As Guardian members, subscribers and contributors, your financial commitment makes our journalism possible. But we also see our relationship with our readers as being much more than about money. We are collaborators, working together to shine a light on the most important issues around the world.
A year ago, the membership team started considering how we might forge a deeper relationship with our readers. We wanted to uncover the potential of our journalism, and understand how we could improve and evolve it, so that it better served your needs.
As we increasingly rely on our readers to support us financially, the Guardian knows its reporting has to be the absolute best it can be. It must hold power to account, give voice to overlooked issues and people, and help readers to make a positive impact on issues they care deeply about.
So the membership team began researching, developing and testing ideas to improve the way that our most loyal readers experience the Guardian’s digital journalism. Our focus was on making it easier for readers to make sense of the world, and form opinions on stories that mattered most to them – things you told us motivated you to visit the Guardian regularly.
We were interested in how you read our work online, what we could do better, where the gaps in our coverage were. Instead of presuming we knew what readers wanted, we presumed that, actually, we didn’t.
The Guardian of course has a large editorial team. But we also have many colleagues who work in digital development who have joined us for this project. They are responsible for transforming the website and app and creating new formats such as our much-loved live blogs, identifying and helping realise new areas of potential digital innovation for the organisation, and ensuring that these ideas properly serve the needs of readers.
We began by asking readers about our news coverage and the role it played in their lives. Many people told us they found the volume of stories and the speed of the news cycle overwhelming, and said that we often assumed too much knowledge about complex stories. They said they found it hard to quickly catch up with long-running stories, or those on unfamiliar topics in which they had developed an interest.
Those comments may be unsurprising to many of you, but they certainly challenged some of the assumptions we held as journalists about how much and how often most people want to check in with a story. Put simply: while those who do news for a living are always consuming lots of it, other people have less time and inclination to be constantly reading every update.
One rather simplistic way of responding to this would be to presume that readers wanted us to dumb down our reporting. Instead, they also told us they were keen to better understand subjects in the news, but didn’t want to have to spend time searching elsewhere for more information. Crucially, they said that they trusted the Guardian’s insight, and our judgment. But we needed to make it easier for them to understand essentials, while also reporting at length and with nuance and insight.
You may have noticed some small blue boxes sitting within articles on the Guardian’s site and app. These are what we have called “explainer atoms” – the first phase of our response to this feedback, which generated many ideas, and a user-, digital- and mobile-friendly way to explain and contextualise news events.
These distinctive explainers answer questions such as “Why do migrants and refugees head for the north coast of France?” inside an article about the refugee crisis, or “Who is Emmanuel Macron?” for people reading about his victory in the first round of the French elections.
By answering questions such as these inside an article, we aim to provide a richer, clearer reading experience for those who haven’t followed every cough and spit of a story (or even for those who have, but never quite caught the initial explanations), and to do it in such a way that it isn’t intrusive for readers with more knowledge. That means communicating the maximum amount of information in the minimum number of words.
We trialled this approach over the EU referendum last summer, with 100-word explainer atoms considering “What is article 50?” (the question everyone was asking the morning after the night before), “How might Brexit affect Ireland?”, or “Why is the referendum happening now?”. The idea was that, whenever you joined in the debate, you could catch up with the important elements of it.
We were determined to be rigorous in understanding whether our ideas actually had an impact on readers’ experience of our journalism and fulfilled your needs. So on the bottom of each explainer atom, we included a way for readers to tell us if they found its inclusion helpful.
Many thousands of readers have let us know what they thought – if you’re one of them, we’d like to thank you for your input – with the vast majority (upwards of 85%) telling us these little blue boxes were indeed helpful. In cases where that percentage falls, your feedback also allows us to identify what’s not working, and change it quickly.
When we used explainer atoms to make our reporting around the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war clearer and easier to understand, 94% of readers who gave us feedback were positive about these deceptively simple explainers. We’ve heard from readers who’ve told us they find them “just as interesting as the article itself”, and say that “a handy summary of recent events and comment relating to the story can help with very fluid news stories”.
That’s why the Guardian has committed to expanding our use of explainer atoms in our coverage of the UK’s upcoming general election. We’re excited in particular about how they might serve younger audiences on mobile devices, something that feels particularly relevant with this election.
To ensure that our journalists are asking the questions that readers most need answering, we have added a short survey to the end of some of our news articles in recent months, and used these results to inform which explainer atoms we publish. If you see one of these surveys, or come across an explainer atom in an article you are reading, be assured that any feedback you give us will be very gratefully received and acted upon.
Our readers are transforming the Guardian’s financial future – but also informing the future of our journalism.
