Morning Conference: The Recirculation System

“Recirculation” is the sort of fancy word that most journalists, quite rightly, turn their noses up at. It’s a horrible piece of jargon for a simple idea: getting people to reading more stuff once they arrive at our sites.

However, it remains a significant challenge in many newsrooms. All too often, I come across pieces with not a single internal link or other means of encouraging people to explore what we have to offer. Conversely, sometimes the reverse is true: the page is so plastered with links to newsletters, podcasts and other stories, it looks like the site has no confidence in the actual article people are reading.

Finding a happy medium is critical — especially for membership model sites, which need to push people towards enough of a habit that they’ll convert.

The mobile recirculation challenge

And so, this piece from Chartbeat, is useful stuff, especially in terms of thinking about mobile strategies, rather than desktop ones:

Reader scroll patterns on mobile devices differ from their desktop counterparts — how you show the depth of your content is critical to keeping them engaged in these experiences.

Worth taking some time out with a cup of tea to dig into this and, in particular, to following a lot of the links (which will create recirculation on the Chartbeat site… see how that works? 😜)

Refining your Recirculation strategy for long-term loyalty | Chartbeat Blog

Previously, we addressed the importance of forming a Recirculation strategy and using experimentation to encourage deeper reading, while also outlining the internal barriers that can accompany the audience engagement hurdles...

Chartbeat BlogNick Lioudis

New Google Update

If you run product reviews, you need to know about this:

Google announces product reviews algorithm update

Google has released a new quality algorithm update that promotes outstanding product reviews.

Search Engine LandBarry Schwartz

Reviews are a highly competitive category, but a very search-friendly one. If you’re running them, and especially if you’re using affiliate links as a revenue source, it’s worth watching this.

Quick Links

• 🔥 Don’t use Wix to make your website. Seriously.
• 🔭 My City colleague Dr Glenda Cooper is the new director of the European Journalism Observatory. Really interested to see what she does with this great resource.
• 🇺🇸 Some useful data about social media use in US adults from the Pew Research Centre. Great if you’re doing audience work in the US, but bear in mind that patterns vary from country to country.
• 🤦🏼‍♂️ In a final sign of the collapse of civilization, Facebook is to label satire stories with a “satire” tag. Have we really fallen this low?

Jobs Corner

• The Bureau of Investigative Journalists is looking for an environment reporter and a US health correspondent. Talk about chunky beats…
• Reach expanding its “Live” brand and creating 50 new jobs in the process.

And Finally

This is beautiful, and thought-provoking:

Have a great weekend.