Backchat: Audio reporting, audience feedback, and Brexit

Host: Adam Levy

Hello and welcome back to Backchat. If the regular Nature Podcast is your graduation photo then Backchat is your 2007 Facebook profile picture. In today’s roundtable, we can look forward to discussion of audience feedback, Brexit confusion and the benefits of audio vs print. I’m Adam Levy and joining me in our London studio are: Nisha Gaind…

Editor: Nisha Gaind

Hi, I’m Nisha. I’m chief of Nature’s European Bureau.

Host: Adam Levy

Anna Nagle…

Editor: Anna Nagle

Hi, I’m Anna and I’m the Chief Editor for Digital and Engagement.

Host: Adam Levy

And on the line from Washington D.C. we have Geoff Brumfiel…

Editor: Geoff Brumfiel

Hi, I’m Geoff. I’m an erstwhile Nature reporter for many years, now science editor at National Public Radio - the American BBC.

Host: Adam Levy

Lovely to have you all here. Coming up in the show, we’re getting meta and discussing the pros and cons of podcasts. What can audio reporting do that the written word can’t, and vice versa. Plus, what challenges does it present for reporting the nitty gritty of the science world in audio format. We’ll also be finding out what we can find out about what our audience is thinking. Journalism is a somewhat one-sided conversation with our audience so how can we tell what’s working for our listeners and readers, and how much of what we do should actually be informed by the feedback we get? Finally, we’ll be breaking apart Brexit. Two years on from the vote and not long to go until Britain does indeed exit. How has reporting on the chaos evolved, and what does it take for a Brexit story to make it into the pages of Nature? Now, first up, reporting science in audio vs print. Geoff, we’ve already touched on this, but could you give us a little background on your personal journey through the multiple media?

Editor: Geoff Brumfiel

Well, I started very much in print for Nature back in 2002. Actually, at that time we didn’t even contribute. There were separate reporters for print and the website so that’s how retro things were back then. And I became involved with the podcast when it started and got involved with public radio reporting as well, and over the course of 6 years I gradually moved increasingly into audio, and here I am.

Host: Adam Levy

What actually prompted that jumping ship from the written word to the spoken word, as it were?

Editor: Geoff Brumfiel

I like to talk. I think it was pretty much as simple as that. You know actually, that’s not entirely true. There was something else which was - and this gets it, the whole audio vs print discussion - I liked meeting my sources face to face, and that’s something that audio puts a premium on in a way that print really doesn’t. You do a lot of phone conversations.

Host: Adam Levy

So, why is there that premium? I mean, you are speaking to us on the phone. We can have your voice on the show. But what do you gain in audio by having that face to face contact?

Editor: Geoff Brumfiel

Yeah, I know. I’m recording on this end. It’s all going to sound very like we’re in the same room. I mean audio conveys emotion in a way that print really can’t and so very often while we’re telling audio stories, we’re trying to get that emotional connection and obviously, the best way to do that is to be in the same place.

Host: Adam Levy

Now, I want to give print a right to reply because so far, we’ve emphasised the benefit of audio, which I agree Geoff, absolutely is this emotional side to it that a voice can convey so well. But what is it that print can do that means it hasn’t yet gone out of business?

Editor: Nisha Gaind

So, I think especially in science reporting and at Nature, we like to add visuals where we can and data because that’s so much part of the topics that we’re reporting, and that’s a real part where we can add value for our readers.

Editor: Anna Nagle

I don’t think the two things are mutually exclusive anymore. So, with our now digital presentation, we’re often mixing videos and audio and text and all kinds of things to provide a really immersive experience for the readers, so I think they can be complimentary as well as providing different sides of a story.

Editor: Geoff Brumfiel

Yeah, and I mean I would say, you know, where print really has the edge is my reporters - I’ve been working as an editor for the past couple of years - my reporters joke that my job seems to be to take all the facts out of their story. I mean, the truth is that you can convey one or two big numbers in an audio story. You really can’t provide the sort of level of detail that print can provide. The human ear just doesn’t want to absorb, you know, six different statistics in a single story.

Host: Adam Levy

I mean does that give us a disadvantage, Geoff, in audio, that we have to strip the numbers back and can’t show what the graphs are showing?

Editor: Geoff Brumfiel

You know, I think it does in some ways. I think it also forces, you know, people to find the story. One thing audio has really taught me is, you know, we’re a narrative species. We like a good yarn. And so, I think science reporting, one of its weaknesses overall is that it often doesn’t supply that, even when there’s a very good story to tell. And so, you know, maybe again one of the strengths that audio provides is it does force people to actually - whether it’s the story of how the research was done, or what comes next, or how it’s going to change the way listeners live - I think it does sort of force people to look at finding the story within the numbers.

Editor: Nisha Gaind

I was going to say, I think that’s a really pertinent point and probably one of the things I was thinking about as well, that for example, when we listen to pod pieces here and we might have also done a written news piece on it as well, I really love listening to the pod pieces because it forces you to listen to it in a linear way. And I think especially when your job is reading and writing, you become very quick at skimming down to the part of a story that has the actual news in it. You can’t scrub through a piece of audio very quickly in a meaningful way, you get to listen to it in that way.

Editor: Anna Nagle

One of the other things I really like with audio is that it’s much more immersive. You can shut your eyes and be somewhere, be transported by what you’re listening to.

Host: Adam Levy

One of the things that I have always really liked about audio is that it gives voice to an issue, and partly that’s because I like the sound of my own voice. But I think it is a slight disservice to writing to suggest it doesn’t, as I sometimes am inclined to do, because if you read a great piece of writing, it does have voice and you want to read it in order, you don’t want to skip paragraphs, you are drawn in and taken along on the journey. But I guess it doesn’t have that by default in the way that podcasting does.

Editor: Nisha Gaind

I think it’s a lot easier in an audio piece because your sources are talking to you and you can hear them and you can differentiate their points. Often in long pieces of writing it can get quite difficult to differentiate characters.

Host: Adam Levy

It’s a nightmare when two contributors have similar sounding voices though. You have to constantly remind listeners who they’re listening to, and that is where video shines - at least you have the face as well. Heaven forbid you ever report on identical twins. Of course, increasingly, apart from multimedia, a huge part of reporting is now going towards social media, and while video and I think writing do quite well when we promote them on social media, we have long-struggled to find a way to get people scrolling through Twitter or Facebook to stop and listen to our audio pieces. Anna, what is it about audio that disadvantages it on these platforms?

Editor: Anna Nagle

So, I mean, one of the most difficult things with audio on social is that you have to listen to it which is a pretty fundamental feature of it. So, you’ll see that on Facebook, even if people are uploading videos, there’ll be captions or there’ll be text on the screen because the way that people tend to consume it is not with sound.

Host: Adam Levy

Geoff, do NPR have a particular strategy for getting audio out there on social media?

Editor: Geoff Brumfiel

Nobody listens to our audio on social media. Our strategy is to write web stories that accompany a lot of our big features. I think the key is that, you know, the social media, the digital revolution has created audio pathways but I think that they’re not Facebook and Twitter.

Editor: Anna Nagle

Us deciding that we want audio to be on social is not going to make it happen. What makes sense is to put the content where it’s most natural for people to consume it, and if that’s via a podcast app on their phone, then that’s what makes sense and that’s how we work with the content. Trying to force something where it doesn’t naturally live is not going to really get us anywhere.

Host: Adam Levy

Well, this takes us on to our second subject for the day, which is working out what our audience wants in the first place, trying to deduce what is best for our audience. Anna, this is what takes up a lot of your time, right?

Editor: Anna Nagle

Yeah, me and my crystal ball try and do that every day. So, I guess one of the big differences between traditional print and now the majority of our content is online is that we now have ways to be able to track when people are coming to a website, see what they’re reading, see where they’re going. Like we are basically sitting over your shoulder and watching every move you make. But one of the things that the focus has been on more recently in the last few years, is this word engagement which is a bit of a buzzword now across media, which is moving beyond what have been called ‘vanity metrics’. So basically, a raw traffic to a website won’t make any difference between someone who stayed for 2 seconds and someone who stayed for 20 minutes. Whereas now we’re trying to make a more nuanced approach and seeing exactly whether people are reading your content, whether they are listening or whether they are watching, but one of the things that I think is really important, that I’m keen for us to do more of, is to make the whole process more of a conversation. So, rather than us as journalists and editors deciding what we think you need to read, is allowing people to have that channel to communicate directly with us and let us know this story was really good, I really enjoyed it, I found value from it.

Host: Adam Levy

But at the moment, is most of the information we deduce from spying over people’s shoulders, or is there a fair fraction of it which comes from people writing to us and letting us know or us putting surveys out?

Editor: Anna Nagle

It’s an art more than a science in many ways. We have to kind of put pieces of the puzzle together and see what’s happening. But we do things like we do look at the raw traffic, we can see what’s happening on social media, what people are saying around certain stories. People email us, they drop us messages on social. We don’t have a commenting section on the website at the moment. Many websites do and some websites have started doing interesting things like before you can comment, you have to answer a question about the content of the article you’ve just read.

Host: Adam Levy

I remember there was kind of a prank website which I think on April Fool’s Day, maybe, saying, you know, it had some unbelievable statistic as the headline, and then the rest of the article actually specified that the headline was made up and it was just to investigate how many people commented on the headline without reading the content of the title.

Editor: Anna Nagle

That is something that we see a lot on social media actually, is that people will share things and comment on things based solely on the headline or the thing that you can see in that snapshot.

Host: Adam Levy

That’s why this episode is going to be ‘OMG: You won’t believe what happened in Backchat this month!’

Editor: Geoff Brumfiel

So, here’s my question. You know, you work for a scientific journal, you’re all into your data. What metric do you value among all those metrics you gather on your readers? I mean, is it time on page, is it raw views, is it click-throughs? What is it that you guys see as being most important?

Editor: Anna Nagle

That’s the million-dollar question. So, the thing is, it’s a combination of things. We don’t boil everything down to one metric to rule them all because that’s never going to work. It’s almost on a story-by-story basis. There are some things that we might expect to get a huge number of views, but if something doesn’t get a huge number of views, but we know that it’s appealed and be read by a certain section of our community and has had some kind of impact there, then that’s great. That’s just as good as something else getting thousands and thousands of views. But we’re also really interested in qualitative metrics and that’s really, really tricky to be able to get a handle on because you can’t sort of go into the real world, and do I would like to search the real world for impacts of this investigative feature that we’ve done because the world doesn't quite work that way. So, that tends to be on a much more ad-hoc basis. But we’re really interested in knowing if our news stories or reports have made a difference in the real world.

Editor: Nisha Gaind

And we do exactly that. We do track that sort of impact and occasionally we may hear that some expert-authored piece has been passed around in the hallowed halls of some government or institution and that obviously matters loads, and that’s exactly what lots of these pieces are intended to do.

Host: Adam Levy

Nisha, when you’re considering topics to commission, do you consider, say, the stats? Do you think last time we did a story on this topic it got all these click-throughs, that means we should do it again or is that not a part of the thinking when we’re deciding something?

Editor: Nisha Gaind

I think that is sometimes part of the thinking and there are definitely topics that find the balance - they’re both very important to our readers and they’re also very starry topics that a broader set of readers like to read about, and we’re very aware of that. I think it would be probably rare that we would do something just for the clicks, but…

Editor: Anna Nagle

Yeah, Nature’s version of clickbait is anything with a P value in the headline.

Host: Adam Levy

For Nature Video, certainly, we know that there’s some topics which will just attract more attention. If it has robots in the title then it’s going to get quite a lot of views.

Editor: Anna Nagle

So, interestingly I think the kind of things that tend to do well on the engagement things that we look at are anything to do with your life in science, community things, anything about how hard it is to get a job in science or just the insane working hours and environments and that kind of thing.

Editor: Nisha Gaind

And things like open access and CRISPR. We still love CRISPR.

Editor: Anna Nagle

Everyone loves CRISPR.

Host: Adam Levy

Geoff, do you find that at NPR you have to chase listens to some capacity or are things just done for their inherent value?

Editor: Geoff Brumfiel

We’re not, no, I wouldn’t say we chase listens. I mean, we’re a news network so we’re kind of trying to report on things that people want to know about in the moment. We’re not like Nature, right. I mean, Nature is more of a community publication and we’re definitely trying to hit much broader topic areas. On the other hand, you know, we’re a non-profit and we’re a public service, and so if we want to talk about CRISPR - which we do a surprising amount - you know, we’re not going to shy away from it. Obviously, every journalist wants their story to be heard or read and so we do try and make them as appealing as possible.

Host: Adam Levy

In terms of the audience who actually get in touch with active feedback, there are times when we as editors might not necessarily agree with what they’re saying. So, for example, on the Nature Podcast, we updated our music a year or two ago and we all absolutely loved the new music but almost everyone who got in touch by email, emailed us to tell us that they were not fans. And, I mean, maybe there’s a selection bias there - the people emailing are the people that have a problem with something - but it does end up leaving you questioning your music taste somewhat.

Editor: Anna Nagle

I know your taste in music Adam - it’s fine. One of the things we see a lot is, it’s the good and the bad of social media, it means that people have a direct channel to us. They can tell us exactly what they think in no uncertain terms and if they don’t like it they will say so, loud and proud and make sure that everyone out there knows it. But similarly, that is also one of the places we can really tell if we’ve hit a nerve and covered something that is really meaningful. The Briefing subscribers - and I think Flora was on Backchat a month or so ago - we get emails every single day from them, and it’s great having that direct line of communication. They tell us what they like, what they don’t like, by the way have you seen this, have you seen that. What it really is, is seeing our audience as human beings and we really want to build that relationship with them and build that trust between us and them, that we’re providing the kind of content that they want.

Editor: Nisha Gaind

As an editor, often when I want to see very quickly what a story is doing, I will just go to our Twitter page and see how much it’s been retweeted or liked, and you can often see that those start racking up really quickly for popular stories, and I will usually go there first before looking at our actual analytics which tell us how many people are on the page because if it’s provoking conversation that’s where you’re going to see it - you’re going to see it on social.

Host: Adam Levy

And much as I might complain about people who write in to complain, there are times of course, that we make a misstep. We’re fallible like anyone else, and certainly our audience can perform that function as well, pointing out things we as editors might have overlooked.

Editor: Nisha Gaind

I think that’s really important as well because you get to take a step back every so often, because when something is often good, you don’t think why did that go so well, it seems implicit. But if someone has levelled a criticism, it’s something that makes you step back and think about what’s fair, what isn’t fair, what we could have done differently, or actually is it an unreasonable criticism, or is it a totally reasonable criticism, and often they are.

Host: Adam Levy

Let’s turn to our final topic of the month, and I want to loop back to a conversation that we were having on Backchat a full two years ago, and that topic is Brexit. At the time, this was the science politics story that just kept giving, and editor Celeste Biever talked to us about a never-ending stream of Brexit stories. Now, spoiler alert: the never-ending stream in Nature has slowed to something of a trickle. Nisha, where are we with reporting on Brexit these days?

Editor: Nisha Gaind

So that’s right, the UK voted to leave the European Union two years ago, and it was the political story of the century, of a generation, and it also had a very real effect on our readers. And at the time, like you say, there was just a frenetic pace of stories and news and it affected just absolutely everything. A year passed, another year passed, uncertainty has ruled and that has dictated a lot of what we do and don’t cover because the negotiations about the UK leaving the European Union have just been fraught with uncertainty, fraught with infighting, and we still don’t have many of the answers that we need. So, there was a sort of hump in stories. We did lots and lots of news stories immediately after the vote because there was just such a huge amount of news, and then after that, I think Brexit in the newsroom became a bit of a moany, groany word.

Host: Adam Levy

If you compare this to a lot of the other British press where it’s still making headlines day after day, week after week, what is it about us being a science publication which means we end up covering it less?

Editor: Nisha Gaind

For scientists, lots of the key decisions about how science will be affected haven’t been made, and that’s most of the reason that we don’t weigh in all of the time because we’re waiting for particular decisions. I mean, there have been sort of spikes in reporting things that affect us. Nuclear regulation and drug regulation and those sorts of things are marks that we can hit. But the sort of day-to-day political intrigue and political infighting is not really our wheelhouse. And science, like lots of other sectors, we’re waiting for our big decisions which have sort of started to emerge in the last few months.

Editor: Geoff Brumfiel

As you try and get your reporters to figure out what’s happening, how clear is the process over there on the ground? I mean, can you call up these agencies or even ministries and get any sort of clarity on how this is playing out? I mean, is there any process for your journalists?

Editor: Nisha Gaind

Usually, journalists have a big role to play in actually clarifying the situation and it is utterly muddy. It’s become a malaise of just confusion and uncertainty, and never-ending reshuffles and the agency’s names have changed. Lest we forget we had an election last year which ordinarily would have been a huge piece of news, and sort of just got sucked into this day-to-day confusion. Probably, the public may have even tuned out of what has happened with negotiations, and I can say that I have definitely tuned out of some of it, and in those cases what’s quite helpful is to read the press of other countries. The US press is often quite good at clarifying the situation for an outside reader because the UK press will be very, very in the weeds.

Host: Adam Levy

Geoff, as part of the US press, thank you for your service in clarifying our news.

Editor: Geoff Brumfiel

Absolutely, no problem.

Host: Adam Levy

It’s important to point out though, it’s been two years since the vote. We still haven’t exited. This story is not over. Presumably there will have to be a bit more clarity at some point.

Editor: Nisha Gaind

So, we’re coming up to about six months to go. We’re supposed to be leaving at the end of March and we’ll enter a transition period, so we fully expect some of the important decisions to be made in the coming months, and we’re preparing for a ramping up of coverage and everybody’s going to hopefully get back on their stations. The big thing that scientists are waiting for will be to see what happens with freedom of movement. That’s also something that non-scientists, everybody will be looking at as well and also, how the UK will associate with the European science funding framework. We will start covering Brexit more as these decisions and as this clarity begins to emerge, and it has just about started to emerge.

Editor: Anna Nagle

Often on our site, we get comments from people on social asking why we bother covering policy and politics, and we’re a science publication, why are we covering this stuff? But this kind of thing, when it happens, has such a direct effect on what scientists do day to day. This is exactly why we cover this stuff because when we got the Brexit result, when the referendum results came in at whatever time it was in the morning, we were straight out there on social asking people what their reaction was, and the flood of really quite terrified responses from people all across Europe going I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t know where I’m going to be able to live, I don’t know what’s going to happen to my job. It really, really does affect the community that we’re writing about and for, really deeply. So, it is important for us to cover this stuff.

Editor: Nisha Gaind

It’s also really great, in this instance, to be a publication with a very definite community, and so we can dig quite carefully into the issues that affect them.

Editor: Geoff Brumfiel

Well, fortunately after March it will all be cleared up.

Editor: Anna Nagle

Everything will be better then, definitely.

Editor: Nisha Gaind

That’s what we’re waiting for.

Host: Adam Levy

Well, thank you to the American for bringing some extra clarity, once again. And I think that is it for this Backchat, which I’m sad to say is likely my final Backchat as host, as I’m leaving the Nature Podcast next month. But thank you to Nisha Gaind, Anna Nagle and Geoff Brumfiel for joining me for my swansong. Before I leave, I’m sure Anna would love it if you gave us some feedback on the show, so drop us an email at podcast@nature.com, or tweet at us: @NaturePodcast. To make sure we see it, just use #audioisbetterthanprint - we’ll have it trending in no time. I’m Adam Levy, thanks for listening.