There was a great article on the Poynter website titled, “New research finds 92 percent of time spent on news consumption is still on legacy platforms.”
The article does bring up great points about newspaper (print) readers do often kick back over a cup of coffee and may spend extended time reading, just as the article points out an NPR listener could listen for an hour on his or her commute.
Despite this study, people are spending more and more of their time on digital platforms – smart phones, tablets, etc.
So what does this mean as a news strategy?
Our best-selling print day, by far, is Sunday. It is also typically our lowest-traffic digital day.
On Sundays, we tend to spend more time with our stories. This past Sunday, the story Raising Brooke, Raising Braxton was our front page centerpiece. It started on the front page and took up all of A4, A5, A6 and A7 – not unusual for a Sunday centerpiece.
Interestingly enough, the story received NO comments online, but it generated more phone calls than any story in recent weeks.
Was length the contributing factor? The Sunday Q&A is also always a longer piece as is the lifestyles focal story on Sundays. I do believe print readers are OK with longer, more in-depth stories, while digital readers (note: on the above story, the photo gallery received more pages views than the story itself) prefer photos, video and quick bites of information.
Obviously, different audiences require different approaches, but is there a place online for longer pieces that run a couple thousand words or more? Or should that be exclusive print content? Should our content planning – including length – revolve more around platform?
There’s a lot to think about in our ever-evolving news strategy.