Journalism is a social process: we need to connect with our audience
Building an audience is a skilful dance, combining numbers, instinct — and good, old-fashioned conversations.
Apparently, I need to get triggered more often. Last week’s piece has done, as they say, #numbers — and also has triggered a good number of very interesting discussions. That’s good. Starting conversations is fun — and at the heart of much audience work.
However, there’s one common response to my piece that I think misses the point I was trying to make. Some people have characterised it as a blast against revenue and analytics. For example, when the American Press Institute linked to my piece, this is what they said:
Adam Tinworth argues that too many people focused on “audience” in journalism are concerned with metrics and revenue rather than the people who make up that audience.
That wasn’t quite my point because I think both revenue and analytics are vital. But others have taken it the same way. For example, here’s David Clinch on LinkedIn:
Engagement without revenue is not a sustainable strategy. The real metrics are monetization of attention time and conversion to reader revenue and loyalty.
To which, the only response is “well, yes; these things are the baseline you need to make engagement meaningful”. Look, if you build engagement without revenue, you don’t have a business. VC-backed media startups can do this for a while — and then they evaporate in a cloud of debt, and we’ve seen that happen too often. The more common danger is not what he’s outlining, it’s that you try to build revenue from a membership model, without engaging the audience. The metrics he’s suggesting can help measure that, sure. But any serious engagement strategy can be thought of as a three-way dialogue between the journalistic instinct, the analytics of displayed user behaviour, and the conversation with the audience about what they care about.
Audience: MAU or person?
I am a big believer in the use of analytics and the appropriate metrics. But they are tools in the service of engagement, they are not an end in of themselves. In some ways, that’s what separates us from companies like Meta: all they care about is users as numbers, as MAUs (monthly active users). We don’t have the scale or the technology to match that, sure revenue models don’t generally support that approach, so we need to do things differently.
There is a weird undercurrent to a lot of journalism discussions about audience. On one hand, people are keen to downplay the role of metrics, which is an error. If you don’t use them, you don’t understand the success — or failure — of what you’re doing. But equally, there’s a marked reluctance to actually engage — talk — with the audience. And that sometimes manifests as a desire to see social media disappear. And the current travails of X and Facebook have birthed a type of article that celebrates that possibility.
For example, I think Ian Bogost’s piece for The Atlantic is a classic of the genre:
I have written before in The Atlantic about a problem that I see as superordinate to all of these others: People just aren’t meant to talk with one another this much. The decline of X is a sign that we may soon be free of social media, and the compulsive, constant attention-seeking that it normalized. Counterintuitively, the rise of Bluesky is also a good sign, in that so many people are still trying to hold on to the past. Giving up on social media will take time, and it will inspire relapse.
This isn’t an argument, it’s journalistic wish-casting. The fundamental issue with Bogost’s piece is that, well, humans are inherently social creatures. We are a communal species, who live, and have always lived, in extended groups, often family based. We survive and thrive by communicating with one another and co-operating. As soon as we got hold of the internet, we started making it a social place, in long-forgotten ways like email discussion lists and Usenet.
As I’ve said before, social media isn’t dying: it’s regenerating.
Social media is returning to social networking
However, where Bogost is correct is that this is a matter of scale (and his earlier piece on the subject makes that clearer). The idea of the single, monolithic social platform where everyone congregates is eroding because we have seen the downsides. We won’t give up on social media — but we will use it more mindfully.
I’ve seen a marked generational shift in this. Over the past decade, my students at City St George’s have gone from being big users of Facebook and X, to barely any of them having accounts. The number of users of those once dominant platforms has steadily dropped intake by intake.
At the other end of the scale, my 12-year-old is desperate for access to social media. In the six to nine years that separate the two groups, they learn the downsides of social media, and withdraw from wide-scale use of it. Instead, they use more controlled, focused groups of interaction. Or, they use it as entertainment: as social media rather than as a social network.
Social media versus social network
I think it’s really useful to separate these two ideas, that we’ve tended to dot use interchangeably:
- Social media: a platform where anyone can publish and possibly acquire and audience
- Social network: a platform where people can develop and maintain relationships
Social media is largely about consumption for the many, and creation by the few. Social networks are about interaction and connection. YouTube and TikTok are social media, LinkedIn and (for now) Bluesky are social networks.
What we’re seeing is a rejection of social media as the dominant paradigm of online social interaction, and a rebuilding of the idea of social networks. And this is being driven by users, not platforms. Meta is becoming a social media company, as its platforms move inexorably towards a creator/audience model. Yet people are taken its neglected third leg, WhatsApp, and building their own micro networks on there.
The next social age of the internet
This is no unwinding of the past 30 years of digitally mediated social interaction. We are not about to give up our phones, and start communicating by letter again. Crucially, and I think this is the secret desire behind some of these arguments, we will never go back to a handful of people having a megaphone — printing presses, broadcast antennas — and the rest being a passive audience. There will always be an element of that. We all want to switch our brains off and just consume, sometimes. TikTok has done very well out of understanding that.
But the social networking side of online social activity will not go away. Why? Well, people are used to having a voice now. But also because that nostalgic vision of an old, traditional media separate from social activity was never really true. People always discussed and challenged our work — they just did it in more closed, private interactions we couldn’t easily see. And now they’re returning to that. Rather than performatively fighting in the comments of a Facebook post, they’re discussing the pieces that matter to them in WhatsApp groups, or on Reddit.
And, indeed, that’s where audience work is heading. I don’t think there will ever be a single TwitterX replacement. We’re seeing a clear and dramatic fragmenting of social media into other places. The discussions that once took place on X are now spread across Bluesky and Threads and Mastodon, and also on LinkedIn and Tumblr — and even on Reddit. (I’ve been surprised at how much of my idle Twitter time has been sucked up by Reddit instead. The Telegraph is well ahead on this one, and you’d be wise to pay attention.)
What does engagement really mean?
In the end, if we’re to build our businesses on member revenue, we need to embrace those members. Engagement needs to mean something. The problem is that “engagement” has become a buzzword; publishers ask for engagement without thinking what it actually means in the context of their audience, their business model.
So, what is engagement?
Audience as contributors
Well, it might mean taking your conversations with readers, and turning it into content:
"Due to the extraordinary amount of comments, and also the detail that some readers went into, we ended up producing a read around that piece where we listed some of the best comments that weighed in on the telltale signs and showed how split our readers were and how much of a debate they were having in the comments section," Whittington said. "It’s a great example of an easy win because this is content and comments that are already freely available on your site."
Bringing the voice of the readers into the publication in this way creates a virtuous circle: you turn the audience into advocates (brand promoters, to borrow the language of marketing), drawing more people into the community.
Consulting the audience
It might mean considering the impact of a new technology on the audience, and not just your bottom line, before you implement it. As Mattia Peretti put it at news:rewired:
"Especially with the generative AI boom, we have been experimenting with a lot of different things and yet the audience is largely missing from the conversation."
Research has shown a marked lack of enthusiasm from the audience about AI content. Best check with them before you rush into using it for cost-savings, as the lost revenue might be greater than you anticipated…
Answering your email
It can even be as simple as just answering your email:
It’s very old school, but on Blog Preston, we try to email back and respond to every person who tips us off about a story, sends us in a story or engages with us. Yes, sometimes that means doing it at 10pm on a Saturday, but to me anyone who takes the time to engage with and write to a brand at that community level deserves a response. Even if the response is, we hear you but we’re not able to do anything about it at this time. And a reminder not all audience engagement happens in public.
There’s no, one, simple off-the-shelf model of engagement. It’s a dialogue, a relationship, and like all good relationships, it’s a living one that shifts over time. A relationship that doesn’t evolve, doesn’t survive.
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