Curation, and the challenge of choosing our news
More and more people are switching off the news. Why, and what does that mean for people working in comms?
Print media may be slowly dying, its readership dwindling annually as the people who buy physical newspapers get older and pass away. But a newspaper or magazine is still one of the most effective modes of curation.
Plenty of digital models have tried to replicate the look and feel of flicking through a magazine; most have failed. I still use Feedly, and I love it, but it's a poor substitute. Digital curation is hard, and the inability to crack its code means more and more people are actively turning off the news.
Things that make a newspaper or magazine so effective, in my eyes:
Length constraints - there's only a certain number of pages, so newspapers must make careful editorial decisions. There's no "bung it all online and see what clicks."
The flick factor - you don't need to worry about a user journey through a magazine; you open it, flick through, linger on things that look interesting, and skip those that don't. There's no worry that the story you want lies behind some link somewhere.
Linked to the above, page layouts help give you an at-a-glance look at the content. You don't need to scroll beyond a clickbait-y headline to see an image - it's all there in one go.
The serendipity factor - you might pick up a magazine to read that feature about how Nirvana made Nevermind and end up loving an interview with Pale Waves and discovering your new favourite band. In a world of simplistic algorithms giving you more of the same every time, the art of human curation can expose you to ideas and stories you didn't know you'd like.
Our newsfeeds and media websites are less effective ways to deliver news and information, turning people off the news. The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report for 2023 highlights that "with an abundance of channels and options now available to consumers...we find that news consumers are increasingly overwhelmed and confused, with many turning away temporarily or permanently."
The proportion of people globally who say they actively avoid the news is "close to all-time highs at 36"%"; 41% in the UK, with a steep drop in the number of people who say they are "very or extremely" interested in the news since 2015.
In addition to this general trend towards news avoidance, respondents to the Digital News Report survey highlighted how people increasingly dislike having news stories "automatically selected for them" (a 19 percentage point decline in UK adults under 35). Nearly half of respondents worry about missing out on important information and challenging viewpoints due to having their news automatically curated online or via social media.
The current digital delivery tools we have in place to serve news to consumers fail to tick many of the boxes that made print media so effective. Most people in the UK still get their news via broadcast (BBC One being the top news source nationally), but accessing news online or via social statistically creeps closer every year. Continuing down the same path risks more and more people switching off from the news every year.
However, we must be wary of the say/do gap with these qualitative surveys. Respondents say they don't want algorithmically chosen news (they're also sceptical of human curation - yet another reason the newspaper industry won't be having a renaissance any time soon), but "content based on previous reading/watching history is still preferred, on average".
And, as anyone who spends time on YouTube and Spotify knows, previous consumption history tends to play an outsized role in algorithmic recommendations. The thought of algorithms choosing what we read is likely unappealing because algorithms sound secretive and nefarious.
So we rail against these perceived biases within algorithmic and human curation engines and choose our own media diet. Or we switch off completely in favour of TikTok, Netflix, or some other form of entertainment.
But that say/do gap looms large - particularly when we return to 2018 and Revealing Reality's online news consumption report. This study mixed qual surveys with analysis of people's smartphone usage - the data found that participants "significantly under-reported their online news intake". In particular, being drawn into a wormhole of news via a push notification was a common behaviour that happened unconsciously.
That research may be five years old and happened in the "before" times. Still, some of the findings are strikingly similar - the same chat around the volume of news and feelings of being "over-loaded" and "exhausted" by the relentless nature of current affairs.
This ennui with the volume of news and the absence of curation from the online media landscape has been building up slowly ever since smartphones began becoming ubiquitous. Less time spent on Facebook and the slow decline of Twitter may release some of this tension. But with more and more news publications looking at TikTok as their next frontier, seeing less news will require dedication to the cause.
And, of course, the big question we need to ask ourselves is, where does increasing news avoidance leave the communications industry? There are fewer media outlets than ever; it's never been harder to land a story, given the chaotic news agenda. Consumers actively avoiding the news, and by extension, our campaigns, is another headache we don't need.
With this in mind, there are two areas to consider as we plan our campaigns for H2 2023 and start getting into planning for 2024. Firstly, if you're still relying solely on media coverage to tell your brand story, you're doing campaigning wrong. Being multichannel has been a buzzphrase for over a decade - every week, it becomes even more essential. And being multichannel in the 2020s means having access to media spend - spend for partnerships, spend for social, spend for influencers. Again, if you don't have media behind your campaign, you will get left behind.
The second area to remember regarding news avoidance is to know your audience. 41% of people in the UK actively avoid the news; that means 59% of people are still reading the news. And when it comes to corporate and B2B audiences, news avoidance is way less of an issue. They're likely still feeling bombarded and likely curate their sources accordingly to feel in control of their news flow. However, for many professionals, particularly those working in finance, politics, or tech, being informed and having informed opinions is an important part of the job.
The trick is to curate our work effectively to ensure we're reaching the right audience on the right channel, with the right message, at the right time.
That might mean, as the Digital News Report suggests, ensuring that stories we want consumers to read "feel relevant" to them and help them "make sense of the complex issues facing us all".
That means digging into the meaningless catch-all term "stakeholders" and building our understanding of how specific audiences curate their sources. What podcasts and newsletters are SpAds and civil servants listening to? Which subreddits are buy-side analysts browsing? What publications do CMOs have a subscription to?
Curating our campaigns effectively, aiming to tap into the serendipity factor and giving people a chance to know your story in three seconds can help attract and retain your audience's attention. People want to feel informed and in touch with the world; we need to be present in the places they choose to do just that.