Tech
How Leveraging Technology Intentionally Can Help Make Your Content More Human-Centric
As the news publishing industry is increasingly catalysed by advancements in technology, some editors and readers have concerns that too much technology could take away the human element of content. This is why it is crucial to leverage technology, without letting it leverage you.
In an ideal world, technology should be used not only as a tool to alleviate editors’ workflow burdens, but also as a support to get them and their content closer to their readers. To anticipate and meet reader needs. To understand and accommodate their behavior. To create a sense of empathy and connection, and nurture relationships of trust.
Indeed, from the content management system to the front end, the technology news publishers use should come together not only to facilitate newsroom transformation but also to create a comfortable experience for their readers.
Honouring the homepage
As Hannes Vollmuth, Senior Editor for Digital Strategy and Innovation at Süddeutsche Zeitung, said during his presentation at the Livingdocs Summit last September, news publishers should reorient their perspective from “distribution first” to “destination first”, designing their homepages to serve like their readers’ favorite local cafe, where everyone knows their name, their favorite order, and their appetite to try something new, all while offering a familiar environment: A homepage that is as reader centric as can be. And technology can help with that.
Following this image, if a favorite cafe can anticipate the needs of a customer in the form of their favorite beverage, so should a homepage to a reader in proactively and responsively catering to their needs. To do this, editors can organise content based on perceived or measured user needs. This can be done using a model, like the Smartocto User Needs model, which defines eight different user needs based on four central groups.
How tech can support reader-centric goals in a digital-first strategy
But how can newsrooms apply this model efficiently in order to offer more reader-centric content without losing momentum? This is where technology comes in: Editorial teams can make use of metadata plugins that can assist in categorising different types of content according to user needs, so they are placed appropriately on the homepage and throughout the publication to best resonate with readers. In fact, our January Release introduced a new metadata plugin that does just that: our User Needs plugin allows you to categorise articles according to intended user needs.
User Needs
Indeed, categorizing content according to user needs early on — already at the topic and distribution planning stage — can help media organizations create a mix of content readers genuinely desire.
News publishers must understand that, like a familiar cafe that is ready to meet one of the regulars who’s always on the go with fast delivery of their preferred coffee (take away, of course) and brief, polite conversation, as well as another regular who likes to sit in the corner armchair for hours with a large oat latte (or three) and sparks conversation with the baristas, making their community of readers feel at home not only consists of fulfilling their needs, but also of accommodating behavior.
Working with machines to connect on a human level
When it comes to the news, duration of attention is a key behavioural marker. It is no secret that, in the digital age, society at large is experiencing a trend of ever-shortening attention span. Despite this daunting fact, there are many ways that news media organisations can capture and keep the attention of their readers.
One example are AI-generated short-form videos which offer summaries of news stories in a readily accessible, easily digestible, sensorily engaging format. Another is to introduce AI assistants which make use of GenAI to implement machine-based collaborators that help generate article summaries so that readers on the go — or those with particularly narrow focus windows — can get up to date as quickly as possible. Along that line, in our May 2024 Release, we introduced the "Livingdocs Assistant" platform; "Livingdocs Assistants" make use of generative AI or any other system to implement machine-based "collaborators" to support journalists in doing certain designated work, bringing more flexibility to a newsroom's workflows.
Livingdocs Assistants
In a final allusion to the local cafe, some cafes may be franchised, and therefore have decor, menus and quirks that are locale specific. A multi-brand news publishing house has the same set of parameters.
In a news company that has multiple brands defined according to region or thematic content, while there may be some overlapping content, certain content would be showcased or prioritised differently depending on the audience. In this case, editors would be well served by technology that is able to curate and deliver digital news with specificity, and can designate certain components to be delivered only for certain brands, regional contexts or thematic focus. Being able to place conditions on content to align with a given brand is especially useful if a publisher presents the same homepage or publishes the same articles across different yet connected brands. This capability can also be applied to conditions related to time and date, which allows for greater possibilities in more complex page management scenarios.
Knowing how valuable this functionality can be, we introduced Brand Conditions in our January Release in order make the curation of pages even more powerful and facilitate more multifaceted page management.
Brand Conditions
Looking ahead
In today’s news media landscape, news publishers must find balance in the human-machine relationship while taking an intentional, people-centered approach, both within an organisation and outwardly towards its readers. For editors to maintain creative control rather than letting GenAI take over every time they feel writer’s block. For news media companies to use technology to get their content even closer and more relevant to their readers. For publishers to design and align their content algorithmically or with automation according to specific user needs to create a relationship of trust.
At Livingdocs, we proactively support the journalists by finding streamlined solutions to make their content more reader centric in this digitalised news space. We are in constant dialogue with our customers so that we can keenly understand the challenges their newsrooms face and offer a product that can overcome them by prudently leveraging innovative technologies and utilising the expertise of our dynamic and dedicated team.
There may not be any sign of technological advancements slowing down, but in the world of digital news, keeping readers, their needs, their behaviors, and their world at the center of decision-making related to digital transformation is the only way forward to maintain reader loyalty, economic viability, and ultimately personal integrity.
