Why Audiences Say They Like Vegetables But Eat Candy

A recent survey by a coalition of Canadian international development organizations found that 94% of Canadians say it is “important to improve health, education and economic opportunity for the world’s poorest people.”

I'm sure they feel that way. Who wouldn’t? It would be a very mean-spirited and Grinch-like person who says the world’s poor shouldn't be able to improve their lives.

The aid groups that created the survey might think this proves to government that it should increase foreign aid spending. The public wants it!

But it really proves no such thing. At best, the question only tests aspirations, not what they really believe or do.

In the world of polling, questions like this are known as a halo or angel question. That is, people answer with what they think or believe they should say—the thing they aspire to.

There’s nothing wrong with aspirations; we all should have them. But they only measure what people think they should do. They don’t measure what they actually do.

A good follow up question would be: And when was the last time you donated to help poor people improve their health, education and economic opportunity? 

That would provide better data for making decisions.

For non-profit groups, asking good questions is key when doing surveys about giving. It is also helpful when doing surveys about communication.

We want to know: What do people want to read in our newsletters and websites? The challenge is that people will tell you one thing, but do another.

This is something the media is discovering, sometimes to its chagrin.

For decades, it was hard for TV, radio and newspapers to know what kind of news audiences actually watched, listened to or read.

In focus groups and TV and radio measurement books, people reported that they liked hard news about the world. But who could tell if they were really telling the truth?

Then the Web came along. Now the media knows exactly what people pay attention by counting what they click on.

It’s not the result they hoped for.

Intuitively, editors and news directors knew that international news ranked lower than, say, horoscopes and celebrity gossip. But by counting the clicks they now know how much lower it is.

Last year, BuzzFeed released a review of traffic to sites within its partner network, including the New York Times and The Atlantic. Of the 20 most viral stories across those sites, just three dealt with recent news events.

What was in the top most shared items? Quizzes, lists, and emotional poppers. Iraq, Afghanistan and the economy—three important topics—didn’t rank high at all.

In an article in Atlantic Online, titled "Why Audiences Hate Hard News and Love Pretending Otherwise," Derek Thompson put it this way: "Ask readers what they want to eat, and they'll tell you vegetables. Watch them quietly, and they'll mostly eat candy."

Audiences, he went on to say, "are liars, and the media organizations who listen to them without measuring them are dupes.”

The culprit isn't Millennials, or even Facebook. This challenge has existed for a long time.

According to Thompson, it’s about something psychologists call fluency.

“Fluency isn't how we think: It's how we feel while we're thinking,” he wrote.

“We prefer thoughts that come easily: Faces that are symmetrical, colours that are clear, and sentences with parallelisms."

For hard news, fluency creates two problems: "It's hard and it's new.”

(Fluency also explains why most liberals prefer to read and watch liberal-oriented media, while conservatives prefer to read and watch conservative-oriented media—because it easier to read something that bolsters your conviction thatn something that challenges it.)

Now that the media is able to precisely determine what people pay attention to—before there were eyeballs on our eyeballs—it was hard for them to know exactly what we were doing.

But now the media knows. And what they know, as Thompson put it, is that “readers lie.”

This is something to keep in mind the next time someone produces a survey saying that a majority of people feel one way or another about your cause or issue—so put more hard and detailed articles on your website.

People may, in fact, believe they should show read those kind of articles. But when it comes to what's real, your web analytics will tell the truth: Most prefer candy.

Read Thompson's full article here.

The Discarded Newspaper in Airport Metric: A Different Way to Measure Newspaper Decline

Not a discarded newspaper in sight . . . .

There are different ways to measure the decline of newspapers today.

One way to chart it is overall profit. In the first quarter of 2015 the top ten newspapers in the U.S. made about $21 million. Compare that to 2005, when one newspaper company, Gannett, alone earned $1.8 billion in net income.

Another measurement is print ad revenue. It dropped (again) in 2014 to $16.4 billion, 4% down from 2013.

The number of readers is also an important indicator. Weekday and Sunday circulation both fell in 2014.

The number of reporters? Down 3% in 2013, although that’s a bit of a win since it fell 6% the previous year.

Single-copy newspaper sales, which once made up 15-25% of sales, are dropping in double digits per year.

(All figures are from the U.S., although I have no reason to suspect things are different in Canada.)

These are all valid and important ways to monitor what’s happening to newspapers in North America today. But I have another way of measuring the disappearing world of print newspapers.

I call it the Discarded Newspaper in Airport Metric (DNAM).

I have been observing this metric since 1981, when I first started travelling for business.

During that time, I have been through a lot of airports. As a news junkie, I like to read local newspapers. 

Lucky for me, other people liked to read newspapers, too. When done, they discarded them on seats in waiting areas, where I found them.

When I finished, I left them behind for others, a pay-it-forward kind of thing.

For many years, it worked well. It was easy to find lots of discarded newspapers in airports.

Lately, however, things have changed. Discarded newspapers are harder to find. On my last trip through two major Canadian airports, I found only one.

Why is that? One reason is that fewer people read newspapers.

The other is if they do read them, they tend to do so on smartphones and tablets.

The result? Fewer discarded newspapers in airports. 

Or, as New York Times Deputy Tech Editor Quentin Hardy put it: "Dammit, I used to go through an airport and read discarded newspapers. Now I have to look for smartphones and tablets.”

And that digital revolution is, of course, one of the main reasons behind those falling profits, falling circulation, falling ad revenue, and falling jobs.

On future trips maybe I’ll have to break down and actually buy a newspaper, then leave it for other travellers.

Either that, or be like everybody else and read them on my phone.

Figures from Nieman Labs State of the News Media 2015. 

The Media and Facebook: The Changing World of Communications

In the 1980s, when I started my career in communications in the non-profit sector, I faced the challenge of how to get the attention of the broader public.

I knew it was highly unlikely they were going to start reading our newsletters and magazines. How to reach them?

The answer was simple: Use the media they were already plugged into—newspapers, radio and TV.

By working with the media, I could get into their homes and share messages about the work my organization was doing, and ways they could be involved.

It worked. Since I was offering reporters what they needed—good stories—I was able to get what I wanted—access to their readers, listeners and viewers.

For a long time, it was a good, symbiotic relationship. We both profited from the arrangement.

It still is, for the most part. The media is still a good way to extend the reach of non-profit groups. But there are challenges on the near horizon.

Today, the web makes it much easier for non-profits to reach the public. 

Unlike 30 years ago, when signing up for a print newsletter was the only way to get our information, today our stories are available to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

And for the media, that’s the problem.

For a long time, the only way to learn about what was happening in the world was through the media. Those days are gone.

In 2015, people have a plethora of options for getting news. And one of the main ways they do that is through social media.

A 2013 study by the Pew Research Center for Journalism and Media found that almost half of American Facebook users got their news from Facebook.

They aren’t looking for news on Facebook; they find it while searching for something else. And the group that gets most of their news this way are 18-29 year-olds.

Whatever the reason, the media is seeing it’s hegemony on the news slipping away. And if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

At least, that’s what the New York Times, NBC,National Geographic, the BBC and five other media outlets have concluded. 

These media outlets have reached an agreement with Facebook to share news content on that platform, rather than making people click on a link to visit their own websites.

Called Instant Articles, it promises to give the media a way to offer fast interactive articles on Facebook.

For the media, this is a new paradigm. It used to be that it was the platform others needed to help them reach the largest audiences. Now it’s the media that needs Facebook to do the same thing.  

They don’t really have a choice; that’s where the audience is. 

But it does make them uneasy. One fear is that it could become more of a destination than their own sites for the work they produce, drawing away readers and advertising.

Then there’s what seems like the capricious nature of Facebook, changing its algorithms for what seems to be no apparent reason. 

It’s hard to create a communications strategy when the platform you use doesn’t belong to you, and it keeps changing the rules about what people will see in their feeds.

Those of us who work in communications in non-profits will need to pay attention to this trend. What will it mean for our media relations work? 

In the future, perhaps the goal will not just to be on the front page or to lead the news, but also to get on to Facebook.

Things have changed a lot in the over 30 years I have been involved in media relations. 

And the only guarantee is that they will keep changing.

Never Bury The Lead!

In the movie Broadcast News, a producer played by Albert Brooks tries to convince another producer, played by Holly Hunter, not to date a handsome news announcer (William Hurt) that he has no respect for. 

Instead of dating the announcer, who Brooks believes is dim and devious, he wants her to date him.

Following an evening out, he makes his case for why she should date him. He concludes this way:

“I grant you everything. But give me this: he personifies everything that you've been fighting against. And I'm in love with you."

After that, he says deprecatingly: "How do you like that? I buried the lead.”

(See that clip from the movie here.) 

Never bury the lead. The most compelling, most newsworthy aspect of what you are trying to say must always be at the top of your press release. 

The lead is the thing that makes the reporter, editor or news director want to continue reading. It’s got to be a grabber. It has to catch their attention.

And it has to do it in about 30 seconds, the maximum amount of time most people in the media have to give to your e-mail.

This is the opposite of what they teach you in university, where an essay rises to a conclusion. In a press release, the most important information is always at the top. (See my post about the inverted pyramid style of writing.)

My friend Nick Martin, the education reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press, wrote about his experience with a buried lead recently.

On his blog, he wrote about a PR firm in the U.S. that failed to provide a local angle to a story Nick had written about.

Nick managed to write the story, about a Winnipeg company named Permission Click, but with no help from the PR firm. It was only after the owner of the local business called Nick that he managed to connect the dots.

“I reread the email pitch that had set all this off, and nowhere in it was there any mention or hint that Permission Click was local," he writes. 

"And I dug down into my deleted files, and there found a previous email from the PR people in Florida, a lengthy story pitch which, at the very bottom, mentioned that Permission Click is based in Winnipeg."

Since Nick gets 70-90 e-mails a day, it's hard to give each one the time or attention it deserves.

That's why the most important information needs to be right at the top.

As Nick wrote about his experience with Permission Click and the PR firm:

“If your client is local — and yes, we are parochial within a readership area larger than several states put together — then you should say so. Like, in the lead.”

His advice to the PR firm: “First paragraph: ‘Local Winnipeg tech startup Permission Click could have prevented the alleged theft of $24,000 in school lunch money.'

‘CEO Chris Johnson is available to talk to you about the way in which his company has already helped 12 Winnipeg schools communicate far more efficiently and easily with parents, and he can tell you about dozens of schools in Manitoba who are doing due diligence on his company and could soon be signing up.'"

Because that information wasn’t easily found, the story almost didn’t get written.

The takeaway for non-profits? When writing a press release, or proclaiming love, never bury the lead.