Chapter 77: To Read? Or Listen? Both?

Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.

* * *

When you live in the world of analytics, as I have for a dozen years, it is tempting to focus on the story, literally, in real time. Is it being read? Where and for how long? Where are the readers coming from? And ohmygod where did they all just go?

This is neither healthy nor wise, for in focusing on the moment it is easy to lose track of the trend line. Because it is there that you can spot the greater and more useful insights.

Analytics are scary, especially for someone like me who came of age in the analog world where you had no clue how many people read a particular story, let alone who they were, how much time they devoted to that story, and whether reading one story prompted them to read another. Instead, editors and publishers relied on the blunt instruments of sales, as well as that seemingly surefire barometer for success: their own guts. Their guts, we began to learn when analog gave way to digital and its measuring capabilities, could be woefully wrong. 

This is not to say that analytics can or should replace an editor’s judgment about a story’s value. Rather they are a useful tool in adding knowledge to instinct, in much the same way that a sagacious baseball manager (looking at you Buck Showalter of the Mets, my hero of the moment!) incorporates the reams of data the team’s clever analytics folks dump on his desk every day into his deep knowledge of the game to make decisions on how best to win.

Winning is now a verb that is part of  writers’ lives, in ways not imaginable say, fifteen or twenty years ago. Winning then meant only getting a story or book sold. For book authors that began to change, as so much did, with Amazon. Suddenly, you could go to your book’s page and see your ranking. Not how many copies of your book Amazon had sold, just how your book stood in relation to everyone else’s. Trailing Stephen King and that cheesy book of advice for college grads. Dammit. 

It was at once dizzying and terrifying, and feels from an analytical standpoint almost quaint, given what that other digital behemoth Google can tell you about a story. In newsrooms across the world, the question asked most often by journalists of the new breed of audience analysts is: how did my story do? Meaning: how many readers? A number please, preferably a large one. To which those wise analysts might respond not necessarily with that single number but that number in the context of how many readers the story might have reasonably drawn. 

Analysts are trained to look at the bigger picture and editors have learned to follow suit. So even as I cannot help but look at how a story is performing at a particular moment in the history of the world, I remind myself to pause, go back and tweak the measurement tools to look beyond today. 

I have learned a good many things: that there is no way to predict which story will perform best, an insight repeated to me by wise audience people. Nor is there any way to necessarily understand why a story that seemed so promising failed to catch the audience wave. But perhaps the most interesting insight came when I compared our readership at The Delacorte Review over the past three years with readership of stories that appeared between 2013 and 2016 in our previous incarnation as The Big Roundtable.

Back then we deemed a story a success when it drew over 20,000 page views. Better still, we saw a very encouraging level of engagement in time-on-page of about six minutes, an eternity in a world where time is often measured in seconds. The number of page views - which corresponded roughly with the number of readers – was generally regarded as a strong number for small publishers like us. Some of our stories did far better, and as stories were picked up with our permission by other outlets around the world, we often lost track, even as new readers presumably discovered the work.

But those numbers today are nowhere near where they were eight or nine years ago. And in that regard we are not alone. I have talked with colleagues at other publications and have had access to other publishers’ analytics and can tell you that readership for long, written stories (I want to be specific here) for us and others is roughly half of what it was.

Wise colleagues attribute this to greater competition as well as to Facebook (yes, them, before they went Meta) advantaging stories because publishers boosted posts by paying to get them before more people. (Full confession: we used to pay to boost posts. They reached many more people, one percent of whom ever clicked on a link. We now save our money.)

But I felt my colleagues’ explanations did not quite capture what was going on.

Because no one ever mentioned what seemed like the most important variable: Serial Season One.

Serial did not invent the audio version of narrative nonfiction. But it did make listening to a particular serialized story into a national phenomenon. If podcasting before Serial was often associated with 20-minute edited segments or with two people sitting around gabbing about relationships, Serial got a lot of people, and with them sponsors, thinking about the potential for storytelling aimed at the ear rather than the eye.

As it happens, we had partnered with digg.com for a podcast series in 2016, What the Hell Happened in East New York. The story was a powerful account of New York’s most benighted neighborhood. The podcast took listeners behind the scenes to tell them how that story came to be. The focus was on the author, Kevin Heldman, a terrific journalist who needed to tell this story and who struggled in the reporting and the telling. It was Kevin’s story as much as it was the neighborhood’s.

Two numbers were striking: the total number of downloads of the four episodes – 50,000; and the number of page views of the written story that came on the fifth day of the series: 80,000. 

I suspect that if we had run what was an 8,000 word story on East New York on its own – as terrific as it was – it would not have drawn nearly so many readers. But the numbers also suggested that the podcast needed the story, in its written form, as much as the story needed the podcast.

I am not suggesting that we had discovered something new. For years journalists have been discovering ways that different storytelling forms can complement one another. But what excited me is the extent to which a single story, told in ways that complement without undermining one another, could create a larger audience. We do not know whether all the podcast listeners read the story, how many listeners listened to each episode, or how many readers listened to the podcast. 

All we knew for certain was that a lot of people discovered this story, and discovered it in different ways. 

All of which I find reassuring. Yes, the page views for our stories are not what they were. But nor is the landscape into which our stories are being published. Audio storytelling has evolved from Serial, and will surely continue to do so as the rapid changes in technology make more ambitious ways of consuming stories possible.

Perhaps what we are witnessing is the same audience that once saw words on page or screen as the one way to experience the wonder of narrative nonfiction now going through a process of sorting itself out, with some preferring words they can read and others preferring words they can hear. For some the experience of reading was preferable to the possibility of listening while doing something else.

More likely they were really all the same audience as before – with choices made depending on circumstance. A car drive called for a podcast. A lazy afternoon called for reading. 

My youngest child writes fiction. Some stories are words on the page. Some are collaborations between artists and writers and others whose skills and talents bring comic books and graphic novels to life. It depends on the story. 

But I have seen how ever more journalists, once a breed of solo operators, have found that they need one another because it is the rare journalist who possesses skills across all storytelling forms.

The audience has not gone away. It’s just not all sitting in the same room, waiting for the same experience.

They’re waiting to discover our stories. 

Our stories. That we need one another to tell.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every other week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.

* * *

We’re eager to hear how you most enjoy ambitious works of narrative nonfiction. If you have a moment, perhaps you’d be willing to take the following poll.

Many thanks