How do veterans of #vanlife feel about all the newbies? Can you make a statement about your gender, when there’s no one there to watch you? And is that “maskne” on your face, or is it plain old acne?
In case you want answers to any of these questions, head on over to the New York Times website. As I write, these stories are all up on the home page.
A guy named Tom Cleveland has been snooping on the Times. I wrote about him a few weeks ago. Through his snooping, he discovered how the NYT makes its headlines more dramatic through A/B testing.
Now Cleveland has put out a part two to his research. It’s about which stories linger on the Times digital front page. And the breakdown is this:
News: 46.6%
Opinion: 22.2%
Feature: 31.1%
“Categories and numbers, huh?” Let me translate what I think this means.
“News” you’re probably familiar with. “U.S. Adds 916,000 Jobs in Sign of Surging Labor Market.” No thrills there.
“Opinion” is a little more fluid. It includes hard-hitting editorial such as “The unsettling power of Easter” (also on the NYT front page right now) as well as the “If a gender falls in the forest” piece above.
And then there’s “Features.” This is apparently an industry term for pure fluff — your typical #vanlife and maskne pieces.
So adding up Opinion and Feature, we get that the NY Times shows this type of content 54.3% of the time on its front page. In other words, this is most of what they show — because it’s most of what people want to see.
Please believe me:
This is not my ant-sized attack on the elephant that is the New York Times. Instead, I just want to point out that people always want human-interest stuff, first and foremost.
If you’re in the business of feeding people whatever, just to sell subscriptions and ads, they you might as well stick to fluff or tabloid content.
On the other hand, perhaps you have an important message to share with the world. But you worry that your topic puts people to sleep. Or gives them a headache.
Don’t worry. It’s an easy problem to fix. Just wrap your dry, complex topic in a thick human-interest sandwich. People will happily devour it, all the way to the end. Here’s an example from an email I wrote last year:
“It’s a story of family betrayal… of breakthrough ideas, conceived in prison… of a small group of desperate visionaries who took an almost occult science… and combined it with a strange, untested new technology… to create the foundations of an industry worth over a quarter trillion dollars.”
Do you know what that paragraph was about? It’s about dry, technical topic. Namely, direct marketing, told through the colorful characters who dun it — Claude Hopkins, Gary Halbert, Ken McCarthy. And if you want to know how that story developed, you might like to sign up to my very human-friendly email newsletter.