Viral News or Making your content Newsworthy?

Values that make a news content worthy for the reader

Disruption of digital media all over the world took the media industry to a point where contents can have a set of goals to be measured, monitored and improved. It is because digital media has given us immense opportunities to define value for our goals and parameters to measure them. For example, we could only identify the amount of newspapers sold in the early days, but never knew how many times each news was read. Through defining values like impressions, clicks, etc. in this digital era, we can now identify if a specific news had expected readership, whether users prefer reading fact based news or not, for how long a reader spends time on your content, etc. A positive increase in these factors determine how well the reader was attached to your content. But the question is, how can a journalist or a content writer give enough reasons to make their article find positive results? To summarise, how can they make their news content Newsworthy for the reader?

I have been working with a news organisation for more than two years and our team has been providing them support through developing a web-based content management platform. What we came to understand is that, through scrutinising data associated with the readership parameters, News organisations nowadays are lucky enough to understand how loyal their users are to their content. Data on different aspects has helped these organisations largely to emphasise on how to upgrade according to the user behaviours and identify trends or patterns of user preferences. Contents that stand out in numbers are the ones that follow certain values to fulfill these preferences. Let’s go for a deep dive into these globally practiced values that make your news article newsworthy.

Impact | Is it useful for me?

Asking yourself if your news content will affect people’s lives or not and how significant is the impact. News contents having impactful resources clearly increases value to the reader and eventually grabs the attention of the audience. Analysing the last one year, we found out that the most read news are the ones that talk about tips and tricks associated with health benefits. People tend to rush into news contents that are educating them on how they can impact their health positively. We got 200,000+ unique visitors for a news article that talked about the indications of heart attack. This is why finding the impact level of your news is a vital aspect for journalists. On the other hand, news articles related to death, rape, crime, etc. (excluding burning issues or issues having surprising elements) saw higher bounce rates and it is illustrating the fact that these news categories don’t necessarily have a significant impact on reader’s lives.

While writing the news, it is important to portray impact on the lede of the news because this is the point where readers find the important information that will work as the trigger to dive into the depth of the news. A long article with no attention grabbing points on the lede will eventually increase the bounce rates of the news contents.

Timeliness | Why are you publishing this news right now?

The story that you are telling, is it new or not. The content of the story can be old, but the information you are providing is new to the audience or not. Usually, burning issues fall under this news value, because in most cases these news are new to the readers and eventually the follow up articles (even though the whole topic is old) also reaches higher readership. It is just because through each article, readers are being fed with new information. From our experience, we saw an exponential increase in readership on all the news associated with the illegal involvement of a celebrity with alcohol. And since then, any news article related to that celebrity has been experiencing the maximum amount of readership in real time irrespective of the similar old topic that made the celebrity a person of higher interest to the readers.

It is not always important that timeliness refers to burning issues. Letting your readers know something that is new, counter intuitive or against traditional wisdom to them also creates value to the readers. If we go back to the example of tips and tricks related to health benefits, most of the time these articles bring out information that is new to the readers or goes against something they have been doing all wrong. That desire of knowing what is the new idea and what they were doing wrong works as a trigger to read the news.

Prominence | How to make readers feel credible enough to trust you?

The information that you’ve stated, have you got the authority to say so or does the reader feel credible enough to believe what you’ve written? Usually, statements from renowned individuals like Sheikh Hasina, Shakib Al Hasan, Ananta Jalil, etc. creates higher credibility in the reader’s mind as their media presence is linked with reader’s emotions which lets them build a personal connection with these individuals. We have seen from the pageviews parameter of the last two years that news related to cricketer Shakib Al Hasan has brought 50% of the pageviews compared to the topic Corona. Even though corona being the burning issue during this time period brought major pageviews on the site, news related to Shakib Al Hasan also dominated right after corona. This is how prominence plays a higher value to increase content credibility.

Proximity | To what extent is my reach?

A plane crash in Nepal won’t be an important news for the readers in Bangladesh. But a plane crash carrying 20 Bangladeshi citizens would make the headline of news portals in Bangladesh. Parameter values tend to increase if news events occurred or content elements are related within the close proximity of the audience you are serving.

Surprise | Did that actually happen?

News contents having surprising elements tend to drive more users to your contents. For example, recently the Bangladesh government decided to implement power shut down due to oil shortages and this news was a surprise to the readers because load shedding has not been a burning topic for the past ten years. On the day this news was published, it ranked in the top five most read news. The news raised the question whether it is actually happening or not.

Conflict | Why are they against each other?

Conflict is one of the key elements of drama and when it happens in real life, it leads to interesting writing. However, conflict associated with surprising elements and celebrities leads to better readership. Journalists are often badly criticised for emphasising more on negative news but this obsession towards publishing conflict news comes for reader’s interest as they are keen to know what lies behind any conflict, how the issue is being solved, etc. One of the greatest examples of conflict based news is sports rivalry. Any news that addresses Messi-Ronaldo or Federer-Nadal or India-Pakistan cricket matches or Argentina-Brazil football matches rivalry is bound to grab sports lover’s attention and thus result in higher increase in readership.

Trending | Is this what everyone is talking about?

With the evolution of social media, it is easier to identify trending issues. Journalists can make the most out of the topic people are putting their interest in and focus on writing related articles. We saw fundraising campaigns for flood affected people in Sylhet become a trend on social media and news related to flood at Sylhet were achieving more reader attention.

Human Interest | Who got impacted by this story?

People are eager to read about stories that have an interesting person at the heart of the story who has been impacted by it. One of the recent topics about the Bangladesh Women’s National Football team winning SAFF Championship, saw huge reader interest. Everyone was eager to know anything and everything they found on the news site. Although their winning story falls under Trending or Timeliness value, news like their money being stolen from the luggage at the airport also achieved an increasing number of real time readers making this news one of the top five news articles on the publishing day.

Continuity | What is the new issue of that story?

Some news such as elections, wars, protests, etc. are likely to create reader’s attention for a long amount of time as such incidents create new issues to talk about and eventually generates higher reach on the specified new articles. Even though COVID-19 started two years back, we can still find a considerable amount of pageviews on COVID related news every single day.

A first of it’s kind | Did I ever heard of something like this?

Any story that never happened before triggers reader’s attention to a large extent. Due to their desire to know something that they never knew serves a value for newsworthiness. For example, an epidemic like COVID-19 was new to the whole world as the whole world went under lockdown for months. This phenomenon increased readership on all the contents related to COVID-19 as people never experienced such issues throughout their lives. Due to the increasing number of readership in COVID-19 contents we even had to implement a separate web page under the hot buttons section and were able to provide readers a better experience for COVID-19 related news.

Lastly, there are a lot of other minor factors that also drive news value. A combination of all the above mentioned news values plays an important role in making your content newsworthy. Our team saw results whenever we found our client’s contents implemented such values in their writing. Thus, these news values helped the news organisation drive positive results and outnumber other news stories. Let’s focus more on the newsworthiness of a news article than making it viral with misleading titles or clickbait.

References

1. Beale, S., 2022. 9 factors that help define news value for journalists. [online] Agility PR Solutions. Available at: <https://www.agilitypr.com/pr-news/journalism/9-factors-help-define-news-value-journalists/> [Accessed 10 September 2022].
2. Zajechowski, M., 2022. The Eight Values That Will Make Your Content ‘Newsworthy’. [online] Digital Third Coast | Digital marketing and search agency. Available at: <https://www.digitalthirdcoast.com/blog/values-content-newsworthy> [Accessed 10 September 2022].
3. Owen Spencer-Thomas. 2022. News values — Owen Spencer-Thomas. [online] Available at: <https://owenspencer-thomas.com/journalism/newsvalues/> [Accessed 10 September 2022].
4. Maven. 2022. 8 Tips To Determine Newsworthiness | Maven. [online] Available at: <https://mavenagency.com/news-insights/insights/determine-newsworthiness/> [Accessed 10 September 2022].
5. Purdue Writing Lab. 2022. The Components of. [online] Available at: <https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/journalism_and_journalistic_writing/components_of_newsworthiness.html> [Accessed 10 September 2022].