The Latest: The Boston Globe is publishing fiction now (May 11, 2020)
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THE NEWS
The Boston Globe is publishing a serialized fictional “mystery thriller” set in Boston over the course of two weeks, with prominent placement on its website homepage and the A1 of its print edition.
SO WHAT
This is the latest example of how fiction — and other non-journalism content, like poetry — can serve readers in ways that journalism can’t: countering news fatigue, reaching new readers, and driving habit and conversions with new products.
Publishers have turned to fiction to help engage and retain readers experiencing news fatigue, an issue affecting about a third of those surveyed by Reuters in 2019. The Boston Globe framed its decision as giving readers a respite from COVID-19 coverage, a real need given that seven in 10 Americans want to take breaks from pandemic news according to Pew. Even outside of pandemic times, The Verge, for example, hoped that it would “refresh the feeds of followers who may be getting burnt out of Facebook data privacy explainers or the government shutdown” with Better Worlds, an initiative last year to publish original and adapted science fiction stories.
Different kinds of content can bring in new readers. These can be fans of the writers published (as The Verge banked on) or more generally, consumers of fiction or poetry. A viral story can also entice even those who aren’t fiction readers: The New Yorker’s Cat Person, for example, was the second-most viewed story on its website in 2017, even though it was published in mid-December.
Fiction can also inspire new products that drive habit and subscriptions. The New Yorker, for example, spotlights its published fiction in a bi-weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. On its fiction podcast, recent New Yorker fiction contributors read other author’s stories from the archive. The magazine also launched a poetry bot, which sent followers on Facebook Messenger and Twitter a poem a day from its archives. Monica Racic, The New Yorker’s director of production and multimedia, told us that the poetry bot’s audience was highly engaged and subscribed at a significantly higher rate than people who came to the site from other avenues.
LOOK FOR
More blurring of the line between fiction and journalism. It isn’t necessarily black-and-white: speculative journalism, which intertwines reporting with science fiction to imagine possible futures, has grown in popularity. Readers can find the form in the op-ed pages of The New York Times, which runs an “Op-Eds from the Future” series and publications like High Country News and McSweeney’s Quarterly, which devoted entire issues to speculative climate change writing.
Also look for forays into fiction in non-text forms. Publishers may build on their experiments with speculative journalism and enter the fiction podcast game. This could open the door to optioning as another business justification for fiction production down the line, as podcast-native companies like Gimlet Media have done. Gimlet’s Homecoming, for example, became an Amazon Show, and the company has a whole division dedicated to making Hollywood deals (read our conversation with Chris Giliberti, Head of Gimlet Pictures for more).
