Speed, accuracy and volume: Newsweek’s formula for election night

A screenshot of Newsweek's website banner in 2018, illustrating a story about what drove the magazine's rapid growth in web traffic and its attempts to build a more stable direct audience. — A screenshot of the banner from Newsweek’s website. Photo: Sharaf Maksumov/Shutterstock

Fast-growing media brand Newseek said it wants to use speed and accuracy to help it stand out in the race for readers during the US election.

Josh Awtry, vice president of audience development for Newsweek, told Press Gazette that the news brand — the fastest-growing 50 English-language news site in the world — must find a way to compete with news outlets “that have infinitely more resources, fleets of data engineers. … we are dealing with people who have holograms”.

The magazine editor’s plan, he said, was to “jump right to the key questions on people’s minds” beyond individual race results and be faster than the competition.

He said the title has historically hired journalists with a focus on speed, has a roster of overnight journalists in the UK and has “prescripts” ready to continue covering a range of stories. (The brand has also reportedly hired AI-assisted live news reporters.)

The site typically publishes more than 300 stories a day, with a strong focus on politics and current affairs. Newsweek is the top 50 fastest-growing English-language news site in the world, according to Press Gazette rankings.

Newsweek has tried to position itself above the partisan fray: The website features a “Daily Debate” panel at the top, which hopes to present two sides of an issue (or, as the election nears, pitches from Donald Trump’s supporters and Kamala Harris).

It also launched a “Fairness Meter” a year ago, which allows readers to vote on whether a particular article is fair or if it leans right or left.

*A screenshot of the “Fairness Meter” that appears under many articles on Newsweek.com.*

Awtry said the introduction of the fairness meter came from the public’s desire “to keep us honest”.

Commenting that “it’s hard to beat journalism The New York Times“, he added: “What we’re hoping to do is set ourselves apart from a lot of other media by being more interactive and listening a lot to our community.”

Four-tenths of Newsweek’s audience “self-identifies as politically middle-of-the-road,” Awtry said, “and if you break it down to left-leaning and right-leaning, it’s pretty close to . . .

“We don’t want to lose the ability to talk to America. If you look at our penetration state by state, it reflects population trends. Rural, urban, suburban — pick your metric and we look like America.”

The Fairness Meter has been applied to more than 25,000 stories since the feature launched, Awtry said. It’s not placed on all articles, although most of the heavier news stories get it. In 90 percent of the cases it was used, the story was labeled “correct” by the majority of voters, he said, and of the two million total votes cast, 70 percent were for the correct option. About 14% of all those votes indicated a story “leans right” and 16% that it “leans left.”

Users don’t have to register to vote for the fairness counter, and Awtry said the plan for next year is to “keep the core functionality wide open and free for everyone, but then use it as a registration driver for that smaller percentage of readers who want more interesting things,” for example, to allow users to track how they’ve voted over time.

Newsweek.com is free to read, although it offers a paid digital subscription that removes ads and provides access to exclusive podcasts and newsletters.

“We don’t want to create any friction in the ability to register that vote,” Awtry said. “We don’t want you to have to register or create an account. We want it to be something we use to take our pulse. But we’re looking for features that power users might want.”

E-mail [email protected] to point out mistakes, give story advice, or submit a letter for publication on our “Letters Page” blog.