New Zealand’s Stuff “abandoned” the traditional inverted pyramid structure for its “most contentious” stories as part of its battle against news avoidance.
Stuff.co.nz introduced a sentiment tracker asking readers for their emotional response to stories and discovered that changing the way certain stories were written had resulted in “much less negative” emotions.
Ben Haywood, chief product officer at parent company Stuff, set out the newsbrand’s response to news avoidance at the recent INMA World News Media Congress in London.
The traditional inverted pyramid approach to news begins with a ‘hard intro’ where readers are given the most important information first – the who, what, when, where and why of the story.
But for stories that could sew division, Stuff has instead decided to adopt a softer explainer-style approach that leads people into the most important and contentious elements of a story, including subjective takes on it, further down.
For example a story published on Monday about a politician’s online newsletter byline being edited to include a derogatory term began with the sentence: “Has National MP Maureen Pugh been the victim of a hack?” And another political story began simply: “Te Pāti Māori wants to set up its own parliament.”
Three-quarters of Kiwis avoid news to some extent
A report about trust in New Zealand news published in April found that about 75% of those surveyed said they actively avoided the news to some extent, up from 69% a year earlier.
Last year’s Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 36% of people across markets said they avoided news often – two percentage points lower than in 2022 but seven percentage points higher than 2017.
Haywood said news avoidance was a “real threat” to Stuff’s mission “to help make New Zealand a better place”.
“You couldn’t get a better mission for an organisation. It requires, though, our journalism to have impact – and for our journalism to have impact it needs to reach people.”
He said Stuff data backs up the news avoidance report, with people “consuming fewer sorts of news and spending less time”.
One reason for the growth in news avoidance, he said citing the report, was that people were “finding us boring and repetitive, and a lack of variety from day to day and between publications.
“But also they’re finding us biased or opinionated and feel fed up by opinion masquerading as news or bias or perceived bias… But then also really importantly, they’re seeing us as a threat to their mental health.
“They’re seeing that negativity in our news either in the subject or the way that we’re handling it. And they consider us to be emphasising conflict and division.”
He continued: “So how are we thinking about that at Stuff? Less as a problem, but more as a signal from our audience that they want to have a healthier relationship with news.
“So our starting point is we think mindful news consumption is a good thing and we want to find ways to support them to have a better relationship with the news. How might we give people more control of their news experience? How might we ensure that people can trust Stuff with their mood and with their wellbeing?
“If the way that news avoidance is showing up in data in New Zealand is people choosing fewer sources, how can we make sure that we’re the source that they’re coming to?”
Stuff sentiment tracker gets thousands of reactions a day
This is why, Haywood said, Stuff developed a sentiment tracker that asks readers to choose an emotion at the bottom of each story – although it can be turned off for the most sensitive articles – to show how it made them feel. The options are “happy”, “angry”, “concerned”, “sad”, “like”, and “don’t care”.
People can also choose to write extra detail in response to the question: “Why did this story make you feel that way?”
“This is generating thousands of reactions every single day and a really deep data set for us to understand and a new human data point for our newsroom to consider alongside its other metrics,” Haywood said.
Generally speaking, stories about art, music and culture, cute animals, resilience and bittersweet stories make people feel happy. They like it when national rugby union team the All Blacks win, as well as stories about food, travel and local issues. They are concerned about climate change, housing affordability and the cost of living. Stories about the All Blacks losing, natural disasters, cost of living and floods make them feel sad. They feel angry about unfairness, injustice, government policies and agencies. And they claim not to care about celebrities.
Haywood said this data is used to look at how broader topics are performing and how people respond to them, as well as the more traditional data for individual stories.
“It also allows us to see how people or brands or issues in the news are changing over time,” he said.
“Because it collects this data in real time, it’s also allowing us to think about how we might provide more thoughtful recommendations to people based on how they feel. So for example, if we’re seeing that people are feeling really down and out after a tough climate story, how might we recommend something that’s a bit more proactive and solutions-focused as their next story.”
The data also has commercial applications, Haywood said, which is “really important to us, because we found that advertisers can be news avoiders too.
“That was displayed really graphically to us when last year we published a story that Google didn’t consider safe for its advertisers. It was on the homepage and our programmatic ad revenue dropped until we could find that story and figure out what the problem was.
“But we also see this anecdotally in our conversations with advertisers and their discomfort sometimes around some of the topics that we’re covering. The sentiment tracking data has allowed us to have a more sophisticated conversation with our advertisers about their brands, about their industries and how they’re being perceived in the market. And those have been great conversations that have led to new business for Stuff.”
Stuff ‘not shying away from difficult stories’
Editorially, the newsroom is “taking really great care not to amplify conflict” and this has meant a change in the way stories are written.
Haywood referred to a quote from Stuff.co.nz editor-in-chief Keith Lynch, who said: “Journalists have been taught for years to put the most important piece of information in the lead paragraph of a story. But sometimes this is swapped out for someone’s subjective view of an issue or topic.
“This can sometimes mean we are incentivising simplicity and amplifying conflict over helping our readers understand a complicated topic that impacts their lives.”
Haywood said: “So how does the newsroom deploy this? In a really, really simple way that didn’t even require the product team to build anything, which was awesome.
“They have abandoned the inverted pyramid for some of the most contentious stories and politics stories and planning stories, things that would often sew division, and taken more of a real-time explainer approach to structuring those stories.
“And it’s been really effective. The stories are getting just as much engagement, but the debate that’s happening in the comments is much more civil, and the responses we’re getting from a sentiment perspective are much less negative.”
However, Haywood added that these changes are “not about shying away from difficult stories.
“It’s about organising ourselves to hold people’s attention so when we do have difficult stories to tell they have impact.”
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