If you are too busy or not a big fan of watching recordings, here is an AI edited transcript made so you can browse at your convenience:
Francesca Dumas (00:30)
Hi, Jeremy. Thank you so much for joining Redefining Engagement. I’m really excited to have a chat with you. We’ve worked together and spoken a lot and you have a massive range of experience. Would you mind starting by telling me a little bit about you, a little bit about your experience maybe?
Jeremy Clifford (00:51)
Hi, Francesca. Great to see you again. And thanks for inviting me on the podcast. So my background is very much in news. I have far too many years in the news industry, about 35 years, where I edited numerous titles in the UK. I was the editor-in-chief of two of the largest publishers in the UK as well. And that was all about defining digital strategies and restructuring newsrooms.
More lastly, I now work for myself. I have my own business. I’m a media consultant, a media advisor. And what I do is I help businesses on their digital transformation journey. And chiefly, that’s about helping them to understand what it takes to create the right sort of content that helps them to move from a scale-based business to one where they interact and engage with their audiences and develop a subscription basis.
The subscription business is still pretty new for the regional industry and that’s where I do a lot of my work. I’ve been working with my partner, Alastair Lewis, for maybe 18 months now with about 12 to 15 publishers helping them to move into that digital space and with subscriptions. The chief thing I specialize in is in user needs. So I’m an exponent of the user needs strategy working globally actually. So we do quite a lot of work in Singapore and in Europe with some brands around how to use user needs as a way of increasing your engagement, improving your engagement with readers. And then the last bit I do is that I’m an AI consultant. So I do some work with publishers around the world and help them just to get started with AI. They think it’s a big problem, a big subject and they don’t know how to really get into it. So, me and a fellow partner, we work on some starter packs and how to really just take those first few steps into how to use AI.
Francesca Dumas (03:00)
You do so much. Which one do you find the most challenging?
Jeremy Clifford (03:02)
The most challenging, I think, is the user needs side of it. And that’s because when people talk about user needs and they say, we do user needs, you then start asking the questions, and what they don’t really look at is how they change their journalism. So they may understand what an update me story is or an educate me story. But have they really worked with their journalists in their newsrooms to change the way that they present the stories, how they research the stories and how they distribute it as well. So it’s about getting into that whole mindset that says, okay, well, you’ve done a bit of change, but you haven’t really done the whole change, change mindsets that you need to and go into your newsrooms and, and really challenge yourself in the way that you produce your content.
Francesca Dumas (03:50)
So it’s more getting people to think about it differently that leads to the change of content.
Jeremy Clifford (04:05)
Definitely. It’s about moving people from the way that they traditionally think about journalism to a different approach. When you really understand what the user is coming to you for, what the audience has come to you for. And that’s going to be different for different brands as well. And so what, what we tend to do now is we go right back to the beginning and say, okay, so what’s your purpose? What’s your mission as a brand?
If you haven’t done that work, then you won’t really be able to understand what your user need model should be.
Francesca Dumas (04:39)
Interesting. And you’ve obviously worked in a lot of newsrooms and with a lot of newsrooms. So I’m really quite keen to hear your point of view of what audience engagement means to you. What is audience engagement to you?
Jeremy Clifford (04:55)
It’s a good starting point. Audience engagement is more emotional now than just getting people to your websites and getting them to stay on your websites. In the past, it was about, you know, just getting them to come and measuring your clicks. And we thought, okay, that was a good level of reader engagement, but it’s far, far more than that now. It’s about how do you foster loyalty? How do you build trust with your reader?
How can you build that sense of community around your content so that they understand what you’re doing, that they like what you’re doing, and they’re going to come back to you more? And to me, I think true engagement is when the audiences feel heard and they feel valued and they know that they’ve been understood. And when your content generally resonates with their needs and their values, that’s when I think you’re really getting into what user engagement and reader engagement is all about.
Francesca Dumas (05:37)
That is such a good definition, but it also sounds like something that is extremely hard to measure, which we always focus on, this measuring side. How would you say we measure this feeling heard, feeling valued, feeling understood?
Jeremy Clifford (06:10)
It’s really hard to get those measurements right. And I think there’s so many measurements out there to try to focus on the ones which I think are right for your brand. If you are, let’s say, if you are Reach, for example, you know, the Reach newspapers, that level of engagement that you’re after is going to be different from a more subscription based business. And so therefore your metrics are going to be different.
If you’re Reach you’re going to measure the returning visitors. You are going to measure your click rates, et cetera. You are going to measure your time on site, et cetera. So they’re pretty much the superficial engagement metrics that you’ve got. How do you measure that loyalty and that trust? That’s really difficult. And I think you need more sentiment type of measurements for that, which are really quite difficult to put your finger on.
I don’t think we as an industry have cracked that. So I’m struggling to answer that question because actually I don’t think we have those metrics in place just yet. If you are more of a subscription business, then the metrics are a little easier. And I think the way I would describe it is that we’ve moved from a passive way of measuring engagement to a more active way. So before we measured it by page views, time on site, et cetera. Now I think it’s a deeper involvement.
The way that I look at it would be maybe, the level of commenting that you’ve got. Is your content being shared? Have you got people subscribing or have you got people interacting with you in any way? Have you fostered this sense of community? Have you got people coming to you all the time and engaging, asking you questions and you’re responding to them?
So those are some things which you really need to get into to try to get some kind of measure in terms of, okay, are you providing value to them? I don’t think there’s a direct, this is how you measure value and it’s X metric. I think there’s a number of metrics that go towards that, that says, if we’ve got a lot of commenting and sharing and interaction and engagement, then I think people are valuing what we’re producing.
Francesca Dumas (08:23)
It’s difficult because it’s so hard when we haven’t got a direct measurement to also measure return on investment. So when I ask this question, which is, what aims does your audience engagement strategy deliver on? It’s not necessarily a direct return on investment, but what would you say it is?
Jeremy Clifford (09:03)
Well, I think it depends what the aim of your business is as well. As I say, if you’re a scale model, then your aims of engagement are going to be different. So, you want volume, you want people coming, spending time on your site and looking at many, many pages.
If you are not in the scale game and you’re trying to drive revenue from your audience through subscriptions and through registration, then your metrics can be different.
And they’re going to be very much about, okay, well, first of all, have they engaged, have they registered with you? You may want to use email newsletters as an engagement tool. And so have they signed up to your emails? Are they opening your emails? Are they clicking through on stories?
It depends really in terms of what your business model is, in what engagement metric you’re going to use. Does that make sense?
Francesca Dumas (10:07)
It would be really useful to have specific examples. Have you ever seen it done well by anyone in all of your consulting time that you’ve been going on?
Jeremy Clifford (10:17)
Have I seen them measure it well or have I seen them engage?
Francesca Dumas (10:19)
Either. Any of those are really useful! I’m quite pushy with real examples sometimes because I think it really gives an image of what we could be doing or inspires.
Jeremy Clifford (10:24)
If I look at the Daily Telegraph, for example, they’ve got a really complicated but effective engagement model called the stars model. The journalists know, so they’re not measured by subscription, they’re measured by engagement, and they know if they’ve got people spending time on their sites, and they’re interacting with them. But I think, although it’s a good model, it’s quite complicated.
And so I think from a journalist point of view, you need to keep it really simple for the journalists. So when you move from, measuring your engagement by page views, and then you take that away and say, okay, well, now we want to measure it by people subscribing. All of a sudden the number of views you get on your content plummets because you’re driven by getting 1000, 2000 page views on your story. Once you’ve got a subscriber, you’re down in the hundreds.
And so therefore, you know, from the journalist point of view, saying, is my content being successful? Is it being read wide enough? The key thing about it is that your engagement level is really important.
So if people are coming back to your content and that type of content, and then you understand why they’re coming to you, then you change your whole content plan to produce more of that type of content.
So engagement isn’t about just about measuring how long they’re coming to you or how long they’re spending time on your site. It’s about, how do you change your content plan knowing why they’re coming to you and then producing the right type of content? So as I said at the beginning, to me, engagement is about making sure that your content resonates with your audience and you’re producing the right type of content.
It’s less about the sheer numbers, it’s about the type of content you’re producing. And so as an example of that, I’m working with a national newspaper at the moment down in London, and we’ve done a lot of work with a sports team.
And the sports team was producing a load of content, which quite frankly was being measured by clicks. And a lot of that content wasn’t landing with their audience.
We then did a lot of work on what you want to be known for. Which is about going back to your mission, your purpose. Maybe there’s two or three really big sports that you want to be known for?
And so we then invested time and energy on the user needs approach to that, looking at rather than updating type stories, giving perspective and educating the audience on certain issues around sports.
And what we found was that their subscription business quadrupled over six months. So that’s when you get the ROI that comes back into it because they were relatively successful in their subscriptions, but when they really focused on what the readers were coming to them for, they then saw a real growth in the level of subscriptions and engagement they got from the audience.
Francesca Dumas (13:19)
What would you say are the biggest hurdles or challenges in your experience? What do you think stopping these news brands, even these different teams from engaging better?
Jeremy Clifford (13:53)
Well, I think it’s important first to say that I think engagement has improved massively over time. And, I think we’ve got news brands who really understand the value or beginning to understand the value of engagement rather than just volume. And so, that’s really important to recognise that first. The hurdles though, I think it’s more about, first off, I think we’ve been in a broadcast mode. So for many years, we’ve had the luxury of just being able to put content out there, expecting people to read it.
And we didn’t have the data and analytics, we just put it out there and we didn’t have much interaction. Now you’ve got a lot of new entrants in the media market. The media landscapes changed completely. Let’s take influencers as an example. They’re absolutely brilliant at engaging with their audience. But the challenge that we have as a more traditional media is that we’re still pretty much very much based in what I would call the church and state relationship. So we are very much based on the content’s got to be objective. We’ve got to be almost like a different language that we use. It’s more corporate in the way that we present stories and it’s very factual and pyramid based in terms of what we do.
And so therefore to engage with the audience becomes quite a hurdle now because the audience is changing and they want to have more emotion in the content. They want to have more feelings expressed, which is why influencers are doing so well. The challenge that influencers have is they cloud that integrity of fact-based journalism with their opinion.
And we, as more traditional media brands, struggle to do that because we are fact checkers, we have that integrity, we have that authenticity around it. And so that’s a really big challenge, to try to navigate what the audiences are getting from elsewhere, from social media explosion, to the way that we traditionally presented our news.
Francesca Dumas (16:10)
Huge challenge. Have you seen any brands that are approaching that in a good way? That emotional barrier or managing to do that in a way that keeps their integrity?
Jeremy Clifford (16:23)
I’ve got to say, mostly no. I don’t think there is an awful lot of that. I think people are still wrestling with that balance. But you do see it beginning to creep into what I would say, almost like the personalisation of news. Making heroes of your correspondence, for example. The BBC do this really well, so you’ve got people like Mishal Husain who’s just left the BBC to go to Bloomberg. It was very much, you built your brand around your key broadcasters, and I think the BBC do that relatively well in terms of building that personality profile that you have with news.
And to a certain extent, you can see it happening in certain elements of the news brands. You’ve got your columnists, they’re beginning to be far more personable and using social media now to project themselves, et cetera. And I think, the future for that will be to help make them more become the influences of your brand. So, when you’ve got your football correspondence, you’ve got your political experts, et cetera, I think that’s when you can start to really give them the platform.
They can do podcasts like we’re doing here, or they can do Q&A’s, et cetera, so that they can move beyond their written word and use social media technologies and platforms to become more engaging. And I think that’s where they need to get to. I think we’re beginning to see it, but I wouldn’t say that I could name any brand that’s doing it really well at the moment.
Francesca Dumas (18:04)
It’s quite a scary thing to do because you’re linking your brand to key people who could leave, but also you’re asking quite a lot from your team. Hiring for that is a whole different spectrum. And we’re almost expecting our journalists and our team to have all of these skills that are probably not necessarily native to some of the people, but also quite natural to a lot of our younger teams.
What kind of training are we even thinking about when we’re thinking of this? It must be an absolute minefield to go down that road.
Jeremy Clifford (18:42)
You took me back to when I was the editor of the Sheffield Star and we had a really good columnist and this was about 15 years ago now and maybe 20 even and Twitter wasn’t as big as it is now and I went to one of our columnists and I said, I want you to have a Twitter account and he said, why? And I said, because you’re a really good columnist and you should be talking about what you’re writing in the column and present yourself.
He said, no, I don’t want anyone to know who I am. I said, well, you’re a columnist, so people know who you are. And that really just sort of sums up the challenge that we’re facing a little bit in that, so we’ve got these people who come into our industry and they want to write great journalism, et cetera. But our audiences want more from them now. They want to understand who they are.
They want to know more about their lifestyle. So they want them to be more personable rather than corporate. And this columnist just refused to do it. He just wouldn’t open a Twitter account. Now obviously, it’s changed massively now and everyone has an X account or a Twitter account or Blue sky or whatever you want to call it now. But we just expect our journalists to be very good at suddenly becoming a personality within the news brand. And we don’t really give them an awful lot of training.
And so what sort of training do you need to give them? Well we’re very good at giving media training to external organizations, how to speak to camera, how to do radio, how to do podcasts without always hesitating or stammering. And we don’t do an awful lot of training for that. And I still don’t think we’re very good at that as an industry. So the first thing I would do is I would make them comfortable in using social media platforms.
The world is moving really fast again, back to video and tick tock and YouTube, et cetera. We don’t give them any training on how to present themselves on tick tock or on YouTube. And so therefore I think we should really do some really good media training to enable people to move from the written word to the broadcast word. And I don’t think we’re very good at that yet.
Francesca Dumas (21:08)
I’ll take you up on that training any day. It’d be great. Straight in there!
Jeremy Clifford (21:12)
I’ve never had it and you can tell!
Francesca Dumas (21:16)
I wouldn’t say I could tell, but I’d definitely be up for a training like that. And I think a lot of people would. They know there’s this expectation. It’s just quite a scary thing. And it’s always fear that stops us from doing things, isn’t it?
Jeremy Clifford (21:32)
I think so, but I also think that post COVID, people are far more comfortable now with using Zoom calls or video calls. So if you think about where we’ve taken people from, where they were only three years ago, we always used to do conference calls and never saw anyone’s faces, but now we’re always on and your face is always on a screen and you’re always talking in these types of meetings.
And so I think, we’re beginning to change and evolve the way that we communicate anyway. And so I think it’s just a natural progression then to start to put that into some kind of professional development that, as people, if you want to make them a hero brand within your organization, then give them better training on how to present yourself on video.
Francesca Dumas (22:29)
Well, let’s talk a little bit about strategies and best practices focusing on engaging audiences. Are there any strategies that have proven or what are the strategies that have proven most effective in engaging audiences in your experience?
Jeremy Clifford (22:49)
I think in terms of strategies, let’s talk about where you need to start really. So the first thing is that introducing data into your newsrooms is going to be the first part of your strategy. And most newsrooms now do use data. So you’ve got Chartbeat or you’ve got Parse.ly, real time analytics etc.
They are really useful because people can then see what content is actually resonating with their audience. The next step from that is, well, how do you then start to integrate that into the way that you commission your content and how you plan your content? That’s definitely a piece of work that still needs to be done.
It says, okay, this type of content is working. So part of the strategy must be let’s stop doing the content which isn’t working so well and letting go of that content is really, is quite a challenge in newsrooms and journals because they like to do what’s within their comfort zone or news that’s coming in.
But so you’ve got to be, you’ve got to be brave enough to say, okay, well, look, we’re not going to do this type of content anymore. We want to do more of this new content because we know that’s resonating. So how you use data in your newsroom is one of the first parts of your strategy.
The second then is how do you put that into a content plan?
And then you communicate that to your journalists. We need to be producing this volume of content on these topic areas to really be successful in engaging with our audience. So that’s just from a content point of view.
The second part, then, from your engagement side is, OK, well, how are people interacting with us? And what platforms have we got that enable people to do that?
National World, for example, introduced the Your World platform, which enables people to post their videos and their comments and their stories on their platform. Your own platform, Francesca Contribly is one of those as well.
So it allows people to engage in a more community funded or crowdsourced type of content. And we’ve got to get better at how we engage with those audiences in asking them for content and then using it on our sites. So if I give you an example, when I was the deputy head of Leicester Mercury many years ago, about 25 years ago now, we asked people for their thoughts on some campaign that we were doing. And we got loads of comments coming in, we got loads of letters, it’s a time before email was really much of a thing.
And I went to our new test and said, how did that call for information go? They said, great, we’ve got about 35 to 50 responses. I said, great, what are you doing with it? What do you mean? What are we doing with it? I said, well, we’ve got 35 to 50 people who’ve taken the effort to write to us their views. We’ve got to find a way of publishing it in a paper. And they hadn’t thought about that at all.
Now, we’ve moved an awful long way from that, but I think, you know, modern day, in terms of the way that people want to engage with us, whether it’s through WhatsApp or whether through commenting on our websites, et cetera. I think we’ve got to develop a strategy around that, that says, okay, well, how do we capture all of this content? How do we reach out to people and bring it back into our brands? Because it comes back to my definition of engagement is that you’ve got to build that community of trust and value around the content you’re producing.
Francesca Dumas (26:40)
And it’s interesting because it’s thinking through that value exchange for the reader, isn’t it? It’s about saying, well, what are you going to do with that content? Right, hopefully now not that many people are thinking that way. And I’m sure they are, I think, there are probably a lot of brands who do get stuck on, we’ve done this and it was great and don’t necessarily use it all. But hopefully part of the process is thinking through what the reader experiences, because that’s what all of these big social media brands are doing.
They’re constantly thinking of what dopamine hits, what feeling are our audience going to get from engaging with this? And at what point in the process do you think that we should be thinking about this audience engagement? How should it be taking shape?
Jeremy Clifford (27:18)
Right at the very start. Because if I go back to what I’ve said before, you know, previously we were in a broadcast media. We just used to put content out there and hope that people would find it and read it. That day’s gone.
We’ve got so many competitors in the marketplace now, who are experts at how they engage with their audiences, that we, as media brands, can be seen as pretty out of date.
We’re pretty aloof because we’re not really understanding how to engage with audiences, in a way that they want to be engaged with and communicated with. So you’ve got to do it right at the beginning of the process. When you’re planning your content, you need to start thinking about: How are we going to reach our audience to let them know that we’re doing it, to give them an opportunity to comment on it? Is that via Q&A’s? Is it when you’re doing a live blog?
Can we allow people to comment on that live blog? Should we be producing video? And when we’re doing that, what sort of sentiment tools have we got that we can use for people to communicate with us?
You’ve got to think about all those sorts of things. Are you going to ask people to engage with it, or are you just going to shut it off?
If one of the things we have is that when you write court reports, you’re not going to open commenting on for that, but most other stories you go into. How do you then start to ask people for their feedback and invite that feedback to come in and then how do you use it? So, all of that thinking has to happen at the beginning of the content creation process.
Francesca Dumas (29:13)
And who should be thinking about this? Because different teams, different structures, is it everyone? Should you have someone that is pushing that agenda? Because it is a big cultural change to start thinking in this way. In an ideal world, how does it look?
Jeremy Clifford (29:32)
Yeah, I think you’ve got different elements in your newsroom. If you’ve got a newsletter team, they’ll be thinking about it. But I think it really rests with your social team, your social media team, because they’ve got all the knowledge of what platforms and how to use the platforms, et cetera. So I think it needs to rest with them. But let’s not make the mistake we made when digital came along and we set up, one or two people as digital experts and they were the ones who managed all the digital uploading.
We’ve seen that a little bit with AI as well. So you’re getting AI experts in your newsroom, but it’s not being spread to everyone to be able to use it. So the democratization of it is really important. Everyone should have the responsibility of thinking about how they’re engaging with your audience, but you do need some experts within your newsroom as well who know how to use the platforms.
It reminds me of one of your earlier questions in terms of what are the barriers that we’ve got, and what are the hurdles that we face in our newsrooms. Part of the barriers that we’ve got is that we don’t own our own social engagement media platforms.
And so therefore, we might invest a lot of time in how to use, let’s take Facebook. So we spend a lot of resource and a lot of time in how we build up a Facebook community. And then Facebook then decide to take their bat away and de-prioritise news.
And all of a sudden we’ve lost a massive audience there, so now we’re shifting to Instagram and we’re shifting to TikTok to build that audience engagement as well. But because we don’t own those platforms, we don’t know what the future is going to look like. Snapchat, everyone was working on, you know, thinking, okay, we need to be on Snapchat.
Well Snapchat just has been proven not to work for a lot of media organizations. And so therefore one of the barriers is because we don’t own our own technology, We’re reliant on others to do it. And so therefore, you’re always going to be at the mercy of their whim, their algorithms and how they’re going to promote your content.
Francesca Dumas (31:45)
It’s difficult because owning your own technology sounds great, but it’s very expensive. It’s a massive job. We don’t necessarily share particularly well between media brands across the country, even the continent. And once you’ve done it, you need a lot of expertise in your teams as well.
Are there other ways or have you seen ways that audiences can interact directly with the editorial teams or together on these platforms. And it’s not necessarily so technological. There’s not so much emphasis on that tech.
Jeremy Clifford (32:23)
Yes, there’s some really simple stuff that people can do and should do really. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not making a case that we should develop our own platforms. It is a hurdle and a barrier that we face. But if we’re giving an example of a really good case study of how to engage with your audience. When I was the editor-in-chief at Archant, one of the titles we owned was Not Achieving News.
And we created an app for the Norwich Evening News. And one of the most successful parts of their coverage was their football coverage. And they had a really good Norwich City reporter who had a massive following. They did a really good podcast. And so they did everything right. And then we took their content and we put it behind a paywall, effectively.
So therefore they saw, as I say, their measures of success, page views went through the floor. But for us as a business, we saw great growth because we’re now making money through reader revenue and charging them £2 a month to have access to the content.
But what we, as part of the value exchange that we had with that was that the Norwich City Reporter had a Q&A on a Monday with Norwich City fans, and because they’d registered to be on the app, you suddenly got a greater quality of conversation coming from those people.
So, when I was at the Sheffield Star, you had lots of vitriol and lots of trolling from the Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday fans who were just insulting each other on the platforms.
But because in Norwich, you know, people had to register and they, you know, and they then knew that the New York City reporter was going to be hosting a Q&A between one and two on a Monday morning after the weekend’s match.
You had some really great engagements, really good conversations. And those are people who kept on coming back to that call each week. So in terms of when we talked about, so how do you measure trust and value and that sort of thing, it’s not a direct correlation between trust and the trust metric.
But you’ve built trust because people know that they’ve got a safe environment where they can ask questions. They’ve got direct access to a journalist, which, we underestimate the power of the journalist. For someone to have a one-on-one conversation with a journalist, you know, they love it because the journalists, they’ve got access to the players and the manager that the fans just don’t have. And so to have that Q&A and ask him what he thinks went wrong on Saturday and who do they think is going to be fielding for next week, et cetera, was a huge engagement success for that brand.
So yeah, to answer your question in a very long way there, it’s a really simple thing. You can be on a phone call, it can be on a podcast like this, or a webcast, really simple technology you can use to ask questions.
Francesca Dumas (35:42)
I absolutely love that example. That is such a good one. And it is so simple and it does, you could quite easily measure that sentiment in it.
Have you ever experienced or seen any engagement that’s genuinely surprised you by any chance?
Jeremy Clifford (36:05)
Let me take you back to one. So it relates to me actually. So when I first became editor of one of the titles, I decided that I was going to meet the readers. And so I got it. We were talking with the newspaper sales team at the time, and we decided to get a big red sofa and we put it in the heart of the shopping center.
And we said, okay, come and meet the editor on Saturday morning. And my circulation manager said, you’re mad, they’re going to kill you. I said, no, why, why should they do that? Do you not know how people feel about your newspaper? I said, I just don’t believe it.
So we then advertised it in the paper, and we put this big red sofa in the heart of Kettering town centre. And we invited people to come and sit on the sofa and talk to the editor.
And we had a queue of people just wanting to talk, and the mayor came.They wanted to chat.
And it was just a really good example of being human and taking the role of the editor and saying, I’m gonna come out and meet you, rather than just to expect that the office of the editor is this cardboard figure, et cetera. So let’s show some of the human side of it, the personality that you’ve got.
It was such a success. We then did it in subsequent months in different towns around the area. I had one person who came up to me, one Saturday morning down in Wellingborough, and he was an old guy and he said, I’d like a word with you. I said, great, come and sit down. He said, no, I don’t want to sit down. I said, okay, well, how can I help you? What would you like to talk about? He said, I’d like to know why you’re not wearing a tie.
That was my reaction too. I said, what do you mean why I’m not wearing a tie? And he said, well, you’re the editor of the Evening Telegraph. I expect you to be wearing a tie. I said, well, it’s a Saturday morning. It’s in the shopping center. So I thought I would just dress more casually. He said that’s not what I expect from the role of the editor of the Evening Telegraph. But the thing about it is, when you work for a brand or a news brand, your readers think they’ve got some ownership over that brand, because, it’s unlike, you know, a lot of other businesses that they feel like it’s part of their lives.
Come through their letterbox every single day in those days, you’re on their screens etc. So people think they’ve got some kind of ownership. Therefore that’s a huge element of trust that you’ve got.
We should really try to build on and nurture and develop. And I think that’s the lesson that I would take forward from that, that says, okay, by interacting with people, being prepared to meet them where they want to be met, which is what young people want, the younger generation wants, and we’re not very good at that. I think we need to learn those sorts of lessons and learn how to engage with people in a way that they want to be engaged with.
Francesca Dumas (39:23)
I can’t even tell you how much I love that example. I agree. I think you should be wearing a tie right now, Jeremy. Well, touching back onto that point that you just made on trust and looking at the recent Reuters School of Journalism report, it highlighted the high standards and a transparent report approach, and that people are expecting this lack of bias and fairness in terms of media representation.
Do you have any strategies or things that you think that we should be doing to push that more? That is one particularly amazing example. Are there other things that we could be doing that will allow us to attract new audiences or demographics?
Jeremy Clifford (40:15)
Well, yeah, I mean, there’s loads of examples out there that people are doing. So if you think about, let’s take the BBC for example. The BBC did your voice, your view. So they launched around October last year this surprising thing, where they know, it’s earlier than that, it’s certainly in 2024 though, where they started to reach out to their audience and say, well, we’re going to be covering this piece of content or we’re covering the election, general election.
Tell us what questions you would like us to ask. And that’s a really big departure for the BBC who, coming down from their ivory tower, if you like, and engaging with audiences by saying, you tell us what questions you want us to ask. So they do that really well.
People who, and then you’ve got The Guardian who’ve launched their young reporter thing. Where, they’re effectively engaging with a younger audience by going out and effectively asking them or giving them advice about how to vote, young people’s issues, etc.
So you’re engaging in that way. You’ve got The New York Times who’ve created their recipe app. So they’re trying to engage with a new audience by sharing cooking tips and those sorts of things. So you’ve got a lot of examples out there as to what people are doing and what they’re trying.
And then you’ve got, I mean, to go back to The Guardians of The Young Adult Platform, that’s what it’s called. That’s about, you know, it was targeting students and first time voters and covering issues such as climate change and that sort of thing.
So, I think where we have to go is that we need to, from the Reuters report, we need to invest in products and we need to create new products for new audiences.
We can’t expect to reach people off our fairly staid, maybe boring type of brands that we’ve got at the moment. I think if we’re trying to engage with different audiences, we’re going to need different types of products and platforms to be able to do that effectively.
Francesca Dumas (42:32)
That actually leads on really, really well to talking a little bit about tech. And obviously your experience in AI is really useful for that. What role do you think technology like AI and data analytics is going to play or is playing already in our audience engagement efforts? Where do you see it going?
Jeremy Clifford (42:52)
Oh God, it’s huge. You know, it’s massively huge in terms of, if you just go down to the most basic thing of using AI through personalization. So, you know, in the past, it was pretty much a one size fits all here is your content. Aand you know, that’s all one platform, but if you went to one website and I went to the same website, Francesca, you would have a completely different type of content served up to you than I would.
Yours would be far more lively, dynamic, fun. Mine would be far more news and sport. But that’s the difference now is that AI is doing and has been doing for quite some time and it will only get better.
I mean, there’s a risk in personalisation because if all you get served up is stuff which they know that you’re interested in because they’re tracking you through algorithms, then you won’t get exposed to other opinions and other other other viewpoints, et cetera.
So that is a risk of personalisation. But let’s just park that for one moment. But the technologies now that is at our fingertips in terms of how we can understand what people are coming to our sites for, make it easier for them to find it and then serve it up in the volumes and the formats that they’re expecting is a massive evolution in the way that we engage with people.
And secondly, I was at an AI conference last year, where Ezra Eeman was talking about liquid content. And what he means by liquid content is that, you can have one piece of content but with AI coming on stream now, it won’t be very long before you can choose what format you want that content to be consumed. I might want it in text. You may well want it on video. Someone else may want that content on audio, and that’s how AI is going to personalize the content now. So that liquid content is something which I heard for the first time last year.
I think we’re going to hear that phrase or those two words more and more through 25 and 2026, because that really is personalisation in terms of not only the type of content, but the format that you choose that you want to consume it with.
Francesca Dumas (45:29)
I find it really interesting going back to what you were saying about that personalisation. We get these, there’s a lot of debate around or worry around, personalisation is only going to feed you the same kind of content again and again, and you’re not going to necessarily get the news and the information that you want.
And I sat on the train, I think it was maybe a few weeks ago, and I am a millennial. I’m a social native, I’ve always had social media.
And yet this group of girls that were sitting next to me were talking in depth about how often they reset their algorithm. And this was a conversation I found extremely interesting because everybody knows that the algorithm is feeding them certain things and they almost expect the personalisation. They also expect to be able to restart it.
I used to be a teacher. The content I used to get was all teacher content. And we would swap social media between our friends all the time to see what everyone else is getting.
And I find that really interesting as well because we talk about personalisation from our point of view as a news brand, but actually our audience is probably seeing it from a completely different point of view of what they expect the tools to do that we’re creating. It’s not really a question, just a comment that I thought I’d throw in there, but I found it fascinating.
Jeremy Clifford (46:47)
It’s a new one to me.
I’ve never heard of being able to reset your algorithm. I wouldn’t even know how to do it. Do you know how to do it?
Francesca Dumas (46:55)
Well, apparently you can go into your settings and make it reset. And apparently dating apps do the same thing. I found out recently through TikTok, if you feel like you’re getting “rubbish” people, you can reset your tool to start giving you the “good stuff” again. And I was like, this is fascinating. And this is actually an expectation from a lot of social natives. So yeah, apparently you can. I haven’t done it, but I might do it soon!
Jeremy Clifford (47:22)
I’ll download my dating app tomorrow! But yeah, I think that whole area of personalisation, I don’t subscribe to the echo chamber risks because I think people are more savvy than that, generally speaking.
And I do believe that, you know, if you come to a site and you’re not interested in certain bits of content, then why should you be served that in today’s age? You know, so in the whole era of supply and demand, et cetera. Why would I go to a site where I can see everything and I have to find my content?
Whereas I could go to another site and it understands me and shows me the contents that I’m interested in. And I think that’s definitely going to become more and more a thing if you like, as people become more sophisticated in the type of content that they want.
I suppose the only danger to that would be if you are, as a news brand, you only serve the audience the content that you’ve already got. In your audience, you’ve only got one type of audience. How do you think you can reach out and find new audiences and then try to diversify your offering to attract different audiences? How can you even begin to start to understand that?
Francesca Dumas (48:51)
I think personally there’s a bit of what you were saying at the beginning, which is the mission. One of the things that we try and do and that we focus on so much is when we’re publishing on social media and when we’re creating content, that is reach style content, using all of the usual tricks of the trades to be able to get reach.
It’s about giving valid reasons for people to come back to our site and to our own platforms. And the clickbait isn’t necessarily the only thing that makes people act. I think we need a stronger understanding of motivation and what makes people act.
And part of what makes people act is what you were saying at the beginning, is what makes people care, and why they should be coming back. So there is a piece which talks about why the news is important, but also sometimes one of the examples that we even had on this, on the podcast was a brand that asked people to join them in a challenge, which was to stop cutting the grass in their garden and to leave natural things in their garden to see and get insects to come back, to watch how their gardens changed over time.
They made this amazing piece on social media that went out to everyone asking for people to join them in this challenge.
Jeremy Clifford (50:10)
Fantastic.
Francesca Dumas (50:11)
It was so good. I love that example.
And I think there is a piece of asking people to join you in something, but the why is so, important.
It’s not just for me at least about you saying, hey, send us a photo. We want to create something special and we need you to do that. And if people are interested in those topics and they think that they’re contributing to something bigger than them, that makes a massive difference in my opinion.
Jeremy Clifford (50:40)
Yeah, I love that. So the why is a really good question to ask yourself, and I do that through user needs as well in a way. We start off with saying, who is it we’re trying to reach? And we do a lot of work with that.
Who is the audience? And then we say, why are they coming to us? What is it that they want to find out? So, you know, is it that they want the answer to a question. So are they coming via search or why are they coming to us?
Is it because they want to be entertained and diverted? And if you go back to the Reuters report, which Reuters has been saying for years now about news avoidance, we are so rubbish at understanding the fact that people don’t want to have day after day listening to the fires in LA for example, which is ravaging Los Angeles at the moment.
There is no solutions journalism attached to that. Therefore, the diet of news that is being sent out at the moment is just, it’s almost like a broadcast mode. Again, saying these fires are terrible and people’s lives are being devastated, et cetera. And there’s nothing else apart from the way that we are reporting that content.
There’s got to be some really good stories to be had with, you know, the people that are doing brilliant work, the people who are helping people off the streets, et cetera.
And what I’m saying from the user’s need is that people, although it’s a really devastating, serious news event, people probably want to be diverted from that as well.
You know, they want some distraction, et cetera. And so, why are people coming to us? Okay. They’re coming to find out what the latest of the LA Fires are.
But they’re probably also saying, I want to be distracted from it as well, because it’s just this daily drumbeat of doom and gloom. And so, you know, we do the why bits as to why people are coming and then we get to the how. What do people want? Why they come to you? How do you then create that content? And it may well be that we don’t need to write this content anymore. We’ll produce a video or we do it as a blog or we do it as a newsletter and we distribute it via social.
Understand your brand. Understand what content people want from you, why they’re coming to you, and then how are you going to reach them in a place where they want to be reached?
And I think, so similar to what you were saying about, you know, if we’re going to ask for pictures, why do we want those pictures? We’ve got to ask ourselves as journalists as to why do people come to our site and what can we do to make sure we’re providing them with what they want on the platform that they want it.
Francesca Dumas (53:42)
And there could be many whys because people might, the action might be the same, but the reason is different as well. I used to work in marketing with football brands and they always talk about you, you might all be Nottingham Forest fans, but the reason you’re Nottingham Forest fans and the reason that you go to a game might be completely different. Some people are just there for the winning. Some people are there because their favorite footballer is there.
Some people are there because their granddad used to follow that team and there’s a sense of nostalgia. So people act because they care and they feel and we need to almost not just talk about why are people doing, but what emotion is getting them to do these actions? Is it fear? Is it a distraction? Well, distraction being an emotion, there are so many emotions behind that and those are conversations that we should be having as editorial teams all the time.
Jeremy Clifford (54:40)
Tell you who does that really well is The News Movement. They’re very much looking at the Gen Z moving to Gen Alpha. Frighteningly enough, there’s another one behind them. Yes. And they very unashamedly state they are a young person’s platform, but they’re not just producing young persons content. They’re actually asking those questions. So, how can we help you to understand the world? How can we help you to to interact with things?
And, there’s a global community which they’ve developed. So Gen Z people very much see news from a world perspective rather than, you know, their own small community. And the news movement has really made a success of the way that they identify that and how they present that content to their audience.
Francesca Dumas (55:42)
It’s making me think of, we’re giving so many great examples and obviously this conversation is so important. If you were to talk to a brand today and you were going to give them a hack, they’re starting from scratch, they’re really looking at what they need to be doing. As my last question to you really, if anything, what would you say the one thing they should do is? One hack for me.
Jeremy Clifford (56:13)
Well, if they’re not doing anything, they should first of all start and then say, well, where do we start?
I think I would go down to one where you don’t need to use any technology. So you use your brand strength. And I would say that what I would get them to do is say, tell us what news event you want us to cover. It’s a simple hack like that. So create a simple prompt.
Ask your audience to submit a topic that’s important to them that they want you to investigate and to cover and frame it as a collaborative effort, so you’ll begin to really get that engagement going on, so you know it could well be, let’s take something around the local park, it’s been run down.
Ask them to come up with ideas about what should happen to that local park. So we’re talking really micro level here, you know, really hyper local. Then you promise that you will publish their answers and then what you can do is get more sophisticated with it, and you can get people to vote… These are the three story ideas we’ve had from the park. Which one do you want us to investigate the most?
And you can gamify it a little bit. And then you use all the user comments that are coming in. You build a whole community around one story idea, one topic idea. And you start from that and you just measure that success. How engaged people get. Then you can do follow-ups on it.
Then you can have an event around it, et cetera. Invite people into your newsroom or you can go to that park and say, come and meet us, get your big red sofa down to the park or whatever.
If you haven’t put your toe in the water yet about engagement and you’re a little bit like, well, where do we get started? Well, ask your readers what they would like you to be covering.
Francesca Dumas (58:33)
And it potentially will save you a massive amount of time not creating content that people might not have been interested in in the first place!
Jeremy Clifford (58:39)
And you can use some really simple stuff. You can use a Google form, for example, and say on this form put in questions that you’d like us to ask someone.
We’re going to be having an interview with the police crime commissioner. Tell us the questions you’d like us to ask the police crime commissioner. And then you just get a list of their questions.
You’ve got their names for it. You do the interview, you can feedback the answers, some really simple stuff.
Francesca Dumas (59:10)
Thank you so much for that. Jeremy, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for your time. Let’s move engagement forward across the world. Hopefully we’ll get there!
Jeremy Clifford (59:16)
I really enjoyed it.
Well, you know, if you go back to the Reuters report, it’s one of the biggest things that they’ve come out with in terms of their findings is that you’re beginning to see more publishing, wanting to engage with audiences more. And the biggest challenge they’re facing is how do you engage with the Holy Grail, which is the younger audience, et cetera? So, that’s what I would like to see in 2025, we’re in January 2025 now.
I’d like to see some really good product innovations around that and some real successes.
Francesca Dumas (1:00:01)
I would too. Thank you so much, Jeremy.
Jeremy Clifford (1:00:05)
Great talking to you, Francesca. Thank you.