Wednesday 24th February: What audience engagement really means

February 24, 2021

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Engagement is one of those buzzwords; something we all acknowledge to be a worthy aim but not something we take much time to define beyond praising some nice upward trending metrics.

On his blog, Adam Tinworth has taken the time to unpack one of the biggest weaknesses in our broad conception of journalistic engagement - the widespread failure to listen to our audiences when they don't agree with our editorial decisions.

Please read the piece. It's way more nuanced than I can be here. But since out job is to provide you with the TL:DR, to build trust with your audiences you must be prepared to explain your choices to them. They shouldn't set the agenda, but give them the respect of listening when they disagree.

Publishers, some almost without trying, have benefitted from the revenues that affiliate commerce delivered through the pandemic. Digiday is reporting that this year some are starting to work on more intentional affiliate revenue strategies to grow the income stream as the e-commerce boom continues.

WordPress has partnered with Anchor to give publishers on the platform an audio option. Anchor, acquired by Spotify in 2019, will provide WordPress bloggers with the direct-to-speech tools to create podcasts for free from their sites. This is very cool, but we can't help wondering how many really rubbish podcasts this is about to unleash.

Because there just aren't enough right-wing media outlets in the world, Al Jazeera is launching Rightly in the US. The new platform will target Republicans who ‘feel left out of conservative media’. We can only hope the Qatar-based news network, once known for its liberal leanings, will be a popular alternative to the American right's more batshit news sources.

This week's podcast:

This week Megan Lucero, director of the Bureau Local at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, provides us with a hopeful look at the present and future of local journalism and how regional media is changing.

In our latest Conversations episode, I was joined by Pugpig founder and CEO Jonny Kaldor to discuss what’s been happening in the world of digital publishing, and what to expect from 2021.