The Washington Post’s recent announcement of staffing cuts is a story with heroes, villains, and victims, but buried beneath the headlines is the reality of a big brand publisher confronting the same changes with Google Search that SEOs, publishers, and ecommerce stores are struggling with. The following are insights into their strategy to claw back traffic and income that could be useful for everyone seeking to stabilize traffic and grow.
Disclaimer
The Washington Post is proposing the following strategies in response to steep drops in search traffic, the rise of multi-modal content consumption, and many other factors that are fragmenting online audiences. The strategies have yet to be proven.
The value lies in analyzing what they are doing and understanding if there are any useful ideas for others.
Problem That Is Being Solved
The reasons given for the announced changes are similar to what SEOs, online stores, and publishers are going through right now because of the decline of search and the hyper-diversification of sources of information.
The memo explains:
“Platforms like Search that shaped the previous era of digital news, and which once helped The Post thrive, are in serious decline. Our organic search has fallen by nearly half in the last three years.
And we are still in the early days of AI-generated content, which is drastically reshaping user experiences and expectations.”
Those problems are the exact same ones affecting virtually all online businesses. This makes The Washington Post’s solution of interest to everyone beyond just news sites.
Problems Specific To The Washington Post
Recent reporting on The Washington Post tended to narrowly frame it in the context of politics, concerns about the concentration of wealth, and how it impacts coverage of sports, international news, and the performing arts, in addition to the hundreds of staff and reporters who lost their jobs.
The job cuts in particular are a highly specific solution applied by The Washington Post and are highly controversial. An opinion can be made that cutting some of the lower performing topics removes the very things that differentiate the website. As you will see next, Executive Editor Matt Murray justifies the cuts as listening to readers’ signals.
Challenges Affecting Everyone
If you zoom out, there is a larger pattern of how many organizations are struggling to understand where the audience has gone and how best to bring them back.
Shared Industry Challenges
- Changes in content consumption habits
- Decline of search
- Rise of the creator economy
- Growth of podcasts and video shows
- Social media competing for audience attention
- Rise of AI search and chat
A recent podcast interview (link to Spotify) with the executive editor of The Washington Post, Matt Murray, revealed a years-long struggle to restructure the organization’s workflow into one that:
- Was responsive to audience signals
- Could react in real time instead of the rigid print-based news schedule
- Explored emerging content formats so as to evolve alongside readers
- Produced content that is perceived as indispensable
The issues affecting the Washington Post are similar to issues affecting everyone else from recipe bloggers to big brand review sites. A key point Murray made was the changes were driven by audience signals.
Matt Murray said the following about reader signals:
“Readers in today’s world tell you what they want and what they don’t want. They have more power. …And we weren’t picking up enough of the reader signals.”
Then a little later on he again emphasized the importance of understanding reader signals:
“…we are living in a different kind of a world that is a data reader centric world. Readers send us signals on what they want. We have to meet them more where they are. That is going to drive a lot of our success.”
Whether listening to audience signals justifies cutting staff or ends up removing the things that differentiate The Washington Post remains to be seen.
For example, I used to subscribe to the print edition of The New Yorker for the articles, not for the restaurant or theater reviews yet they were still of interest to me as I liked to keep track of trends in live theater and dining. The New Yorker cartoons rarely had anything to do with the article topics and yet they were a value add. Would something like that show up in audience signals?
Build A Base Then Adapt
The memo paints what they’re doing as a foundation for building a strategy that is still evolving, not as a proven strategy. In my opinion that reflects the uncertainty introduced by the rapid decline of classic search and the knowledge that there are no proven strategies.
That uncertainty makes it more interesting to examine what a big brand organization like The Washington Post is doing to create a base strategy to start from and adapt it based on outcomes. That, in itself, is a strategy for coping with a lack of proven tactics.
Three concrete goals they are focusing on are:
- Attracting readers
- Create content that leads to subscriptions
- Increase engagement.
They write:
“From this foundation, we aim to build on what is working, and grow with discipline and intent, to experiment, to measure and deepen what resonates with customers.”
In the podcast interview, Murray also described the stability of a foundation as a way to nurture growth, explaining that it creates the conditions for talent to do its best work. He explains that building the foundation gives the staff the space to focus on things that work.
He explained:
“One of the reasons I wanted to get to stability, as I want room for that talent to thrive and flourish.
I also want us to develop it in a more modern multi-modal way with those that we’ve been able to do.”
A Path To Becoming Indispensable
The Washington Post memo offered insights about their strategy, with the goal stated that the brand must become indispensable to readers, naming three criteria that articles must validate against.
According to the memo:
“We can’t be everything to everyone. But we must be indispensable where we compete. That means continually asking why a story matters, who it serves and how it gives people a clearer understanding of the world and an advantage in navigating it.”
Three Criteria For Content
- Content must matter to site visitors.
- Content must have an identifiable audience.
- Content must provide understanding and also be applicable (useful).
Content Must Matter
Regardless of whether the content is about a product, a service, or informational, the Washington Post’s strategy states that content must strongly fulfill a specific need. For SEOs, creators, ecommerce stores, and informational content publishers, “mattering” is one of the pillars that support making a business indispensable to a site visitor and provides an advantage.
Identifiable Audience
Information doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but traditional SEO has strongly focused on keyword volume and keyword relevance, essentially treating information as existing in a space devoid of human relevance. Keyword relevance is not the same as human relevance. Keyword relevance is relevance to a keyword phrase, not relevance to a human.
This point matters because AI Chat and Search destroys the concept of keywords, because people are no longer typing in keyword phrases but are instead engaging in goal-oriented discussions.
When SEOs talk about keyword relevance, they are talking about relevance to an algorithm. Put another way, they are essentially defining the audience as an algorithm.
So, point two is really about stepping back and asking, “Why does a person need this information?”
Provide Understanding And Be Applicable
Point three states that it’s not enough for content to provide an understanding of what happened (facts). It requires that the information must make the world around the reader navigable (application of the facts).
This is perhaps the most interesting pillar of the strategy because it acknowledges that information vomit is not enough. It must be information that is utilitarian. Utilitarian in this context means that content must have some practical use.
In my opinion, an example of this principle in the context of an ecommerce site is product data. The other day I was on a fishing lure site, and the site assumed that the consumer understood how each lure is supposed to be used. It just had the name of the lure and a photo. In every case, the name of the lure was abstract and gave no indication of how the lure was to be used, under what circumstances, and what tactic it was for.
Another example is a clothing site where clothing is described as small, medium, large, and extra large, which are subjective measurements because every retailer defines small and large differently. One brand I shop at consistently labels objectively small-sized jackets as medium. Fortunately, that same retailer also provides chest, shoulder, and length measurements, which enable a user to understand exactly whether that clothing fits.
I think that’s part of what the Washington Post memo means when it says that the information should provide understanding but also be applicable. It’s that last part that makes the understanding part useful.
Three Pillars To Thriving In A Post-Search Information Economy
All three criteria are pillars that support the mandate to be indispensable and provide an advantage. Satisfying those goals help content differentiate it from information vomit, AI slop. Their strategy supports becoming a navigational entity, a destination that users specifically seek out and it helps the publisher, ecommerce store, and SEOs build an audience in order to claw back what classic search no longer provides.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Roman Samborskyi
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