What I've Been Reading: WhatsApp channels introduce new feature + fragmented sports media audiences

Plus why purpose is crucial for charting a future through disrupted digital audience landscape

Good afternoon,

This week has been a busy one, it seems everything that could happen in Preston has decided to happen so I’ve been hot-footing it around for Blog Preston, we’ve got lots going on with The Lead and also the journalism innovation teaching I’m doing with UCLan is reaching its end of term conclusion with the students doing their innovation pitches. Add in our six-month-old deciding that 5am is absolutely the right time to start the day and the coffee needs to be strong right now.

But, once more into the digest, and starting with a new feature from WhatsApp Channels.

Under each message there’s a little ‘forward’ icon, and when a message is shared from a channel it shows the name of the channel at the top and makes them more visible and discoverable. This only appears on mobile - which is where WhatsApp is used the vast majority of time.

While forwarding has always been there, via the traditional method, I’ve not seen it so prominently called out before. I imagine this is because WhatsApp data is showing it’s a common action people take from when news is shared with them via the Channel.

I’ve written before about the learnings from the Blog Preston WhatsApp channel, but I think this function being introduced means we’ll start to see (and have already seen) a steady growth in followers to the channel recently as the updates become pieces of content in their own right.

Sports, and football, journalism points to audience fragmentation - Lewis Wiltshire - this post from Lewis, reacting to Henry Winter’s departure caught my eye. I’ve often felt that changes within sports journalism are often ahead of the trend in how wider media content and distribution then start to be influenced. Lewis touches on how the digital conversation is happening in more places, in more ways, than ever before. Football, in particularly, had X as a very dominant platform but the splintering of conversations after news has broken on the more traditional platforms, and even within those platforms how it’s happening on say Facebook pages, groups, individual profiles, high-followed accounts, under the comments on a reel, is ever-increasing. Essentially you need to get comfortable with a smaller amount of engagement and reach, with a more focused audience, spread across multiple digital platforms.

If you forget why you exist for your audience, you will fail - Jeremy Clifford - the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, an annual event, has plenty of reaction and think-pieces off the back of it. Jez’s take to me feels about purpose, if you cannot articulate a purpose for why your publication exists (beyond digital audience metrics) then you’re going to run into choppy waters. That purpose helps give you a path through the disrupted platforms. Note: I’ve announced that Jez and I are collaborating on projects this week through our consultancy businesses.

That’s the round-up for this week, as always, any interesting bits at the cross-section of digital media and audiences you think I should be featuring then ping them over to ed@almaonline.co.uk

Have a great rest of the week and keep going.

Ed