Do People Still Want News?

2022 has been a year of sweating margins, and when you’re an investment company most of a trillion on your ledger those margins often look quite large.

Buzzfeed found this out in February when eight months after winning a Pulitzer Prize for the journalistic work exposing China’s vast infrastructure for detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims in its Xinjiang, it was told by investors to wind down that same news division, to become more profitable.

The wash up revealed that news is expensive to create and while lovely to break, it’s more financially rewarding to focus on media and partnerships which you unlock through having massive reach rather than writing award winning journalism. Disney Princesses as Cement Mixers over Pulitzers, apparently.

To quote the most recent QWI report on digital usage trends: “Our relationship with the news is particularly telling of how things have changed. Between 2017 and 2021, we observed a stark decline in the number who trusted major news publishers. In the time since, we’ve watched as consumers gradually lose interest in knowing what happens around the world“

Contnuing “More people now say they see news on social media than they do on a news website, app, or anywhere else on the internet. With misinformation the number one frustration consumers have with social media, it’s little wonder why people are beginning to lose their trust in the things they see online“.

When discussing reasons people go online, to find out about news or current events has had a 15% decline in intent since 2018.

Conversely, almost four in five who use TikTok do so to be entertained. Entertainment is by far the largest content category on the platform, by summer of 2020 it attracted an eye watering 535 billion views of related hashtags.

Right about now you should be preparing to kick me about human behaviour and how TikTok is primary a content discovery tool, and people casually scroll a feed often with no intent other than to watching nice things, while researching the news, like looking up a brand of ice cream on Google or review of a model of car on YouTube, is a very deliberative behaviour.

The changing landscape of trust is the key differentiator. In general people are more willing now than a year or two ago to suspend their disbelief to make emotional connections to scripted fake prank videos on TikTok, scripted influencer drama, and scripted reality programs on television.

I remember the uproar when people found Zoella had featured sextoy reviews on her website, which resulted in a question about her being removed from the GCSE syllabus. Then the secondary squeals of shock that Zoella had nothing to do with the article, that it was a branded partnership put together by one of her staff, and the copy by one of her writers.

The idea that Zoella wasn’t writing, shooting, editing and uploading every daily video, yet alone managing her own PR, running her own website, writing her own articles, managing every brand relationship, scheduling and making her own media appearances, running finances, and looking after the business of all that single handily blew some minds. The same as when people learned Russell Brand and other presenters have writing partners who they compose their jokes and skits with.

If the public was naively overconfident about how much in the media was authentic and spontaneous, I think the pandemic and recent elections have done a lot to ebb away at that trust. Which is why a lot of news media platforms aren’t as trusted today as they were three years ago, and why going online to find news feels less important to many.

That’s not the end of the story though. A deep dive I did for a client covering multiple countries earlier this year found that while people were spending less time online and less time on social media, they were spending more time reading print, with news titles gaining the most, and listening to news via radio and podcasts.

This is probably best shown closer to home by news that Channel 4’s televised news keeps growing in audience size, up 23% YoY and up 56% among 16-34s.

Why? Because people have learned the difference between a quick clickbait headline and a long form piece of high utility content. B2B marketers will tell you that infographics and reports presented well are the key to getting leads to spend thirty minutes of their morning reading your blog or a PDF they’ve handed over their details just to access.

In a world of 24/7/365 news cycles we’ve been told it’s about who shows up first, but the reality is it’s equally about who provides the most utility. The BBC had an editorial rule (and may still have, I don’t have a contact there to update this for me), that if a story broke, they’d have to have a BREAKING NEWS holding page up within thirty minutes, or they wouldn’t cover the story. From that page though they could build out and once the links were in social, they’d be driving clicks.

I think this is an important lesson for how all of us can approach content.

Firstly, it’s about getting something out. Secondly, it’s about making something bigger, deeper, and more worthwhile for your audience, in a format that they want to spend time falling into.

So, do people still want news? I’d say so. They just want it to be more like going out for lunch with a friend than grabbing a fistful of Pret sandwiches from a tray as they dash out of one meeting room and into another. They want trusted sources, who have clearly invested time and effort in creating something worthwhile for them. You can’t fake or rush a broadsheet article, an hour long podcast or a TV news item.

What impact does this have on social media in its current form? I think it’s tempting to look at John Stewart and John Oliver, and see a blueprint for how to deliver the news, but in many ways it actually leans in on that kind of wry, sarcastic, dismissive tone that many dislike on social and filing down the corners of news to make everything party political. I’d actually suggest looking at Channel 4 News and their website, where most items are presented as three or four minute long videos with little copy. Remember: What’s good for YouTube is also good for TikTok and Stories, providing you format it correctly for the audiences and platforms.