I don't need your full attention
Newsrooms don’t spend enough time thinking about what the user is trying to accomplish.
A few years ago, I wrote a piece for Nieman Lab about how we were measuring the success of push notifications. My main takeaway was that only looking at open rates is a poor way to decide if push notifications are valuable to audiences. I maintain that reading a push notification and then moving on without reading the story is beneficial. I do it every day.
I’ve been thinking about this example in the ongoing debate of maximizing attention vs. being respectful of audience’s time. Social media platforms are designed to maximize your time. They not only want you to come back again and again, but they want you to spend as much time as possible there during each session.
Building habit is absolutely critical in news organizations’ success. But does it—or should it—matter if that habitual visit is for 30 seconds or 30 minutes?
Newsrooms don’t spend enough time thinking about what the user is trying to accomplish. Do they want to make sense of something? Find a specific answer to a problem they are having? Explore others’ perspectives and experiences? If their goal is to learn the net worth of Ariana Grande, and they can do that in less than a minute, then they were successful, and that short session time was not in vain.
Any website that has proven itself to be trustworthy, easy to use, and knowledgable on what the audience needs information about is worth visiting. Likely over and over again. It’s not always about getting every user to take the next action immediately. By serving information in a way that meets their needs, we can create habit *and* respect their busy day.
What I’m reading
Mother Jones: Shane Smith Goes Down His Own Personal Rabbit Hole
Chief: Shop Favorites From 25 Diverse- and Women-Owned Brands
Nieman Lab: There’s now a way for journalists to verify their Bluesky accounts through their employers
Better News: How to better connect fundraising asks to your journalism
Collins: 101 Design Rules
The Digiday Podcast: How news publishers are adapting post-election, with Yahoo News’s Kat Downs Mulder (starts around minute 21)
NBC News: Trump's business empire has expanded. Here's where he could profit in his second term.
Embedded: An interview with Sally McKenney, Google’s favorite recipe developer
Awful Announcing: Adrian Wojnarowski saw the light and found that insiderdom was meaningless
Press Gazette: Time CEO Jessica Sibley says B2B shift is working for 101-year-old brand
Ness Labs: The Art of Wintering: How to Find Strength in Slowing Down
The best thing I made this week
I made these pumpkin maple muffins to share with my son’s daycare friends during a weekly meetup.
One more thing
Annemarie Dooling, the VP of audience experiences at the USA Today Network, created a scholarship fund at CUNY to support single parents going into journalism studies. If you’re looking to give back this holiday season, this is a good one.
See you next week,
Rachel
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