Between information abundance and falling attention spans, how should publishers prepare to engage future audiences?
This is a pressing question as technologically driven changes in media habits become increasingly apparent.
Social media and mobile devices now deliver an endless buffet of bite-sized content, leading users to compulsively scroll through their feeds for hours.
Many publishers simply don’t have a plan to cater to “grazers”, who are challenging long-held industry notions of what readers want from content. And the tools publishers have relied on to identify website performance issues can’t pinpoint engagement issues at a foundational level.
Two US academics’ study on engaged journalism — a decades-old concept that advocates for news outlets to consult with audiences on story coverage to foster greater engagement — underscores this challenge.
Mixed Results
The six-month experiment, published in July, involved 20 local news sites in the US of varying sizes, with half serving as the control group. The 10 participating newsrooms asked their audiences to submit questions for coverage, which they then put to a public vote, with the winning question reported on.
The study’s authors — Professor Natalie Jomini Stroud at the University of Texas at Austin and Assistant Professor Emily Van Duyn at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — found that while involving audiences created an uptick in new subscriptions, newsrooms saw no impact on their subscription renewals, pageviews or return visits.
The results showed that while engaged journalism can convert anonymous audiences into paying customers, it won’t necessarily improve subscriber churn rates or engagement levels.
The results surprised me at first before I considered that audience consumption patterns have shifted significantly since the concept of engaged journalism first appeared in the 1990s under the title public journalism.
The idea of reading stories proposed by their fellow readers doesn’t excite audiences when social media has already created an ocean of bloggers, vloggers and citizen journalists producing an endless stream of content.
Is Brevity the Key?
Like it or not, the amount of time available to hook an audience has dramatically decreased. Increased competition for mindshare and evolving media habits will likely shorten that window further.
The answer? Be competitive and embrace the classics. Shakespeare famously wrote that “brevity is the soul of wit”, but in this case it might also be the soul of engagement.
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Axios has made a name for itself on the back of the smart brevity concept, which takes the mantra “all killer, no filler” to a new level. Indeed, co-founder, CEO, and chairman Jim VandeHei contests the idea that “long text equals depth and relevance“.
While he believes “long-form journalism will always be important”, he argues that publishers need to “adapt quickly to fast-changing audience needs and habits”.
It’s important to remember that railing against short attention spans isn’t going to put that particular genie back in the bottle. A quick look at the technological landscape only suggests this trend will continue and that finding new ways to package existing information can only help publishers thrive.
