newsroom. The other guests and I were not allowed to take pictures, but I took the liberty of asking questions. It wasn’t entirely clear to me if the data on the screen showed the top-performing articles in real time or by the hour, but it was constantly updated.
I remember thinking that if this was the top-performing post, and most WSJ articles took much more than a minute to read, that meant that people were in fact not reading the Journal, they were skimming the Journal’s headlines. This behaviour indicated that the job their visitors wanted to get done was not to be informed, but to feel informed.
Whatever they were eating, vegetables or meat, they were eating it fast or just snacking. The biggest source of waste in journalism may not only be everything a journalist has written before today, as Ezra Klein put it but also a lot of the things the journalist is writing today will be wasted.
Using a restaurant analogy, the Journal is an all-you-can-eat buffet business restaurant, if that niche even exists. There’s so much stuff! Breaking stories and background stories, analysis and opinion, advice on where to go on vacations and when to depart a bad relationship. It’s all there! Everything you can wish for in a healthy new diet. The everyday familiar business stories of companies doing business things, a few spicy things, some low-calorie portraits of people with great looks and grand ambitions to change an industry alongside meaty reportages from various sectors to suit every taste, some veggie stuff that is good for you and the sweet stories to finish the meal.
However, because of analytics, the serving plates are not all the same size. At a buffet, the most popular dishes are placed front and centre, and the same logic applies to the front pages. One needs to serve people what they want, right? And since the most popular dishes are the steaks we’ve put at the front and not the salad we put into the corner, that means people like steak more than they like salad, right?
Look behind the salads, sausage rolls and bite-size pizzas and it turns out that buffets are a microcosm of greed, sexual politics and altruism. According to science, a smorgasbord (or smörgåsbord as it is spelt in Swedish for it’s a Swedish word) is a place where our food choices are driven by factors we’re often unaware of. (Understand the science and you’ll see buffets very differently next time you fill your plate.)
Scientists who study what makes people eat more greens have concluded that to nudge people to eat more healthily at buffets, the second most effective method is “convenience enhancements”, as they call it. That’s making the act of selecting or consuming healthier foods the easy option, such as arranging salads before the steak and indulgent foods at the end of the cafeteria line when our tray is already full of healthier foods.
Another convenience is pre-cut fruit or vegetables. After all, it’s much easier to eat peeled and chopped pineapple than a whole one. On a scale of sugar cubes, a novel way of indicating expected calorie reduction, making convenience enhancements equal to nearly 20 sugar cubes, compared to the most effective way — reducing plate size — at 32 sugar cubes. I was surprised to find that one of the least effective ways was visibility enhancements. That is to put the healthiest product in the most visible place — at eye level on a shelf or in the best place in the middle of a menu. Still, it didn’t have a significant impact on making better choices. Expected calorie reduction: seven sugar cubes.
To get people to consume more spinach, it may not help to put evergreen stories and good-for-you explanations at the top of the front page. But it would help to serve pre-cut vegetables, which is another way to understand Vox’s original idea of “stacks”, snack-sized versions of the required context. The problem might not be that the evergreen stories are not front and centre, but that there are so few of them. And it seemed the rise of analytics had a lot to do with that.
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When putting all of our content under the lens, the shorter the time frame we analyze, the more biased our analysis will be towards news over greens. A central idea of making analysis an integral part of the editorial process was that journalists would get access to data that gave them data on how well their own stories performed. Every day, the figures for the previous day would show up on a dashboard, in a link on Slack or in an email where the journalist could see in black and white how well their stories performed.
“Performed” is the keyword here. For more than a century, a piece of journalism has been evaluated based on how entertaining, factual, informative and educational it was. But never how well it performed. What is journalistic performance, anyway? What date should be used to judge that?
I guess most people have heard about the Watergate scandal that stemmed from the Nixon administration’s attempts to cover up its involvement in the June 17, 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Washington, D.C., Watergate Office Building, as revealed by the Washington Post. How should that first piece of reporting be evaluated? It was probably a failure since not many people read the Post. There were likely more people who read about it in Time and the New York Times who also did a lot of investigative reporting. Many more people probably heard about it through other media channels that reported about the scandal based on what they could read in the three outlets that broke the story. Or should the performance evaluation be based on the number of awards a story gets? In that case, most of the stories should be underperforming.
What deemed a story to be performing or not was the number of page views, not the content itself. It was the medium, not the message — although they are linked. It was never about journalistic performance, but about financial performance. The data displayed on jumbotrons in newsrooms and sent to journalists was always about the number of page views which equates to the amount of financial contribution a reporter brings to the business.
In 2021, The Sydney Morning Herald launched an internal analytics tool, called Topic Editor Dashboard (TED). It gave reporters individual data on how stories have performed against their topic’s static benchmarks, which have been calculated on their previous year’s actuals. Then, each article falls into one of four colour-coded benchmarks (green, blue, orange, or red) for whatever period they choose to select. Reporters can also see the number of articles they have written during that time, average subscriber views per article, average total views per one of their articles, and the average time subscribers spent on one of their articles. These metrics are also detailed for each story. When the Herald describes the tool, they say they intend it to be “a helpful tool, not a punitive yardstick.” I’m not sure all reporters felt that way.
It was however an example of how these tools are often presented, not as business metrics, but as personal development tools. In a blog post published in April 2022 on the website of the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism, Alicia Barron writes about why journalists should care about metrics. “Journalists have never had as many tools as we do now to discover who and how many people are reading our stories. Why not take advantage of these numbers to better understand the people we’re serving and how to deliver better quality reporting?” she asks.
That all sounds great in theory of course, but the numbers most journalists were given did not help understand the audience or how to deliver better quality. They were only traffic performance numbers. “Knowing these numbers can help you advance your career as a journalist.” Barron writes. Not from a quality standpoint, nor to prove you provide journalistic excellence, but rather to prove that you are not a liability, a cost centre to your current boss or your next employer. In Barron's words: “Most importantly, they can prove you have an audience — which will help a potential employer make an informed decision about hiring you. You are proving your worth to companies with tangible measurements.”
The popular weekly performance report tried to capture that worth. The most prominent feature was a list of what articles you wrote that performed best during the week. At the top of the list may have been a news article that got 50,000 views, then another that got 37,400 views, followed by a third, a fourth and a fifth that 12,000 people read. The single evergreen story I did that month may have gotten 5,000 views in a week, but it would rarely show up in the top five. The next week, another five stories were in the top five, and the evergreen might again get 5,000 views, but still not enough to make it into the top list.
The bias towards news meant that as a reporter, I would get my analytics every week to find that news articles performed much better than evergreen stories. I might then think that evergreen stories didn’t perform as well as news stories and so she would be doing more news and less greens. If I hadn’t asked for reports that charted the best-performing stories of the year, I would never have known that the evergreen story I did tick along with five thousand views week after week, silently racking up 260,000 views a year!
What started as a way of keeping track of how many times a page has been viewed as a way of correctly invoicing the companies behind the banners, has changed journalism. As Caitlin Petre describes in her book “All the News That’s Fit to Click” metrics and performance analytics are transforming the work of journalists in many ways.
Related to evergreen content, the specific problem with analytics I’ve come to realize is that they do not reflect the full lifetime value of that evergreen content. By evaluating the performance of a single reporter every week, we might never see the best-performing articles of the year. The likelihood of it being an evergreen story is pretty big.
Around the offices of video streaming services, you rarely hear the word “evergreen”. I had wrongly assumed they did and that’s why I asked to speak with a couple of people at various organizations. This being a very competitive environment, they all spoke on condition of anonymity. (It also had the benefit of not needing to get approval for my visit from the PR departments.)
I quickly learned that what I would call evergreen content, they called bulk titles or library content. That’s the collection of titles you need to have to feel useful and relevant to your audience. “Basically, I call Sony Pictures and ask them for a list of 1000 titles and pay a flat fee of 10,000 dollars a month to offer that to our audience.” a head of content at a Scandinavian streaming service told me.
To understand what people want, you either rely on the judgment of Sony Pictures or mine your data from IMDB, as Amazon Prime Video allegedly is doing, someone else told me. “It’s an open secret, and that allows them to be even better in ensuring they only get the rights to what people watch, not what they think they’ll watch.” This person, working with content strategy at a global streaming service, explained using “Gone with the Wind” and “E.T.” as examples. “They might look like two well-known and loved classics, but people would only watch one of them. Nobody is going to stream ‘Gone with the Wind’ whereas ‘E.T.’ has had a stable viewership year after year.
(A person I talked to at Amazon Prime Video confirmed that they are using data from IMDB but said it’s only one of many sources of information they use to evaluate titles, along with other indicators such as Google Search trends, user preferences of similar titles, and more.)
The ability to make accurate predictions is the key to success in video streaming, and analytics is at the core of those predictions. Analytics is also what decides what shows that show up on your front page. The strongest indicator is viewing time.
When launching the top 10 list on Netflix, the company explained that “having looked at the different options, we believe engagement, as measured by hours viewed, is a strong indicator of a title’s popularity, as well as overall member satisfaction, which is important for retention in subscription services.” It’s not rocket science. If people like something, they will watch it and the more they like and watch, the longer they stay. Netflix is then pouring vast resources into perfecting the algorithms to make sure you always get something you’re likely to like, and watch, on your front page to keep you paying. Rewatching a show is a particularly strong sign of member joy, according to Netflix.
Bulk is constantly underperforming, and that’s the plan. The real art is in predicting the amount of revenue a new show will bring in the first 30 days. “That’s what counts and that’s what we optimize for”, an executive at Amazon Prime Video told me. For the user, the big value resides in the first 30 days of a new show or season being launched. Previous seasons will then also increase in value, at least in the eyes of the user. To video streaming companies, the bulk of the value lies in those first few weeks. After that, all content is just considered to be bulk titles.
The financial value of a title is calculated in two ways. First by assessing the expected lifetime value of every new customer a new show attracts to the video streaming service and second, the decreased churn of existing users that can be contributed to the show. The performance of this content is easy to understand. It is measured in cash.
Some variations exist. At Viaplay, a streaming service that is head to head with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video in many markets in northern Europe, a wider set of KPIs is used. Equality, diversity and inclusion are a part of the factors they use to predict performance and to evaluate what new shows to green light, one senior vice president told me. “By showcasing non-all-white casts and embracing themes that might not be mainstream, we’re able to differentiate our content from the competition,” the SVP said. To put it differently: “We have a different go-to-market strategy for our content.” When everybody is fighting for the same mainstream audience, they can get new subscribers from niche audiences.
Amazon Prime Video has experimented with different strategies as well. Being “consumer obsessed” as they call it, Amazon Prime Video sees themselves as content aggregators, not content producers per se. Much like Amazon is a product aggregator at heart, not a product manufacturer. That’s why Amazon Prime Video consumers in the US have the option of adding competitive services such as Showtime and Max (formerly HBO Max). Although this has had financial benefits for Max, it has also strengthened Amazon’s relationship with its customers. It’s all about adding as many dishes to the buffet as possible.
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2014 was the year Quartz expanded to India. The then two-year-old publication had launched from an office in New York City’s SoHo neighbourhood and with the backing of Atlantic Media. Its founding team came from news organizations including Bloomberg, the Economist, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They had made the same analysis of user needs and the problems with journalism that the founders of Vox would make a few years later.
Using the same lofty language Monocle championed from their start in 2007, Quartz too wanted to target “a global, cosmopolitan crowd, people who see themselves as living ‘in the world’. That’s why Quartz needed to be in India.
According to the Tumblr post where the name of the new venture was launched (a full four months before the actual venture launched), the chosen brand reflected the global ambitions in a way. Quartz, the mineral, is found all over the world and plays an important role in tectonic activity.
The expected audience had a special interest in understanding the shifts in the world. According to Quartz’s first editor, Gideon Lichfield, they were a crowd that was “keenly aware of how distant events influence one another; their lives and careers are subject to constant disruption from changes in technology and the global economy.”
In other words, Quartz was going to do grand explanations and evergreen content. They didn’t call it that themselves, of course. Instead, they strived to call it “obsessions”, or phenomena and that would also impact how they organized. Lichfield explained: “So instead of fixed beats, we structure our newsroom around an ever-evolving collection of phenomena — the patterns, trends and seismic shifts that are shaping the world our readers live in. “Financial markets” is a beat, but “the financial crisis” is a phenomenon. Their way of talking about it was presumably as airy as their Soho office, but in essence, they wanted to “reframe news” to be more contextual. Explanatory stories would be their thing and Quartz would get associated with evergreen, ever-relevant content.
At the time of the launch of Vox.com Ezra Klein was asked what prevented him and his co-founders from starting something like his new venture within a traditional news organization. “We were badly held back not just by the technology, but by the culture of journalism,” he said of daily newspapers, in an interview with The New York Times. Starting Vox they made sure they created a different culture in the newsroom, a culture where the ability to explain things was more important than what school you went to. It lowered the bar to who could explain things and created a culture where colleagues inspired each other to hone their craft. Quartz, on the other hand, did not.
Eleven years after its launch, Quartz’s office is no longer in Soho. Instead, they are located on Sixth Avenue, four blocks north of the News Corp. building and the Journal. They are all legacy media now, with offices in generic-looking skyscrapers. Around 2020, the publishing of clickbait headlines on social media had largely stopped and as a result, traffic at many media companies was drying up. According to a writer who worked at Quartz at that time, the management at Quartz strongly felt they needed traffic through SEO. Evergreen content seemed to be the most efficient way to get there.
By their nature, evergreen articles tend to give readers the answers to a question they searched for, and the more evergreen articles you have, the more questions they can respond to. News articles, on the other hand, are always the answer to the same question “What’s happened?”.
The initial process of picking stories at Quartz reflected the insight that the users already read from other sources. Quartz thus tried to give you “stories you don’t find elsewhere”, nuggets in bigger stories or angles of current affairs that surprised you. This proved to be a great strategy in the clickbait era because even if Quartz didn’t engage in that, it found that their stories still sneaked their way into people’s feeds. After all, they had something people couldn’t find anywhere.
By 2020, that strategy was no longer working. As the thinking went, asking reporters to write evergreen stories could give Quartz a more stable stream of traffic from Google. Most of the reporters had other thoughts. “It was baffling to me!” said the former writer. “If you’re a beat reporter, covering the topic every day, why wouldn’t you want to stop once in a while and try to make sense of it all in an evergreen article? If not for anyone else, for yourself?”
The problem was that the way the other reporters saw it, evergreen stories were not news. And they only wanted to do news. In new ways yes, but only news.
The last in a long line of people wanting to do news in new ways is Ben Smith. During his reign at Buzzfeed, he created BuzzfeedNews which indeed did news in a new way after a stint as a media columnist at The New York Times, he felt he wanted to do news in new ways, again. Together with Justin Smith, they launched Semafor last year. The latter was most recently at Bloomberg and before that at Atlantic Media where according to Semafor’s masthead (if one still can talk about one) “he led The Atlantic’s revitalization and founded Quartz.” I read that and wondered what lessons he had learned at Quartz regarding shaping culture so it does not eat your strategy first thing in the morning.
In introducing Semafor as “the world’s first news platform designed to meet the moment we are in” the founders are the latest in a long line of news platforms founders who felt the same way, like the good people at Quartz and Vox. “Join us and make sense of a complex world with a news source you can trust.”
A few months ago I got the opportunity to meet Ben Smith in person. He talked about Semafor’s grandiose ambitions, and that they aim to cut through the noise of the news cycle with smart, distilled views and explore competing perspectives across borders for a curious, new global audience. To me, that sounded like evergreen content could be a part of that, so I asked him about that. He looked at me puzzled as if trying to understand why I would ask about such an antiquated concept, as I was a reporter sent from 2014. “No, we’re not interested in doing things just to get SEO traffic,” he said after a while. Instead, they planned to do things such as events and premium sponsorships, he explained. Just to get advertiser revenue, I thought. Not that there’s anything bad about being focused on revenue, of course. Selling soap or subscriptions doesn’t matter, in the end, you need to be profitable.
Blake Eskin is a teacher at The New School in New York. In a previous life, he worked at several newsrooms, including The New Yorker. Over remote coffee, he tells me that he sees many similarities between teaching and journalism. With a notable exception. “Only the teachers care if the audience learns something or not,” he says, adding that there are of course exceptions to this rule, but it’s an industry problem. “Reporters are programmed to report on new stuff, on breaking news, not providing the audience with a service or being useful.” To a lot of reporters, breaking is simply more fun to do and it makes you feel more important than writing an evergreen story. To me, it was the opposite. I was told not to do breaking news so I learned how to explain things in an evergreen way instead.
Eskin tells me that he noted that media companies tend to talk about their “audience”, not their users. In other words, they expect a homogeneous audience to be sitting in their seats and receive whatever is happening on the stage. The way many editors see themselves is as directors, not curators. The Swedish director Ingmar Bergman never did audience research and he surely didn’t listen to any of their requests. Why should he? He knew best and he had awards to prove it.
Another editor I talk to on Zoom mirrors Eskin's observation. He used to work at Quartz and tells me about another argument used to argue why evergreen stories are boring. “If you map the top ten questions around a current topic, let’s say around electric vehicles, a few of them will be about how EVs actually work,” he says. “The reporter would then say that it’s too basic to write about, even though it is obvious there’s a huge interest in getting this question answered. “’ It’s just too basic, it’s not interesting for me to write about what they would say, as if they are primarily writing for their own personal development, not to serve the audience!”
As I closed my notebook and made my way back to my hotel in NYC, I compared the two newsrooms that I’ve heard and genuinely tried to get their audience to have more vegetables. At Vox they had the culture but they never managed to get the distribution to work. At Quartz they had the distribution but we never managed to change the culture in the newsroom to get the reporters to write evergreen content.
Still, explanations are a very popular format, just not at news organizations such as Vox or Quartz. The Internet may have killed the movie star, but it didn’t kill the explanatory star slash journalist. Phil Edwards, Cleo Abram, Johnny Harris and Carlos Maza all do really good stuff along with other YouTubers such as Mark Rober and Simone Giertz.
This is also something I find in my own analytics. The media company I founded five years ago pivoted to becoming an ed-tech company last year. At our core, we still do the same thing: evergreen journalistic content, but we’ve stopped talking about what we do as “explaining the news”. We now help people to improve their knowledge on topics that are relevant to our time — with minimum effort. We put more emphasis on our staff being curious than having a long background in journalism. We serve vegetables and we’re proud of it, and we don’t offer any fast food. I think that is the trick if you want to do explanatory journalism and evergreen — you have to only do that.
I had this idea of comparing media to restaurants as I was listening to Alex Hardiman, CPO at The New York Times, talk about how they build products. Freed of the constraints of only having to publish all the news that is fit to print, the Times seems to be doing everything, even evergreen content and really good explanatory journalism. Hardiman talked about how the Times has set itself apart with its subscription package. That’s when I realized that the Times isn’t just a single restaurant, the Times is a food court!
Once you pay the flat fee at the door, there’s a little for everyone, regardless of your food preferences and you can eat as much as you like. There is the fast food with breaking nuggets next to where they serve meaty investigations, a kids section, an athletic-themed restaurant and sections catering for Spanish and Chinese audiences. Adjacent to the food court there’s even a Wirecutter mall and a game arcade.
The lobby of the New York Times is so big it could fit an actual food court, including an open atrium with a birch grove that looked like it had been stolen from somewhere in northern Sweden. Renzo Piano envisioned the building in a way that seems to combine their grandiose ambitions stretching 52 floors into the sky with being firmly rooted in the real world. Next to the Times is an old building that in many ways represents the past. It once housed the New York Herald Tribune, an important newspaper that failed to invest in innovation.
It was founded in 1832 by James Gordon Bennett Sr. who wrote much of the paper himself during the first years and pioneered a new format in which he “perfected the fresh, pointed prose practised in the French press at its best”. Like many founders, he had grandiose ambitions but needed to adjust to reality a little later. The paper eventually merged with other papers and became bigger and changed owners a couple of times but never earned much money. The paper was much appreciated but its main problem was that it never matched the comprehensiveness of The New York Times’ coverage. After World War II, The Herald began a decline. In August 1966, the paper printed its last edition.
“The death of The New York Herald Tribune stills a voice that for a century and a quarter exerted a powerful influence in the affairs of nation, state and city. It was a competitor of ours, but a competitor that sought survival on the basis of quality, originality and integrity, rather than sensationalism or doctrinaire partisanship.” wrote the Times in its tribute the day after.
Today the building is the home of my alma mater, the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, teaching innovation to journalism students. On my way to class, I stopped by Starbucks. I know I should be ordering something sensible but opt for the latte mocha with whipped cream on top. If clickbait were a hot beverage, it would probably be the mocha with the whipped cream and Buzzfeed would be Starbucks. I enjoy going to Sweetgreen which has all the stuff that I know is good for me. But some days, I still want a mocha with whipped cream.
Special thanks to Eric Hellweg for guidance and great conversations.
