In November, Press Gazette reported that the majority of English speaking news websites saw a slump in traffic (readers, to humans). It’s not the first time the trend has been noticed, and being able to point to dips in visitors from Facebook and Google as a cause will be of little comfort. The loss of around 8,000 journalism jobs in the UK and North America last year will attest to that.
As the industry plots a way forward, there are dozens of ideas percolating. Asking people to pay, doubling down on what the data tells us readers like and find useful, experimenting with new platforms to attract younger readers are all, correctly and sensibly, among them. But while delivering the same content to readers in a different way rises to the challenge Facebook and Google have provided, there’s something else I’d like to see be a part of that discussion on a more regular basis.
There are too many reasons why really captivating writing is rarer than ever in journalism. Some of the reasons are even good ones. But there are few things more powerful when it comes to forging a lasting connection with readers.
Journalists are expected to produce quite a significant amount of stories – story count is important. You can measure total, quality is much harder to measure and often intangible. You can’t keep readers consistently with stories you’ve not written yet and simply being useful to readers – telling them the weather, the road closures and the things likely to affect them today – is the easiest way to be part of their lives. To inform is the very basic purpose of most newsrooms and the journalists in them. But, it seldom leads to memorable pieces of work. A reader is unlikely to remember those things when it’s sunny and the roads are clear – so then what?
Readers are more likely to remember the headline they didn’t like, or worse, the errors, than the weather forecast you provided. We see that, sometimes unconstructively, in our comment sections. And overcoming that hurdle is a small part of what journalists need to do to regain the goodwill of audiences.
It’s true that the captivating element of a piece of work on any news site can often be the facts behind the story. If we take court reporting as an example, a staggering murder case will hook a reader purely on the events that have happened. There is a place for creative flourishes in crime writing, but it is seldom appropriate when pulling together a report on a sentencing that has just taken place that day. Dedicated court reporters are rarer than ever, and you aren’t getting beautiful storytelling from a release the local constabulary has put out before the local press. Taking your time is not always appropriate, or viable.
I’ve spent time working with student journalists who are working in a voluntary capacity (as I was, to be clear) who can turn around 300 words of clean news copy at the drop of a hat. Journalism courses are wonderful at preparing future reporters for this. Significantly less so, however, when it comes to a feature or a long-read. Here is where writing ability alone can turn a lukewarm topic into something that fizzes. With some exceptions, journalism degrees are not preparing reporters to write fascinating non-fiction. In part, perhaps, because it’s not a priority for employers. Creative writing courses can serve this purpose a little better, though. Journalism courses, not unreasonably, focus on the digital skills needed for a modern reporter, and those traditional news-writing skills and the qualifications that go with them (shorthand, law and so on).
Much of the type of work that encourages brilliant prose has been dwindling in the industry – though less so on the nationals. You’re unlikely to find dedicated reviews to music, theatre or the arts unless it just so happens a reporter there has a passion for it enough to do it in their free time. You will, however, find fantastic football writing (The Guardian is wonderful for this, but George Hodgson covering Preston North End can inspire me to tolerate even the most unwieldy site interface) and political opinion (Liam Thorp at the Echo). It exists, especially around the topics that generate sufficient engagement, and readers love it when it lands. In this void is where the most successful blogs often exist. That connection with fantastic writers can be hard to replicate or manage into existence. But when it does exist, where memory of fantastic writing has created a connection, so does that goodwill from readers that can be missing.
I’ve seen dozens of reporters given legal guidance or guidance on clarity of message or how to set their story out to make it the most engaging it can be. However, guidance, or even conversation, when it comes to fantastic writing is less common.
One of my favourite bits of writing – ever – came from Kirsty Bosley for the Birmingham Mail in 2022 when she reviewed Michelin-starred Adams with such character and sincerity that the piece ‘went viral’. It was so successful not because the concept was quirky or the headline caught the eye – but specifically because it was so beautifully written. When that same ‘commoner doing posh things’ concept was mimicked elsewhere, it felt slightly stilted.
The point is that the level of connection that can be formed through fantastic, witty, moving writing is hard to force. That it often comes from unexpected sources, as this wonderful and brave piece from Jake Oates demonstrates, is just one thing that points to the fact that you can rarely guarantee it.
News has big challenges. Conveying information is the starting point from which teams should build and I’d like to see more writing that the reader remembers the next day. Write something that people remember because of the way you’ve written it, and they’ll be much more likely to come back again. Write something that makes a reader feel something other than informed, or annoyed. Kirsty wrote something that made me feel something in 2022 and now every single time she appears in my feed, I’m stopping to read. Seeing more of this in journalism in 2024 would be a wonderful thing.
Alma 