Rem tene, verba sequentur — if you know your subject words will eventually follow. Or maybe not?
What do we really know about Reach’s readers?
Do you ever read an article and think, why did I just read this?
As humans, we like to think to be totally in control of our decisions and everyday actions. We wake up, head out and, eventually commute to work. We sit down in a hopefully ‘not so packed carriage’ — but it will be inevitably — and occasionally browse the news. We just want to be informed or kill the time, we tell ourself that we are going to ‘just check some facts’, but how do we end up getting to know information about who got the latest lip filler and how Katie Price’s house looks like? Or why Gwyneth Paltrow sells candles with a dubious scent?
The answer is, unfortunately, that most of us are attracted by gossip related news and unusual facts. But why? Sometimes humans are doing things without being consciously in control. To be fair, when something like this happens, it can be an extension of what I like to think is an archaic social-emotional response. According to the Smithsonian Institute, humans started to build social networks about 130,000 years ago. That’s an important event in time that gradually leads the start of the human ability to interact with social groups far from their own.
As David H. Koch states “By 130,000 years ago, groups who lived 300 km (186 mi) apart were exchanging resources. Social networks continued to expand and become more complex. Today, people from around the globe rely on one another for information and goods”.
This means that nowadays we are still living in a process of social evolution, and that will span further on of course. But as a UX researcher and not an anthropologist, I can say that behaviourally speaking this is an interesting human trait that could possibly highlight a huge portion of news consumption. The previous news consumption study last year highlighted the difference between behavioural traits linked to different contexts and profiles. In the next series of research studies, the aim will focus on narrowing down the motivations that are leading people to read specific topics. Specifically, the spotlight is going to be on news topics related to celeb and TV, sports, politics and headlines, and why people are choosing to read them.
The motivations that are behind the act of reading, are already a matter of speculation in many research contexts, and it’s a relatively modern topic, i.e. according to Stephanie Pappas “People have long looked to monarchs for social, and even fashion, cues: The now-ubiquitous white wedding dress caught on after Queen Victoria wore one in 1840.” James Houran says that in our society, celebrities act like a drug. That would explain partially the interest the audience has in the celebrity life and gossip, but still the ramifications of motivations related to specific demographics and context needs further exploration.
The aim of this study is to have a view on the panorama of motivations that are leading our readers to specific news topics on the Mirror. It is known from the numbers that in the month of January 2020 the most viewed articles on the newspaper belonged to topics related to celebrities (135m page views), headlines (126m page views), sports (91m page views) and home & lifestyle (34m page views). The amount of traffic on each news topic is well known but it’s hard to grasp the reasons why they are attracting people to specific news. Of course, everyone can get some of the motivations behind, however speaking from a researcher’s point of view the reasons to read a specific news topic are often not just one but many and, interconnected with a different context. The contexts and the reasons are the findings to be after in this research plan, and the aim is to find new ways that could potentially be impactful to optimise the content that is already present for better user experience. A better user experience based on a high level of engagement with the stories on the Mirror than will not fail to find each time the designated audience.
