You’re a journalist — maybe a reporter creating stories, or a Web producer responsible for creating engaging content. What’s one of the many factors you have to consider in doing your job?

Page views. You need to drive traffic to your site. That aids in advertising revenue, attracts an audience and impacts your news brand. A debate has surfaced recently on the effects of page view journalism on the profession. In May, Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher wrote a post centered around how journalists won’t report news unless it can drive page views. A recent article by the The New York Times on burnout in online news seemed to confirm that notion in a sense. Foremski wrote another post reacting to the Times story, saying:

The medium is not the message. In today's media: page views is the message.

That sounds dangerous, but analytics do seem to be playing a larger and larger role. The real question is how do journalists harness page view journalism for the better? How do they steer visitors to the important stories?

It would be easy if journalists could crank out Internet memes (see some memes above) for campaign coverage, the war in Afghanistan or net neutrality. The State Journal-Register in Illinois saw some success with its Rod Blagojevich ringtones. While crafting the perfect traffic-driving piece of content isn’t an exact science, there are certain principles you take away from the good, old-fashioned meme.

BuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti, a former Huffington Post staffer, put together a presentation on creating viral content. It’s an interesting read, and is embedded below (thanks to Peter Kafka at MediaMemo for spotting it).

In it Peretti sums up his strategy to go viral:

Viral Media — activate the bored at work network
Mullet Strategy — business upfront, party in the back!
Big Seed Marketing — pay for the seed, optimize for viral lift
Maniacs — target crazy people, not couch potatoes
Mormonism — quality is not enough, build evangelism into your ideas

Jonah Peretti Viral Meetup Talk

So where does that leave journalists wanting to create content that people will read, understand and share?

1. Make your content short, and easy to understand. Journalistic giant 60 Minutes has used this strategy with its online video, according to Michael Radutzky, a senior producer for the show. This approach has also worked for MTV, as Steve has pointed out in research, saying:

Catering to users' preference for chunked content, as the snippet storytelling that's emerged on the Web is often called, dramatically increased traffic on MTV News' Web site (Shields, 2009). Shortening stories, breaking apart longer videos and publishing "fascinating nuggets" from longer stories as individual pieces preceded a more than 1 million year-over-year increase in unique video streams, a MTV executive told trade magazine Mediaweek.

2. Try to give the reader/user a warning of the time investment involved (this is why lists are so popular on the Web).
3. Try to entertain as much as educate. Those “crazy people” Peretti talks about want to be entertained.
4. Don’t be afraid to fail. The vast majority of content will never go viral.
5. Page views may be the online metric of the day, but remember, most Internet memes fade from people’s memories quickly. How can you create something that will last? How can you garner significant page views while your content passes certain tests of quality and educates people at the same time?

There's no sure-fire answer to those questions, but you can head in at least one direction, and expect to find some favorable results. Steve has pointed out that active news consumers let others be passive, so you don't necessarily need to activate everyone, just the ones who want to be engaged. According to a recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project on understanding the participatory news consumer, "37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter." Bingo – that's the segment of your audience that wants to be engaged, and might turn your news content into memorable content.

Why?

They work for you in a way. They create content, and serve as evangelists for your own content. You don't need analytics or Internet memes to know that having more people on your team is a good thing.