Abstract
Digital data can reveal which stories are popular: it's a resource to be used, says a convert to the new world
Ron Birch, the Daily Mail's deputy news editor while I was medical correspondent, told me one day that I had an exceptional news sense. This was a great compliment (Birch was not liberal in his praise). But he was right. I did and do have a good nose for news. Some people do, some don't. Many people far cleverer than me don't.
Where does this gut instinct come from? Is it hard-wired in our journalistic DNA or something learned on the job? As a national newspaper correspondent, I never considered this most fundamental question, even though my living depended on it. I just relied on snap judgements and never discussed what makes news or news values with colleagues.
Similarly, I had no such discussions with readers. I never asked them about the kind of things they'd like to read in a newspaper or hear about on radio or television — unless they had an exclusive for me, when I was all ears. With hindsight this seems arrogant, but I was, I suspect, part of a large club. In contrast to magazines, which were ridiculed for their trust in focus groups, the compass or satnav on national newspapers was set by three golden pillars: circulation, advertising revenue and editors' musts.
Beyond interviewees and letters we did not have a direct relationship with readers, even though they were indirectly paying our mortgages. Most readers, of course, never wrote letters to the editor and those who did may not have been representative. Who knows? To my knowledge no one took the trouble to find out. My uncompromising view was that I was the specialist correspondent. It was my job to decide what ideas to put up to the news and features desks. If I had done otherwise — if I had engaged (to use the fashionable term) with readers — I might have discovered far sooner something of fundamental importance.
This is now looming large in the digital era. A shift towards engagement and away from traditional news values may emerge as one of the big differences between journalism in the 20th and 21st centuries. For example, we all recognise the fundamental importance of novelty in news. In assessing novelty, we focus on extremes, on “first” or “last”, on “best” or “worst”. There is often nothing wrong with this, but in medicine, as in many other areas, it can take you away from the more representative ground.
The late Oxford GP Dr Ann McPherson recalled: “When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, even as a GP with 25 years' experience, I remember being struck by a sudden dread and overwhelming sense of isolation. Though I had all the hard facts, I had no idea how it would actually affect me and I wanted to hear the stories of others who had been through the same thing, I tried a support group. It was not for me.
“Media stories to help newly diagnosed patients were often confined to unhelpful stereotypes. Beautiful people or people who had had terrible experiences were presented as the norm. The media do not reflect the wide range of experience of illness.”
McPherson was citing a common complaint. As I wrote previously in the BJR (December 2015), reading how a cancer patient has climbed Everest or rowed across the Atlantic might make good copy, only to depress other patients who cannot even manage the stairs. McPherson's experience led to her co-founding DIPEx, now known as www.healthtalkonline.org, which features representative case histories from a broad range of patients. For example, the breast cancer section includes interviews with more than 50 women in their homes. In its first 10 years, the site's researchers interviewed almost 2,000 people and established nearly 50 sites about different disease areas.
Healthtalkonline was, in effect, a revolt against traditional news values. Patients no longer needed traditional media when they could publicise their own material independently, outside the straitjacket of the news value culture.
So is there no place in the media for stories of the Everest or Atlantic kind? While the triumph over tragedy formula, in particular, can reduce complex issues to unhelpful stereotypes, it can also have positive effects in highlighting individual achievement. For example, as a young child the gifted artist Stephen Wiltshire was mute. His is an inspiring story. Noting his interest in drawing, his teachers got him to speak by temporarily taking away his drawing supplies, forcing him to ask for them. He went to art school and is now renowned for his cityscapes.
Of course, his story should be told, but as part of a representative picture including different examples. A major limitation of print media is that they are restricted in the number of, say, medical case histories they can report at any one time. Conversely, there is no limit to the number of such stories digital media can report simultaneously. There is, of course, a limit to how much people can take in. The challenge is to get the right information in the right amount to the right people at the right time in the right format.
Digital accounts for 70 per cent of FT subs
The Financial Times, which in 2007 became the first UK national newspaper to impose an online paywall, is trying to achieve these goals with its digital data. It must be getting a lot right because Tom Betts, chief data officer (CDO), told a recent meeting at the Royal Society of Medicine that digital now accounts for 70 per cent of its subscription business.
He was speaking about how the data is transforming news and the media. If I had to select just one word to sum up his talk it would be “engagement”. Betts is, significantly, the first CDO to have joined the FT executive board. The newspaper said: “Under his leadership the FT has become widely recognised for its pioneering use of data and his award-winning analytics team has grown to include more than 30 people dedicated to customer analytics and research.”
The FT's commitment to engagement is highlighted by its interest in Spotify Discover. Spotify is a music, podcast and video-streaming service with more than 100 million active users (June, 2016). Spotify Discover provides a personalised playlist for each subscriber, updated weekly according to their preferences. It takes a few weeks to a month to compile a weekly playlist for new users. Updates are loaded every Monday, ideally in time for the work commute. The previous playlist is deleted as the new one comes on-stream. A personalised Spotify-like FT news service would be based on data about what encourages reader loyalty.
How will all the FT number crunching impact on editorial judgement and traditional news values? Betts insisted: “We will never edit by numbers — let's be clear about that. But we do want people in the newsroom to think about how people read our journalism. This is about them being data informed, not data led. They might see, for example, that a particular story was widely shared, while another did well on social media.”
If FT journalism was driven by data alone, he insisted, it would be restricted to coverage of gold, nickel and bitcoin. There would have been no Middle East bureaux in place “when things kicked off there”. Data, he stressed, was incremental, not substitutional. Editorial judgement was as important as ever and would remain so.
Traditionalists, however, fear that the data culture will eclipse editorial authority. This is a risk, but I feel more optimistic than pessimistic. If we had had today's data in the 1980s and 1990s, newspapers might not have lost readers such as McPherson. Circulation, advertising revenue and editors' musts might have served us well, but we might have done even better with a more advanced satnav.
A thought to leave you with: I began this piece by commending my own nose. In putting it to work to sniff out stories, I never asked: “Will readers like this?” My question was: “Will the editor like it?” The editor was the gateway to the reader. Moreover, the editor determined my salary. Again, I think this made me part of a large club. Digital data may provide more detailed and accurate intelligence than “sniffing”, gut instinct and second guessing editors. For this reason at least, we should welcome the digital era.
