The holy grail of direct traffic
Plus: The Lords have their say on the future of local journalism in the UK and what's happened on social platforms in 2024
Good evening,
And happy Lancashire Day - yep, that’s a thing. I’m based in Preston, I’d say the unofficial capital of Lancashire, and each November 27 there’s a joyous outpouring of Lancashire-ness. This poster below is pretty cool, I think. And reminds me no matter where you are in the world there’s always plenty to celebrate about the town, city or region you live in.
And now, to the digest itself…
Verification leading to direct traffic increase? - there was an interesting stat about data in the Reuters News Report 2024 shared by Thomas Baekdal. It was about how people go direct to news, including all the elements of what makes up direct traffic. This includes typing in the URL of the site, typing in the name of the site in Google e.g. blogpreston m6 crash, newsletters, push notifications, WhatsApp and other direct methods too. He dug into the data and while as you’d expect, older demographics are more likely to access news sources directly, the 18-24 group was growing. Why? They increasingly very stories and content they’ve seen on platforms like TikTok, Instagram and other visual-driven media by cross-checking with more established news titles.
The difficulty there can sometimes be in then finding that story they are seeking to cross-check with. Something to consider when thinking about how to order homepages (still a big weapon in building loyal audiences) and having a search function which works.
There’s plenty of methods to help build direct audiences, but that’s a post for another day (and a whole digest in itself!).
How the House of Lords thinks local journalism can be saved - gov.uk - Baroness Stowell and the Communications and Digital Committee in the House of Lords have interviewed countless organisations, publishers and lobby groups as they seek to understand the local news landscape.
Their 90-page report I have not read in full yet but there's some helpful summaries on HoldTheFrontPage and Behind Local News.
To me, it resonates about how news is increasingly fragmented - in terms of platforms - which means getting a 'full picture' increasingly difficult. This means you need news outlets who can work cross-platform, but that by its very nature is expensive (regardless of whether you're a large or small publisher).
It's encouraging to see talk of a 'Future News Innovation Scheme' but with some safeguards to ensure it doesn't just end up in lots of small projects which fail to have an impact. I'd also like to see them encourage collaborative schemes (you could file the podcast we did between National World and Blog Preston under that heading).
There's also noises about expanding the Local Democracy Reporting Service, having greater prominence for originally produced local news on platforms like Google and Meta and also widening the pool of where public notices are displayed (i.e. on decent-sized digital publications which serve a geography).
The tax-breaks bit is interesting, especially with how they would define a local journalist.
With Ofcom and the Local News Commission also due to their reports into the state of local journalism soon there appears to be no shortage of people researching the state of things and looking into it - and I guess it’s a watch-out we don’t end up with more people ‘being interested’ than actually contributing in the sector.
Your new front page: How newsrooms and publishers will win audiences on social in 2025 - Newswhip - a comprehensive summary from the social listening tool on what’s working in different platforms.
The research and perhaps publishers it listens to means there is a fairly US-bias to some of this but in terms of formats which work across a variety of platforms it is a good read.
One thing that resonated with me was how harder news/politics is really breaking through on Instagram. We had a really hard-edge report on a people smuggler operating from Preston who was jailed, the reel has been very well viewed and shared.
That’s the digest for this week, I hope you found those useful and as always feel free to leave a comment below.
Hope you have a great rest of the week. Keep going.
Ed
I’ll save you the read on the HoL future of new report. I’m afraid no viable solutions have been proposed, besides for the government to look more into it… 😞
Solutions will have to come from within the industry… the government is already busy with the BBC, and we now know the tech platforms are not interested in helping - they have already extracted all the value (read money).