Readers are smarter than we think. They enjoy long, challenging articles. But they have to be exciting, awe-inspiring and surprising

The New York Times just published an intriguing study by University of Pennsylvania, where researchers spent a year intensively studying NYT’s list of most e-mailed articles, checking the changes every 15 minutes.

What do the readers really share? “The results are surprising,” says Josh Tierney, who reported on the study. He goes on to say:

I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”

But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

A few days ago, I found myself listening to a classroom discussion, here at journalism school, on the issue of our audience – our readers. Who, apparently, are mostly moronic. “TV-Guide auidence” was mentioned as an euphemism for “stupid people.” People merrily discussed how stupid people don’t have the same level of education as we do. We, the journalists.

These comments, like Tierney’s, were mostly made jokingly. Nonetheless, they reveal an incredible amount of paternalism in contemporary journalism. Numerous guests and books that we’ve had the pleasure of enjoying in the past few months offered the exact same sentiment. Without the humor.

The trivial logic goes something like this: we, the journalists, are better educated. We know what people should know. Most people, and most of our readers, don’t really know what they should be reading. Therefore, we either make our content more stupid, so our simple readers can understand it. Or we continue being puritans, offering what we believe is quality content, even if nobody really wants to consume it.

The implication of this is murderously morbid. First, it shows we consider ourselves supremely smart. Way smarter than most people, even our readers. This is never a good place to be in. Openly declaring yourself smarter than others usually means you are: a) actually pretty insecure, about yourself or your profession b) an imbecil.

In addition to insecurity – or imbecility – this worldview is also contains a fundamental insincerity. It implies we ourselves are only nterested in important and serious topics. Even though the story is kind of boring, and the headline lacks juice, we would read it. Because we have to. Because it is important. And we are smart enough to know it.

This, naturally, is utter bullshit. Unless we have a serious obsession with the Afghanistan war, we will not pick up a copy of a paper that carries, as its main headline, this: “In Afghanistan, A Range Of Options“. The story could be described as a sterile compilation of quotes at best. Or, more fittingly, as: zzzzzzzzzzzz.

But for some reason we expect others to read it. If they don’t, they are stupid, lacking education. A TV-Guide audience. We consider everything below our fictional, not to say fabricated, level of importance to be cheap, stupid and a waste of space. Which gets you to something like this:

In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the most-emailed list.

Even if the story fits our self-imposed definition of importance, let’s say an article on healthcare, we will find an exciting headline to be a cheap trick to “sell the paper.” Because, obviously, people are stupid, and only stupid people respond to interesting headlines. We don’t.

“Paternalism – assuming a low estimate of the public mind – runs through all discussions of sensationalism,” Kenneth Whyte, the noted Canadian editor and publisher, observed.

The truth is, all of us love some kind of porn. For some, it’s actual pornography. For others, cars and machines. For others, food, fashion, movies or recreational drugs. And yes, some love reading about Afghanistan.

But unless the story is gripping, exciting, compelling and emotional, and the headline makes us want to read it right away, and the photograph next it is flabbergasting, why would anyone read it? Why would we read other people’s porn?

I mentioned emotional, which many will automatically associate with sensations, and thus, God forbid, sensationalism. Here’s what The Times study says about that:

More emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, the researchers found, and positive articles were shared more than negative ones. Longer articles generally did better than shorter articles.

Surprising articles, like one about free-range chickens on the streets of New York, were also more likely to be e-mailed — which was a hardly a surprising discovery, of course. But the researchers also kept finding popular articles with a quality that went beyond surprise.

(…) Penn researchers defined the quality as an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.”

They used two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.

Yes, our audience will read and share longer articles. On intellectually challenging topics. But they need to be presented well, with an unexpected headline, an exciting story arc. They need to be surprising, emotional and awe-inspiring.

The real problem with journalism today is not that we need to dumb down our content so that morons can understand it. We don’t. It’s that we are the morons. Only truly smart and knowledgeable people can put complex ideas into simple, compelling sentences. They tend to write books these days.