Riddled with pop ups and autoplaying, sound-on videos, but light on actual news content, there’s much to malign about news websites. For many broadcasters, they’ve been gathering virtual dust while digital attention has instead focused on streaming and FAST channel development.
But news sites today can be so much more, and Tuesday’s NewsTechForum panel discussion “Rebooting the Digital Product Suite,” featuring a raft of design and UX tips from elsewhere in the news media ecosystem, brought much needed fresh insights on the platform’s potential.
Habituation Is The Holy Grail
Among the buzzwords at NewsTechForum, “habituation” was a standout. Creating new consumer behaviors where they repeatedly, almost instinctually, return to a news group’s digital asset means higher engagement, which translates into first-party data and greater monetization potential.
Achieving such outcomes is top of mind for Sam Guzik, senior director of product at New York Public Radio. His approach to building that level of loyalty? “Make sure that with every platform we have in market we’re being very clear about what part of that user journey it is trying to serve.”
Not every product can be “everything to everyone in every moment,” he continued. But specificity in user experience — that’s also hopefully an enjoyable one — will create a stronger connection between consumer and brand.
Guzik said New York Public Radio leverages the digital print publication Gothamist to “reach as many people as possible” by publishing articles that perform well in search. Once a consumer has landed on an article, they’re asked to do just one more thing, like sign up for an email newsletter.
“We know that that’s a place where we can kick off a longer conversation with our users,” Guzik said. “In our app, though, it’s a very different kind of journey. Those are people who are accustomed to being with us. They spend a lot more time with us, and so in the app, we’re spending a lot more time thinking about, ‘How do we make sure it’s a different experience every time they come to us? How do we make sure that the app can fill every moment of their day, whether it’s watching a live broadcast or listening to a livestream or catching up quickly with a newscast or skimming the headline?’
“So, we’re trying to think about on each platform that we’re operating, ‘How do we really clearly meet the goals of driving people on a destination towards habit?’”
A Personalized Approach
Malik Abdullah, NPR VP of product, noted that news organizations “have so many factors working against us” when it comes to drawing consumers to their products.
“With audiences having so many options today, creating habits has become the new golden goose,” he said. “We need to drill into what we do best because that is how we gained audiences in the first place. The key is not to deviate from what your calling card is, but to make it easier to have that available at all times.”
When it comes to the user experience at NPR, digital platform managers are working on ways to facilitate a personal experience through curation. This is particularly important to the NPR brand because it’s a national news organization with affiliates in different markets. Abdullah pointed out that many Americans move out of the city in which they were raised, but still want easy access to that market’s news plus information about their new area.
“We want to give users the ability to kind of create their own journey, and give them a reason to always check in with us when they need us,” he said. “We have to be mindful of what our users are going to be looking for, and make sure we have that front and center based on what the data is telling us.”
David Schmeltzle, founder of Bizbudding, a WordPress site builder and host service, sees artificial intelligence developments assisting news publishers with optimizing personalized user experiences even further.
“Moving forward, you’ll be able to use AI technologies to create this portal, this community, where your app, your method of distribution of content is delivered to somebody the way that they want it to be received,” he said. “That’s the biggest challenge now, is using the technology to deliver content, in the format, at the time period that somebody wants to view it.”
News Sites Can Build Community
News sites can become a meeting place where people share ideas and even report some news, said Paul Wagner, founder and CEO of Chord Communities, a news community platform builder. He cited the website for KHQ, a Cowles-owned NBC affiliate in Spokane, Wash., as a standout example of this approach.
“Their on-air personalities have a constant way to engage people visiting the site,” he said. “So, if there is a snowstorm in the forecast, Leslie Lowe, their chief meteorologist, will initiate a livestream directly from their domain through the community’s platform.”
Those same KHQ news consumers, who may interact with Lowe online, can also get into the reporting act.
“The other great thing that we’re starting to see is what we would consider local micro influencers that are trusted and vetted by the station creating their own content, being able to go live on the station’s website,” Wagner said.
He’s also observed “weather junkies” who snap pictures of funnel clouds on their smartphones and upload them to the site.
“That’s an exciting, not only new way to engage, but all of these pages can also be personalized to generate ad revenue,” Wagner said. He added that this kind of interactivity cultivates not just greater site traffic but also “repeat engagement” — which could also be called “habituation.”
Leveraging news publisher homepages to build community is also a smart strategy, Wagner noted, because social media engagement with news company posts has “plummeted” due to algorithmic changes initiated by social platform. With their “incredible reach in local communities,” as Wagner put it, news companies are in a pole position to cultivate such interaction with consumers on their sites.
If they need some additional help, they could always sneak a peek at their competition and find out what’s working for them.
“Look at how social influencers and niche content producers have been keeping audiences engaged,” Schmeltzle said.
Generative AI As Friend And Foe
Generative AI can also play a role in improving news digital products and their habit-forming prospects.
“I saw for the first time last week a news organization published a newsletter, and attached to it they had a little audio file, and they said, ‘Hey, check out this deep dive into this newsletter content with our Google Notebook LM podcast,” Schmeltzle said. “They made a little note, ‘Hey, there may be some hallucinations on names and things like that,’ which we see happening, but it’s really cool.”
Schmeltzle envisions gen AI having a far more radical impact on news sites in the not-too-distant future. He foresees gen AI will soon create “smart agents” that understand user intent, thanks to first party data, when they engage with search.
“It’ll help you really unlock a lot of hidden content that you have in your archives,” he said. “It’ll give you the ability to create a managed portal for this user, which will help with personalization. It’ll help with first-party data management and also help with monetizing that site visitor. It’s almost like having a smart assistant.”
But gen AI, even when optimized, has limited use capabilities — at least in the eyes of contemporary news group leaders.
Panel moderator Rubina Madan Fillion, associate editorial director of AI initiatives at The New York Times, asked Abdullah if NPR would consider publishing AI-generated content like the podcast Schmeltzle mentioned. Abdullah said the organization “will definitely explore” the option for consumers who might prefer a podcast version of a written article. But replacing radio show and podcast hosts with AI audio avatars would potentially damage “one of the most valuable parts of NPR,” he said, which are “the voices.”
“When it comes to AI,” he continued, “we will definitely look at ways that a user can choose to engage AI to consume NPR if they want to, but I don’t think we’ll make AI front-and-center over what makes us different.”
Guzik added, “We spend a lot of time thinking about, ‘How do we make sure that if we’re delivering an experience, it’s an experience that is worthwhile and justifies that time spent locally?’” At this point, Guzik said considering gen AI to manufacture content also means exploring whether the output is “safe” and “reliable.” If the answer is “no,” such content doesn’t achieve New York Public Radio’s desired outcome.
Guzik said his organization is thinking about the ways gen AI can service consumers in a less profound way than producing the primary content they’re offered. These days, New York Public Radio is experimenting with ways gen AI can catch listeners up on in-progress broadcasts.
“It’s something that we’re excited to be playing with,” Guzik said, “but also being really cautious, because one of the things that we found is if we asked generative AI to summarize our broadcast, to summarize something that’s happened … it does a lot of things, like attributing quotes as statements of facts.”
A test of the tech may create, for example, an audio file where it sounds like a police officer’s assessment of a situation is indeed a hard fact.
“Any journalist in the room hears that and they turn a little bit pale, because that’s a really scary thing to do to a broadcast,” Guzik said. “When we’re thinking about that we want to make sure the value is local, but we also want to make sure that we’re holding up that standard.”
The Time For Reform Is Now
Wagner said news sites, particularly TV news sites, can’t afford to continue gathering dust. “Today, the broadcast news site is its own worst enemy.”
The fact that digital remains a small percentage of broadcasters’ overall revenue shouldn’t be a reason to keep sites and apps languishing.
“It wasn’t that long ago that 10% of photography revenues came from digital cameras,” Wagner noted. “And we all know that Kodak became a leader in the digital camera space.”
For those who do invest in improvements, Wagner said they now count digital revenue as 20% and even 30% of total revenue.
“There’s a promising future ahead,” he said. “I’m hearing more this year about the need for radical change than I think I have in decades of being in this space.”
