Skok, who earlier in his career worked at Global in Toronto among other places, now lives in Boston, where he is taking on the monumental task of trying to grow the Boston Globe’s audience through new digital initiatives.
His talk, the 2014 Atkinson lecture, was called “Share THIS: Why the death of the homepage is good for digital journalism.” Despite the grim title, Skok doesn’t make this fact out to be a bad thing.
He began his talk by mentioning the “olden” days of journalism, where if you wanted to hear about certain types of news, you’d seek it out. Something breaking in New York City? Find the New York Times. Want to read about the back-to-back World Series wins from the Toronto Blue Jays? Read the Toronto Star. Now, however, we as an audience expect news to find us. And we sure aren’t going to go to just one source.
In the past, news sites could depend on the 70/30 rule, in which 70 percent of traffic came from the homepage, while 30 percent came from search engines and external sites, including social media. Now the opposite is true, something sites like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post have embraced.
The general idea Skok expressed is that: “Every story is a homepage, every beat a site, every journalist a brand.”
To unpack this: according to Skok, news sites should make each and every story a user stumbles upon into something enticing, whether that’s in the form of video, an interactive timeline or something more. “Every beat a site” means verticals: examples are offshoots like Beta Boston from the Boston Globe or Motherboard from VICE. And finally, every journalist should strive to create a community around his or her work.
It seems like a tall order, but Skok said that it’s a way to increase a newsroom’s audience without resorting to posting cat videos and a Justin Bieber story a day.
There’s also another thing, arguably a bit harder to come by: simple journalistic excellence. Skok brought up that when sites measure “time on site” as a metric, the mark of a job well done is 60 seconds, while the reality is that 30 seconds is much more likely. When the Boston Globe posted an in-depth investigative piece on Jared Remy, the average time on site was five-and-a-half minutes. It’s not hard to see why: the story featured a video, but more importantly, it was a case of the Globe knowing its audience. Everyone in Boston knows Jerry Remy.
Skok boiled down this idea into something even simpler: nothing should matter except the story, its relevance to your audience and the community that can be built around the story.
An example of an old practice that should mostly go by the wayside, based on the above idea, is the classic three-part series often seen in newspapers. Skok argued that unless your story is excellent, think of news like Netflix’s House of Cards — just post everything. Most users aren’t likely to come back after reading the first part.
His talk ultimately led to one idea that has been expressed in many other journalism talks reported on this site — it’s to be better.
