Pivot to video 2.0, Reddit’s rise, and what comes after pageviews: Our notes from ONA 2024

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’s some of it; click through for more.

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

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. — Neel Dhanesha

Keep reading for the rest of our notes from the conference, plus a few of the best social media posts about it.

— Laura Hazard Owen

Pivot to video 2.0, Reddit’s rise, and what comes after pageviews: Our notes from ONA 2024 In the age of “meeting the reader where they are,” mission-driven news orgs say they’re looking beyond the pageview — plus other lessons from ONA 2024. By Nieman Lab Staff.

The National Trust for Local News keeps buying local newspapers. Here’s what they’ve learned. “What we’re trying to solve for is not necessarily a business model problem. We’re trying to solve for an ownership incentive problem.” By Sarah Scire.

What would Project 2025 do for (or to) journalism? From defunding NPR and PBS to kicking reporters out of the White House, it’s an array of conservative priorities and Trumpian retreads. By Joshua Benton.

Google Discover is sending U.S. news publishers much more traffic. (Social? Still falling.) Traffic from Google Discover now exceeds traffic from Google Search for some publishers, but what works there is a bit of a guessing game. By Laura Hazard Owen.

With help from Denmark’s Zetland, Finland will get a member-supported news outlet in 2025 “It feels more like a partner and a support than Zetland coming to the Finnish market.” By Hanaa' Tameez.

A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. For one German reporter, the statistical underpinnings of a large language model meant his many bylines were wrongly warped into a lengthy rap sheet. By Simon Thorne.