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Meet the Facts Man: BBC's Ros Atkins on the rise of explainer journalism
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October 20, 2022
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PUSHERS: HOW PUBLISHERS BECAME ADDICTED TO THE TRAFFIC HIT FROM NEWS ALERTS
By Aisha Majid Twitter
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The instant traffic hit from push alerts means that most publishers are now
using them every day, regardless of whether the content they are promoting is
worth the news-flash treatment.
Press Gazette’s own analysis of mobile app push alerts sent between 16 September
and 1 October (which included the Queen’s funeral on 19 September), found that
the 27 international, national and local publishers at which we looked together
sent over 2,300 alerts.
TIMELINE
* October 25, 2022
ONE BBC JOURNALIST DISCIPLINED OVER SOCIAL MEDIA USE IN SECOND YEAR OF TIM
DAVIE'S GUIDELINES
* October 24, 2022
BBC NEWS PRESENTER MARTINE CROXALL TAKEN OFF AIR AMID BORIS BIAS CLAIMS
* October 20, 2022
MEET THE FACTS MAN: BBC'S ROS ATKINS ON THE RISE OF EXPLAINER JOURNALISM
Data from mobile app specialists Airship supports these trends. In 2021, the
worldwide publishers on its platform – among them the BBC, Sky News, Reach and
CNN – collectively sent 446 billion push alerts, a 2% increase compared to 2019
and 28% more than in 2018. (2020’s exceptionally big spike in alerts was an
anomaly due to Covid-19 explains Patrick Mareuil, Airship’s managing director
for EMEA).
More recently, the Queen’s death resulted in an additional two billion
notifications sent by the media companies in Airship’s platform between 7 and 19
September, compared to the the same period in August.
While push alerts form part of many publishers’ digital strategies, approaches
vary. The Washington Post sent the most alerts in the 17-day period we looked at
(147), followed by The Telegraph (140) and Reach-owned MyLondon (125 alerts).
Where the option to personalise alerts was available, we opted in to receive
general and breaking news alerts but excluded opt-in push alerts on specific
themes such as climate, US politics, or Covid-19 meaning that our totals will be
conservative. The average publisher in our sample sent four alerts a day,
although this varied depending on the day’s news agenda. Perhaps unsurprisingly
more alerts were sent on weekdays.
According to a 2020 study by AP, for most publishers push notifications only
drive a single-digit percentage of total traffic. But advertising revenue,
building a habit with a brand and demonstrating editorial priorities and voice
to audiences are among the reasons publishers use push alerts.
Evolving technology around mobile web push notifications and temporary
notifications linked to live activities such as sports events are also areas
increasingly of interest to publishers.
"When you send push notifications to users on a weekly basis, you have a
retention rate after 90 days that is six times higher than if you don't send
those push notifications," says Mareuil. According to Mareuil, app users that
opt-in to push notifications generate five times more advertising revenues than
those who do not.
Open rates on push notifications for news (3.5% on Android and 3.2% on iOS),
while slightly lower than cross-industry figures have increased in recent years.
Open rates, however, don't tell the whole story for news. Many push alerts
provide casual readers with enough information in the lockscreen.
While push alerts have historically been used for breaking news, publishers are
increasingly using them to drive engagement with other types of content.
"Media publishers more and more are now trying to send slower content and more
personalised content, meaning that they really want to understand what are the
types of articles and topics that users want to receive", says Mareuil.
In our sample, less than 20% of the alerts used the term "breaking news" in the
lock screen summary, although some publishers share breaking news without
explicitly using the term in the alert.
Publishers such as Metro, Washington Post and the New York Times regularly used
alerts to push edition products such as the Washington Post's 'The 7'
newsletter, which rounds up the day's top seven stories, or New York Times'
evening briefing.
Press Gazette spoke to three publishers - the BBC, Reach and the Guardian - to
understand how they use push alerts
BBC NEWS: BREAKING NEWS IS THE PRIORITY BUT ALERTS ARE INCREASINGLY USED IN
OTHER WAYS
"The biggest breaking news is the real priority for push alerts and that's
something that hasn't changed. But in the last year push alerts are being used
for more varied stories," says Samanthi Dissanayake, senior news editor at the
BBC.
Those other stories have included alerts that help audiences make sense of big
and long-running stories such as the war in Ukraine or the death of the Queen -
alerts are used to highlight key moments and stories within the bigger story.
The BBC is also pushing alerts on big investigations, features and more unusual
news to try to "broaden the news agenda".
Within this strategy, deciding which stories warrant a push alert is a decision
that’s usually made between the newsdesk and curation team, although alerts on
big breaking news stories often require a quick response from the newsdesk.
While distilling the biggest stories involves some subjectivity, "picking the
best stories and most important stories is not just a game of instincts", says
Dissanayake. The selection of stories is driven by balancing what's the most
important news as well as audience priorities.
The BBC’s team looks carefully at data insights in a weekly meeting to review
past pushes, their performance and their wording. Data helped inform the BBC’s
decision to push related human interest angles and stories about other royals in
the days after the Queen’s death.
The BBC is known for the speed of its breaking alerts - helped says Dissanayake
by having a digital news desk in the centre of the newsroom that is able to
source, verify and sub-edit news quickly and efficiently.
"The decision then is what's the key information we need to get out to
audiences? What's the most useful form of words for people to understand what's
happening?" she says.
But breaking news is not only about being first.
"It's important we are swift, particularly on breaking stories but what matters
most to us is getting exactly the right set of information out for readers," she
says. "Sometimes it's wiser to go for the wording and the alert that is most
likely to be meaningful to readers. So we're always treading that balance."
What makes a good alert for the BBC?
Dissanayake points to a recent alert informing readers that Russian missiles had
hit the Russian capital, Kyiv.
"It hits all my key priorities for what we want to push alerts to do. We were
pretty swift on it and got onto the breaking news quickly. We explained why it
was important …The other thing we did is situate our own reporting in it - we
know this because our reporter was on air as the strike started," says
Dissanayake.
While the BBC is not chasing advertising revenue, open rates are important for
the publicly-supported news provider.
"It’s important that people read the stories, particularly when it comes to the
journalism we want to put out there, such as our big investigations," says
Dissanayake.
"When we’ve uncovered something particularly important it is important to us
that we frame the push alert in a way that will make people want to read more.
But we also understand that there are some which are about putting down a marker
and letting people understand that we are across a story and that they can trust
us to mark out the important moments."
Front loading important information and keywords and keeping alerts shorter
while providing the right context are some of the ways that the BBC tries to
increase open rates.
The BBC does not have specific guidelines to how many alerts it pushes each day.
"Obviously with it being news you have to let the news dictate what the
frequency might be," says Dissanayake. "I think audiences are sophisticated
enough to understand when there is a huge national or global moment that you
will get more alerts."
She adds: "We haven't seen much measurable signs of fatigue when people send
more because audiences are pretty aware of how news organisations might use
alerts."
REACH REGIONALS: "LESS IS MORE"
At Reach, less is more, says David Bartlett, audience and content director for
the publisher’s 40 regional apps.
His main piece of work since he started overseeing the publisher's apps has been
to find the right cadence for push alerts.
"If you'd have asked me a year and a half ago how many pushes were being sent
across the network everyday it would have been a lot higher than it is now," he
says.
"At a certain level the more you push, the more users you lose because people
get fed up with being interrupted. Although it's not hard and fast we have a
general rule that we'd like our brands not to push more than six times a day.
"Once you go over that the data shows that we lose readers because they tend to
not just disable push but delete the app as well."
In terms of what content is selected for a push alert, Press Gazette's analysis
showed that a large proportion of alerts from the ten local or sub-UK Reach
brands we studied focused on local crime.
"As a rule of thumb we choose the things that are going to perform well from
push. We know that by the open rate. It really is big crime, big breaking news,
a road closed for a big crash or something like that. Something that's actually
useful to you where you live or big national news," says Bartlett.
"It tends to be surprising and shocking news that people open the most. The kind
of news that you feel like you need to know rather than 'oh, that's that's
interesting'", he adds.
At Reach, the day-to-day decision on which stories should be pushed to phones is
made by news editors who, like the BBC, use data to help inform their decisions.
"Once you've had the app for a little bit of time, you can look at the data and
interrogate it," says Bartlett.
Yet while news editors use data to help inform decisions on which stories to
push, story selection is very much a human effort with news editors’ knowledge
of their patch informing the selection of stories which will resonate well
locally.
For advertising-funded Reach, push alerts are monetised through advertising
impressions when a user clicks on a story. While Bartlett says that app page
views are worth less financially than on mobile or desktop, reader loyalty makes
them valuable.
"Our loyal readers in the apps consume a lot more pages than the average reader.
So even though they don't monetise at quite the same rate they're valuable
readers to us because they're consuming that many more pages."
Although push alerts are one piece of the publisher's digital strategy, Bartlett
says that Reach is not reliant on pushes. Traffic from alerts while
"significant" is not "huge."
Last year in an experiment Reach pulled back the number of push alerts sent by
the North Wales Live app from around seven to two a day (before increasing to
five or six again once the experiment was over).
"Traffic obviously went down, but not to a huge extent," he says. "The
interesting thing was the open rates went up because teams were more selective
about the things they sent."
“That's why we can be fairly confident that pushes are best-used just for things
that people need to know about immediately," he says.
While Reach has the ability to segment audiences and use rich media in alerts,
the publisher has not adopted either of these approaches.
"We've got at least 40 brands on our apps so it's a lot of resources that would
have to go into it. Our view is that we aim to provide as good a service as
possible, without taking up too much time in any particular newsroom."
THE GUARDIAN: 'THE CORE IS STILL – AND IS ALWAYS LIKELY TO BE – BREAKING NEWS'
Since adopting push notifications alongside its first mobile app in 2009,
readers have been able to opt in to get Guardian alerts for live blog, a
favourite writer and, since last year, sports. "But the core is still – and is
always likely to be – breaking news," says Claire Phipps, digital editor,
Guardian News & Media.
The publisher’s strategy for breaking news, says Phipps, centres around "what we
think the reader needs to know now". For the Guardian this might include news on
significant events that have just happened or are about to happen or exclusive
Guardian content such as investigations.
"We don’t have a target of how many alerts we send daily or weekly. It’s wholly
guided by the news agenda, although we’re mindful on very busy days that readers
want to be kept up to date but might not want to be bombarded," she says.
While speed is important to the publisher, it’s more important, says Phipps, to
be right.
"We don't alert to stories that we're not confident about: that might mean we
take time to verify a potential terror attack, for example, before sending an
alert. You're pushing that information in front of a huge number of people; it
needs to earn its place," she says.
As a consequence, the Guardian probably sends fewer alerts than other media
outlets with a team of digital editors in London deciding on the stories.
"We don't want to overload readers, and we don't want to stretch the definition
of 'breaking news' beyond its limits," says Phipps.
"Working in a digital newsroom, you get a pretty instinctive sense of what does
or doesn't reach the bar for an alert; for borderline cases, there's always a
speedy discussion. But we don't alert based on what other news outlets have
done."
In areas such as sport or during the 2019 general election where the publisher
feels there is substantial interest, the Guardian has set up separate alert
categories.
"That all sits very comfortably with our digital strategy which centres on
building a lasting relationship with readers, and one in which they trust us and
feel we are responsive to them," says Phipps.
For the Guardian, push notifications are not typically seen as a revenue driver,
although they can help drive loyalty, says Phipps.
"A high clickthrough isn’t the only measure of a successful alert. For a
straightforward news event, a reader might get all they need from the one line
of information on their phone screen and that's fine: the journalism is serving
its purpose," she says.
Like many quality publishers the Guardian does not use clickbait-style alerts.
"I really dislike clickbait-style alerts and would never send one. If a cabinet
minister has resigned, tell me who it is: alerts are part of the news, not a
hint at it."
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