By Dominic Faria
No one is reading your stuff.
Those are the six words every sports journalist dread hearing. For an industry where success requires so much hard work and creativity, the harsh reality is that it can often be difficult to get stories in front of the people who want to read them.
Fortunately, there are a variety of strategies that journalists and their newsrooms can use to counter this — many of which were touched on during Friday’s “How to attract a new audience and subscribers” panel discussion at the APSE Summer Conference in Charlotte, N.C.
Led by panelists Micah Adams, managing editor at Sporting News; Jennifer Zahn, senior director of content at Flosports; and Steve Wiseman, assistant sports editor at The Raleigh News & Observer, the discussion waded into a laundry list of hot-button topics surrounding readership and engagement, including writing for SEO, paid-subscriber conversion/retention and getting ahead of the news before it happens. The discussion was moderated by APSE President Naila-Jean Meyers, the senior assistant sports editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis.
“Any time we’re [story] planning, we’re strongly utilizing Google trends,” Adams said. “[We’re] looking back at what people are searching, how they were searching the last time an event was going on. The World Cup in 2022 was a prime example of this, where it’s just anticipating every possible storyline that we’re going to have.”
Though planning pre-written content beforehand is an effective way to capitalize on breaking stories, and thus pull in a larger audience, Wiseman knows from experience that being “nimble” and prepared to react to unexpected outcomes is also critical — as was the case for his publication during N.C. State’s surprising run to the Final Four of the men’s NCAA basketball tournament this past spring.
Investing in the right stories that resonate with a specific audience can be an important driver of subscriber retention, a goal that nearly every outlet strives for in today’s ultra-competitive online landscape.
“If we retain a subscriber, it’s worth far more than half a million page views, frankly, because it’s hard to monetize that in our business,” Wiseman said, noting that one metric he’s paid special attention to as of late is percentage of page views from subscribers. The higher the share on a given story, he said, the better sign that the audience wants to consume this kind of content.
But attracting new subscribers also means meeting audiences where they are – which, for many, is on social media.
According to Zahn, younger demographics are using social media as a search platform, entering keywords directly into platforms like TikTok and Instagram, as opposed to Google, to find the content they want to consume.
“Especially for the younger demographic, they’re tapping into social media as a search platform. They’re not going to Google. They’re going to TikTok, they’re going to Instagram, they’re putting their keywords in there and they’re looking for the answers they want on social media.”
Changing user tendencies and unpredictable algorithms means news outlets must go beyond posting content and hoping it gets clicks. Often, a detailed plan is necessary to truly attract eyeballs.
“We’re incredibly intentional around leveraging social [media],” Adams said. “There’s not just content for the sake of content. Any well-thought-out plan around those endeavors, for them to work with us on social, we have to be very far ahead of the curve with our planning.”
But no matter what any outlet is doing to expand its subscriber base, it all comes back to one question.
“When a reporter comes to me and pitches a story, I say, ‘Who is the audience for this?’ ” Wiseman said. “Is it superfans? Is it a heart-tugging story that the general population would like? How big of an audience can we give this, and is it worth our work going into this?”
