Tag Archive for: TopicPulse TV

Beyond CrowdTangle, Truly Understanding Your Audience

Beyond CrowdTangle: Truly Understanding Your Audience

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By Tim Wolff, Futuri’s VP, TV and Digital Publishing Innovation

Nearly every newsroom in America has attempted to use CrowdTangle in some capacity, but some have been caught unprepared by the news that CrowdTangle is ending support and will shut down the product. The good news is that many newsrooms had more valuable systems in place for understanding audience data.

An accurate and in-the-moment understanding of the topics and stories people are sharing and seeing on social media has enormous benefits for newsrooms, who are, after all, trying to report and create content about what interests the most people. Earlier this year, I wrote about how newsrooms were working to prepare for transparency legislation affecting social media, and how data could become available to newsrooms. Meta’s decision to close CrowdTangle shows that transparency has been uncomfortable for Facebook.

CrowdTangle was launched as an independent social monitoring tool, tracking which posts were getting the most traffic. Facebook bought it in 2016, then gave it for free to newsrooms under very specific conditions. Journalists log in using a personal Facebook account to access a depth of data culled from public Facebook Pages and Groups, Instagram accounts, and the most popular subreddits. But access was extremely limited, with most newsrooms only having a few people — who had to tell Facebook they were journalists — with access to CrowdTangle.

In other words, Facebook verified you as a journalist, then controlled the information it gave you.

It’s another reason newsrooms need to be careful not to put all their eggs into one basket. A reliance on data coming solely from one social media company could make it hard to know you are getting accurate data — and, as we now see, could end at any time the company finds it to be inconvenient.

What’s really trending on social media? What do audiences care about right now?

That’s one reason Futuri has always focused on a much broader range of data here at Futuri. With TopicPulse, the most advanced AI-driven social data tool, we track data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and over 100,000 news publishers. Because we monitor all these different sources and publishers, our partners won’t be disrupted by one social company shutting something down.

We also include real-time analysis as part of the mix, helping monitor and manage the artificial intelligence that brings real-time, live demographic data and predictive analysis to thousands of stories every minute.

We believe in data, we believe in transparency, and we believe in constantly improving the best tools that help newsrooms spend less time unraveling the data behind trending stories so they can concentrate on serving their communities.

Here are our top pro tips to help your newsroom track social media for content:

  1. Have a broad scope of data sources. Not only Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter… all of them +.
  2. Choose information that can be widely accessed in your newsroom; if only one or two people have access, that’s a significant risk for you.
  3. Track more than just the socials for your brand and your competitors’ brands; after all, that’s only a tiny portion of the average consumer’s social media activity.
  4. Remember, it’s not a zero-sum game between you and the other TV, radio, and newspaper outlets in town. Social and digital platforms are virtually unlimited, and you have endless opportunities to grow your brand.
  5. Keep a healthy skepticism about any platform that reports on itself.
  6. Track trending news topics outside of your news team’s comfort zone. We tend to live in similar areas, follow similar social media, and only reflect a portion of our communities. Your content should reflect the entire community you’re covering, not only that portion for which your team may have an unconscious bias.
  7. Ask for (or demand) transparency from the technology you use whenever possible, just as we should be as transparent as possible with our news consumers.
  8. Ask your news team how much time they spend mining social media for news and tips. Then have them track it to get the actual number. Chances are, their time spent doing this is higher than it needs to be if they’re using the right technology.
  9. Look for tools that can save your news team time and get them the essential information they need. The right AI can be an incredible tool that delivers an immediate positive impact on your team and your news content.
  10. Take a look at what personal data your news team has had to share to get access to tech or social media data. Journalists are under fire as never before, and it’s a good idea to have a cybersecurity expert review the risks journalists have taken in exposing private information to tech and social media companies.
  11. Stay up to date on changes in social, AI, and media technology by following Futuri Media on LinkedIn, Twitter, or your platform of choice.

Tim Wolff is Vice President of TV and Digital Publishing Innovation at Futuri. He has 20+ years of experience as a digital and broadcasting leader who’s led top-performing teams across the country. Wolff, who holds a Master’s in Journalism from the University of Missouri, also makes a mean green chile stew.

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Breaking News: CNN is Changing Its Banner Policy (Finally!)

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By Tim Wolff, VP, TV and Digital Publishing Innovation, Futuri

You may have seen the news in the past week that CNN is reconsidering its decades-long use of the term “Breaking News” in on-air graphics. For me, this could mean a change in how I teach local news producers–after all, CNN”s “Breaking News” banner has been on my list of things for them NOT to do for years.

It’s about audience trust

The message to CNN staff came from Chris Licht, the new CEO. He says exactly what I’ve taught journalists: As quoted in The Hollywood Reporter, “We are truth-tellers, focused on informing, not alarming our viewers.”

It’s one thing for a viewer to watch a newscast and see newsworthy stories that they don’t happen to care about. They might change the channel, but they won’t hold it against the station.  But when you start claiming something is newsworthy when it is not, or when you lie to them about the urgency or importance of a story, they will hold it against the station. They will be skeptical when you tell them something is important; they will ignore you when you tell them something is breaking. 

They will find you less credible.

That is the biggest harm that can happen to journalists. Once viewers doubt your credibility, it is incredibly hard to get them to trust you again. 

So how did we get here?

For decades, CNN has made a habit of calling something “Breaking News” not just for hours, but for days–and sometimes even weeks. In the nature of news, especially cable news, some stories last several days, even when nothing new is happening. For example, the Gabby Petito story was in the news for weeks, but only on some of those days were there actual developments. But every day, even when nothing changed, it was “breaking news.”

The root cause of this happens not just at CNN, but with anyone who is faced with live ratings. The temptation is to drive as much interest and as much viewership right now…and worry about tomorrow tomorrow. This is the trap local newsrooms fall into, too. 

Our instinct is to make everything as exciting as possible, even more exciting than it is. Over time, this leads to the awful stereotype of “breathless” news reporters showing too much excitement over mundane stories. The reporters (who sometimes get “energy” and “excitement” confused) are doing what we are naturally tempted to do: try to make this moment bigger than it is. It is a powerful temptation with terrible consequences for our credibility.

Building viewership starts first and foremost with building trust with the viewers. When it is breaking, tell them it is. When it is just information they need, present it that way. Tone is so critical with news; whether it’s a breaking news story or a severe weather situation. You have to get the tone right with them every day so viewers know they can trust the news from you.

CNN’s tone on breaking news has been wrong for decades. But now they are working on fixing it, and it’s something all viewers and journalists can applaud.

___

Tim Wolff is the VP of TV & Digital Publishing Innovation at Futuri Media. He focuses on building trust with audiences, including how artificial intelligence can help us understand audience needs in real time.  To learn more or continue the conversation, email him at timwolff@futurimedia.com or message him on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/timwolff1/. 

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Sweeps is over. What did you learn?

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By Tim Wolff, VP, TV & Digital Publishing Innovation, Futuri Media

There is rarely a more dramatic difference in a TV newsroom than the staffing level on the last day of sweeps and the staffing level the next week.

Typically, there are no vacations during May sweeps at local TV stations, and only limited vacation during the less-important July sweeps. So everyone tries to take vacation in June. But before you leave sweeps behind and hit the beach, take some time to figure out what you learned during sweeps.

Whether you’re new in the business or a 40-year vet, every sweeps period holds new information. On a grand scale, your station might have tried new strategies, or you might have gone through the same tactics as always, with this year’s stories echoing those of the past. The important thing is to analyze success and failure while you are still fully engaged in sweeps mode, because when you come back from the beach, you’ll have a hard time remembering all the finer details of how you executed sweeps coverage.

I’ll share with you a few stories of how analysis changed strategies and tactics in my own news career. First, let me talk about the process and the mistakes you can make.

Everyone in metered markets looks at the overnight ratings (and least where Nielsen is still the standard), and the first thing we typically do is look at how our promotables performed. These are usually the stories at the quarter-hour of our most critical newscasts, designed to bring the highest viewing where we need it most…and coupled with main weather to get the most impact.

Why do stations do that, anyway? Why do they put their big stories right next to weather?

In traditional Nielsen metered ratings, viewership is measured by the highest 5 continuous minutes of each quarter-hour. So at night, when viewers are ready to go to bed, that usually means 10:15-10:20 (or 11:15-11:20) will be the highest-rated 5-minutes of the 15-30 quarter-hour. So stations will put their big, promotable news story at about 15 minutes after the hour, followed immediately by weather that will last until at least 20 minutes after the hour. If, at 10:21, everyone who was watching turns off the TV and goes to bed, it doesn’t matter to the ratings: that 10:15-10:20 number will count for the entire 10:15-10:30 quarter-hour.

Additionally, having a strong promotable story can keep viewers watching the beginning of the newscast longer, waiting to see the promoted story.

A common mistake

This reality for stations often leads to the most common mistake I see in analyzing success and failure in sweeps stories. We’d often look at the previous night’s late news, see what the second quarter hour rating was, and base our judgment of the sweeps story on that ratings performance. But there are so many other factors that have to be included.

The finest research director I ever worked with had a great system. She tracked every sweeps story, lead story, lead-in rating and…the weather at the time of the newscast. This made a dramatic difference. Too often, I’ve seen stations double down on a sweeps topic because they thought it performed well–when in reality, there was severe weather coming, and it was the weather that viewers cared about. I’ve seen the opposite, too; stations giving up on a sweeps topic after a lackluster ratings performance without realizing the weather was unusually pleasant. That’s not to say the sweeps stories don’t matter; they do. We just have to also realize that weather coverage is a key driver for most local stations.

Most of all, we have to realize that looking at a quarter hour rating and deducing anything specific is not easy. Minute-by-minute reports are helpful, though still somewhat limiting. One way we analyzed success was whether a sweeps story gained or lost viewers during the story; a spike in viewers leaving tells you there’s something definitive you’ve done wrong. We’d also look at what happened in the moments before the big stories, where you can learn another truth.

Sometimes your best stories are not promotable

I remember one particularly excellent sweeps story done by our main anchor. It was a beautifully told story that went on to win just about every award it could. It did not lose a single viewer during the story.

Unfortunately, we lost viewers before we got to the story. I was the producer that night, and it is the only time in my life I can remember that I knew we had a great story…but there was no good way to tease it. The story was about a topic that people generally did not care about, and the crux of it was a surprising twist…but to tease the twist would have ruined the story. So I remember the tease being lackluster…and the minute by minute analysis showed that we lost viewers with the tease, not the story.

Of course, most of our big stories are promotable, but that doesn’t mean we always promote them well. When you see surprisingly low ratings for a story you thought would do well, it’s best to investigate. Often, when you go back and look at the teases, you’ll find the problem there; it wasn’t the story, it was a bad tease. Or maybe a clunky anchor intro. Armed with that data, you can then set new systems or methods to make sure you’ve got great teases and intros going forward.

It’s not always the big story

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about sweeps stories, but they don’t exist in a vacuum. The everyday decisions made about lead stories, other reporter stories, live shots, vos and vosots at any moment in any newscast can make a big impact on ratings. It’s important we analyze these, too. In so doing during one sweeps period, I learned that our 11pm news actually performed better when we didn’t do sweeps pieces–it was actually one key in that market in going from third to first place at 11 (I’ll write that full story in a future article). In another case, we learned that a particular reporter’s live presence had become a liability; in another, we learned that first weather in the middle of the A block actually drove viewers to bed earlier.

All of these things can vary by market, station, and time of year. The important thing is to create a strong way of analyzing your performance during sweeps, get to causation whenever possible, and adjust future strategies and tactics accordingly.

Don’t forget the people

And one last thing before you hit the beach: don’t forget about your team. Everyone just spent 4 weeks giving you everything they had, with emotions tied into the stories they did and how those stories performed. Take some time to manage that team, to make sure they are heard, empowered and fully invested in your mission. After all, some of them are going to have to do double shifts while everyone else goes on vacation.

Tim Wolff is the VP of TV & Digital Publishing Innovation at Futuri Media. To learn more or continue the conversation, email him at timwolff@futurimedia.com or message him on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/timwolff1/.  For insights on how digital data can help grow TV ratings, click here.

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NBC Wins Despite Losses

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By Tim Wolff
VP, TV & Digital Publishing Innovation, Futuri Media

The proverbial champagne corks were popping at NBC this week, with news that the network had become #1 in the coveted 18-49 year-old demo.

The Super Bowl and Olympics were key drivers to get them over the hump, but it wasn’t really a story about strong growth over the past few years; rather, it’s a story about the least amount of loss.

As Adweek points out, in the 2017-2018 season, NBC had twice as many viewers in the demo as they did this season. In fact, this year’s victory with a 1.1 rating in the demo would have been 4th place just a few years ago.

But a win is a win, and NBC gets to say they are #1 in the demo. It gives them something to brag about to advertisers.

However, it is more than that. It is an illustration of the nature of our broadcast business. We often find it more important to compare ourselves to our perceived competitors than to focus on our real performance with our audience.

I see it at the local level, too. I recently was talking with a GM (and former News Director) whose station used to dominate early-evening news with double-digit ratings. In the last ten years, they’ve lost 80% of their audience, down to a 2 rating. “But hey,” he said with a smile, “we’re still #1 in our market.”

In sales, local stations go out of their way to determine their share of the market spend. Sometimes, a station can miss its revenue goals by more than a million dollars…but if they hit their market share relative to their competitors, they’re satisfied.

What both of these examples show us is that we are wired to compete, and that we judge ourselves by how others with similar roles are performing. Unfortunately, it’s not necessarily a great barometer of success. Having a solid share of the market means a lot if your competitors are really good; it means nothing if you and your competitors are all mediocre. On the news side, being the #1 station out of 4 lousy stations is really nothing to brag about; it just means you’re the least lousy.

That’s one reason that top stations find other ways to measure success–starting with measuring against oneself. At the #1 stations I’ve been a part of, we have always set our goals relative to our own performance–not to our competitors. This helped ensure we never fell into the trap of lowering our standards to anyone else’s level, and that we kept pushing forward to always be a better version of ourselves. It was a driving key to our success.

So what about NBC, winning the demo despite having half as many viewers as just 5 years ago? They’ve got some real challenges to consider; Peacock is far behind Paramount Plus (and Disney Plus, Amazon and Netflix). CBS still had more overall viewers than NBC.

The reality is that network programming, with commercials, will always have a hard time competing against commercial-free streaming. In that context, it can feel like “losing the least viewers” is a reason to celebrate for NBC.

But for local news stations, the scenario is different. Local news stations are offering something no streaming service is: local news. It’s typically the only place to get it on television in any given market, and local stations have a 70-year branding lead on streaming services.

As long as they are providing value and local context, strong local stations can continue to see strong ratings, no matter how the networks perform. And local station leaders need to realize that their competitors are not the stations across the street; the competitors are also not the streaming services.

The only way for stations to truly succeed is for stations to compete with themselves. If we can constantly strive to understand our audience better, to deliver higher-quality content, to report news that has profound impact on our communities, then the audience will be there.

If we’re just trying to hang on to be a little better than the other guys, then our audience will fade away, and being #1 will be an empty celebration.

Tim Wolff is the VP of TV & Digital Publishing Innovation at Futuri Media. To learn more or continue the conversation, email him at timwolff@futurimedia.com or message him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/timwolff1/.

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AP report: AI is an opportunity for local newsrooms

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Groundbreaking report surveying hundreds of newsrooms points to the importance of AI.

By Tim Wolff
VP, TV & Digital Publishing Innovation, Futuri Media

What would you choose if someone else could do part of your job? What if, instead of a person, artificial intelligence could do it? And what if it could go beyond just replacing a mundane task to actually creating ways to make your product better?

Newsrooms across America have been wondering about that, and some have actively engaged AI — artificial intelligence. How much a newsroom uses AI has a lot to do with how many resources and how much time a newsroom has to experiment.

That’s according to a new report from the Associated Press, which was part of a project where they interviewed people from hundreds of newsrooms across the U.S. The goal was to learn what newsrooms are using and what newsrooms want, then to chart a plan for getting our newsrooms to that AI future.

Quoting from the AP’s press release:

“Key findings from the report include:

  • There is a significant gap between large and small news organizations in terms of how widely AI and automation technologies are used.
  • Despite some concerns about handing off human work to machines, there is nevertheless strong support among local newsrooms for automating tasks that could free journalists for deeper reporting, streamline production or enhance content monetization.
  • While interest is high, AI technologies are not in wide use at the local level because many news outlets lack the resources or time required to experiment.”

Diving deeper into the report itself, while survey respondents came up with a wide range of uses, there were some areas where nearly everyone agreed there was a need. Finding stories a local market would care about in social media was near the top of the list for newsrooms of every kind (the AP works with newspapers, TV and radio stations, and digital-only newsrooms).

This quote in the report really stood out to me:

“WTAE-TV News Director Jim Parsons said that sometimes events happen in the communities the Pennsylvania station serves, and the reporting team misses it on social media. ‘We don’t have a great system in place, other than keeping our eye on TweetDeck 24/7,’ he said. WTAE-TV relies on manual scouring of local websites and social media that AI may help solve. ‘It would help to have some ‘robotic eyeballs’ trying to find these events.'”

Sure, as the AP’s key findings note, there is some concern among newsrooms respondents about handing human work off to machines. But when resources are finite, aren’t they better spent creating compelling content that sets your brand apart? What’s the harm in letting technology do the busy work?

Reporters in every newsroom are spending a lot of time looking through social, trying to find stories. As anyone who’s spent a lot of time on social can tell you, most of it isn’t newsworthy. Our own research here at Futuri (conducted in partnership with SmithGeiger) shows that social media is the number one way newsrooms get stories today. It’s part of what makes AI-powered TopicPulse ContentAdvantage such an incredible tool. Futuri has been creating cutting-edge AI media tools for more than a decade, and the amount of data processed through a powerful AI is a true difference-maker for newsrooms.

The survey also showed automated writing and automated personalized experiences for users were also near the top of newrooms’ wish list, among about a dozen other key newsroom needs.

The adoption of AI in newsrooms varies, as has the AI knowledge within newsrooms. The AP will begin offering classes to close the knowledge gap next month. And as artificial intelligence in the newsroom is a topic on which I’m passionate, I’ll present the session What News Managers Need Now — spoiler alert! It’s AI — at NAB Show in April (learn more about the session and how to join me by clicking here).

I applaud the Associated Press for calling attention to the benefits of AI for local news. Used correctly, AI stands to change our industry — for the better, meaningfully.

Tim Wolff is Vice President of TV and Digital Publishing Innovation at Futuri. He has 20+ years of experience as a digital and broadcasting leader who’s led top-performing teams across the country at companies including Gannet, Belo, and Cox Media Group Ohio, which includes three daily newspapers, three radio stations, WHIO-TV, and more. Wolff, who holds a Master’s in Journalism from the University of Missouri, also makes a mean green chile stew.

 

Webinar for making appointment TV

WATCH NOW: Making Appointment TV When You Have 10 (14? 24?) Hours of News

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Access Tim Wolff’s webinar on proven ways to keep your viewers engaged

“Tonight at 5, this story, then at 5:30, that story, at 6, another story, and make sure to watch at 10 and 11 when we have another must-see story…”

This is what it can feel like to be a promotions producer, trying to figure out how to tell viewers they need to watch every newscast every day. Unfortunately for the viewers, they just can’t hold that many stories in their heads at once as critical, must-watch stories. Besides, 90% of the newscast isn’t really set until just a few hours before air. So how do you convince viewers there are times when they need to watch your news? [Interested in a fascinating blog post on this subject? Read here!]

This webinar explores ways to find effective, quick, and easy stories and tease them in ways that turn your short-time viewers into long-watching viewers… and viewers who pay attention to your newscasts, instead of leaving them quietly running on the wall.

Enter your information below to access the on-demand webinar now!



AI, big data, and the newsroom: It's Time

AI, big data, and your newsroom: It’s time

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Adjusting strategies and tactics in newsrooms used to take months of work (and a lot of faith in limited info).  Now, AI and data tools can help you learn and make changes in minutes. It’s time for your newsroom to catch up.

By Tim Wolff, Vice President of TV and Digital Publishing Innovation, Futuri

It was the big moment in every newsroom: the day the sweeps ratings arrived. Early in my career, “diary markets” were prevalent. A small sample of viewers would be given books to write down what they watched each day.  At the end of the sweeps month, they would mail those books to the ratings company, who would compile them, turn them into ratings spreadsheets, and send them to the stations. Newsrooms wouldn’t find out how many people watched their newscasts until weeks or months after the newscast aired (assuming, of course, people religiously wrote down exactly what they watched and when they watched it, which was far from a sure thing).

That was why I couldn’t wait every day for the overnight ratings, driven by meters placed on some viewers’ televisions. As a news producer, I wanted to see what kind of impact the hundreds of little decisions I made had on the ratings. Getting a spreadsheet the next day that showed how the newscast performed in 15-minute increments was the best I could do in trying to figure out whether my strategy and tactics had worked.

In truth, it didn’t help much on an individual day. Seeing a tenth of a point change day over day in a quarter hour could be from so many factors, ranging from the quality of the newscast to the weather outside to the level of excitement in a baseball game on another channel. There were rare occasions when it would show a dramatic mistake—like country music interviews at 10pm that saw our second quarter drop 10 points—but those were rare. Having overnight ratings was valuable in long-term assessments, but not so much for all the decisions that go into a live television newscast.

Then I began to get really excited about minute-by-minute reports. These were detailed reports, showing each minute of the newscast with ratings increases or decreases, and included all the other channels, too. That way, I could see if my B-block tease kept viewers around or sent them flipping to the competition.  It gave some idea about which stories were retaining viewers, and which were turning them off. It wasn’t perfect, since many stories are shorter than a minute, or overlap into different minutes. It also wasn’t available until 3 days after the newscast aired, at which point I’d usually forgotten what was even in that newscast. Still, with a lot of tracking and work, I could use them to learn about what did or didn’t make viewers go away.

The digital metrics rush

When I first came to digital in the mid-2000s, the availability of metrics was like an adrenaline rush. I could see how well each individual story performed. It wasn’t in real-time then, with a lag of a few hours and a full report not ready until the next morning.  Still, it was amazing to me, as I could track all these individual stories to learn the trends of what performed well on our website (there were no apps or real social media then).

I moved back to broadcast for a while, and metrics tools improved. Eventually, we had a tool that showed real-time performance for individual stories on a monitor right above my desk. I’ll never forget how shocked I was when I glanced up and saw a relatively minor story getting 600 live page views (about 10 times our typical top story then). I asked one of our digital team members what was happening.  It was Facebook, she told me; the story had gone viral, and it appeared there wasn’t much rhyme or reason to it. 

Over time, as I returned to focusing on digital, the measurement tools got faster and helped us focus on which stories to spend our limited resources perfecting and promoting. But they were all really doing the same thing: tracking metrics. All these tools could tell us what our consumers were consuming, but the tools couldn’t tell us why, or what might work next. For that, we needed teams of smart people analyzing and tracking what worked so we could refine our strategies and help our producers figure out what they should post—and when they should post it. Given the mercurial nature of which stories take off on social and which ones fail, it was still a guessing game.

Data helped define strategy…slowly 

As we gathered more data on our social brands (and even on our talent’s social brands), we were able to continuously refine strategies, and help give everyone a better chance of creating winning social posts. But even with our team focused on the metrics, it was a ton of data to manage, especially as we tried to be competitive with posting 24/7. What I really wanted to be able to do was track data across our entire market, not just on our brands. Of course, there was no way our team was going to be able to effectively do that. Having people dive in to generate reports just on our pages and our competitors’ pages was already an onerous task—and accounted for just a slice of the social media usage among our consumers. More and more, the data was becoming available, but there was no way for us to track and analyze it all.

That’s where “big data” processing and machine learning really began to come into play.  We needed tools that could ingest data from all the millions of posts our consumers were seeing, then take that data and present it in a way we could learn from it and use it. The next game-changer was machine learning, the artificial intelligence that could spot the trends in all that data. As more and more data came into the machine, the AI could learn not only what was working, but what was likely to work. This created an amazing opportunity.

Futuri’s TopicPulse is at the forefront of this AI in the newsroom revolution. With years of data from more than a hundred thousand sources, the tool has insights from the performance of trillions of posts. With AI, TopicPulse uses those insights to be able to predict which posts are going to go viral—and which ones are about to lose all their momentum. This gives newsrooms actionable, immediate information that our digital producers and social teams can use to truly engage their consumers, drive traffic, and make sure that they are spending their time on the stories the community wants. 

Even with our great team using human eyeballs to pore over a (relatively) small data set, we would never be able to use data like that. Instead, our team could focus on writing better posts instead of staring and spreadsheets and looking for trends.

AI is coming…AI is here

AI has a growing presence in newsrooms in other ways, too. There are a number of projects that have studied how journalists write stories, and AI allows computers to take a set of facts and create stories that read as though journalists wrote them. These are common in financial reporting and sports (some video games like FIFA and Madden were early adopters). You’ve probably read these stories and not even realized they were written by computers.

Recommendation engines on websites have been powered by data and personalization for years (what did Lilly do before those AT&T commercials?). There are even AI-powered broadcast anchors on television, like China’s Xin Xiaowei.

For local newsrooms, these kinds of advances in AI are coming from many directions. The great benefit is that the data helps newsroom leaders make better, more informed decisions. They can also spend more time on creating great newscasts instead of slogging through limited and late-arriving data.

We have come a long way from waiting a month to find out whether anyone wrote down that they watched.

Tim Wolff is Vice President of TV and Digital Publishing Innovation at Futuri. He has 20+ years of experience as a digital and broadcasting leader who’s led top-performing teams across the country at companies including Gannet, Belo, and Cox Media Group Ohio, which includes three daily newspapers, three radio stations, WHIO-TV, and more. Wolff, who holds a Master’s in Journalism from the University of Missouri, also makes a mean green chile stew.

The demo targeting you're probably getting wrong

The demo targeting you’re probably getting wrong

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Every newsroom has a plan for targeting its key demographic groups. But the assumptions we make can do more harm than good. Here’s what newsrooms really need to focus on.

By Tim Wolff, VP, TV and Digital Publishing Innovation, Futuri

It’s a situation that probably sounds familiar to any television executive. At a TV station where I used to work, I was in a meeting where our management team was reviewing research, trying to figure out how to stop what we were told was a slide in viewing among a key demo: women 25-39.

(Note—while this meeting happened to be focused on this demo, I’ve found what’s true in this demo is true in any demo.)

We thought this demo was sliding because the consultant presenting the research quite gravely pointed out that favorability among women 25-39 had dropped nearly 2%. No one seemed to care that the entire research tracking study only had 500 participants, and only about 60 were in this demo… meaning exactly 1 person had rated us as less favorable than the previous tracking study.

Just because numbers seem alike doesn’t mean they are alike

As it happened, we were in the middle of making a decision about the hiring of an anchor. The first conclusion our team jumped to was that, if we are trying to attract women 25-39, we should hire a woman who is between the ages of 25 and 39. It may seem like a reasonable assumption, but it is, in fact a very large assumption—and assumptions are a poor proxy for data.

That was something I’d learned early in my news career. At another station where I’d worked, they had followed this exact approach when naming a chief meteorologist. She was quite good and very well-liked, but one of the managers told me they had really been surprised—her biggest fans were women 60+. “They love her because they remind them of their daughters or granddaughters,” this manager told me. She actually did not perform particularly well among the younger female demographic.

It was that experience that helped me understand the value of what one of the leaders said in the room. It was something along the lines of, “If we are going to try to target one demographic, shouldn’t we do some testing to see if this demo has a preference for a news anchor?”

Everyone agreed this was a great idea—even the VP who had to pay the consultant for another round of research. 

What the research showed

When it came back, it turned out that women in the DMA between 25-39 years old did appear to have a slight preference for one demo. The researchers had asked about trustworthy news among 6 different potential anchors, using a variety of pictures as representation: Females or males in the ages of 25-39, 40-55, and 55+. Each person in the research — again, women 25-39 —chose one as they’d most trust and want to watch in a local newscast: 

  • Male 40-55: 22%
  • Male 55+: 20%
  • Female 40-55: 18%
  • Female 25-39: 17%
  • Female 55+: 13%
  • Male 25-39: 10%

But even this research is misleading, as the margin of error was staggeringly high, and the margins so small as to hardly be definitive. But it did show us that our proxy for data, our assumption that people in a given demo have a strong preference to watch news delivered by someone in that same demo, was not a very good proxy at all.

The newsroom leader who was making the decision on hiring an anchor used all of this very wisely, deciding that what it really meant was just that we needed to hire the best anchor; someone who was both a strong journalist and a great communicator (and in this case happened to be a woman in her late 30s).

And while this particular case was focused on women 25-39, I’ve seen similar truths about men and women of all ages. If a sports radio station is targeting 25-49 year old males, it does not mean that the best anchors they could hire should be men 25-49.  There is simply very little correlation to how much they trust someone or want to watch someone and the coincidence of whether that person happens to be in their demo.

That’s not to say representation doesn’t matter—it does, and it is critical for all people in your DMA to see people they can connect with, or to see someone who looks like them and the people they know.  This is especially critical in traditionally under-represented communities.

But which demo your anchors happen to fit into is actually not very important in whether a viewer will choose to watch your newscast.  And there is a very simple reason for that: YOUR VIEWERS ARE NOT SHALLOW.

It’s about substance

News viewers care about substance. They care about their community, and they know their community is intertwined with people of every age, gender, lifestyle and hometown in your DMA. They live with and love people outside of their demo, and they care about news from every demo.

(Tip: To help your assignment desk and anchors quickly find content that suits your target audience demo, try Futuri’s TopicPulse. Its AI-powered feeds tell you what topics people in your target audience are seeing and sharing, and even clues you in to which ones aren’t yet getting a lot of news coverage.)

That’s why the best path for you, and the most critical way to move forward, is to focus on the representation in the substance of your content, not in the demo appearance of your talent.

Track what you’re doing

This was the biggest realization for me, and the way I found we could have the biggest impact on every demo. We started tracking our content topics, and we started tracking who we were interviewing…and made a discovery both startling and familiar. The overwhelming majority of our interviews were with officials, and, in our market at the time, the overwhelming majority of officials were white males over 50. 

This presented a few problems; first, it meant that we were getting an overabundance of one perspective; second, it meant that we were getting a lot of boring soundbites that just stated information.

So I started by using a proxy goal; have the numbers of people we interview align more closely with the breakdown of demographics in our DMA. It wasn’t a perfect proxy, but what it did do was open our content to having more perspectives that our viewers were used to in their lives and communities.

Most of us don’t spend our lives talking with “officials.” Most of us talk to people throughout our interwoven communities (social media bubbles in a pandemic will be a topic for another time), and want to hear the perspectives of real people affected by stories.

Over time—and it didn’t take very long—as we tracked who we interviewed, we made a dramatic difference in the perspectives of our stories, and in the quality of our news. It also made a big difference in our research; our ratings and our favorability scores went up with every demo.

If you’re in local news, and you’ve been tasked with raising ratings in a particular demo, I hope that you, too, will focus on your content and your community. Because that’s what your viewers will focus on.

Tim Wolff is Vice President of TV and Digital Publishing Innovation at Futuri. He has 20+ years of experience as a digital and broadcasting leader who’s led top-performing teams across the country at companies including Gannet, Belo, and Cox Media Group Ohio, which includes three daily newspapers, three radio stations, WHIO-TV, and more. Wolff, who holds a Master’s in Journalism from the University of Missouri, also makes a mean green chile stew.

 

Winning Breaking News

How to win breaking news (hint: it’s not just about being first)

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Webinar: Winning Breaking News: Hint! It’s Not Always About Being First, is taking place on March 11th at 1 PM ET! Click here to learn more.

“Winning” breaking news is a non-stop battle. But if you think the only goal is to be first, then you’re missing the most important parts. Here’s what every newsroom needs to know about winning breaking news.

By Tim Wolff, Vice President of TV and Digital Publishing Innovation, Futuri

In the newsroom days of my youth, I thought this was how we would win breaking news: 

  • Word would come into the newsroom that something big was happening, something worth breaking into programming for. The assignment desk editor, simultaneously on the phone and shouting at the producers, would be staring at the televisions with the competitors on the screen, sweating and hoping they didn’t break in first.
  • Then, my station’s animation would start, and we’d be on the air first.
  • The assignment editor would say something like, “Yes, we won the breaking news!”

What I didn’t realize then is that we hadn’t won breaking news. At least not yet.

As winning the breaking news battle moved online, then onto mobile, the adrenaline is the same, but the methods are different.  Now, when word comes of breaking news, one poor digital or assignment desk staffer frantically types out a push alert (maybe even taking a second to proofread it) while the rest of the newsroom stares at their phones, hoping the competition doesn’t push it first.

When we’d “win,” there’d be an audible sigh from that poor person who had to get the push alert out with the weight of the newsroom on them.

But what was true in television is true in digital: being first doesn’t win breaking news.

I’ve known assignment editors and digital staff who were judged by station leaders almost solely on how well they did in being first, especially if research showed that viewers thought their station was losing at breaking news.

But here’s the thing about viewers: they don’t remember who was first.  And they don’t really care.

It’s about the coverage

If a viewer sees you break in on TV, but your coverage is terrible, they will flip to the other stations. When those stations are on the air, the viewers will stay with the one doing the best job; and that is who they will credit with winning breaking news.

It’s true for breaking weather, too. At one station where I worked, we had so thoroughly proven that we were the leader in weather that when our competitors would break in with severe weather, their ratings would go down. Their viewers knew we had the best coverage, so they would turn to us immediately.

It works that way in digital, too. If I get a push alert from the first station to break the news, and I open the story and there are two sentences there, that’s fine. It’s breaking. If, 20 minutes later, there are still only two sentences there, then I’ve moved on and I’m reading the competitors who’ve added context and information. I won’t easily come back to that first brand, and I certainly won’t think they won the breaking news.

This is an area where newspapers have made gains on TV stations in breaking news. In most cases, the newspaper staff is immediately working to add context around breaking stories, with more immediate depth and information around the who, what, when, where and why–and the immediate history of the location. On the national stage, digital publishers like Heavy have made a business out of this.

Getting the second-day story today

Locally, newspapers have also been quicker to adapt to what we used to think of as the “second-day story.”  On the first day of big breaking news, it’s about getting the facts out, and letting people absorb that information before hitting them with what it means, or the perspective, or the investigation into the conditions that led to the breaking news. Those used to be the second-day stories.  In today’s media environment, however, consumers have gone to every site to look at what they have about the breaking story.  And they have absorbed all that information quickly, immediately pivoting to how something could have happened, or what it means.  They may go on Twitter or Facebook, or other forums, to get perspective. In other words, they are looking for the second-day story, and they are looking for it almost immediately.  The “second-day story” is now the “second-hour story.”

Inside the newsroom, we’d find those stories by getting together and throwing out ideas.  Someone (like the news director) would pull out a sharpie and start writing out all the angles to pursue on a whiteboard. Now, this may be happening on video chats with Slack, but the concept is the same: everyone shouts out every angle they can think of.

Of course, we’d always have way too many angles to pursue, especially immediately. It would fall to the newsroom leaders to use their experience to judge which ones to focus on. Almost invariably, later that night a different station would pick a different angle, and we’d be kicking ourselves for missing that angle. And because we didn’t have ways to do much new reporting overnight, it would fall to the next day for us to catch up on it.

There are two ways to avoid that. First, having experienced leaders who are always right in their judgment will help a lot (OK, I caught you there—any experienced news person will tell you they don’t always get it right).  

Second, there are tools today that can help.  We now have the ability to tell, in real-time, what questions are viewers are asking about the breaking news.There are SEO tools that show what is being searched, and social tools that show what is being shared. One tool, Futuri’s TopicPulse, will even show you the stories a specific target audience is likely to share, and further notes which ones aren’t getting much news coverage yet—giving you a huge advantage in knowing which big-story angles to pursue first.

Practice, train and have a plan

Each of these elements happens quickly, and your news team can’t be recreating the wheel every time breaking news happens. No matter how big or small your staff, each person working needs to know what to do, and they need to know the priority order. Just as critical, when you build your plan, don’t just build it for the workday when you’re there; build it for overnights and weekends, too, when you might just have one person in the newsroom.  

It might look something like this: Get information – Alert others in newsroom – send push alert – post basic story – keep getting info to whoever is publishing or on air – update digital story – when basic info is covered, start working second-day angles – source info from search and social – add and update stories.

Of course, depending on the position and your structure, those elements will vary.  The point is that there needs to be a plan anyone can follow, from your most experienced journalists to your entry-level desk workers covering weekend overnights.

Having a plan helped our newsroom when a mass shooting happened early one Sunday morning. The inexperienced, part-time desk employee knew exactly what to do, and it made all the difference in our brand being first with important information. The news team that came online knew what to do next, and that gave our coverage context and the ability to add the right angles long before the competition.  Most of all, combining our experience with search and social listening helped us answer our community’s most important questions in a time of crisis.

This won’t be the only time I write about winning breaking news; there are a million key actions to take by everyone involved, and they are all worth diving into.  But I hope these steps help you turn your newsroom into a breaking news winner long after that first push alert goes out.

The keys:

  • Have a plan
  • Practice
  • Publish quickly and update with context
  • Listen to the questions your audience has
  • Answer those questions with facts and perspective
  • Ask yourself later not just whether you were first, but whether you were best

One final note: if you fail, learn from it. Do an honest, open deep-dive debrief with everyone involved. Failing on one breaking news story won’t kill your brand; failing to learn how to be better will.

Tim Wolff is Vice President of TV and Digital Publishing Innovation at Futuri. He has 20+ years of experience as a digital and broadcasting leader who’s led top-performing teams across the country at companies including Gannet, Belo, and Cox Media Group Ohio, which includes three daily newspapers, three radio stations, WHIO-TV, and more. Wolff, who holds a Master’s in Journalism from the University of Missouri, also makes a mean green chile stew.

 

To register for the free webinar: Winning Breaking News: Hint! It’s Not Always About Being First, fill out the form below! To learn more about the webinar, click here.



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Futuri is the leading provider of cloud-based audience engagement software for the enterprise. Brands rely on Futuri to make their content more relevant, accessible, engaging, and results-driven. Founded in 2009, Futuri holds 12 published or pending patents in 151 countries. Named to the Inc. 5000 List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies for seven consecutive years, Futuri is the only audience engagement platform that includes solutions for sales, marketing, and content teams.