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Quizzes, Anniversaries and Q&A Content Can Bring Engagement and Fuel Your Archives

by Media

Archives can be used in many ways. They can feed quizzes, populate features and anniversaries, and be a source of valuable evergreen content. It can also work the other way. Education Week and MedLearn Media have had quizzes for years now, and the answers turn into their own impressive archive and search platform.

Education Week’s latest quiz is How Much Do You Know About Literacy? It’s sponsored by Lexia Learning, but “Education Week has full editorial control of content.” I got 3 out of 7 right—“Looks like you didn’t quite pass. See answers and learn more below.” Lexia gets a “Find a Solution” button, and, more importantly, all of this information becomes part of a vast archive.

One of my favorite publisher features continues to be MedLearn Media’s Compliance Question of the Week. There are weekly questions in six categories: Cardiology, Laboratory, Pharmacy, Radiology, Respiratory and General. While this does take some upkeep, all that information adds up to a hefty Compliance Question Archive that can be searched with the probe, “Looking for an answer?”

Quizzes are just one way to use and populate an archive. Here are other ideas that can provide value to your audience.

Dig for historic value. Your institutional memory matters. You have old publications with significant value, just sitting on shelves—print or digital—somewhere in a makeshift morgue. Do a little digitization work every once in a while to ensure that this info isn’t getting lost. Republish old ads and photos occasionally. We love nostalgia. And if you’ve been doing this a while, This Day in Our History or 10 Years Ago This Month… can make for a fun look back. Maybe there’s an old pay phone in a picture—I just saw one in perfect shape at the National Building Museum (but it was real, not part of an exhibit).

Look for evergreen content ideas. Fall for the Books, Spring Cleaning Ideas (for Your Organization). Things to Be Thankful for at Thanksgiving. At the start of our in-person events, I update the blog post Making the Most of Attending Live Events and always hear from a grateful publisher who is sending someone new. Last year, a member told me about a post they had first used in 2013 offering reminders or ideas to try. “While it’s still highly relevant, it’s not exactly earth-shaking advice,” she wrote me. Yet the article received 144 likes and 45 comments from people sharing some of the advice. Five of those comments came in well after the post, so it was still resonating.

Use content from your online discussion or forum group—or your webinar Q&As. This has become one of The Washington Post’s biggest repurposing strategies—especially in their travel, relationship and restaurant columns. Some of the relationship discussions go as far back as 20 years ago! I guess some of those situations and the advice for them does not change much. I’ve always thought that the Q&A parts of webinars can be more valuable than the presentations, but they often get lost being at the end. Publish those Q&As as a special column.

Take a quarterly look at what has resonated most. Be transparent—let your audience know what your most popular posts were. “People forget about 90% of what they read after 12 weeks,” said Luis Hernandez, editor in chief for InvestorPlace Media. “Check your analytics and repeat your most popular posts every quarter.” We’ve been doing this for the last couple years and have received good feedback. Everyone is in a time crunch these days and is likely to miss an article here or there. It also brings attention to the moments where the content really sparked interest and revenue-generating ideas.

Make access to your archives a valued commodity. As part of its landmark campaign for its 75th anniversary celebrations, the Association for Computing Machinery is opening up a large portion of its archives, reports Associations Now. ACM will make the first 50 years of its published records—more than 117,500 documents dating from 1951 to 2000—accessible to the public without a login. “It’s nice to link it to the 75th celebration year in general, but the emphasis was really coming from what it takes to get the Digital Library fully open,” said CEO Vicki L. Hanson. “All those seminal articles from years ago can be made available to everyone.”

In 2012, Harvard Business Publishing made the decision to open archive access to subscribers on hbr.org and haven’t looked back. They saw a 20% increase in subscription revenue right away.

 

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‘What Do You Have That’s Truly Unique and Scalable?’ Lessons From the Axios Sale

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“The lesson of the digital era: Chase fads, fantasy and clicks, you fade or famish,” Jim VandeHei, Axios co-founder and chief executive, said last week in a New York Times article. “Chase a loyal audience with quality information, you can flourish.” There are definite lessons to be learned from the big sale of Axios last week.

I had dinner with a scientific, non-journalist friend last night when I brought up Axios—fresh off their $525 million sale to Cox Enterprises. “Oh I know them,” my friend said. “The short, bulleted newsletter—very easy to read.”

Yes, that’s the one. They usually give a quick, one-sentence summary like today: “Morning Brew… has launched a creator program that allows independent personalities to work for the company full time while maintaining separate and distinct products and brands.”

And then you get the all-important “Why it matters: The program will help Morning Brew expand into niche areas, like personal finance, entrepreneurship and productivity, said Austin Rief, CEO of Morning Brew. It will also help the company continue to expand into business verticals outside of newsletters.”

Then comes “Go deeper (2 min. read).” The next “Go deeper” is for a 1 min. read, so they’ve basically redefined the word “deeper.”

“If there’s one thing Axios is known for, it’s for its ‘smart brevity’ format that’s heavy on bullet points and light on expository padding,” Simon Owens wrote in an excellent column titled 4 Things Axios Did Right in his Media Newsletter on Substack last week. “It’s perfectly designed for email consumption, but Axios also prioritized web optimization for each of its scooplets so that they could be easily shared on social media.”

Here are other reasons for Axios’ success:

Develop your platform with growth in mind. “Listen, you’re trying to look at a company’s revenue—what do you have that’s truly unique and truly scalable?” VandeHei told Vanity Fair. “So from the Cox perspective, they’ve got some neat things to work with. We’ve got this national platform with an elite audience. We’re launching our high-end subscription business, Axios Pro, so there’s endless room to grow in the high-end subscription space. We’re in more than 20 cities today, and there are a lot more cities in the United States.”

Right vehicle at the right time. “There are so many ways technology has helped email newsletters become a replacement for the newspaper and magazine as people’s view into the world and how they get news and information,” said Kerel Cooper, CMO of email service provider LiveIntent. “It’s in your inbox. It’s there almost on-demand when you’re ready to consume it. With the pandemic and everyone being home, that growth accelerated.” In Omeda’s Email Engagement Report for Q2 2022, newsletters have a better click rate than every other email type except for reader service and white papers.

Niches contain riches (and first-party data generators). From Owens: “Given the number of verticals that Axios launched, it’s essentially a general interest news outlet at this point—no different from a New York Times or USA Today—but its emphasis on niche newsletters allowed it to generate great first party data that made it the perfect vehicle for native ads.” The Omeda report writes: “Email continues to be a force, and with a few tricks to test out and some diligence, you can optimize performance over time. Plus, when your audience strategy is built on a foundation of first-party data, you’ll be well-prepared for future changes.”

Hire great people. “Axios devoted a substantial portion of its hiring to mid-career journalists with already-existing brands,” Owens writes. (Industry Dive, which was also recently sold for that $525 million tag, used that strategy as well.) “While the average salary was likely higher, these journalists were able to scale up their niche verticals more quickly and efficiently than they otherwise would have if they were hired right out of college.” Owens also wrote that they never became overly reliant on Facebook, thus having more ownership over their audience.”

Stick to your mission and push what you’re good at. “Hopefully, with Politico first, and Axios today, we have shown a way for serious journalism to thrive in the digital era,” VandeHei said. “This country so desperately needs it.” Axios’ founders also wrote a book called Smart Brevity to “share their transformative methods for punching through the noise to get people to pay attention to what matters most.” The title says it all.

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‘Ignore Sustainability at Your Peril’; for Publishers, Action Has to Replace Words

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“Reduce, reuse, recycle is no longer enough,” said Pum Lefebure, co-founder of Design Army and jury president at Cannes LIONS—an event focusing on key advertising trends and innovations that publishers need to know about. “We have to rethink, repurpose, reinvent and reimagine. We have to constantly set new standards for creative solutions.”

When it comes to playbooks—especially this time of year—football comes to mind. But last year, Bauer Media published its Sustainability Playbook. Included in the 15-page document are ways they will be “Influencing Sustainability” in their Lifestyle publications, Outdoors, B2B Automotive (pictured here), Fashion & Beauty, and Audio Brands.

“Sustainability has become a key strategic focus for us because we recognize the leadership role media plays in driving sustainable behaviors,” Kaushala Ratnayake, head of strategy, Bauer Media, told What’s New In Publishing. “Shifting towards a sustainable publishing industry is not something any company can do alone so we really invite this movement towards working with publishers that have clear sustainability goals and targets.”

Number two on WNIP’s post-Cannes list of five takeaways was this: Ignore sustainability at your peril. “The largest media buying groups are beginning to select publisher ad inventory using a checklist of ‘sustainability criteria,’” they wrote.

“[Young people] want to align with brands that share a vision and a mission with them and they’re willing to pay more for that—and that’s where sustainability comes into play,” growth strategist Robyn Duda said last year. “If we don’t start doing it now, there’ll be a disrupter that comes in and turns things upside down.”

Here are more sustainability initiatives among publishers:

The American Chemical Society’s Scientific Advancement division is leading the ACS Campaign for a Sustainable Future Initiative. The multifaceted initiative will include a campaign promoting sustainability, increased advocacy for sustainability research funding, and expanded efforts to modernize the chemistry curriculum for 2- and 4-year colleges to include a focus on sustainability. There will also be a prize for international collaborations.

“The impact that we’ll have is creating a future chemistry enterprise workforce that’s trained in sustainability concepts,” ACS COO LaTrease Garrison said. Such a workforce “will help to revolutionize chemistry as a discipline and to increase the amount and pace of chemistry-related sustainability innovation research.” Adelina Voutchkova is their new director of sustainable development.

Recurrent—their publications include Popular Science, Field & Stream, Saveur, etc.—has three pillars on their website: Editorial First, Audience Obsessed and Sustainability Focused. “Coverage across Recurrent brands emphasizes products, technologies, and policies that could shape a more sustainable future, for the longevity of the planet and its ecosystems.” In June they established two new sustainability-focused roles to solidify the company’s commitment to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives. Sam Dagirmanjian has joined as the new VP of sustainability, and Amber Nolan moved in as sustainability commerce editor, after contributing to Treehugger for five years.

Conde Nast announced new advertising guidelines as part of its sustainability commitments. It will now only accept ads from energy companies that promote renewable energy products. The company also aims to be entirely carbon neutral by 2030 and use only renewable energy in its offices globally by 2025.

Bloomberg Media has made the commitment to bring its Net Zero plans forward to 2025. Half of the firm’s existing energy already comes from renewable sources. Only 12.5% of its emissions come from publishing operations, but it is seeking a further 10% reduction in energy use across its offices and 5% in its data centers.

The Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN) is a new program at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Its mission is to help journalists and editors develop their coverage of climate change, and support leaders in identifying the issues involved in reporting on the climate crisis. The network is free to join and is open to working journalists, employed or freelance, covering any beat, not just environment and climate.

“We know that the journalism and information space as a whole is looking for spaces for sustainability, so if we don’t have unique and diverse voices in these rooms, how do we know what to solve for?” asked Sherrell Dorsey, founder and CEO of The Plug, an AM&P Network member. “How do we think creatively about the solutions on the table? We decided to go subscription and create these revenue-generating platforms in order to ensure our survival.”

 

‘You Need Enough Time to Get It Right’; Longform Articles Take Prizes, Clicks and Time

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“From the data, it’s clear to see that there’s positive correlation between high performing pages within organic search and word counts of over 2,250 words,” wrote HubSpot’s Matthew Howells-Barby. “The sweet spot seems to be 2,250-2,500 words.” Barbara Spector, our 2022 Grand Neal winner, went well beyond that.

In our summer editorial council meeting last Thursday (which you can view here), Barbara Spector of MLR Media and Rachel Engel of Lexipol spoke about their 2022 Neal Award-winning articles, and the benefits to taking the time and effort to write longer pieces.

Writing earlier this year, Christian Cappoli of The Hoth also cited the benefits of long-form content—including more keywords—adding “if it’s done right.” He noted a study by Pew Research showing that “users spend twice as much time on articles over 1,000 words. They found that short and long articles both attracted the same number of visitors, yet people would actually keep reading the longer pieces versus navigating away to something else.”

HubSpot also found that “higher word count is correlated with more social shares,” something Engel expressed concern about. She praised her colleagues and the new voices she was able to amplify.

“I have a great team that is very encouraging of these types of articles,” Engel said of her story, titled Modern Day Rosies, about a paramedic/illustrator who embarked on a project spotlighting diverse, female essential workers. “But I also feel like it’s important to showcase the people and the demographics that aren’t typically seen and thought of.

“It’s good to be able to pull in those voices when there is a gap in our coverage. We want to make sure we include all the kinds of people that are working in our industry so we are reflective for audience members.”

The article by Spector—titled Reckoning: Family Businesses Confront Race, Racism and Inclusion— put the long in long-form, with riveting sidebars, photos and pullquotes. She did it right and won the Grand Neal.

Spector offered six takeaways from her experience with the story:

  1. Get the support of top management.

2. “When tackling a big project, you need enough time to get it right, including a lot of time for a major rewrite if needed,” she said. “…If possible, wait until the editing is far along before committing to publish it on a specific date.”

3. It’s important to be known to your readers “as a trusted resource that is sensitive to audiences concerns. It will be easier to find sources and get them to open up to you. That being said, of course, I had many people just declined to take my calls and I had to just keep pushing.”

4. “Back up your assertions with quotes, facts [and] statistics from trusted sources. This is especially true for controversial topics.”

5. “If you have a complex story to tell, break it up into parts and make ample use of subheads, pull quotes, illustrations and sidebars to avoid the old wall of text,” Spector said. “Link to sources where readers can go to research and learn more.”

6. “Everyone needs an editor, and you also need a talented creative director and web designer for projects like this. David Shaw, our publishing director, talked the story out with me, read my drafts and gave me great advice on structuring. And Monica McLaughlin and Richie Madden made it easier for readers to navigate all the various parts and made it all visually interesting.”

BioPharma Dive’s Ben Fidler, another 2022 Neal Award winner for a longer article, added that a cooperative staff is also much needed.

“There are always trade-offs when someone has to cycle off of daily coverage to do something bigger,” Fidler said. “In our case, because we have a small team, it means others have to pick up the slack quite a bit. But we all know that and aspire to write great stories. So when someone has an idea in the works, we come up with a plan to give them the time they need to execute efficiently. And I think that goes for other publications at Industry Dive, not just BioPharma. Many journalists I’ve spoken with here want to write standout stories, not just daily churn.”

Engel said that her piece took about two months to write, but she was able to work on other things during that time such as daily newsletter articles and social promotions. “So it was a relatively straightforward process.”

“Today’s online culture, along with the pressure to control costs and the competition for reader’s attention, has created a trend toward shorter articles,” Spector said in conclusion. “But there can be great value in doing a deep dive into an important topic. You can still save on print costs and hold readers’ attention if you publish a report like this as an online series, but the reporters still need support from management and the freedom to put in the work.”

For Rebrands, Instruction, Humanity and Reaching New Audiences, Video Wins Out

by Media

In their 2022 Neal Awards Best Use of Video finalist—titled The Economic State of Black America: What Is and What Could Be—McKinsey & Company used one-minute, one- and two-person interviews to drive up the stakes of the report. It’s just one way that organizations are pumping up the volume of their articles, reports and mission.

Pauline, a real estate agent, talks eloquently about the lack of opportunity. Armond, a Los Angeles lawyer, speaks about the limited entrepreneurial paths. Alonso, an Atlanta store owner, said he had to give his people a place to go for healthy food. Ehren and Noella talk about creating pathways to generational wealth.

The videos personalize the data and numbers of the report. In Reuters Institute’s Journalism, Media and Technology Trends and Predictions 2022, they predicted that short-form video would make a comeback off the back of creator innovation in social networks. They were right.

“Expect publishers to adopt more of these techniques in 2022, along with the growth of streaming platforms such as Twitch, contributing to a new ‘pivot to video.’” In addition, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube were named as where publisher efforts would be most going socially this year—meaning more videos. Instagram topped out at a +54.

Here are other Neal and EXCEL award-winning video uses in the industry:

Inform about your mission. For its 2022 EXCEL Gold award-winning video for Single Entry (Promotion), the ALS Association’s Whatever It Takes uses just a minute to go through the many faces of the disease and talk about future hopes and access to treatment. “How do we turn ALS from a fatal disease into a livable one?…ALS takes everything from people and their families. So it’s going to take all we’ve got to stop it.” Added Washington Post head of editorial video Micah Gelman: “Most video consumption happens off platform, whether that’s YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and so it’s very much about reaching people who may not be familiar with the Post at the start but will come to sample other types of our journalism.”

Instruct your audience. “Join the AOPA Air Safety Institute as we follow the Bonanza’s likely encounter with high density altitude—an inherent hazard in high terrain significantly degrading aircraft performance. Deceptively upsloping terrain would leave no escape for the flatland pilots facing the canyon trapping them.” Thus begins their 12-minute EXCEL Gold award-winning video—titled Accident Case Study: Into Thin Air—in the category Single Entry Education. The video provides huge lessons for that audience—and what went wrong with this undertaking—telling a story that would have been hard for text to do. Industry experts emphasize that insights from the video can also be applied to platforms like Coinpoker’s crypto casino, highlighting the importance of comprehensive risk management in high-stakes environments. Members also get credit for watching the video, which “uses FAA ATC radio communication transcripts, NTSB documentation, and video animation to recreate accidents and share critical lessons, so we can recognize and avoid similar mistakes.”

Bolster a story or report. For his 2022 Neal Award winning story, Industry Dive’s Ben Fidler found a powerful video of his subject, Sek Kathiresan, winning the Curt Stern award—an honor given to pioneering human geneticists by the American Society of Human Genetics. In his acceptance speech, Kathiresan recalled the journey that took him from a small town in India to an awards stage in San Diego. While the story’s personal photos added context, the video added so much more.

Announce a rebrand. “You want a brand that reflects a diverse community and a more flexible, responsive and modern association. You wanted the AABB initials to remain iconic and essential to our identity, but with meaning. It is with great pride and excitement that we share with you our new name. The Association for the Advancement of Blood & Biotherapies.” Thus Debra BenAvram, CEO of AABB, reveals the new name of the American Association of Blood Banks in a 2022 EXCEL Gold Award-winning video for Single Entry (Membership). It’s a five-minute moving and emotional watch that could never have been conveyed with the same gravitas in an article. It begins and ends with a photo of the association’s first executive secretary, Marjorie Saunders.

Reach a younger audience. I wrote about Harvard Business Review’s Christine vs. Work in January, and I’m happy to see that she’s still going strong. She’s smart, has fun and says what others just think. Her latest video, titled What to Do If You’re Undervalued at Work, begins like this: “If you’re working at a job that you’re like, ‘I’m putting in all the work, but this is not putting it back into me,’ this episode is for you.” “When it came time to reimagine what video content would look like for Ascend, [HBR’s] brand for young professionals, we knew we’d have to make it real,” said Kelsey Alpaio, associate editor of HBR. “We knew we’d have to take a host-driven approach. And we knew we’d have to meet our audience where they are. On TikTok, yes, but also on YouTube, Instagram, and whatever comes next.”