The stats I’ve seen about online reader engagement are pretty discouraging, as I discussed in “Disengagement.”
Leaving aside, for now, the challenges related to the medium itself, which are difficult to control, I think there are some basic approaches and principles that news sites can keep in mind to engage their readers more deeply.
Beyond the basic requirement that you offer compelling and distinctive information and services, I think it’s useful to think about three important characteristics of what you could think of as web-positive publishing. I call them the Three I’s: immediacy, interactivity and interneticity.
Immediacy is about recognizing the voracious desire among our readers for good old-fashioned news, with the emphasis on new. Having spent many years poring over news site traffic logs, I can guarantee that the big preview of coming legislative battles and priorities, however important and well-written, will drop like a stone to the bottom of the most-read list, while the short newsy item about the fire that consumed a meth lab will rise to the top. Also: Quirky news wins, short wins, timeliness and urgency win, images help and feature stories can be either big hits or traffic flops and there’s no way of knowing beforehand. And, yes, controversy loves a crowd.
That’s not to say that a steady diet of meth lab fires and short quirky blurbs is the solution for every news site. (That’s what local TV news is for.) And that’s not to say that you shouldn’t do the big takeout on the upcoming legislative session, or the heart-warming profile or what have you. All of those may be essential to your mission and equally essential to maintaining your brand and personality, both in print and online.
But the content strategy for news sites has to begin with the understanding that online readers are looking for information fixes. You need to meet that need with a steady flow of timely, newsy, relevant information.
Pew offers some insight into news readership habits. According to Pew, online news junkies typically patronize a slowly evolving core list of trusted sites that they visit frequently. For most internet users, the core list includes just a handful of sites. Only 11 percent regularly visit more than five news sites on a typical day. Critically, news readers are not terribly attached to the sites they visit — about two thirds do not have a favorite site.
One key aspect of online news readership appears to be missing from the Pew study, though — the frequency of vsits from regular users. As far as I can tell, the Pew study only went as far as measuring daily use. My belief — and it is a key assumption — is that a news site’s best users will come to it habitually, perhaps several times over the course of a day.
Or at least they will if the site rewards repeat visits. A site that doesn’t change quickly kills that impulse to check in. A site that has a sense of urgency and recency rewards repeat visits — and stays on that reader’s short list of core news sources.
So how do you engineer immediacy? It doesn’t have to be a huge effort. News blogs, alerts (even automated alerts) on stories that are hot, most-read and most-commented lists, “coming tomorrow” promos, integrated wire tickers, quick mid-day updates and quick page remakes to emphasize popular stories all help. You can look beyond the main news stream, too, to things like featured reader comments, Twitter feeds, reader queries, rotating classified displays, featured reader business reviews, reader-submitted content and anything else that’s relevant and timely.
Interactivity is the second pillar of engaging readers, and it should include both content interactivity and institutional interactvity. Make it possible for readers to grab hold of your offerings and make them in some sense their own, through comments, social media integration, personal clipboards, ratings and so on. And embrace the notion of dialog with your readers, making it easy for them to submit tips or photos or news, offering chats or other interactive events, giving them opportunities to shape presentation, coverage and priorities.
(Update: Robert Niles has written a post at OJR: The Online Journalism Review on baby-stepping your way toward interactivity.)
The third “I,” interneticity, is my own horrible neologism, for which I apologize to anyone of linguistic sensibility. By interneticity, I mean taking advantage of the possibilities of the medium for smart, useful and engaging information presentation. Some of the best examples of what I mean by interneticity can be found at the New York Times, where their team of data-smart designers regularly produce stunning information graphics. Fortunately for the rest of use, there are lots of tools out there for integrating maps, timelines, charts that can be manipulated by readers, interactive Wordles, tag clouds, slide shows, etc.
There’s no one path to re-engaging readers online. But keeping immediacy, interactivity and interneticity as touchstones for news site content strategies will reward and promote more frequent, deeper site use.
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