Most people in the news business agree on at least one thing right now. As search and AI reshape how people find information, the old model of waiting for audiences to wander in is finished, and we have to build direct relationships with readers instead. The numbers are stark. When Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing habits of 900 Americans last year, it found that a Google search showing one of those AI summaries up top sent the reader on to a website just 8% of the time, versus 15% when no summary appeared. Half the clicks, gone. And that’s before you count the people skipping search entirely to ask a chatbot. We all can see that the referral traffic we leaned on for many years isn’t coming back.
That means organizations all over the spectrum — commercial papers and nonprofits alike — are quietly renegotiating their relationship with readers right now. Many of us are arriving at similar conclusions, often from very different starting points.
At LAist, a nonprofit newsroom that’s built on a membership model used by other public radio stations nationwide, we ran two experiments over the past six months that illustrate how we need to think about our audience relationships in fundamentally different ways. To a lot of the commercial news industry, our experiments might look like table stakes. In public media, where “payment” has always been voluntary, they got a few gasps.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here