If Brexit – and other *big* votes taught journalism one thing, it’s that it’s not impossible to engage readers with important decisions. The problem is, not everyone who was fighting for votes played by the rules journalists consider their cornerstones.
At the same time, in journalism, it’s almost folklore to say that important journalism should be above the scrutiny of analytics. After all, how often do council meetings, long-running court cases, and in-depth feature reads made it to the top of your Chartbeat screen (or similar?)
Well, in newsrooms in two UK organisations, that’s increasingly what is happening as newsrooms pivot – or at least focus more – towards the 3% of readers we can truly say are loyal.
And in doing so, the battle to connect readers with information they can trust, is slowly being won.
Who are they? What do they want? How does your newsroom change when you put a greater emphasis on them? And what happens to the all-important headline metrics – like page views and unique users – which so much of our industry still obsesses on?
And is possible that in all of this, there’s an awful lot from our history in print to look on to understand how to make what we do truly valuable to readers?
This is a session about making the important, popular.
Suggested Speaker(s)
- David Higgerson (@davidhiggerson)
Digital Editorial Strategy Director, Trinity Mirror - Eileen Murphy (@theeileenmurphy)
Editor, BBC News website England, BBC