Last week, six of us attended the Online News Association’s 2024 conference in Atlanta. We wrote up two full panels — one on The National Trust for Local News, one on Google Discover and Chartbeat’s newest traffic stats — but lots of interesting stuff remained in our notes. Here it is (along with the most useful social media posts from the conference — but there weren’t that many! Livetweeting a journalism conference just feels a little too unpaid labor these days).

The rise of Reddit?

Although Reddit still accounts for a relatively small fraction of overall referrals for most newsrooms, newsrooms have noticed a surge in traffic from the social site in recent months, and it was mentioned frequently both in panels and in side discussions. Chartbeat’s 700 U.S. news publisher clients have seen an 88% increase in pageviews from Reddit since January 2023, though the numbers are still relatively small on the whole. (Chartbeat counted, for instance, a little over 30 million Reddit pageviews in August 2024; pageviews from Facebook have declined massively but still totaled around 500 million in August.) Many credit the bump to Google Search giving Reddit posts new prominence. One newsroom mentioned they’re regularly running what are essentially liveblogs in subreddits around specific news events; they may link back to their coverage on their own sites (rules about this vary based on the subreddit). Reddit’s VP of business development, Jonathan Flesher, was a keynote speaker, and its news partnerships lead, Gabriel Sands, moderated a panel; the vibe across these was very much that Reddit is “the only platform still working with publishers as partners,” and that sentiment was echoed by some attendees. But also, this is something that publishers have heard from other platforms before! — Laura Hazard Owen

Reddit shares up and downvote information with Google. That’s news to me – and likely an important sign of what’s going to get Discover / search engine attention. I’m not really sure it’s a good thing, tbh. #ona24

— Ben Werdmuller (@ben.werd.social.ap.brid.gy) September 19, 2024 at 9:41 AM

Beyond pageviews

Newsrooms are hungry for new ideas and benchmarks around reach, especially in nonprofit news, where newsroom leaders need to show funders something that can be measured. I’ll admit we’ve been somewhat skeptical internally about newsrooms inventing new measurements for readership. (Not that any floated so far are as dubious as the, uh, creativity shown by Ozy in counting reach.) The process of tallying views and engagement metrics across myriad partnerships and social platforms is complicated, tedious, and resource-intensive. I’ve heard — from both sides — that forcing the issue can put a strain on partnerships and collaborations. But in the age of “meeting the reader where they are,” mission-driven news orgs say they’re looking beyond the pageview and rethinking how to measure reach and audience. There may be room for industry-wide conversations here. — Sarah Scire

“Not you, Big Tech”

Before we landed in Atlanta, the Nieman Lab team discussed a warning from conference organizers that coffee would not be provided due to exorbitant hotel catering fees. (“The cost for catering coffee at ONA24 would be $120/gallon + taxes and fees of $44.66/gallon.”) We found this particularly interesting given the plethora of sponsor logos that accompanied each official conference email, many of which were the logos of tech companies; surely they could sponsor a pot or twenty of coffee?

The tech companies made themselves known throughout the conference, from the usual tables staffed by friendly representatives to a Microsoft lounge that, at the least, offered a place to escape the bustle (and was conveniently positioned from another lounge that supplied coffee). But they were also heavily represented in the conference programming itself. AI was omnipresent, as were the companies developing AI tools. Perplexity, which recently announced a revenue-sharing agreement with publishers but has also been accused of plagiarism, sponsored a trivia night and sent a representative to a panel about (what else?) using Perplexity for research. In the opening session on the second day of the conference, Reddit’s VP business development explained Reddit to a roomful of journalists. Representatives from Microsoft sprinkled themselves through panels, and Canva sponsored sessions on data visualizations. Taboola had a panel all to itself. In one panel, an editor from a local newsroom mentioned “Big Tech” before catching herself. “Not you, Big Tech,” she said to the Microsoft representative a couple seats down, who chuckled good-naturedly.

I’m not the only person to question big tech’s presence at ONA. “I think it’s telling that the ONA24 Online Journalism Awards had an award for best use of AI but for no other technically-supported work,” Ben Werdmuller, ProPublica’s senior director of technology, wrote on Threads. “My biggest takeaway is that technology companies are setting the tone of the conversation about how technology is used in journalism, and nobody seems to be (publicly) questioning it.” — Neel Dhanesha

A focus on social video

If you twitch at the words “pivot to video,” you’re not alone. But social video came up early and often at ONA. Many noted video efforts are less expensive this time around, since journalists are using iPhones and free editing tools and making videos is less likely to be their full-time job. (One CEO noted half of her newsroom is already making TikToks anyway.) Another part of Pivot to Video 2.0 is more focus on evergreen video and the views it brings in over time. A video takes seven days to surface on TikTok, on average, Chartbeat sales director Brad Streicher noted, suggesting there’s value in diversifying away from breaking news videos. — Sarah Scire and Laura Hazard Owen

AI as a bridge to the real thing

The Haitian Times‘ publisher, Vania André, described using ChatGPT for copyediting and other tasks where the outlet can’t yet afford to hire a full-time employee. Half the Times’ staff is located in Haiti; “I am able to support [employees] in Haiti with a living wage,” she said, but that’s not yet the case for U.S. employees. The digital solutions are “meant to be temporary,” she said, until “we are able to hire” a real person in a role, “and that’s why I create so much emphasis on documentation.”

The Baltimore Times, a free weekly online newspaper that covers positive stories about the African American community and has a “staff of three-and-a-half,” said associate publisher Paris Brown. It uses AI to create diverse content when they can’t get the real thing. It used AI to create “culturally relevant,” diverse” digital voices” “diverse voices” to read articles aloud. Brown also gave an example of a prompt they gave image generator DALL-E: “A-diverse-group-of-black-doctors-both-men-and-women-teaching-young-black-students-in-a-laboratory-setting-the-image-should-depict-the-doctors-wearing-white-jackets.” — Laura Hazard Owen

Great insight from DuBose Porter at #ONA24: If you print the scores to the high school football game and readers know those are correct, *then* they can trust you when you write about health, education, local government, etc.

— Julia Haslanger (@JuliaJRH) September 20, 2024

Learned a great tidbit at the ONA24 featured session this morning: Finland begins teaching media literacy at ages 5-6 (!), partially because they’re next door to Russia and know they face a flood of misinfo / propaganda

— Versha Sharma (@versharma) September 20, 2024

This slide from the Wall Street Journal’s #ONA24 luncheon on the 12 lessons they learned pivoting to an audience-first newsroom must be plastered everywhere.

Treat audience and data colleagues like journalists. pic.twitter.com/uhKSqbGWhB

— Natalie Moore (@nemoore_) September 19, 2024

Jeremy’s slides: https://t.co/MnvPMDFhy3

— Mike Reilley (@itsmikereilley) September 19, 2024

“Given that we spend an average of two hours a day in email, it’s worth exploring whether your email workflow is efficient or not.” @jeremycaplan

#ONA24

— Lex Roman (@lexjustliving) September 19, 2024

Claude for projects: example here is analyzing journalism trend reports.

Jeremy’s process:

1️⃣ Upload trend reports
2️⃣ Prompt it to generate “creative, surprising, provocative” insights
3️⃣ Poke into subtopics from there

A lot depends on the quality of your inputs#ONA24 pic.twitter.com/15lNvIVRuH

— Lex Roman (@lexjustliving) September 19, 2024

People are more interested in what _might_ happen with the weather than what _happened_ which is different than most other types of news. And doing this responsibily involves debunking people who are over-hyping what might happen, @jkeefe says at #ONA24

— Julia Haslanger (@JuliaJRH) September 20, 2024

How our team won the #ONA24 trivia: Correctly identifying @UGAGrady, home of the @PeabodyAwards, and @AAASKavli, the oldest science journalism awards!

Thank you to sponsor @perplexity_ai for giving us a free one-year subscription of Apple News! pic.twitter.com/Syr61Tjl1n

— Alex Ip 葉清霖 (@AlexIp718) September 19, 2024

Me at the #ONA24 hotel bar tonight https://t.co/ntmvoFxW60

— Chris Krewson (@ckrewson) September 20, 2024