Do you really read articles anymore?
People still read things online but the way they do is changing.
Good morning.
I was listening to the People vs. Algorithms podcast last week and one of their segments was on the fact that the role of text at media organizations is changing.
Troy Young discussed how text is becoming “increasingly commoditized” due to the fact that text serves as the input for large language models that power AI tools.
To reflect this, he used an example of the ESPN app where you can either lead with stats that relate to a game, articles about the game, or videos about the game. In this case, the stats lead to a “game” within the game which, primarily, is gambling.
“To me,” Young explains, “when you think about the home page as a surface area that’s the number one thing. Because chatbots don’t do [data and games] as well. The number two thing is probably how we entertain with video. And the number three thing is how do we put smart interfaces on this corpus of millions of pieces of content, that used to be the lead thing, which are now secondary.”
As depressing as that kind of sounds: I have to agree with him. Most web sites stink. And the home page isn’t ever really coming back until websites don’t stink.
In order to make web sites not stink, you have to think about how people actually use the internet now and the surfaces they engage with the most. Namely: media sharing platforms (some of which we used broadly call social media) like TikTok and Instagram and even the text based media feeds like Twitter/X and Notes.
That’s why this random LinkedIn post from a video journalist at the New York Times that was served to me was kinda the most interesting thing I read this past week.
In case you don’t want to click the link, this is what it says:
The New York Times just hit 1 million followers on TikTok, a huge milestone for our team that launched the account a little over a year and a half ago. We've come really far since then — I remember print reporters asking me, "Are people on TikTok really going to care about this story?"
The answer was usually: yes!
Since then, the Times has really invested in vertical video. You've probably seen them at the top of the homepage (case in point: today). That never would have happened without the Times believing and investing in new media formats and meeting audiences where they are.
Now, print reporters bring me stories and say: "This would make a great vertical video." That's a huge shift in mindset, and I LOVE IT!
I’ve admired the Times’s shift to treating its site surfaces closer to media sharing feeds than a “web site” for some time now. I think it is incredibly smart and reflects how people actually use the internet on their phones. This is a video of what the Times homepage looked like on standard mobile web this weekend.
That’s not too far off from what you might see on Instagram or even Substack Notes if you were scrolling through a feed.
It’s video blocks, then short form text carousels (e.g. tweets or Substack notes), then multimedia carousels (a la Instagram). Because most people don’t really read articles that much anymore. (I’m not going to mention the fact that you can also toggle to a podcast feed or over to games to play in a sticky bottom menu that resembles an app experience. Oh, whoops! I did.)
I have no hard data to back that up obviously, but I simply have to think about my own media diet.
The closest thing I read to articles these days for the most part is newsletters. Sure, those could be called “articles” but they aren’t in the standard URL article format.
And, sure, some of those newsletters then link me out to relevant article URLs that I share in the links section at the bottom of each of these posts.
But the primary things I read online right now are newsletters sent from individual people to my inbox.
After that, what I read most online are user comments (mainly on Reddit but sometimes in other communities) and “text chunks” from places like Substack Notes or on the New York Times live update news feeds or even brief Axios news stories in their app.
For the most part, I read long form text in print or in books. I’m too distracted on my laptop or phone to read something long. That’s simply where my brain is now.
Again, that may reflect my personal behavior but I suspect if a lot of people interrogated themselves and their reading habits it might look similar.
What and how we consume media is changing. The media organizations who own surfaces that people have historically spent their time visiting need to meet those changes or face being left behind as the way people interact with and seek out information in new formats continues to evolve.
And right now most web sites still operate like they think audiences consume information in the same way they did fifteen or twenty years ago.
One good quote
“The whole point of me starting a newsletter, I wasn't trying to sustain a business. I have a day job. It was just—I find it hard to write or create something just for myself. I really enjoy writing, which for me is just a tool for doing deep thinking. And it didn't really matter that the audience was big or real. It just needed to have this vague shape of being real. So it was being sent to people's spam folders, maybe one day they would look at it and they would see it. Turns out, it's pretty cumbersome to get emails reliably delivered to spam folders.”
This one is from an interview with Elan Ullandorf on Nick Catucci’s Emedded Substack. I should really be trying to do weirder stuff like this.
More good links
Speaking of the way we consume things now, The Verge scooped that Instagram is internally testing a new content library that lets you save things you’ve come across in various ways on the platform. This is something we think about a lot at work: what’s the most valuable metric on Instagram today? Is it a save of a post at this point?
Oliver Darcy talked to Ben and Justin Smith about two years of running Semafor.
Eater launched a restaurant listing app. Thank god someone did because the Resy app functionality (outside of booking) stinks and it’s time that someone challenged them.
The Press Gazette ran a nice case study of how the Boston Globe built their digital subscription strategy.
Casey Newton went deep on the changes in leadership on Google’s search product. Like I said earlier this month: things just keep getting weird. Like this new functionality that has certainly made my job a little bit harder!
Over at Feed Me, Emily Sundberg did a nice job breaking down this story from last month about the New York Times working on podcast subscription integrations with Apple and Spotify, which is actually kind of crazy.
Also on the New York Times: They’re hiring for a Director of Production for their Games Platform Group.
Netflix’s Q3 earnings call went well and they still have live NFL games coming in Q4 and then their WWE deal kicks in next year.