Why it's so hard to publish fewer stories

Hang around in this world long enough and you learn that what was once a new idea will soon become an old idea, and then, later, be resurrected as a new idea once more.

There’s a case in point in journalism right now: reducing story count. Or, as people were describing it at the recent International Journalism Festival in Perugia, moving from volume to value.

It makes sense. Everyone knows that writing for traffic and the algorithm is now much more difficult than it was even a couple of years ago. I didn’t even think it was a good idea then. You have to earn your readership through the quality of your content, not the amount of it you can churn out.

People are talking publicly about how they have cut their story count. Sofia Delgado, formerly of Metro, talked about how she had implemented a 25% reduction in the number of stories published but had seen page views grow by 10%.

Anna Sbuttoni, the deputy head of digital at The Times, recently spoke to Press Gazette about their new strategy of publishing “fewer, better stories”. They had cut their number of stories a day from 200 to 150, she said, and seen traffic rise by about 30%.

I know others are doing this too and I applaud them. Indeed, my point at the top about new ideas is related to the fact that I once did this too, ironically at The Times about 10 years ago.

When we introduced our new website and app, I could see there were too many stories on the homepage, and many weren’t getting any engagement. So I steadily reduced them: first from about 60 to 50, then down to around 40, which we maintained. Just about, because the pressure to do more and more stories was constant, even though we could prove that engagement was going up despite there being fewer stories.

That pressure won out after I left The Times, which is why the current digital team felt they needed a fresh strategy to reduce the count. Life goes in circles.

So why is it difficult to maintain a reduced story count? There are a number of reasons and I would urge those now implementing to prepare for them.

First, there is a journalistic instinct to report every incremental development in a storyline. But as journalists we are often far closer to our stories and subjects than the average reader, and so we assume people are as interested in every twist and turn as we are. Look at the data – and every publisher reports the same thing – and it’s abundantly not true. A huge number of stories are barely read.

One former colleague has addressed this instinct by floating the adoption of a presumption not to publish: he is proposing that a story should only be commissioned if it passes a strict test of “give me a reason we should publish this”. The assumption is not that every story is a good one, but that each must earn its place on the website or in the app. I like this way of thinking.

The instinct to over-report hits hardest when a major news event happens. We tend to think big stories require big coverage. And at that point, any strategy to reduce story count goes out the window.

I’ve seen this so many times. You can explain to newsrooms until you are sick of your own voice that more than 95% of people will only read one story on a topic, however major, and yet when something big happens they go crazy commissioning, say, a dozen stories covering every conceivable angle.

Then the data comes in the next day and lo, 95% of people read one story, a further 3% read two, 1% read three and it’s the same story as always.

I think, at its heart, the problem is that as a newsdesk you only get told off (the polite way of putting it!) for the stories you don’t do. You rarely get reprimanded because you chose to publish something, unless there’s a problem with the way it was reported or a legal issue. So every news desk, when faced with the question of whether to run a story or not, will run it – simply to avoid missing out. Of course your readership will likely never notice that you’ve “missed” a story, especially since you’re never going to miss the truly big ones anyway.

It is also very hard to unlearn lessons, particularly the one that said traffic is a good thing. This is a challenge that everyone now trying to reduce story count will face. Even subscription publishers were obsessed with increasing the number of visitors. I used to have this debate at The Times. People would ask why our traffic wasn’t higher, and the answer was: it doesn’t matter, as long as we’re signing up enough subscribers. Even ad sales people said they didn’t want huge numbers of uniques unless they were engaged.

Finally, I think the reason this policy is so hard to maintain is that we have become divorced from our original purpose. Newspapers didn’t publish everything – they published a finite, finishable number of stories. But when the internet arrived, we seemed to decide to become competitors to newswires, which was a strange place to end up.

We need to move on from this and examine our purpose and the real role we play for readers. It’s good that there is a move to get back to meticulously reported, closely edited and carefully selected stories. I wish everyone trying it the best of luck, but to be aware that this is not an easy win.

Alan Hunter is a co-founder of HBM Advisory, which helps organisations navigate the transformation of their content businesses, from finding the right strategy to producing the right content, and of course everything AI. Contact us for more information at [email protected]

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