What if we just texted people? A case study.
Should your local newspaper ask 'you up?'
One of the most reliable ways I get news is via text. A friend spots something critical, something that will change my understanding of the world, and is kind enough to share it with me. And in that moment, I am informed.
Whether it’s Messenger, Signal or iMessage, you can spread a lot of information by quickly dropping a link in a group chat and adding, “WTF?” That news could be about the Beirut explosion or it could be a link to the Boston cop slide. For our purposes, all that matters is it’s information being shared by people who value it.1
News shared this way can move really quickly. So quickly that WhatsApp has tried to slow down sharing over the years, in order to reduce misinformation. Old school SMS has a big misinformation problem for a similar reason. Information can move fast between large group chats that make it hard to correct the record at a relevant speed.
But with Meta looking to avoid building news into its algorithms and Google heading towards AI2, we need new ways to disseminate the news quickly. So why not avoid the middle man of someone’s university roommate or their mom, and have the news outlets text it themselves?
In the global south, this is already happening. In India, 46 per cent of people receive news via WhatsApp. In Brazil, it’s 58 per cent3. If WhatsApp happens to be banned, there’s usually an alternative, often Signal or Telegram. Regardless of app, we’re looking at billions of people who already get the news via some kind of direct message.
Meanwhile, no one service dominates in the United States and the United Kingdom. The closest we get is 34 per cent of Americans get their news via Google. And that’s great, because it means there’s room for new platforms and methods to break through.
Experimenting with texts
Like every boomer, North American news outlets have long been text curious. Aware that it exists and bummed they have to learn something new, they have from time to time dipped their toes into the text messaging world.
The Globe and Mail in 2020 had the 24 Treats of Christmas, where for 24 days they would text you a dessert recipe. During the 2021 Texas power outage, the Texas Tribune began texting updates to residents without electricity.
Outlier Media has tried to make the case for years that we should be texting more. Their TXT OUTLIER program has been targeting Detroit residents with critical information about accessing public services and about local utilities. You can also text a reporter directly to ask for information about a specific problem you’re seeing. They argue they get engagement higher than their much bigger local competitors because of it, and can find stories others can’t.
You might argue what’s the benefit of texting over an app’s push alerts — those breaking news notifications that fill up your parents’ phones. For one, most small outlets don’t have their own app and if they did, the average user installs zero new apps per month. Unless you’re TikTok, ChatGPT or whatever nightmares plague the iPhone charts, you’re out of luck.
But apps also miss out on the potential for direct conversation. The Arizona Republic had a texting initiative during the height of COVID where readers could text P. Kim Bui, their then director of product and audience innovation.
“People feel like they know me,” Bui told the Knight-Cronkite News Lab. “If I say I’m having a hard day, they’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry. What can we do to help?’ I think people are feeling extra lonely. I mean, I’m feeling extra lonely. And any sort of connection you can build during the pandemic is big.”
That said, it’s rare that a news outlet will just say, “txt me bro!” Most projects tend to be niche. Cleveland.com’s sports podcast, Buckeye Talk, has a paid subscription texting service where you can talk to its hosts and get insider information about… trades? Scores? Big Wins? Look I’m happy for their success.
Few of these experiments have lasted as long however. The Globe and Mail ran out of cookie recipes and the Arizona Republic decided to put resources elsewhere. Meanwhile the Texas Tribune is keeping it going, and had a renewed pushed during the 2022 midterm elections.
The challenge is few have figured out a catch-all strategy. The model that is easiest to replicate is have a specific focus, like an upcoming election or a sports team. It helps if the people at the other end are well known or have a para-social relationship with their audience. Consider a podcast host or a columnist, where the goal is partly an intimate sense of connection. But then this is a lot of work.
I used to help run a news outlet’s Facebook page, where people could send in messages. Answering the friendly comments, cranks, and genuinely hard requests at that scale was at least half of a full-time job. Having it be a reporter’s side of desk project would be total overload.
It’s also not clear what the conversion rates are. Gannett reported in 2015 that an SMS sharing button on their sport’s site, For the Win, had three or four times the engagement than the Twitter button did. And Buzzfeed found that sharing via text message was more popular than Facebook or Twitter. Those dynamics have likely changed since then, given share buttons haven’t been popular in nearly a decade.
The most interesting new texting project I’ve seen is the Dallas Free Press community news service, where they are figuring out their strategy in real time. They opted to prioritize texting before even newsletters.
“As we discussed the idea of a community newsroom with West Dallas leaders, they told us, ‘If you try to do this with email, you’ll fail.’ They said we needed to get information directly to people’s phones,” Keri Mitchell, the outlet’s executive director, told Nieman Lab.
“So before we even had a website, we launched our texting service in both neighborhoods, and in both English and Spanish for West Dallas.”
How would I actually do this?
Texting exists in a semi-open, semi-private world. Anyone can use SMS, the flavourless, generic texting medium that’s run by the phone companies. That’s to its strength and its detriment. If you’re getting strange requests to dump thousands of dollars into a random TD Bank account, it’s probably via SMS.
Subtext is the most popular tool for texting the public. The app allows you to schedule texts, build templates for common questions and respond to incoming messages. The biggest benefit is the fact that it uses a more open system. Whatever numbers you collect are yours, and there’s no algorithm to decide what content should appear for which user.
But then, of course, there’s the apps. Both WhatsApp and Instagram4 have been building “channels” that function the same way as Subtext. You can directly DM your audience, after which they struggle to figure out what’s happening and ask questions like:
It’s worth remembering, people are very, very annoyed with how much spam they’re getting on their phones. The Dallas Free Press had to quickly pull back how frequently they were texting to avoid losing people. And it’s not clear how many people want this level of direct interaction, even within platforms like Meta’s.
But as the walls come down on social media, we’re left with options like, YouTube Shorts, the vertical video equivalent of screaming at strangers. We should start considering which arenas we can control. That could be newsletters, podcasts, and maybe, a late night text into the bedrooms of the nation. You might be surprised what you hear back.
Just in case you didn’t click the first time.
And you know C-18, the Online News Act, has made Meta’s platforms hard to use
In case you’re wondering why their political situation is the way it is… this doesn’t help.
See footnote 2.