The world is increasingly complex and - with over 140 million unique browsers visiting theguardian.com on a monthly basis - the idea that all readers have the same level of knowledge about the vast number the subjects we cover just isn’t the case.
With this in mind, we’ve been looking at ways in which we can work more closely with our readers to better understand what will make our journalism truly essential to them and to ensure that the Guardian is the place they immediately come to when they want trusted informed information on the subjects they might not be familiar with.
And our readers’ questions project allows us to do just that. We first began testing the project with our foreign desk in March 2017 and the premise is actually very simple - at least once a day readers are asked to vote on a set of three questions which appear at the end of an article. These are written by the journalists and predominantly focus on subject areas within the piece that they feel may need more explanation. It’s also worth noting that they are a useful tool for editors to question their own assumptions about what is or isn’t common knowledge.
Readers are invited to vote on which of the questions they would like answered and this data is fed back into Ophan, our in-house analytics tool. The surveys are proving popular with our readers - on average, of those people who see the questions, around 8% go on to ask one and most questions receive at least 1,000 responses. Around 80% of the people who respond to readers’ questions are regular readers demonstrating that - as a trusted news source - our audience are coming to us specifically to find out more about subjects they are interested in.
Once the questions have closed, our editorial team can then look at the data, seeing what our readers want to know and responding in a variety of ways. This can range from creating an embeddable and reusable snippet - an expandable box that sits within an article - to editing the original piece so that it includes additional information, to creating an entirely new article on the subject.
Reader feedback is key - after all, readers’ questions is all about understanding more about what our readers want to know from us - and they are able to click a thumbs up or thumbs down as to whether or not the explainer was helpful. Readers also have the option to be alerted via email if a question they asked has been answered. Once again, this data is fed back into Ophan, helping us to develop our ongoing responses and enabling journalists and desk editors to reflect on readers’ input when they next commission a piece on a similar subject.
Now we have the tools in place, over the coming months we will be rolling readers’ questions to our science, tech, environment, sport and business desks. We will also be working with our foreign desk to experiment with different formats to present and deliver answers to our audience.
