In a fast-moving election cycle — particularly one that has so much global interest — providing the type of content audiences are looking for is both challenging and imperative.

During this week’s Webinar, How The New York Times and Washington Post are approaching elections coverage, INMA members heard from The New York Times’ Hannah Poferl, chief data officer and head of audience, about how the company is approaching the 2024 presidential election.

Amalie Nash, lead of INMA’s Newsroom Transformation Initiative, said true newsroom transformation is all about “understanding what your audience wants, responding to data, and using that to influence what it is that you’re reporting on a day-to-day basis.”

When it comes to elections, which dominate conversations and coverage for months, it’s particularly important to identify ways to differentiate your coverage and cut through the clutter.  

For The New York Times, covering the elections is “obviously one of the biggest priorities right now,” Poferl explained. Although the organisation is already revered for its political coverage, Poferl said one of its priorities last year was to hire an audience editor to work closely with the political desk, focusing particularly on the elections: “It’s such an important storyline, and it’s important for the whole year.”

Despite the weight the elections carry, the Times’ overall approach to election coverage doesn’t vary greatly from its daily work, Poferl said. That means the company is maximising the reach of its political coverage, encouraging users to share that coverage, and making the most of key tentpole events such as debates and conventions, which “is when the world tunes in.”

Every tentpole event is accompanied by extensive planning from the audience team, and Poferl said they typically identify which target audience they want to reach and what kind of numbers they’re hoping for.

“We might not always share it with the editors, we don’t want them to be distracted by that, but our audience editor certainly knows,” she explained. “[We know] the percentage of our subscribers that we are hoping read this coverage, so we put a lot of planning into those events.”

Focus on the format

In addition to looking at what coverage is provided, the Times studies which formats are most successful. Poferl noted that to tell the election story, it has expanded its formats. Followers on TikTok or Instagram will see more reporters on camera talking about their coverage.

While this isn’t unique to the Times, she said it’s a new area that the company has invested in: “It’s very big and very new for us because we’re not typically on camera a lot, and so we’re asking a lot of our reporters to make themselves available,” she said.

So far, it is gaining traction and adds to what readers have said they want.

“We survey readers a lot, and what we’re hearing is that they really want to understand and have a relationship with our journalists,” she said. “It builds trust. It’s more explanatory. They feel like they’re understanding the big picture.”

While it’s hard to explicitly measure the impact this new approach is having, Poferl said she is confident it is helping drive more traffic.

Leveraging durable content

Evergreen or durable content — in this case, built around elections — also represents a significant opportunity to attract users.

“We have so many stories that are relevant day after day after day … and that’s absolutely true for the election,” she said.

While many people come to see the day’s latest news, they’ll also look at some of the explainers surrounding the election and content that addresses questions that arise during the primaries. The Times created a process to flag content that it has already run and then update and repackage it.

“We’re getting so much value from it, and it’s nice because we’ve already done the hard work,” she said. The most challenging part was creating a workflow process to remember what has been run and to see how it can be repackaged.

Currently, that means using data to identify which stories are pulling readers in. Then the audience editors can ask an editor to update the top of an older story, allowing the content to be re-promoted in its more current form. Poferl said she continues looking for a way to streamline this process.

The power of the polls

In such a rapidly changing climate, readers seek out what the polls say. Poferl said the Times is putting a lot of effort into building its polls to encourage audiences to return throughout the election cycle.

“We’re putting a lot of product work into how we build them so that they’re better front doors,” she said, emphasising that the focus now is to make them accessible and “easy to dive into.”

Bridging audience and editorial

Pairing an audience editor with editorial desk heads is an effective strategy that is paying off for the Times. Part of what drives that success is the willingness of editorial to embrace an audience editor as part of the team:

“They’re not there to be a promotion team and pitch the homepage; the audience editors on the desks have buy-in with their editorial desk. And part of that buy-in comes from everyone understanding they know the mission of the desk and the broader mission of the Times.”

Many editors are reverse mentoring or cross-training their audience team, helping them develop stronger editorial judgement, which means more success for both editorial and audience. When an audience editor suggests something from an audience standpoint that doesn’t make sense editorially, it becomes a teaching moment instead of simply being dismissed.

She added that finding an audience editor with the right skills is also imperative: “You need to hire people with really strong editorial judgement. You need audience editors who are willing to work with scrappy data, imperfect data, but understand how to use things directionally,” Poferl said. “And you need audience editors who can work a spreadsheet because data is at the heart.” 

However, she also noted the importance of not overlooking audience thinkers who have yet to master the data: “If you have really creative, great audience thinkers and they’re struggling with the data part, it’s an opportunity to train.”

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