You should be using interactive formats in your publication daily, here’s why

Hello, fellow journalists and reporters. Today I want to talk about how interactive stories help newsrooms win new readers and engage existing audiences. In a battle with social media, authors and editors need to continuously learn and improve, so today we will be going over the case of one particular project — Meduza. Started as fresh unknown publication 2 years ago, Meduza reached the top of the Russian newsrooms Olymp with more than 12 millions monthly readers. Let’s dig together to discover main drivers of growth.

Meduza Project, https://meduza.io

Meduza is a young Russian independent newsroom, covering broad agenda on clashes with the government, political opposition activities, corruption, personal stories, and interviews, etc. And… it’s not something new for the Russian media scene. Many big players (including BBC Moscow, Deutsche Welle) are playing in the same market, so the competition is high.

The secret sauce behind that success story is the amazing development team, led by my friend, Samat Galimov. We studied mathematics at Moscow State University, and, being a very technical guy, he was able to apply that engineering approach to make Meduza successful.

Many even see Meduza not as a newsroom, but as a technology company, experimenting with the innovative approach for telling news.

Buy / Sell Bitcoin. Meduza’s interactive game

For years, publications use text and pictures to deliver on a story. We had successful rich interactive projects (Snowfall was one of the first which set the trend). But these are the exceptions. The mindset of a majority of authors and publishers remains the same — text is the way to go, special projects are expensive and hard to produce; games, tests, and surveys are low-quality formats, not related to real journalism (hello, Playbuzz). So, Meduza team challenged that mindset. From day one they used interactive formats on regular basis to attract new readers and prove such business model is viable. No weeks of data gathering, formats producing and polishing. Just quick reusable interactive apps applied to showcase everyday hottest news. (they do big projects as well, but let’s keep that out of this story). Let’s learn how that practices helped grow audience and how to improve our own vision for the future of interactive media.

1. Publication is more than a collection of articles and news.

Meduza does not build its main page as a regular media site, but rather as a live collection of web applications, through which readers discover news and get new experiences.

Your publication is no longer a collection of articles, it is a web app that is updated in real time.

The first approach for Meduza was to to replace comments sections with chats and broadcast the latest and hottest replies to a single live tape. The outcome?

Meduza replaced comments with Facebook-like messaging app

1. A familiar messaging interface (Facebook) helps your readers quickly adapt to your service and post more comments.
2. A single site-wide tape of replies sends more traffic to the trending news. This mechanics promotes virality and boosts social media shares.

The average number of replies in a live chat and tape increased by 23% compared to traditional comments section under the article.

2. Fresh ideas, quick experiments — it’s good. Simplification is cool.

The competition remains high in modern media, where lots of newsrooms typically target the same audience. So, one need to run experiments in order to stand out and win. Engaging interactive apps, when applied on purpose, can become a strong baseline for transforming the publication into a media hub. One example from Meduza — the concept of interactive cards. Lists, logos, quotes, charts, numbers — all this is extremely easy to adapt to a single card format, which incentivizes reader to uncover the content on the card after reading the preface. These small UX experiments prepare your audience for bigger projects and even create demand. Cards — short and capacious messages — are also naturally suitable for extensive social media sharing.

Simple card. Tells the story in one picture. Got social media shares boost.

Here are the results of a simple A/B test. A deputy of the State Duma of Russia molested female journalists in the workplace. This went public, and the newsrooms began to boycott the parliament briefings in protest. The list of those who joined the boycott was constantly updating with new brands. Most publications, that used a simple text list to report updates on participants, received no more than a couple of thousand reposts and little traction. Meduza placed the logos of all participants on the card and turned the story into live interactive — “All Russian media that joined the boycott of the State Duma, in one picture, updating live.” The card has collected almost 10 thousand reposts only on Facebook.

Ordinary text list: 👍👍 thousands of likesLive logos on card: 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍 thousands of likes

Live interactive card with logos

3. Interactive formats are actually suitable for news.

Many authors still think games, quizzes and polls are for entertainment only (remember that “Who you are in the Game of Thrones?”). Some of my peers directly said, that ‘playable gimmicks’ are never awarded as a true journalism. Change that. Meduza uses quick interactives to deliver broader news context, to highlight trending topics through novel formats, daily.

To organically incorporate interactives into publication’s everyday agenda, one need to start thinking out of the typical ‘just tell what happened’ mindset. Which additional value could be put into the news? It turned out, that many topics may potentially impact audience decisions and actions. People consume news to stay updated on the latest developments and be able to react timely. Offer an analysis and personalized advice on issues, relevant to readers, to start building a partnership with your community.

News — “Russian authorities are blocking the Telegram messenger”Tutorial app — “Setting up a VPN and proxy on your phone”

News — “There is the presidential election in Russia”How-to Guide — “How do you vote for the president, while on a trip?”

News — “In the Siberian shopping center the fire killed 64 people”Checklist app — “Checking the fire alarm in your nearest shopping mall”

Meduza proactively seeks an opportunity to incorporate personalization into the trending agenda. Having 10M+ monthly uniques means that there is no ‘one-thing-fit-them-all’ approach, so that is where interactivity helps. Interactive apps (such as guides, step-by-step tutorials or calculators) can target specific needs, providing valuable personalized proposals or estimations. Even simple interactive apps provide authentic user experience, compared to static text. People understand that job has been done putting together this solution, and this feeling strongly incentivizes them to try it.

Interactive Guide. Captions on the left. Each card is adapting, based on previous interaction.

Recently, Russian authorities blocked Telegram, a popular messenger. Many newsrooms posted on ‘You need to find a proxy to access Telegram”. Meduza went a little farther on that topic. They quickly assembled interactive guide, that asked about user’s phone type, OS and offered personalized step-by-step instructions on getting around the block to every single user. This simple guide (no rocket science behind!) was treated as an authentic built-in app, so people knew, the one-stop solution is there and shared a lot with friends and communities.

News article “Russian authorities are blocking the Telegram messenger” 👍👍👍Tutorial app — “Setting up a VPN /proxy on your phone” 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

Further, embedding interactives into your publication allows to gather inputs and publish stats. Oftenly, newsrooms lack data to deliver on the story. Meduza used interactives to gather insufficient data from audiences, in form of beautiful polls. The database is updated in real time and users can access accumulated results immediately after a completion of the poll. That enables editorials to experiment with crowdsourcing journalism and run various audience research.

Live updates to interactive poll results, as more data flows in

4. Ambitious projects production doesn’t require a separate team

Let’s look into the traditional niche of interactive specials. Investigative stories, interactive long reads, interview series, large data models — all that remains the charter and proud for established newsrooms with the wide audience. The Financial Times did The Uber Game from dozens of interviews with drivers. Many people worked for weeks on this amazing project, where professional graphics and software engineering was involved.

Contrary to FT, Meduza’s simple yet engaging card games don’t require a dev team to build

Not many publications can afford a separate interactive production team these days. However, modern web technologies allow building high-quality interactive formats quickly and without whopping budgets. Basic interactive mechanics — games, calcs, guides, surveys, and tests are easily adaptable and can be paired with authentic illustrations, which also become easier to produce. Modern tools supply templates and constructors to assemble your custom formats quickly, without coding.

A homeless living simulator, Moscow.

Meduza has made the production of their mini-games an everyday routine, performed by authors without dev team. In their CMS, there are flows — Create Game / Create Test. The author needs to fill in question cards, customize answer options, put the cards together according to a script, add illustrations — and the game is ready. Interactive mini-games, tests, and polls quickly gain popularity on social media and blogs, which remains one of the strongest growth drivers for Meduza.

A young Russian media startup built its news business as a modern web platform rather than an ordinary newsroom site. Thanks to the talented team of engineers, interactive production tools were built into Meduza CMS. We know, that many media teams don’t have enough resource or scale to build in-house tools for their CMS. Therefore, inspired by Meduza, FT and others who delivered wonderful media projects, we make StaffWriter — a platform for creating embeddable interactive formats, so to enable more teams and newsrooms to get started with interactive production.