Help Wanted: What can we learn from newspaper design and readers’ willingness to pay for the news — while we can?

Let me first note, the “help wanted” in the headline is for real. As part of this project (details below) we are looking for a Design Fellow interested in spending a year (or two) in Columbia, Missouri, to help shape the project and to contribute to the experimental designs we will be testing next year. The role would start in Fall 2019 so details are still TBD. But if you have a background in news design, an interest in user experience and the flexibility to move to the middle of Missouri for a while — get in touch.

The “death of print” continues to be an overhyped narrative — though largely because digital news has yet to settle on a sustainable revenue strategy. Digital is ascendant but declining revenues are ironically giving print a lease on life.

And the unrequited love newspapers have for profitability is a key reason that as the programmatic adtech industrial complex enriches Facebook and Google, many news organizations are looking anew at subscription and membership programs. (FYI — more on that topic here.)

But aside from some national outliers (New York Times, Washington Post) and some admirable regional efforts (Boston Globe most notably), reader revenue is also not a silver bullet. It is also true that most news subscription programs are clumsy at best, desperate at worst and generally not informed by a deep understanding of reader’s needs, data insights and user experience research.

Much of our attention to the problem has been focused on the obvious questions: content, promotion and price. But digital subscriptions have a “one penny” problem — the barrier is not the cost but a willingness to pay at all.

That should drive some introspection. Print subscriptions were always a decent business, though were readers paying for the news, the delivery, the coupons or the comics? And in the digital world, are readers not paying because there are no coupons or comics, or because there is free news everywhere at their fingertips? Or are they not paying because the typical newspaper website takes 20 seconds to load, is larded up with ads and trackers and promoted links and auto-play video?

In January, with my colleague at the Missouri School of Journalism Dr. Shuhua Zhou, we will launch a research effort around this question. We propose there are undiscovered factors contributing to a reader’s willingness to pay — and the design of the print newspaper plays a pivotal role in the solution.

Briefly put, digital news websites lack many of the design affordances present in a traditional print newspaper. These cues help people put the news into context and make sense of what they are reading.

A simple example: The work of an editorial writer in a print newspaper appears almost exclusively on the Opinion pages. While the form and content of an opinion column can resemble a standard news story, its placement on the opinion pages — often the last two pages of the first section, the prominent labeling of those pages as “Opinion” and the various graphical elements on the page (editorial cartoons, letters to the editor, columnist photos etc.) provide clues to the reader that a column is not news.

In a digital context, sections are virtual and signaled primarily by text labels or URL structures. And readers of an opinion column are likely to have arrived at that page via an external referral such as Google or Facebook and may apply the expectations set by that external link to their understanding of the text. (If you are not familiar, “why does this news story have the writer’s opinion in it” is a common complaint about opinion pieces.)

When news content is presented in a context-light digital platform — it is left to the consumer to work to find the cues needed to contextualize the content. A reader may ask, how recent is the story and how important is it? Is it news or opinion and is this website trustworthy? This required cognitive effort by digital readers diminishes engagement and comprehension of the news.

An initial set of sensemaking dimensions that may differ between print and digital closely mirror several of the news values taught in journalism schools including, recency, proximity, urgency, relatedness and category. Others align more closely with information seeking and psychological factors such as trust, discovery, completeness and materiality.

We propose that a possible remedy for digital disconnects is a reconsideration of the visual design of news webpages. In the “opinion column” example above, we hypothesize that boosting the visual cues for “category” in the digital context would strengthen the affordance for readers, allowing lower cognitive load, improved sensemaking and increased satisfaction.

The project kicks-off next semester with qualitative interviews to better understand the signals print and digital news consumers most rely on. By the fall, we will be ready to test experimental designs — in both print and digital formats.

Please reach out if you are interested in the Fellowship, or if you just want to chat about the project.