Newsbound is a media and software company on a mission to make complex topics understandable. We produce original explainers and also work with clients to adapt their research, reporting, and analysis into our engaging stack format.
“It’d be nice to catch up with a topic so that I can go back into the world and have the vocabulary and have the background to have more informed conversations.”
— From a user interview with a 26-year-old casual news consumer
Since 2012, myself and the Newsbound team have been crafting explainers— some for clients, some for ourselves — on a variety of tough subjects: the minimum wage debate, the history of groundwater drilling, the international impact of family planning, the Senate filibuster, the rise of license plate cameras, the concussion crisis in football, even the ecological importance of the lowly vulture.
We work exclusively in our click-through stack format. It’s a linear, visual reading experience that generates excellent data on reader retention. Using that data as a feedback loop, we regularly experiment with different story structures and styles. These experiments have been iterative in nature (though not comprehensive or highly controlled) and we’ve gradually gained some insights along the way.
For instance, I previously wrote about how we learned that big shifts in text density from frame to frame can cause the reader to bounce prematurely.
Here I want to focus on the challenge of the “hook.” Whether you’re producing an explanatory video, podcast, blog post, or stack, how do you kick it off in a way that motivates the reader to dive deeper with you?
After all, once your explainer is loaded in your reader’s browser, it’s up against an array of competing distractions. Your job is to motivate or engross the reader to the point where she ignores the beeps and chirps and bouncing dock icons. Your job is to carve out some space in her hectic day — in her busy mind! — and fill it with some useful context and backstory.
Ten clicks or bust
On average, our explainers run 25–35 frames in length (i.e., they require that many clicks or taps to complete).
We’ve seen that most reader abandonment happens in the first ten frames, with the bounce rate usually leveling out after that. So to gauge how well a piece hooks its readers, I focus on the percentage of the audience that makes it to the 10th frame.
Judged by this metric, here are the four top-performers in our library:
91%: The Curious Case of the Silent Filibuster
90%: Shanghai’ed!
88%: De-mist-ifying The San Francisco Fog
84%: Cookie Dough: The Big Business of Tracking You Online
What’s interesting is that these top-performers have something in common. In the opening frames, they all remind the reader why learning more about this topic will be valuable going forward.
The power of vocabulary
In the case of the filibuster and shanghai’ed explainers, it’s all about vocabulary.
We start off the filibuster explainer by showing the reader a bunch of newspaper clippings referring to bills that failed to get the “60 votes necessary” to pass out of the U.S. Senate. We remind them that they’ve seen headlines like this in the past, that they’re going to see more in the future and that, if they read on, they’ll understand them better next time.
Shanghai’ed is a bit more straightforward: We’re identifying a strange phrase that you’re likely to have heard at some point and promising to demystify it (while teaching you some sordid San Francisco history along the way).
Confusing words and phrases are a great point-of-entry for explanatory content. We all know the insecurity that comes with hearing an unfamiliar word in the context of conversation — whether as a child at our parents’ dinner table or in the car yesterday listening to an NPR interview. The news is littered with these types of speedbumps. Words like: entitlements, bitcoin, insurgent, progressive, inflation, gerrymandering, amnesty, fracking, neo-con, gentrification, fundamentalist, mandate, libertarian, and so on.
Understanding these words allows you to read deeper and more confidently, to dive into conversations rather than observe silently, to engage where you might otherwise retreat. For the casual information consumer, it can be like unlocking a new level in a video game — and your explainer is the key to getting there.
The pull of familiar experiences
The next two explainers down the list start similarly: they remind the audience of a time when they were confused about the subject at hand. Except in this case, the confusion is in response to an experience, rather than a word or phrase.
In the fog explainer, we talk directly to those who live in the Bay Area or have visited recently. We prompt them remember the last time they were blindsided by the fog that visits the area almost every day.
In the cookie explainer, we describe the all-too-common experience of browsing the internet and having targeted ads follow you around from site to site.
Just as the news tosses strange words at us daily, the physical world is constantly prompting little puzzlers. Questions like: What’s the purpose of the green mailboxes ? Where did the peace sign come from? What are thosevertical white panels you see on roofs everywhere? (Spoiler: they’re cellular network antennas.)
These questions wash over us and we rarely have the time or energy to actually answer them. Case in point: when we published our fog explainer, we heard from people who had lived in San Francisco for decades, had regularly scratched their respective heads about the fog, and had only now figured out how it works.
To motivate the reader to learn, it’s sometimes necessary to remind them that they’ve asked themselves about the topic in the past — or convince them that they might do so in the near future.
What hasn’t worked as well
In lots of other cases, we’ve lost more than 20 percent of the audience in the first ten frames.
In our football explainer, for instance, we started by focusing on President Obama’s concern about the concussion crisis.
Share of our audience remaining after the first 10 clicks: 75%
In our vultures explainer, we listed a bunch of popular misconceptions about these birds.
Share of our audience remaining after the first 10 clicks: 74%
In our aquifers explainer, we began by quoting a California farmer whose well recently went dry.
Share of our audience remaining after the first 10 clicks: 70%
In all of the above examples, we attempt to spark the reader’s curiosity in slightly different ways. But we fail to directly reference their own experience. And we appear to pay for it.
When it comes to crafting explainers, the best hooks seem to do the following: directly acknowledge that the world is a puzzling place and promise the reader they’ll soon have one less thing about which to be confused.
This is a story about publishing a piece of digital content, studying the analytics, seeing that something is tripping readers up, and fixing it on the fly.
The piece in question was “Scraping By,” a 1,000-word explainer written and designed by my studio Newsbound and commissioned by The Lowdown, KQED’s news education blog.
“Scraping By” is a stack: a click-through reading experience in which you advance paragraph-by-paragraph, with photographs, data visualizations, or illustrations accompanying each chunk of text.
The format obviously has a lot in common with slide decks and slideshows. But as with the similar work coming out of Tapestry, Vox, and even the New York Times, the fact that it is designed for readers — not presenters — sets it apart.
We started building our stack technology two years ago while exploring how best to explain complex topics on the web. Unlike our video or infographic prototypes, our stack-based explainers got rave reviews during user-tests (to our surprise, actually). They struck a nice balance between A) giving the reader control over the pacing, B) obscuring the volume of content so as not to overwhelm , and C) remaining highly visual.
From a production perspective, the format also offers up a few advantages: Once published, a stack is significantly easier to update and redeploy than a video or infographic (most of the text is HTML-based). And because the content is so linear, tracking the reader’s clicks or taps gives us a truly meaningful feedback loop.
Indeed, with every new piece we produce, we obsess over the engagement curve and completion rate (usually around 60%), experimenting along the way to learn more about what keeps readers on board, what keeps them focused.
Which brings us to “Scraping By.”
This stack went live on March 13 and within two weeks over 350,000 people had launched it (thanks, Upworthy!).
But we quickly noticed a problem. Take a look at the engagement curve as of March 13:
How to read this chart: The bar all the way on the left represents the number of readers who launched the piece. The bar all the way on the right represents the share of readers who made it to the end. The bars in between represent the share of readers still sticking with the piece at evenly-spaced intervals along the way (about four frames per interval in this case).
Do you see it? Between the third and fourth bar we lost an abnormal number of readers — 13% percent of the starting audience (as compared to six percent during both the previous interval and three that followed).
When we look at the progress stats for a given stack, we usually see a relatively smooth curve. In some cases it’s steeper in the first quarter of the piece. Sometimes there’s a cliff right towards the end, when readers sense that it’s wrapping up. But rarely do we see a drop-off like this in the middle.
So we went back and examined the actual content. The section where we lost 13% of the audience is represented by the handful of frames in the orange box below.
One thing we quickly noticed was that #10 and #12 were carrying substantially more text than on most of the other frames in the piece. This led to a hypothesis: these two crowded frames were breaking the flow for some readers and sending them packing.
To test the hypothesis, we fixed the density issue, breaking #10 up into two clicks and cutting a sentence from #12. It took just a few minutes to make this structural change and redeploy the stack.
Not long after we made the change, another surge of traffic hit the piece, bringing 300,000 more launches with it. Here’s how the engagement curve changed after we made the fix.
Lightening up those frames led an extra three percent of the audience to read through that portion of the explainer. In turn, most of those readers stuck with the piece to the end, increasing the overall completion rate.
Three percent might not sound like much, but it means an immense amount to us. We’re in the business of creating evergreen explanatory content. We’ve designed our whole reading experience to provide a stress-free orientation for people who have a motivation to learn about a particular topic. We built this particular explainer to deliver a focused 4-5 minute read on the complexities of the minimum wage. And if we can keep an extra three percent of the audience tuned in to the end (nearly 10,000 readers in this case), that’s a huge win.
Why is this important?
Because most of the folks producing long-form digital content today have very little insight into how well their content is actually engaging its audience. You can pat yourself on the back for a great pageview tally or an astronomical number of YouTube plays, but those numbers don’t tell you anything about whether your article or video actually held the user’s sustained attention. And they definitely don’t alert you if one particularly dense or confusing paragraph in your article is leading otherwise-interested readers to head for the hills.
In a pageview-driven ecosystem, even if you possess the data to see that a particular paragraph is causing problems, you’re probably on to the next thing by the time the data arrives. There is little incentive for you to care.
However, if outlets like Upworthy and the Financial Times are successful in prioritizing “attention minutes” over pageviews, then the type of emergency surgery we performed on “Scraping By” — novel and rare today — is going to be increasingly relevant.
When I look at the results of this fix, I can’t help but ask: What other invisible hurdles are we unknowingly putting in our readers’ way? - J.K.
We're excited to announce that we added two awesome folks to our team this spring.
Tim Gruneisen joined us as lead graphic designer. A graduate of California College of the Arts, he previously worked as an associate art director at WIRED and a graphic designer for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He led the design of our new "fogsplainer," which you should check out if you haven't already.
Anastasia Aizman is our second full-time software engineer. In a previous life, she was an art director and a designer for companies like The New York Public Library and Wieden+Kennedy. She is a graduate of Parsons School of Design and HackReactor. She's now hard at work getting our authoring tool ready for its first round of users.
Rivers and Rocks: Why Do We Treat Explainers So Badly?
Here at Newsbound, I spend 90 percent of my days wrestling with the question of how to use visual explanation as a point-of-entry into thorny, consequential topics. It's an all-hands-on-deck challenge, so I'm thrilled when I see publishers innovating in this space.
Lately there's a lot to be excited about:
The Atlantic and the BBC are investing in the production of animated video explainers.
The New York Times is exploring living infographics that grow alongside a developing story.
Conversational, Q-and-A explainers seem to be popping up everywhere -- some even going viral when their topic leads the news cycle.
Circa is tackling the challenge of how to bring mobile users up-to-speed on breaking stories and keep them engaged after the initial noise quiets down.
And a growing number of publishers and organizations are experimenting with the highly visual, go-at-your-own-pace explainer format developed by Newsbound over the past year.
But looking across the explanatory landscape, there's a glaring problem. While the news industry is investing in topic-based explainers, it's failing to get the return it deserves. This isn't due to lack of demand. News consumers are as hungry as ever for context and backstory. The problem is in the presentation.
To get at the root of this problem, let's take a quick look at why explanatory content is so necessary.
Why are we creating this stuff in the first place?
Doing user research at Newsbound, I've interviewed countless casual news consumers about their habits. What I've learned is that there are generally two types of experiences that will trigger a "grazer" of news to seek more context.
The first scenario is the "confusing conversation." This is where you find yourself out of your depth when talking with a friend about the Syrian conflict or the debt ceiling or the Trayvon Martin case (to give a few recent examples). You nod your head and soldier through, but you know you don't have the background knowledge to really participate. It's a horrible feeling, so you go home and fire up Google, motivated to learn.
News outlets are doing a pretty good job of satisfying the user in this case. For instance, if I google "Syrian conflict" right now, the first page of results includes backgrounders from the New York Times, ABC News, PBS, and the BBC. Many of them are neglected or way too dense, but hey, the system seems to be working here!
Then there's the second scenario: what I call the "fourth-graf flop." This is where you find yourself intrigued by a headline and you click through to read the article. By the third or fourth paragraph, however, you realize that the author assumes more background knowledge than you have. Still, you're motivated to learn, so you look around the page for a lifeboat -- a resource to help you quickly get up to speed on the topic.
In today's news environment it's unlikely you'll get rescued. If you're lucky, you'll find a link to a topic page, but chances are it will only intimidate you further. What was supposed to have been an informative experience has now turned into an alienating one. You jump ship.
Remember these voices
Don't believe that this mix of motivation and frustration exists out there? Take a listen to this brief montage of clips from my user interviews over the years:
When we, as creators, decide to craft an explainer, we do it from a position of empathy. We do it to extend a hand to the readers interviewed in the clip above -- folks who aren't necessarily news junkies, but still have a motivation to participate and gain some fluency.
Of course, building a great explainer -- particularly a visual one -- requires a lot of work. This work can pay off over time if the end-product is ultimately spread across your ongoing coverage or commentary of the topic. It can even have a multiplying effect, generating more demand for your coverage of day-to-day developments (as Jay Rosen has written about extensively).
But all that work will be squandered if you don't treat evergreen content differently and recognize that its shelf life extends long beyond that of the average article.
A few recent case studies
Just last week, I stumbled across a new batch of video explainers from The Atlantic. There's a series on climate and energy narrated by Alexis Madrigal and a series on economics narrated by Derek Thompson. You can find them in the site's video section, in their own feature sections, and on The Atlantic's YouTube page. But if you're readying this Clive Crook post on monetary policy, you won't get any notice of Thompson's engaging explainer on the topic. Same goes for this piece on fracking. It's a dense article and surely many readers, right around that fourth paragraph mark, would be motivated to check out Madrigal's quick breakdown of the natural gas boom. But alas, it's nowhere to be found.
This isn't all about the user experience -- it also relates to the bottom line. Joining these two types of content would not only serve the confused reader, it would also help The Atlantic extract more value from the videos over time (i.e., drive more pre-roll ad impressions).
To give another example, here's a beautiful video explainer on the Mars rover mission commissioned by the BBC. But you'd never know it existed if you looked at the outlet's recent articles on the rover.
These examples are particularly frustrating because video is so compact and embeddable. As a result, video-based explainers can (and should!) comfortably live alongside every article on their subject.
Or take the Washington Post's viral hit "9 questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask." This piece of evergreen content garnered over 3 million views when Syria was leading the news cycle in early September. In a CNN interview, author Max Fisher said that he wrote it for his friends who are intelligent and curious, but just haven't been keeping up with the basics of the story. Yet despite the evergreen nature of the piece, it's been buried. If you happen to click through to at any recent WaPo articles on Syria, you'll find no indication that it exists on the site.
To truly serve their purpose, explainers must be in the right place at the right time. They either need to be published at the exact moment when interest in the topic is peaking (a very difficult feat to pull off). Or they need to be positioned across all your coverage and commentary as a guard against the dreaded "fourth-graf flop." (This is true whether you're a news site, a think tank, or an advocacy group.)
When it comes to the river of news, there is ample opportunity to outsource the redundant work of traditional background paragraphs to embeddable evergreen explainers.
When it comes to how we design those explanations, there is lots more experimentation and imagination needed in the coming years.
But it will all be for nothing if we let the final product float downstream.
Over the past six months, we've worked closely with SpiderOak and their nonprofit arm, the 'Zero-Knowledge' Privacy Foundation, to explain various facets of the digital privacy debate. So far, we've produced three explainers on the subject and, if you have 15 minutes to spare, you should really check them out.
They were all written before the NSA revelations came to light and don't really touch on the issue of government surveillance. However, they do show how Internet companies large and small are collecting information about us -- data that, as we've learned, can ultimately be accessed by the government.
The first piece in the series simply attempts to answer the age-old question: "Why should I care about privacy if I have nothing to hide?"
The second explainer breaks down what's in those "privacy policies" that we all instinctively agree to whenever signing up for a new service:
And the third installment demystifies "cookies" -- the tiny data files sitting on your hard drive that allow advertisers to learn all about you:
If you happened to read our concussion crisis explainer, you'll definitely find this news interesting: Yesterday, the NFL agreed to pay $765 million to settle a lawsuit brought against them by 4,800 retired players. Here are a few quick takeaways, gleaned from Mike Florio's awesome analysis over at NBC's ProFootball Talk:
- The suit was based on allegations that the NFL concealed the impact of concussions and/or failed to protect players from head injuries.
- A judge was preparing to rule on the jury vs. arbitration issue and the two sides apparently settled because neither wanted to take the risk.
- The NFL still hasn't acknowledged any liability. As Florio writes: "Settling a lawsuit is about about treating the case as a business proposition and applying a proper dollar value to it." That's exactly what happened here. And $765 million is pocket change to a league that is projected to generate $27 billion in profits over the next 10-15 years.
- The judge cast doubt yesterday over the viability of any future suits of this kind: "The labor law defenses asserted by the NFL would represent a very substantial barrier to asserting these kinds of claims going forward. The combination of advances in medical research, improved equipment, rules changes, greater understanding of concussion management, and enhanced benefits should, and hopefully will, prevent similar lawsuits in the future.”
- As former NFL center Kevin Mawae points out, the big win for the NFL here is that they don't have disclose what they knew -- as far back as the 80s and 90s -- about the danger of concussions.
In response to the ACLU's recent revelations about license plate readers (explained by us here), Mother Jones' Kevin Drum posed these questions to his readers.
After The Century Foundation released its community college report last week, this Twitter exchange took place between the Washington Post's Dylan Matthews, Mother Jones' Kevin Drum, and New America Foundation's Kevin Carey:
So what about Kevin's question? If roughly 11 percent of community college students go on to receive a bachelor's degree from a 4-year university, how many receive a AA degree?
The answer is ... approximately 14 percent. In short, about a quarter of the students who start at community college end up with an AA or BA degree within six years.
By contrast, about 58 percent of students starting at a 4-year school end up getting a BA within the same timespan.
Learn more about why the degree gap exists and how it can be bridged in TCF's new report and this accompanying Newsbound stack:
This week, the New York Times devoted several articles to an emerging medical field: "youth concussion management."
Our recent explainer on the concussion crisis in sports focused largely on professional football players. But as the Times reminds us, this is an issue that spans numerous sports (basketball, soccer, lacrosse, hockey) and that can affect players at a surprisingly young age.
I found this comment particularly fascinating:
“A concussion might be the only injury where the younger you are, the longer it takes to get better,” Dr. Cynthia Stein said. “Anything else, if you cut your hand or whatever, the younger you are, the quicker you heal. But for a concussion, recent studies indicate that a 10-year-old heals slower than a 14-year-old, and a 14-year-old heals slower than a 17-year-old.”
If there's a theme that permeates the Times reporting this week, it's uncertainty. The one thing doctors know for sure is that during the period after a person experiences a concussion "they are especially vulnerable to catastrophic injury if subjected to another blow to the head." But determining the appropriate length of that period is extremely subjective.
It's a reminder of how much work is yet to be done in the area of concussion science.
Until I got around to reading Stephen Brill's TIME article "Bitter Pill" a couple months ago, I'd never heard the word "chargemaster" before. Chances are, if you've come across the term, it's probably because: A) you work around the health care industry or, B) you're uninsured and have had the misfortune of dealing with a medical bill that's based off of one of these documents.
Today, the Obama administration unveiled a federal database that brings the country's chargemasters out of the dark and into the light.
The chargemaster, I learned, is every hospital's internal price list. Decades ago it was a document the size of a phone book; now it's a massive computer file, thousands of items long, maintained by every hospital.
It would seem to be an important document. However, I quickly found that although every hospital has a chargemaster, officials treat it as if it were an eccentric uncle living in the attic. Whenever I asked, they deflected all conversation away from it. They even argued that it is irrelevant. I soon found that they have good reason to hope that outsiders pay no attention to the chargemaster or the process that produces it. For there seems to be no process, no rationale, behind the core document that is the basis for hundreds of billions of dollars in health care bills.
Brill encountered the irrationality of the chargemaster after getting his hands on numerous individuals' medical bills and trying to make sense of the individual charges. He found that it's common for hospitals to exorbitantly mark up the price of a particular procedure or medical supply. With the release of the database, lots of other reporters are zeroing in on the issue today. Here's the Huffington Post:
Americans have long become accustomed to bewilderment and anxiety when confronting health care bills. The new database underscores why, revealing the perplexing assortment of prices for medical care, with the details of bills seemingly untethered to any graspable principle.
And the New York Times:
Data being released for the first time by the government on Wednesday shows that hospitals charge Medicare wildly differing amounts — sometimes 10 to 20 times what Medicare typically reimburses — for the same procedure, raising questions about how hospitals determine prices and why they differ so widely.
In his TIME article, Brill tried to get individual hospitals to explain the mark-ups, but most just deflected his questions or offered up easily-debunked excuses.
In the end, here's what he proposed:
We should outlaw the chargemaster. Everyone involved, except a patient who gets a bill based on one (or worse, gets sued on the basis of one), shrugs off chargemasters as a fiction. So why not require that they be rewritten to reflect a process that considers actual and thoroughly transparent costs? After all, hospitals are supposed to be government-sanctioned institutions accountable to the public. Hospitals love the chargemaster because it gives them a big number to put in front of rich uninsured patients (typically from outside the U.S.) or, as is more likely, to attach to lawsuits or give to bill collectors, establishing a place from which they can negotiate settlements. It's also a great place from which to start negotiations with insurance companies, which also love the chargemaster because they can then make their customers feel good when they get an Explanation of Benefits that shows the terrific discounts their insurance company won for them.
But for patients, the chargemasters are both the real and the metaphoric essence of the broken market. They are anything but irrelevant. They're the source of the poison coursing through the health care ecosystem.
With this database, the government has now forced this poison into public view. It's an important step. Watch closely to see what happens next.
Visit Fight For The Future and CISPA Is Back for an overview and actions you can take, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation for background on the bill since it passed the House and what happens next as it moves to the Senate.
If you found our recent explainer on privacy policies interesting, you should be concerned about CISPA. It would pretty much make the assurances in those privacy policies meaningless, at least when it comes to government agencies gaining access to your personal information.
We teamed up with Harvard Business Review on this new explainer, written by James Allworth. It explores how big corporations use their lobbying power to slow the growth of disruptive startups like Tesla and Uber. Take five minutes and learn how our campaign finance system stifles innovation.
Today a bill to extend gun background checks was defeated by the U.S. Senate -- despite the fact that a MAJORITY of senators support it (not to mention the large majority of Americans).
This is part of a larger phenomenon. In recent years, the Republicans have created a 60-vote threshold in the 100-member Senate for even the most uncontroversial bills. This has led to unprecedented gridlock.
Our latest explainer tackles the concussion crisis in professional football. It's a tragic story and one we're going to be hearing a lot about this offseason, thanks to a class-action lawsuit against the NFL. Over 4,000 former players have joined the suit. It kicked off earlier this week.
Gorgeous 1862 diagram of the federal government and the American Union. Complement with these vintage ISOTYPE infographics explaining British vs. American politics and this vintage illustrated guide to the American government.
