AOE! An effective – and fun! – way of making news product decisions

All too often, operationalizing your product strategy can become a chaos of spreadsheets, emails, Slack channels and the occasional Zoom meeting. Stakeholders multiply, overwhelming the process; technical aspects eclipse content and creativity; and stuffy procedures stifle curiosity.

If your development cycle is distracting your team from what’s most important to creating and/or deploying a great news product, I have good news for you. Product decision making doesn’t have to be cumbersome, stale or – dare I say it – roadmap-y. We can make this process fun, motivating and productive for all involved with the AOE (pronounced “ayo”) assessment.

Giovanni Moujaes at the NPA Forum in May 2024.

If your news product strategy hits all three marks of AOE — Accessibility, Optics and Engagement — you’ll want to yell “ayo” to declare success. AOE was developed in May at the NPA Forum, an in-person unconference that brought news product thinkers from across the industry together to collaborate on sustainable solutions to current and future audience and product challenges.

In short: A great news product should improve accessibility in a meaningful way, enhance brand optics for the organization and deliver high-quality engagement with users. If your news product strategy only addresses one or two of these areas, maybe it should be reconsidered.

Accessibility

News accessibility is about improving the reading/viewing/listening experience so that the greatest number of people can experience the greatest possible understanding of the content at hand. The "greatest" is modified by any resource, technical or structural limitations that would prevent 100% of your current or possible audience from achieving a complete experience.

Looking at accessibility through this lens requires teams to consider how their product can be used by people with disabilities as well as those with other constraints, such as:

• Commuters on public transportation.

• Members who primarily get their news through short-form video.

• Readers who prefer brief summaries over longform reports.

• Residents who speak different languages, and more.

A great news product should improve your total news accessibility in some definable – and meaningful – way. Perhaps it’s a text-to-speech embed at the top of stories that helps Spanish speakers understand a story in English. Or maybe it’s a summarizing widget that toggles between “brief” and “longform” for readers on the go.

Accessibility should be a part of the planning process and not an afterthought once a product has already been deployed.

Optics

Determining how a news product enhances the optics of a campaign, platform or entire organization matters a lot for your revenue strategy, whether you’re trying to attract readers, foundations, donors, subscribers or advertisers. Optics-related decision making will often intersect with accessibility and engagement, but while the latter two concern how the product is used, the former focuses on how the product is displayed.

Thinking through the optics of your news products is essential to building a cohesive brand that aligns with the organization’s goals. An investigative news outlet with a strong mission and vision centered around transparency, for example, may want to invest in products across their website that emphasize the Trust Project’s eight trust indicators. This reinforces the brand and, intentionally or not, increases its trustworthiness with certain audiences.

On the flipside, saying one thing and doing another with poorly thought out products can make an organization lose the public’s trust faster than it can gain it back. For example, imagine a news organization seeking grants to reach ethnically diverse audiences that doesn’t have any news products demonstrating a commitment to serving that community’s needs, or worse, content that actively harms those audiences. They would be perceived as disingenuous.

Remember: If you neglect to build a strong, cohesive foundation for how your organization is perceived early on, you may not be able to weather an inevitable audience earthquake.

Engagement

Creating healthy habits with low friction is key to building a resilient news audience. For example, you could add a story quiz to the bottom of an article to prompt page interaction, encourage greater scroll depth (once a habit has formed) and lead to longer session durations, all of which present additional opportunities to target readers with CTAs and convert them to paying subscribers or donors.

Each step of your user’s journey presents new opportunities for engagement, and strong product strategies consider the user’s experience in both that specific context and in relation to their larger experience of interacting with the product and organization.

The engagement part of the product decision-making equation is often the easiest to quantify using analytics data, but some decisions may still be subjective. An invasive overlay might increase conversions, but ultimately, decrease the number of returning readers who become annoyed. Or a poorly optimized infographic script can decrease engagement and average time on page.

How you define healthy engagement should tie into your organization’s overall audience goals. Ultimately, a great news product increases interactions and time on platform while preserving a quality user experience.

Meeting the needs of your organization

AOE is highly customizable and scalable. Kat Sheplavy, Sr. Director of News Products and Experiences at McClatchy, has adopted the framework with her team and added “yield” as a fourth consideration (AYOE to that!). She says it’s “all about ROI and will definitely vary by product, but yield helps us focus by determining what area we have the most opportunity for.”

Kat explains further:

Stories that have a high probability to get a lot of search traffic will likely lead to more ad impressions, so yield equals ad revenue.

But investigative stories typically do better with a smaller audience of subscribers or more engaged nonsubscribers. Here, yield could equal subscriber retention and/or converting registered users.

New newsletters is another example of a product that will ‘yield’ more in the long term via known audience and return visits that equate to ad revenue and potentially subscriptions. But it is important to focus on one element of yield first so you can measure return accurately.

So make it your AOE-wn (sorry, not sorry) and challenge yourself. We created this framework to help you identify a strong news product strategy, so if you find it helpful, let us know. Find me in the NPA Slack or on LinkedIn.

Giovanni Moujaes is a product thinker based in California, with over a decade of experience in news production, content strategy, and audience development. He now leads product at the local investigative newsroom inewsource and heads a working group within the NPA Slack community focused on developing open-source AI solutions to vexing industry challenges.