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News, Place & Relevance

A study of people’s experiences with a location and

preference aware mobile news and information service.

ABC Digital Network

Canberra Friends – Photo (cc) Richard Thorek

Priscilla Davies & Astrid Scott

Editor: Viveka WeileyContributors: Nicolaas Earnshaw and Charlie SzaszPrepared for: Angela Clark, Director ABC Digital Network

© 2015 Australian Broadcasting Corporation

News, Place & Relevance

A study of people’s experiences with a location and

preference aware mobile news and information service.

iv ABC-WHP-2015-A ©2015 Australian Broadcasting Corporation

News, Place and Relevance News, Place and Relevance

ABC-WHP-2015-A ©2015 Australian Broadcasting Corporation

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C O N T E N T STABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION 2

2. SUMMARY OF KEY FINDINGS 6

3. RESEARCH APPROACH 12

4. DISCOVERIES 22

5. DISCUSSION 98

6. CONCLUSIONS 110

2 ABC-WHP-2015-A ©2015 Australian Broadcasting Corporation



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1. INTRODUCTION

Media organisations have been pivotal in driving the shift towards personalised news and information experiences for mobile. It is now possible for news stories and articles to be surfaced and recommended to individuals based on their stated preferences, previous activity or reading history. Google Now and Zite are high profile examples of these types of services. In this landscape of the personalised experience, it’s common for location to be a key content discovery and organising principle. People can see what’s happening close to their GPS location, explore the news around them via a map, or filter content according to proximity to a certain place.

These approaches are already proving their usefulness, yet they are still relatively new and there are gaps in our collective knowledge about what rates as location-relevant content, and how it might be surfaced for a particular user at a particular time. For example, does a story increase in relevance when it’s closer to home? How do people engage with news and information from locations other than where a person is located right now? If people have relationships with many places, is there some way to accommodate that? How does location-relevance interplay with other factors of relevance such as topic or time? Are there interest topics for which location makes a difference to people’s understanding and level of engagement with stories?

To add another layer of complexity, there is a further question: are there sufficient quality digital stories produced to enable content discovery via location-match alone? Perhaps in the cities there is enough, but regionally-based news and information seekers have a harder time because the contraction of media towards state capitals means that the volume of locally-specific stories has reduced. So how does this impact news and information flows within regional communities?This report contains some answers to those questions by providing insight into people’s perspectives of news, place and relevance. It also describes some implications of these discoveries for media service providers who create and distribute news and information.

How does location-relevance interplay with other factors of relevance such as topic or time?

Bungendore Photo (cc) Jessica Brisbane

Farm Circles

Photo (cc) Gorter Folkert




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This report has been created to help media service providers make some decisions about:

• How to go about making content more relevant when location is a key factor determining a person’s pathway into news and information.

• How to service areas outside of major capital cities, and those living on state-border regions.

• What the regionally-based news-seeker (target audience) wants, values and needs in relation to content about their local area.

• How ‘competing’ media providers might cooperate to service the needs of a particular community or interest group.

• How to describe content via labelling and categorisation in order to ensure it is more discoverable to people.

• How to expose content in ways that liberates it from the limitations of vertical distribution, thereby making it accessible to people who may not engage with your core products.

• Whether or not experimenting with different news presentations may help you identify gaps in your content offering or opportunities. Spoke’s design was just one example of how presenting content in unusual way exposed content gaps for the ABC.

The lessons contained in this report were collected whilst undertaking the third pilot of ABC Innovation’s Location project (‘Spoke 3’). Many of those lessons further substantiated findings from earlier pilots (‘Spoke 1’ and ‘Spoke 2’).

Spoke 3 took the form of a smartphone app that was built and tested with people living in regions of ACT and Albury-Wodonga from September to December, 2014. The app featured a single news feed of recommended content that was dynamically generated according to various factors, including a person’s location and topic preferences. Each interaction was tracked in order for the app to ‘learn’ from a person’s behaviour over time, thereby further influencing their news mix. The app content drew from multiple content sources including the ABC, local media outlets, local interest groups and council news.

Overall, the project’s research approach comprised a mixture of quantative data analysis and qualitative feedback. Using custom web analytics, researchers looked for patterns in the collective actions and app preferences of 1296 users. Time was spent undertaking surveying and interviewing Spoke users in the pilot regions in order to gain insight into their behaviours, needs and values; why they made certain choices in their news-seeking habits overall; how they used the Spoke app, and what they thought of it.

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People’s location interests.

Identifying how location matters to people was a primary objective of this research. Spoke has shown that location based services need not solely be about where I’m at right now but can extend to the other places I care about. Participants were questioned about their location interests, and how those interests impact their experiences using Spoke and other news and information services.

As a news and information seeker...• My interest in location isn’t confined to my local area.

• If the news is local to me, then my topic interests expand.

• Sometimes an unfolding news event triggers my interest in a new place.

• Media coverage paints vivid pictures of places, thereby shaping my worldview.

• I live in a border region, so state-split presentations of news are very inconvenient.

2. SUMMARY OF KEY FINDINGS

People’s motivations for seeking news.

Understanding the reasons why people seek out news and information is key to ensuring relevance of content. News helps me make conversation with other people, and I want to lighten my mood are two examples of twelve motivation statements that were generated from this research. These statements are a useful reference for those who wish to develop a content strategy built around audience motivations.

People’s news-seeking habits and values.

Spoke research participants from ACT and Albury-Wodonga regions describe how they normally access news and information, and which sources are most valuable to them in various scenarios and contexts.

As a news and information seeker...• I like being able to access and cross-reference

news from multiple sources and platforms.

• When a story is local, I turn to social media or to a medley of locally-situated media providers.

• When a story is of national significance, I am likely to turn to the ABC.

• When a story is international in scope, I may go to the top international news outlets.

• I’ve noticed the contraction of local media services towards Sydney and Melbourne.

• Above all else, I want mobile news to be accurate and up-to-date.

• I get sick of the same news repeated over and over again.

Hume Dam

Photo (cc) Alex Blackburn




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Responses to Spoke’s content recommendation system

Spoke’s presentation of news was quite different from more traditional mobile news apps. Instead of providing menu items such as ‘just in’ or ‘world news’, Spoke comprised a single news feed organised by a content recommendation algorithm that responded to people’s stated preferences and their previous activity. This research set out to understand how Spoke’s alternative presentation changed people’s behaviour and people’s engagement with the news. Research participants liked the concept of a recommendation system, but the way it is implementated makes all the difference to their trust and acceptance of it.

As a news and information seeker...

• It’s okay for the ABC to track and collect my personal data because I trust the ABC to use it responsibly.

• Spoke surprises me with interesting stuff I didn’t expect I’d ever want.

• But Spoke also gives me FoMO (Fear of Missing Out)!

• I’m not always the same person, so how could an algorithm ever predict what I want?

• What is a top story? I want transparency. Show me how this thing works, and hand me the controls.

• If you could sort out the problems, I reckon this system could work well.

People’s topic interests

People mentally position topics along the scale of more locally relevant to more globally relevant. The more local a story is, the more personal and direct the impacts of the news story will likely be. Through analysing people’s interactions with Spoke, and then questioning them about their personal associations with news topics and subject matters, revealed content gaps and service opportunities that media providers may consider addressing.

As a news and information seeker...• Give me more grass roots political coverage.

• There is more big business than I need.

• What’s on for me? Events, arts and entertainment.

• Crime is compelling, even when it’s not close to me.

• Education is about my kids and I.

• Environmental news could also be about my area.

• Health matters when it threatens or impacts me and my family.

• I like local community and human interest stories, and animal stories from everywhere.

• I don’t care about Sport but I do love cricket.

• I love science and technology, but they’re not the same thing.

• I care when it’s close, I care when it’s big: Disasters and Accidents, War, and National Security.

ABC Open Day Photo by Jim Trail ABC Canberra

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Responses to inclusion of content from multiple providers.

In the single news feed, Spoke included content from a variety of sources outside the ABC in order to increase the breadth of local news for participants in the two pilot locations. This included material from local newspapers, news items from local councils, and social media posts from relevant local community groups and organisations. Analytics were collected to gauge interest, then participants were directly questioned about their attitude towards the inclusion.

As a news and information seeker...

• Including my local newspaper made Spoke feel more locally relevant.

• Other sources add local substance to subject areas where the ABC is a little thin.

• I expect the ABC to keep a close eye on the quality of content from other sources.

• It makes sense for the ABC to support the work of local media providers.

WodongaFair Photo (cc) Tracey & Doug10




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Lessons from Spoke 1 & Spoke 2

During the Spoke 1 and Spoke 2 pilots, gaps in locally-specific content were identified, and the challenges of content distribution were experienced. Also, it was found that existing social channels are most effective for a public discussion.

Spoke 1 and Spoke 2 revealed, that as a regionally-based news and information seeker...

• I want local news and local information included in the one place. Information refers to content such as local events, community noticeboard, classifieds, etc.

• I want local, national and international content in a single mobile feed.

• I want to customise my news by my location and topic preferences. Topic customisation is well received, but must be fine-tunable.

• I want news and information from multiple sources that are local to me in my ABC feed.

• I want more quality coverage of local issues and discussion around these.

• There is a perceived lack of high quality coverage of local issues. People are noticing their local media disappearing, especially in the regions.

• There is a widespread perception that vested interests control local media sources. People trust the ABC.

• Local issues start slow, and stay relevant for longer.

• Seeking input from local ‘experts’ is major challenge.

3. RESEARCH APPROACH

Background to this project

The Location Project was initiated by ABC Innovation.

The objective was to identify people’s unmet needs for

location and preference-aware news and information.

Findings would be used to inform future development

of ABC’s mobile services, especially in regional areas.

The initial research approach was developed by Symplicit, a Melbourne based user-experience design consultancy:

• Field research: collect insights through meeting, observing and talking to people.

• Build: generate product ideas from research; create lightweight prototypes to test these ideas.

• Pilot: test hypotheses in 3-4 month trials. Refine. Iterate live.

• Analyse: synthesise data and share what is discovered.

Research has been conducted in five different locations over three pilots known as Spoke 1, Spoke 2 and Spoke 3. The pilot sites were: Newcastle & Launceston (Spoke 1), South East South Australia & Townsville, and Canberra & Albury-Wodonga (Spoke 3)

The research sought to understand the relationship between location and relevance for mobile news and information services.

Spoke 1 was designed to test the propositions around the customisation and presentation of location and topic.

Spoke 2 was both a news mix and an open platform for local residents to access and comment on special coverage of local issues.

Spoke 1

Spoke 2




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Spoke 3’s design as an app (rather than a mobile website)

made it possible to collect detailed data about each

individual user: their preferences and activities.

Spoke 3 research questions

The findings from Spoke 1 and Spoke 2 pilots revealed that the relation-ship between location, news and relevance is a complex one that deserved further interrogation. The outcomes from early pilots generated new questions such as: are some types of stories more relevant than others, depending on location? Are certain news topics in greater demand when occurring closer to home? Do people wish to follow certain locations because of the news that is generated there?

There was also the question of how the presentation of news might influence the level of engagement when a person’s individual location and topic interests were factored into the design. With respect to the design, there were are many paths that could be taken. Spoke 3 embarked on modelling just one approach: a mobile app containing a single news feed of content supplied by multiple sources that was organised by a recommendation algorithm.

Spoke 3’s content recommendation algorithm dynamically generates an personalised news mix for each user, based on his or her preferences and behaviour. This system assigns each story a position in the news feed according to a combination of factors:

• User preferences: topic priorities and locations of interest• Recency: date and time published• ABC editorial weight • The user’s previous seven days of activity: which stories they viewed

or didn’t view, and which stories they actively demoted via the less like this feature.

Spoke 3 main screens

Spoke 3 design & information architecture sketches

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Secondary research outcomes

Beyond testing the five hypotheses, Spoke 3 was an

opportunity to discover new information about news-seekers,

such as:

• People’s motivations, habits, preferences and opinions in relation to news and information.

• People’s mental models in relation to ‘local’ and location and the how this relates to their news and information needs.

• How people interact with the local ACT and Albury-Wodonga news and information networks—both formal, and grassroots. Sought to further understand the ABC’s brand positioning in these contexts.

• How people’s content and interaction needs evolve at different points along a news story’s lifecycle.

• How to design mobile news experiences—with respect to both content and interaction design.

• Potential content gaps (demand vs. supply)

Primary research hypotheses

The central hypotheses that shaped Spoke 3’s research

plan were:

• That users show a preference for location relevant content for some topics over other topics.

• Users associate certain topics with particular geographic locations or regions.

• The majority of users will add more than one favourite place.

• That users actively and confidently interact with content presented to them, as determined by the content recommendation system.

• That the user experience isn’t negatively disrupted by presenting ABC content headlines alongside non-ABC (3rd party) headlines.

The search for intelligent life Photo (cc) Keith Midson, Launceston Tasmania16 17




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ACT region participants

• Callum, 23 from Acton, ACT*

• Allison, 27 from Richardson, ACT*

• Laura, 30 from Francislin, ACT

• Peter, 32 from Higgins, NSW*

• Francis, 33 from Queanbeyan NSW

• Annalise, 41 from Bungendore, NSW*

• Nancy, 46 from Giralang, ACT

• Craig, 52 from Monash, ACT*

Albury-Wodonga region participants

• Keira, 22 from Albury, NSW

• Brad, 34 from Barnawartha, VIC*

• Kevin, 35 from Albury, NSW*

• Lena, 37 from Wodonga, VIC

• Denise, 42 from Thurgoona, NSW

• Alan, 43 from Albury, NSW

• Julie, 51 from East Albury, NSW*

• Phil, 55 from Albury, NSW

* participants who were already using Spoke prior to participating in study

NB: The names of participants have changed to protect privacy of participants.

Spoke 3 research methods and activities

In order to validate the hypotheses and generate the

secondary research outcomes, a mix of quantitative

and qualitative research activities were planned and

undertaken:

Data analysis: mobile app / web analyticsThere were 1296 users of Spoke between 16th September - 5th December, 2014. Quantitative data about these users’ interactions with the app was aggregated and extracted from tracking software (appfigures.coms, Google Analytics and from a custom analytics tool). This data was analysed for overarching and generalised patterns about Spoke usage.

Remote qualitative study: survey series & interviewsSixteen participants were invited to participate in a formal study. The panel was composed of an even gender split, spanning ages 22-55. Eight participants were already using Spoke before they were selected for the study, while the remaining six were recruited via a market research recruitment agency. Throughout this document, names have been changed to protect the privacy of the participants.




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Data analysis and synthesis

All data sources—interview transcripts, survey

responses, feedback emails, usage statistics & charts—

have been combed by the researchers in order to

to isolate interesting statements or facts that reveal

something about the users’ actions, habits, motivations,

thoughts and opinions.

Each point (snippet) was written on post-it note or cut out from web analytics reports and stuck on walls. Using the saturate and group method, the snippets are organised into groups and then re-grouped to let patterns and themes emerge.

The saturate and group visualisation process helps us prove or disprove the project’s central hypotheses, plus identify other audience insights that emerged as incidental secondary research outcomes.

Participants committed to using Spoke for a minimum of 5-10 mins per day for 4 weeks. They responded to a series of nine online surveys between October 27 - December 15, 2015. In total, 135 survey responses were generated. Not all participants responded to every survey (n= 11 for survey 9).

The online surveys were followed with a 40 minute phone interview with 13 of the 16 participants which were transcribed and coded, ready for data analysis.

A note about sample size and qualitative research

When assessing the validity of qualitative methods, sample size often arises as a point of concern. In human-centered research, the number of participants is often relatively small because this style of this research favours richness, nuance and stories over statistical relevance. It helps researchers gain a more in-depth understanding about the tacit motivations, desires and values of people.

Spoke’s research approach incorporates a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. Patterns were sought in the quantitative data generated from 1296 Spoke users’ interactions over 4 months (ie. what people do), and then qualitative data was mined to provide explanation about why those patterns might have emerged (ie. why people do what they do).

Content analysis of direct feedback The ABC received email feedback from Spoke users, and researchers undertook seven informal phone interviews with ABC staff who use Spoke. This data was logged, and coded, ready for data analysis.

Spoke 3 data analysis & synthesis 21




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What follows is a selection of qualitative insights from sixteen study participants that describes their motivations, habits, opinions and preferences. The Spoke study was a good opportunity to learn more about news-seekers in Albury-Wodonga and ACT regions. Many findings in this study strongly align with the findings from the initial discovery research conducted in Canberra, Launceston, Mt Gambier, Geelong and Newcastle.

Media providers can use the following insights as a

point of reference—a touchstone of sorts—that will help

them ground mobile news and information services

in the realities of the everyday lives of people living

in Canberra and Albury-Wodonga. The following

section also provides readers with a sense of how news

services are perceived and valued by the participants—

both the ABC’s own news services, and non-ABC

sources.

4. DISCOVERIES4.1 People’s news-seeking motivations, habits and preferences

In this section:

1. My motivations: I am driven to seek out news and information.

2. I like being able to access and cross-reference news from multiple sources and platforms.

3. When a story is local, I turn to social media or to a medley of locally-situated media providers.

4. When a story is of national significance, I am likely to turn to the ABC.

5. When a story is international in scope, I may go to the top international news outlets.

6. I’ve noticed the contraction of local media services towards Sydney and Melbourne.

7. Above all else, I want mobile news to be accurate and up-to-date.

8. I get sick of the same news repeated over and over again.




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E. I want to educate others about the news, so I need to feel confident talking about the facts. Lena from Wodonga is a teacher who is often asked questions about news headlines by her year 8 students.

F. I want to find opportunities to deepen my understanding of—and connection with—someone I know. Laura from ACT reads Navy News so that she can more easily talk and bond with her father who works in defence.

G. I want updates about a particular matter because it directly impacts me or someone I care about. Francis from Queanbeyan reads about Mr Fluffy asbestos issue because it impacts housing market values in his area.

H. I want to broaden my social conscience so that I can be a better person. Peter from ACT believes that reading the news helps him become a better citizen.

I. I want to better understand society and how people think. Craig from ACT is a self-proclaimed ‘news junkie’. He reads the news in order to observe how people think and what they believe. This is important to his community role as church pastor.

J. I want to improve my own ‘lot’ in life. Laura from ACT always looks out for lifestyle content that gives her tips on how to be healthier, wealthier, more productive.

K. I want to lighten my mood. Annalise will visit Mamamia for a lighthearted take on the day’s news.

L. I want to return to the original source in order to to check a fact. Francis from Queanbeyan mentioned that he’ll often want to refer to an original story he read to help him discuss news with others.

4.1.1 My motivations: I am driven to seek out news and information Researchers generated a set of motivations that explain why participants’ seek out news and information. Understanding the reasons why people do what they do is one way to identify design or business opportunities.

These statements were either explicitly expressed or implicitly expressed and interpreted by Spoke researchers.

A. News helps me make conversation with other people. Peter from ACT deals with clients over the phone for his job. He likes how news gives him icebreakers for conversation with clients.

B. I feel out-of-the-loop. I want to get up-to-speed with a story I’ve heard snippets about on the grapevine. Alan first saw mention about the Ferguson shootings on Facebook, but he needed a backstory to fill in the gaps of his knowledge.

C. I want to feel updated; to catch-up on the latest developments to a story that is unfolding right now. Lena from Wodonga wanted the latest daily developments about Ebola, rather than having to read through so-called ‘new’ stories that were barely different (in terms of story-developments) from the previous days.

D. I want to feel updated; to follow-up on a story that I lost track of a while ago. Laura from ACT hadn’t come across any updates about what was happening with the Canberra light rail and knew that there must be news about it out there somewhere.




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4.1.2 I like being able to access and cross-reference news from multiple sources and platforms.Following on from analysis of behavioural data from the complete Spoke user-base, sixteen participants listed their top news sources, and responded to hypothetical scenarios. Their responses shed a light on how and why people turn to their different news providers in different contexts.

There is no single news source that meets all of a person’s needs completely. People appreciate that each news provider has its own strengths and weaknesses, and that each offers a perspective, tone or emphasis that differs from one to the next. For instance, Craig from ACT actively seeks out content about the same subject matter from different sources because he enjoys the challenge of pinpointing political biases through the stylistic nuances of each news provider: ‘every news source has a particular idea that they are pushing.’

Sometimes, different news sources quite naturally fulfil different roles for a person throughout the timeline of their engagement with an unfolding new story. (See Appendix B for more lessons about partici-pants’ regular news habits). For instance:

• Alan from Albury was checking Facebook on his mobile during a work break when he saw a friend’s status update about the Phil Hughes cricket accident. He tuned in to the hourly radio news bulletin broadcast on Star FM 104.9 to hear their coverage of the story. Later that night he watched Prime7 for visuals and a different storytelling take. For Alan, the radio and tv broadcast news gave the story verification and was an opportunity to get a different perspective to fill in the gaps of the story.

• Craig from ACT uses Twitter during news events that are unfolding right now, that the broadcast media might not have immediate access to.

Discussion

These motivation statements to define the content and design strategy of existing and future news and information services. For instance, Statement K indicates a need to lighten one’s mood. How could the a content provider respond to this need, particularly on heavy news days?

Some of these statements can also be combined to map how people’s needs might change at different points along a timeline of engagement with a particular news story. For instance, a user might take the following path: B > A > K > L. How would the one go about designing that entire journey?

ACT region participants

Top 5 news sources

Albury-Wodonga region participants

Top 5 news sources

Phil




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4.1.3 When a story is local, I turn to social media or to a medley of locally-situated media providers. I value local news sources when they are available.

Local media providers were frequently included in the study participants’ lists of top 5 news sources they most frequently access (see page 26). Their answers are listed in the order that the participant responded.

• ABC services appear to be more frequently accessed by ACT participants (7 of 8) compared with Albury-Wodonga participants (5 of 8). Mentioned ABC services: the ABC app, ABC News (on tv, website and Twitter), ABC NewsRadio, ABC Local, QandA, and Spoke.

• Commercial local media providers mentioned by Albury-Wodonga participants include: Prime News 7 (6pm bulletin), Star FM (104.9), The River (105.7 FM).

Local news services are still central to my community’s local news and information flows.

The majority of participants mentioned leading local newspapers in their top five news sources, and local mastheads frequently popped up in survey responses and interviews.

• Albury-Wodonga folk regularly look at their local paper. It is known as a service that covers a little bit of everything: local, national and world news. Some people did have reservations about the quality of the content.

• ACT folk believe that their local paper’s coverage of local news is thorough and of good quality, but some believe that Spoke gave it a run for its money.

• If Laura’s (ACT) neighbours haven’t recently seen any professional news coverage about what’s happening with the Canberra light rail, they will post a question to My Gungahlin Facebook Group. It enables them to check-in with each other and share news regarding local matters when traditional media providers aren’t covering that topic.

• YouTube allows Craig and Alan to view news clips that aren’t locally available. Craig from ACT: if I read an article and I think I’d love to have seen that interview or that Deniseate, YouTube will have it.

• Annalise turns to Mamamia for some light relief when she’s fed up with hearing gloomy news from her other news providers.

Discussion

• Work with (not against) the audience’s propensity to access multiple sources. This is something the ABC already handles quite well, but there’s always room for improvement. Ask why might the media provider might be an important source for a particular user at that particular point in time. The answer could inform how the content is produced and distributed.

• Understand the strengths and weaknesses of ABC’s various news and information sub-brands (News24, ABC News Breakfast, The Drum, AM/PM, etc.) and channels (tv, radio, Twitter, etc.) alongside the alternatives. Clearly articulate the audience value propositions of each, and ensure these messages are incorporated into content strategies and style-guides.




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We still enjoy flipping through free community print publications.

• ‘I would like to see content from The Chronicle in Spoke’ —Eric from ACT reads a local community newspaper which quite often contains local planning and development news.

• Francis and Laura (both from ACT region) will pick up copies of local newspapers like The Canberra Weekly if they see them at shopping centres: ‘They tend to be community events and advertisements. but I’m interested in politics and crime and things. I want to know about redevelopment plans and changing the city plans’.—Francis, Queanbeyan, NSW

Implications when designing for local communities

• Consider monitoring certain community Facebook pages for ideas on local content gaps. What are people asking questions about? What petitions are being distributed amongst community members? What information do they need and value right now?

• In relation to mobile news and information, people value ABC Local content when they remember to access it or stumble upon it, but it does not appear to be front-and-centre in people’s minds as a comprehensive ‘go-to’ digital source for accessible, informative and entertaining local content.

• How can the ABC broaden the reach of this kind of relevant content? Maybe by looking to re-distribute outside specific destinations. For example, by funnelling geo-targeted content via ABC’s main Facebook page as well as sharing content into locally-relevant Facebook groups?

• More initiatives like locally targeted feeds in the ABC app are great, but Spoke shows that hiding a local feed within the broader app is a less effective method than integrating it with national and international headlines.

For many of us, ABC Local is on the periphery of our regular news-seeking experiences.

• ABC Local services were accessed regularly by 3 participants: Annalise and Allison (both ACT region) and Kevin (Albury). Annalise from Bungendore (NSW) listens to ABC radio but prefers to listen to Sydney 702 over Canberra 666 and will tune her car radio to 702 if she can. She finds 666 too parochial and too emotional about local issues. She likes 702 because she loves James Valentine.

• Phil from Albury ‘very occasionally listens to ABC local radio’ but did say that ABC Local would be his first port of call for information about a local issue.

• Allison (ACT) listens to The World Today on Canberra 666 and loves it. She said, ‘I often find out about things for the first time.’ She wants ABC Local to ‘use Facebook and Twitter to say we’ve got a lot of calls on this issue and here are some of the key things you need to know.’

People in my social network help me discover and stay in-the-loop about local issues, usually via Facebook.

• Word-of-mouth is a common source of local news discovery. Participants were asked how they first heard about a particular local issue that they cared deeply about, and most had answers like ‘through a friend ’.

• Participants sometimes mentioned Facebook as the first place that they heard about a particular local issue, such as via sharing of online petitions. Local cause or campaign Facebook Pages are used to follow updates on those issues that people feel strongly about.

• Facebook Groups were by mentioned as an easy and accessible way that some stay in touch with places and communities that relevant to them. eg. My Gungahlin Facebook Group for Laura, ACT.




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4.1.5 When a story is international in scope, I may go to the top international news outletsFor the majority of participants, when a big international story breaks, generally their everyday news sources (including the ABC) would be sufficient. But a notable minority would seek information from interna-tional providers such as BBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Reuters. A small group of news seekers seem not to trust that the ABC’s world news coverage is sufficiently detailed: ‘Generally, I would go straight away to the BBC App. I like the way it splits the continents - they cover each continent. It’s very thorough. Being based over there, they follow that part of the world. They have a larger quantity of news (so it’s) better. I haven’t seen a lot of the Ferguson stuff happening in Spoke at all, but that is highlighted in BBC, so it seems like it’s not a huge priority in Spoke.’ —Callum, ACT

4.1.4 When a story is of national significance, I am likely to turn to the ABC.

When participants were asked: ‘If you heard that a huge cyclone was suddenly threatening the safety and welfare of thousands of people in North Queensland, which news or information sources would you turn to first?’ Eight of fourteen participants specifically mentioned ABC services including: News 24, Spoke and ABC News website. The ABC was followed by The Bureau of Meteorology website as the second most popular information provider.

Many participants already used the ABC mobile app regularly and perceived as being good for national news, in contrast to how they positioned Spoke as good for local coverage: ‘The main abc app keeps me up to date with federal politics. Spoke one is more local stories’—Don, ACT

Discussion

Spoke’s unusual presentation of news content made users feel as if it contained more local stories compared with the ABC app. This is interesting because almost the same volume of local news is available to users via both apps (aside from a small number of additional local third party material included in Spoke). Local news is less prominent in the ABC app, whilst Spoke surfaces local content.

Climate action, Canberra Photo (cc) David Burke 33




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Discussion

• People really notice the absence of news that reflects their own world and priorities back at them in regional areas. They asked for more local coverage—explainers, fact checking, analysis and opinion— that extends to the heart of local issues such as development, council politics, big litigations.

• How can ABC do better at resourcing the collection, creation and distribution of in-depth local news and information? If resources are lacking, is it of value for the ABC to focus on in-depth coverage of important stories while supporting other local media or organisa-tions to distribute their content throughout the local community? ABC Open is one model that explored alternatives, and Spoke was another.

4.1.6 I’ve noticed the contraction of local media services towards Sydney and Melbourne. ABC’s earlier Spoke pilot (Spoke 2) reported that people—especially those based in regional areas—notice how news is produced and distributed from state capital centres, especially from Sydney and Melbourne. The Spoke 2 findings have been further validated by Spoke 3.

• ‘We get more Melbourne news, and very little from Sydney. Our 7 News is Melbourne based. It really is based on that major city’. —Lena, Wodonga

• ‘Everyone seems to ignore that Canberra is a city. We’re lucky to get a mention on national news for more than anything but the weather. We usually get written-off as a regional’. —Peter, ACT

Albury-Wodonga participants noticed the lack of reporting of local issues during the Victorian election:

• Despite being a big newshound, Brad didn’t hear any news from local MPs or policies that would be relevant to his life in Barnawartha and he noticed how Melbourne-centric the election coverage was: ‘The East-West link: I couldn’t care less whether they built it or not. It’s never going to affect my driving in Melbourne’.—Brad, Albury

• Lena from Wodonga said: ‘We’re not hearing much from the members up here, but everything is coming out of Melbourne which is pretty disappointing. The sitting Liberal member is only saying what Denis [Napthine] is saying so how can you hear about Denis, but to be in touch with Melbourne?’ —Lena, Wodonga

This contraction may explain why some participants held an assumption that ‘nothing really happens around here’. Yet all journalists know that stories can be found everywhere. This perception is more likely due to the fact that local resources are simply not available to collect, report and distribute these stories.

Wodonga TAFE Photo (cc) NTEUVictoria 35




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I want it to be up-to-date.

The nature of Spoke’s recommendation system would mean that ‘breaking’ stories may not appear immediately for some people, even though recency is a factor taken into consideration by the algorithm.

Brad from Barnawartha said: I think there’s a level of expectations through things like Twitter and instant news showing up straight away...Spoke did feel behind. So I’d see things 8 hours after they happened, and I’d think ‘that was confirmed even by a different ABC news source six hours ago, why did it take so much time to appear?

We received requests from many users who wanted to be able to override the recommendations filter so they could see a list of ‘just in’ stories (amongst other filters). See more on this at 4.4.

Sometimes idiosyncrasies of ABC’s digital publishing workflow would disrupt audience perception of how up-to-date Spoke seemed.

• Annalise from Bungendore didn’t understand why she saw news items from AM in the afternoon because she had already read about the events they were talking about.

• Allison from ACT was bothered when occasionally she would tap on a story headline, yet the main story details were missing, and the only words were: ‘Transcript coming soon’. She said, ‘I was really pumped about the headline, but I couldn’t read about it.’

Recommendation

Existing publishing workflows may work effectively for one or two purpose-built contexts (such as for the AM website or for ABC News’ audio page), but aren’t suitable for syndicated presentations (such as Spoke). To free content from their original contexts and enable stories to be presented and discovered in other ways, ABC needs to be consistent in its publishing workflows, and in how data and metadata is added to content management systems.

4.1.7 Above all else, I want mobile news to be accurate and up-to-date. When asked which top 5 qualities participants are looking for in mobile news services, the most highly ranked responses in order were:

• Accurate

• Up-to-date

• Independent

• Locally-oriented

• A mix of serious and light news

I want accuracy and independence in a mobile news service.

‘Newspapers are not really that accurate or politically unbiased, but I need the local events news and I quite like the opinions of local people’—Julie, Albury

‘I am moving away from news sources that require payment and show what I consider to be commercial and political bias’. —Craig, ACT

Many participants mentioned that mention that ABC’s reputation for accuracy and independence are ABC’s key strengths, which puts ABC ahead of the pack in terms of qualities people are seeking in a mobile news service. Phil from Albury said ‘I’ve always been confident about Spoke’s accuracy’, while Francis mentioned that Spoke performs very well against both of those two values: ‘I like how ABC tells it straight, there’s none of the junk you get with other media providers that try to sex-it-up or god knows what other junk they do with it’.—Francis, Queanbeyan (NSW)

Discussion

ABC content creators and brand managers must protect ABC’s reputation for independence and accuracy above all else, as these are highly prized and valued by audiences. When aggregating content from multiple sources—including non-ABC content—there is a risk that these values may be eroded if implemented without care and attention to the details of content, context and design.




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• I go to news.com.au when I need to space out for a second! I’d like to say that I’m not into the celebrity stuff, but sometimes you want to read about someone saying something they shouldn’t have or wardrobe malfunctions. I suppose it comes down to conversations that I have with the people around me [at my office] —Peter, ACT

• I don’t want to know celebrity news, but things like your everyday Aussies and what they are doing Your local hero type stuff. —Laura, ACT

• I want to hear about people doing good things for each other such as the Wayside chapel and people supporting a homeless man. —Nancy, ACT

There is appetite for human interest stories (see section 4.3.8).

Future Directions

• Track individual interactions across news content. Over time, we may pick up at which point a user exits out of the gloomy news and seeks something more fun to read. Eventually, we might be able to time the recommendation of lighter-news story.

• ABC R&D are currently exploring ideas around natural language processing (NLP) that provides a layer of consistent metadata to ABC content, including aspects like topic, mood and location. Doing this may allow us to look to a future of recommendation based on mood or sentiment.

I like mobile-news to be locally-oriented.

Interestingly, some users enjoyed this aspect of Spoke, although some users said they wished it would be more locally-oriented.

• I think my taste has changed to become more local and I like to know what is going on. I saw articles in Spoke that I wouldn’t have bothered to look up. —Callum

• Very local focussed. I really like that. Was curious to see what was happening around here and there’s more than I expected —Dan

• Nancy (ACT) considered her local Canberra newspaper’s coverage of a dispute at her local shops to be the kind of ‘really’ local news Spoke could do more of: ABC Canberra stories are more like stories from Sydney.

I want a mix of serious and light news.Participants mentioned they wanted to some relief from the bad and gloomy news, and wanted some news with a positive spin. In their own words, they asked for stories that are ‘good news’, ‘comic and light hearted’, and ‘stories about interesting people doing interesting things’.

• There’s a lot of stuff that goes on that I just go, ‘Oh my god what is going on!’ It’s a bit of a downer, really! But then I saw that Leunig or someone else’s comic in there and I thought, they’re listening to me! When I saw that, I was pretty rapt! I had a bit of a chuckle. You made my day. —Lena from Wodonga referring to a story from Insiders’ Talking Pictures segment

Summernats Fest Photo (cc) Eva Rinaldi




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Discussion

• How might a media provider with multiple sub-branded programs or outlets (like the ABC) reduce the frequency of the same news content being published by multiple outlets? This comes back to identify-ing the value that each property can bring to the overall story. What does each property offer the audience that is different from the next property? How can a more the approach be more coordinated

• Spoke has explored what might be achieved when people’s preferences and interactions are individually tracked, and how their data informs which content is recommended to them. Yet Spoke’s implementation was just the tip-of-iceberg in terms of what might created. An even further personalised news experience would take into account where a person is positioned in their journey of engaging with a specific news event or story. For instance, on any particular news subject the ABC could track which stories on that subject have previously viewed (and in which order), the keywords, opinions, quotes and facts that a user has previously been exposed to. The logical extensions of this data? The ABC could provide that person with a simple story update (instead of a recap and an update). If this is the first time engaging with a subject matter, we could recommend ‘explainer’ content to get them up-to-speed. Maybe after a little while, that user is primed for analysis and opinion. We could also help a user easily track-down the key story points, when they are in fact-checking mode.

4.1.8 I get sick of seeing the same news repeated over-and-over again.

When participants were asked to name one thing they’d like to change about ‘the news’ as they currently know it (in general), some of them talked about how they felt bombarded with the same news headlines, the same story recaps and insignificant updates:

• Sometimes it is hard to get away from the political story of the day/week/month and find news on other things.—Allison, ACT

• When a big event happens in the news they seem to repeat it over and over again. —Alan, Albury

• Lena from Wodonga wanted the latest daily developments about Ebola, rather than having to read through so-called ‘new’ stories that she thought were barely different in terms of story-developments from the previous days.

Unfortunately, the Spoke experience may have further aggravated a sense of story fatigue in users. They noticed a clumping of stories in their feed that covered the same news event, yet the stories were subtly different because they were created by different news programs or divisions within the ABC. Most likely, each of those items would share the same metadata and would be published around the same time, which is why they were clumped together in the Spoke feeds. The Spoke Editor editorialised this where possible but couldn’t eliminate it.




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I have an historical connection with this place.

Peter from ACT: If I see [a crime story] that has happened in the [south coast NSW] towns that I know, and I know people who live in those towns. I know it’s still a longshot that someone that I know would have been involved, I am curious about what is going on in an area that I know.

I am planning to spend time there.

Brad from Wodonga added Melbourne to his Spoke location preferences because he wants to live there one day.

This place generates stories that interest me.

Craig is interested in political stories from China and United States.

I’m interested in other kinds of places that might not be pinpointed on a map.

There are places, regions, and trails that people wish to to receive news about that might more conventionally be perceived as a topic. For instance, participants mentioned: national parks, ski fields, marine parks and outer-space. In a location-based service, perhaps further consider-ation might be given to how to incorporate unconventional places such as these as locations to follow?

Prompt me to save other ‘places I care about’.

Spoke prompts users to ‘add your favourite places for local stories’, at which point users have an option to start typing in the name of a town, and Spoke provides suggested location matches via a lookup table. The alter-nate way for users to add a location is to detect current location via GPS. 14% of all Spoke users added 2 or more locations to their preferences. The maximum number saved by one user was eight.

4.2 People’s location interests

In this section:

1. My interest in location isn’t confined to my local area

2. If the news is local to me, then my topic interests expand

3. Sometimes an unfolding news event triggers my interest in a new place

4. Media coverage paints vivid pictures of places, thereby shaping my worldview

5. I live in a border region, so state-split presenta-tions of news are very inconvenient

4.2.1 My interest in location isn’t confined to my local area.

Location based services need not solely be about

where I’m at right now but can extend to the other

places I care about.

I’m interested in news from locations far away from me.

Via our conversations with Spoke users, we gained a better understand-ing of why people are interested in news and information from a location other than their current location or home location. Some themes emerged that explain people’s interests in other locations.

Someone I care about lives there.

Julie from Albury wants news from New Zealand because she is an expatriate and has family members still living there.




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• Lena from Wodonga said she thought she would need to add Melbourne as a location so that she would be provided news about her local MP’s policies via Melbourne. She knew that local coverage of her local MP was thin on the ground.

• Annalise who lived outside ACT was conscious of adding both home location of Bungendore-NSW-2621, and Acton-ACT-2601 so that she would see news from both states. In contrast, Francis assumed that adding Karabar-NSW-2620 would be sufficient to pick up relevant stories from ACT.

• Craig from ACT added a second location of someone he cared about: Parkes because his son lives there.

There may be many reasons why 86% of users set none or only one location, and it’s likely to be because that behaviour aligns with the established design pattern of mobile apps. One user said that he was surprised to be asked to add a location and expected this to be automati-cally set via GPS.

The design of the Spoke on-boarding experience may have distracted people from acting on the multi-location suggestion. Spoke could have done a better job of succinctly selling the value proposition as to why people might consider adding one or more ‘favourite places’ and how that would impact their mobile news experience.

After Spoke researchers learned from Julie and Craig that they were interested in seeing news from New Zealand, USA and China, the researchers suggested that they try adding those country names to their favourite places. Both participants did this immediately, which supports the idea that once the idea was described to them, they could immediately understand the value of it.

Amongst the Spoke user-base that added multiple

locations, there were some patterns:

• The most common pairing is to add a postcode within greater city, plus the city postcode (eg. Giralang, ACT, 2617, + Canberra, ACT). Why? Perhaps people assume they will receive hyperlocal news from within their postcode. For instance, Nancy wanted news about her local shops and businesses.

• A second common pairing was Albury-NSW-2640 + Wodonga-VIC-3690; perhaps because users expected different news to be generated from these postcodes, according to state-based lines.

Unique locations saved by all users, Spoke 3




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• For users interested in following international places, they must follow country names (eg. China, New Zealand) rather than major international regions, states or cities. Is it time for ABC to expand its location tagging model to enable people to follow global locations at a more granular level?

• Consider enabling people to follow pairings of locations. For instance, if someone has a particular interest in China-USA relations.

• The users’ location preferences data could be more powerfully used in a news and information service if we understood how people relate to those multiple locations in their preferences. For instance, if we understood which location a user added was their ‘home location’ vs ‘a location where someone I care about lives’ we could potentially recommend different content to them for those respective locations.

• Be aware of meeting user expectations when enabling them to follow postcode level locations. Some people assume they will receive hyperlocal news from within their postcode, which may not be an expectation the ABC can always meet.

Considerations

• Allowing people the ability to save multiple locations to their app preferences pushes up against established design conventions. In order to encourage more people to think outside the box (ie. beyond location setting = my current location), we must do a better job in design and implementation. We need to sell the value proposition as to why people might consider adding one or more ‘favourite places’ and how that might impact their experience.

• Consider allowing locations or regions to align with alternate place-meanings or frames of reference that exist for certain groups of people eg. regions from Aboriginal Australia map (organised by language/tribal/nation groups by AIATSIS)

• Expand our notion of locations to allow people to add location-like topics such as ‘national parks’, ‘Murray-Darling’ ‘outer-space’, ‘Java Sea’, ‘The Moon’, ‘Great Barrier Reef’. Establish which location tags may overlap with new or existing topic tags, and how these might be treated in a location-based news and information service.




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4.2.3 Sometimes a news event triggers my interest in a new place.

Due to Spoke’s unusual presentation of news content,

people would find themselves intrigued by a story of

local significance that was not occurring in their own

local area.

• I added Perth because that’s where my parents live, and I found out more about Perth than I think I would have normally, such as about council amalgamations which I actually found moderately interesting! —Brad from Barnawartha, VIC

• Lena from Wodonga is interested in world news so she can think about where she next wishes to travel.

Recommendation

Where contextually appropriate, give people the option to ‘follow more stories from this location’.

4.2.2 If the news is local to me, my topic interests expand.

On the whole, people are more interested in local if ‘it is

relevant to my existence there.’

For some people, home locations are the primary indicator of relevance. When Julie from Albury reflected on diverse range of locally-relevant headlines that she had read over the previous 5 weeks, she said: I think most of those [stories] I read just because they were local, not because I’m particularly interested in those topics. Francis from Queanbeyan agreed, ‘I don’t really follow subjects by location - but I will browse any subject related to my home location simply for the purposes of keeping in touch with what is happening in my area.’

There appear to be some topics that are more important to people if they are local stories. For instance, over the Spoke trial, there was a relative-ly strong interest in local business stories (compared with national, international or capital-city based stories), despite the rarity of those local business stories. Participants might also be moved to act on certain local issues, that would not normally fall into their priority topics of interest.

On the other hand, to some people there will always be topics that they don’t care about regardless of whether it’s local or not, and sport is a good example of a topic that will always be off limits for some people.

Discussion

While people can clearly articulate which topics are relevant to them in a general way, people are somewhat less beholden to firm topic prioriti-sation when it comes to news about where they live. The design of news services and content recommendation systems might take this into account when designing location based-services eg. if location matches user’s home location, give them a topically broader range of news compared with what they might normally see for other locations.

Sky Whale Photo by Jim Trail

ABC Canberra

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4.2.5 I live in a border region, so state split presentations of news are very inconvenient.Spoke 3 captured some perspectives of people living on and across state borders. We spoke to Albury-Wodonga citizens who constantly cross between NSW-Victoria, and NSW citizens who would commute into ACT.

Border region citizens feel like they’re part of one united

community yet depending on which side of the border

they live on, they have different media and political

influences competing for their attention.

Most of the time, news and information providers like to neatly demarcate their coverage along official state lines, which doesn’t reflect the lived experiences of people who live there:

• Dividing news into states drives me crazy. If you are here, or across the border you get NSW news or VIC news. You get one or the other. This is very infuriating as it’s not the way we feel. The Border Mail does a good job in that regard.—Julie, Albury NSW

• Sometimes we hear a little about NSW, but mostly Melbourne based. I have no idea why. —Lena, Wodonga

• It’s like with Yarawonga & Malwala - there’s a bridge development in between the two sides. Where is the money going to come from? You’ll have one side in an election year, and the other one isn’t. One says they’ll fund it and the other one won’t. That’s what happens living on the border.’— Alan, Albury

• Even though Annalise works in Canberra she lives in Bungendore (NSW) and resents being forced into ACT news streams (both radio & online) because she would prefer Sydney.

4.2.4 Media coverage paints vivid pictures of places, thereby shaping my worldview.People use the news as a way to learn about the world

and to interpret and understand their place in it. A

media provider thereby participates in the shaping

Australians’ perspectives, beliefs and ideas about local

places, international places and the respective cultures

of those places.

Through numerous free word-association exercises with Spoke study participants, it was observed how media coverage about particular locations influences perceptions. Locations develop ‘identities’ that are based on the creation of knowledge and ideas about these places. For instance, Australia’s neighbouring Asia-Pacific countries are associated with dramatic and negative news topics: boat people; political turmoil; natural disasters poverty; disasters; live animal exports; military coups; rising sea levels; religious conflicts; violence against women; civil unrest; phone tapping; security; deaths; drugs; crime.

People are also mindful of how their own community or region is represented in the media, because they know that these depictions can be inaccurate: ‘We’re also a city just like any other around Australia, so there are things that are going on apart from what happens of Capital Hill’—Laura, ACT

Discussion

Media organisations are responsible for shaping people’s perceptions of places, people, and cultures. This is a position of power must be wielded consciously and carefully. How might content providers broaden the variety or news topics associated with particular locations in order to create more positive associations (or at least balance them out), dispel and subvert subtle prejudices, promote a increased cross-cultural understanding? Perhaps via generating more human interest stories from these areas? More sport stories?




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A note about location metadata

I never saw that news story about my town because it wasn’t tagged appropriately.Presenting content in Spoke’s unusual way revealed some weaknesses in location metadata. Sometimes location metadata was completely missing, which meant that Spoke could not include that content. This was the case for Radio National and triple j content.

Also, sometimes the notion of a primary location and a secondary location doesn’t always apply. For example, a story titled ‘4WD crashes through Vinnies shopfront’ provided the primary location at state level (ACT) and its secondary locations were set at a suburb postcode level where the accident actually occurred. Really, the location relevance of this event is higher closer to the site of the event. The hierarchy of primary and secondary locations should be suburb as primary and state as secondary.

For Francis in Queanbeyan (NSW), the relevant news being reported didn’t give a complete picture due to state lines: Obviously asbestos is a big issue in both Canberra & Queanbeyan but because ACT is a different jurisdiction they are doing something about it, but Queanbeyan being part of NSW isn’t doing anything.

To mitigate this, Albury-Wodonga users would commonly add both locations: There is no news that is ‘just Albury’ and there is no news that is ‘just Wodonga. That’s why I added both locations. — Lena, Wodonga

Recommendations

• When considering audience news and information needs, consider the unique needs of people living in border regions whereby state-split news streams are problematic.

• Frustrations expressed by participants about this issue further underscore how important it is to have journalists within the community reporting and investigating issues that are relevant to the local region.

• Allow people to decide for themselves how local they wish their local news coverage to be. They could choose from options such as ‘within 1 hour’s drive from this location’ or ‘within 150km from this location’.

Banks Suburb

© Jim Trail ABC Canberra




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4.3 People’s topic interests

Spoke research participants said they want more local

news. Given ‘local’ is not a subject topic, we looked

carefully at how our users interacted with the different

topic areas of Spoke to try and understand this

statement.

In this section:

1. Give me more grass roots political coverage.

2. There is more big business than I need.

3. What’s on for me? Events, Arts & Entertainment.

4. Crime is compelling, even when it’s not close to me.

5. Education is about my kids and I.

6. Environmental news could also be about my area.

7. Health matters when it threatens or impacts me and my family.

8. I like local community and human interest stories, and animal stories from everywhere.

9. I don’t care about Sport but I do love cricket.

10. I love Science and Technology, but they’re not the same thing.

11. I care when it’s close, I care when it’s big: Disasters and Accidents, War, and National Security.

Data patterns that emerged revealed how people mentally position topics along the scale of ‘more locally relevant’ to ‘more globally relevant’. The more local a story is, the more personal and direct the impacts of the news story will likely be, which—in turn—may impact a person’s interpretation and emotional engagement with a story.

When some topics are explored in a local context, people have a different level of interest and engagement with those stories, which changes their association with that topic.

Sunday walking Photo (cc) ABC Albury Wodonga

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Only, 3 out of 5 of the top viewed politics stories were tagged with a location relevant to either pilot site, which is relatively high considering less than 10% of the all published stories were local to those sites. In the case of ACT users, this is because most federal politics stories are tagged by ABC as ‘Australia’ with the primary location, rather than Canberra.

Some participants expressed a desire for more coverage of local political issues. For instance, in the leadup to the Victorian state election, Lena and Brad—both from Wodonga—said they were hungry for more reports and analysis of local election issues: ‘We’re not hearing much from the members up here, but everything is coming out of Melbourne which is pretty disappointing.’—Lena from Wodonga

Sixty-four politics stories were published with Albury-Wodonga postcodes in the 4 month period that included the Victorian election campaign and follow up.

Lena, and others like Francis wanted more ‘explainers’ for political issues, including local political issues:

• ‘I looked at a few [Jacqui] Lambie posts, but I didn’t understand what was happening. I didn’t understand what happened prior to reading the 2nd or 3rd article. If you didn’t have the backstory it was hard.’—Lena from Wodonga

• ‘I see people taking really strong opinions and frothing at the mouth, but if you look at all the facts you think: How big is this issue? and how important is it? Why have you made this decision? My approach is that I think we need more in depth coverage the key facts and what is the background’ —Francis from Queanbeyan in reference to the Canberra light rail project.

Discussion

• Spoke 3 findings reinforce the previous feedback collected from Spoke 1 and 2; that there is a gap in coverage of politically important issues at a local level.

• The ABC is doing a great job of coverage at a federal and state level, but there is still demand for in-depth political coverage at a local and regional level. There is an audience need for ‘explainer’ content that describes the background story to local issues, especially politics.

4.3.1 Give me more grass roots political coverage.

Spoke published more stories about politics than

any other primary level topic, and people read more

political stories than any other topic.

Nine of fifteen survey participants included politics as one of their top five priority topics. They were happy to find out most federal political updates in their own time, but they still wanted to get them. However, some specified ‘local politics’ as being an important distinction: ‘I want to know about the council and our MP’s. This extends to Wodonga & Northern Region Victoria as well’—Julie from Albury




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to people at an individual level? Julie from Albury says: ‘I recognise that my ability to significantly influence those that control the financial aspects of my life is so limited as to make the whole subject rather depressing, so I tend to avoid it.’—Julie from Albury

Only three study participants identified topics tangentially related to business as important to them during the survey series. For instance, Francis followed business news because he works in finance, and Laura is looking for a job so she wanted employment news. Craig was more big picture: ‘I am also interested in the performance of the Tony Abbott led Australian government. Their performance has a direct bearing on my daily life. The current public servant reductions is closing shops and business in Canberra where I live.’

However, 12 of 15 top business stories had some kind of local relevance to the pilot sites such as ‘ACT hopes for economic boom after signing agreement with the city of Shenzhen, China’ ABC News (see Appendix A for full list). Business was proportionately the topic most strongly aligned to the pilot sites, so this begs the question as to whether there is an audience demand for business stories with local significance.

Discussion

• Is the ABC weighted too heavily towards covering globally-focussed business stories? Could the ABC invest resources towards covering more locally relevant business stories?

• Can we find ways to let people know when business stories are relevant to them because they have local impact?

4.3.2 There is more big business than I need.

Spoke published a large number of business stories,

most of which were not read. At least 67% of published

business stories were never viewed in Spoke.

Business, Economy and Finance as a topic label is conceptually located as ‘global’ in people’s minds. In an exercise in which 15 participants were asked to associate business with locations, they mentioned Australian capital cities such as Sydney, and locations of international financial markets: Sydney, Hong Kong, London, New York. Canberra was also mentioned due to its association with the development of federal economic policies. Only three people mentioned their local area, for diverse reasons such as having once worked at the ATO in Albury. In relation to users’ topic preferences, most users had business sitting in the mid-section (‘some of this’) level and only 23% promoted it to a ‘more of this’ topic. Perhaps business as it’s currently presented feels irrelevant




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The first of these is useful when we compare it with what people have been telling us across all 3 of the Spoke trials; that they want more information about what is happening in their local area in terms of entertainment and events. When participants were asked to create their own labels for topics they would like to follow, events or ‘what’s on locally’ was suggested by half our surveyed participants. Also, the 3rd most popular sub-topic for Arts and Entertainment stories overall was Events, even though volume of events content published was relatively low.

ABC Local do cover ‘what’s on’. For instance ABC Goulburn Murray creates a what’s on guide to the weekend via their Facebook page and these stories were republished into Spoke:

• I saw one [what’s on listing] in there and I thought ‘Ha! That’s pretty cool. That would actually be really handy, especially because I don’t have Facebook anymore.—Brad from Barnawartha

• I have seen a couple of things [in Spoke] about events that are on. None of those events were of interest, but it has occurred to me that Spoke could be handy like that. I don’t take as much notice as I probably should about what is going on in my local neighbourhood. So, that’s another reason why I might keep using Spoke fairly regularly.—Phil from Albury

However generally, there is a content gap and inconsistencies in the availability of a reliable local what’s on guide, especially for people who avoid Facebook.

In an exercise in which participants were asked to create their own labels of subjects they would like personally follow, 11 out of the 15 participants wrote topics that relate to Music, Books, Films, and Visual Arts.

A couple of people mentioned that rather than being interested in all content covered by Arts & Entertainment, they wish to follow sub-topics at a granular level, such as music, or books and graphic novels. This need also emerged for other primary topics like Sport.

4.3.3 What’s on for me? Events, Arts and Entertainment.

Arts and Entertainment was proportionally the third

most popular topic area and Music was the most

viewed secondary level topic.

Five of the top 15 viewed Arts and Entertainment stories had relevance to the Spoke pilot sites, but this is reasonably high if you take into consider-ation that less than 20% of stories published had relevance to those sites.

When research participants were questioned about the locations they associated with Arts and Entertainment they responded with:

• Local places where there are events and festivals: I don’t pay attention to this topic, unless it’s in my local area

• Sydney is perceived as an entertainment and ‘party’ destination

• Melbourne is perceived as ‘cultural arts’ capital (concerts and theatre) and for people in Albury-Wodonga, where big gigs are

• Hollywood was still regarded by a couple of people as synonymous with entertainment




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Discussion

• Across the board, all ABC sources must be more consistent with metadata creation so we can do a better job of targeting relevant content to our audience. The content exists, but it doesn’t always reach interested audiences.

• Arts and Entertainment is definitely a topic area where local interest could be fostered. A new comprehensive digital ‘what’s on’ guide to replace the Big Diary could be a real drawcard for the ABC, especially in regional areas.

• To increase relevance of news or information services, allow audiences to follow secondary-level or tertiary-level topics rather than just primary-level topics.

• Consider re-aligning taxonomy further towards the audience’s own content categorisation models. Research could be done around this via card sort exercises, etc.

A note about topic metadata

I never saw that Arts & Entertainment story because it wasn’t tagged appropriately.For someone like Brad in Barnawartha, triple j music stories would have been priority content. However these stories were rejected by Spoke because location data was never ascribed to these stories, as per Spoke’s minimum publishing requirements. Another problem was that triple j music stories that were supplied via ABCs internal systems to Spoke, didn’t include a body of the article. This was raised with internal teams but no solution has been found.

While Radio National does ascribe topic metadata, it doesn’t ascribe location metadata to its content, so its content had to be excluded from Spoke, despite the fact it would be highly attractive to those people interested in books, films and visual arts.

ABC Arts online stories have no topic metadata supplied so Spoke had to write rules to map these stories to the ‘Arts and Entertainment. However, if they had been given two layers of metadata—a primary topic level 1 of Arts and Entertainment and primary topic level 2 of Music— Spoke would have been able to better target Brad’s interest in music by giving him these stories. As it stood, it was luck of the draw.

Additionally, ABC’s taxonomy and topic labelling can confuse people or misalign with people’s own categorisation models: ‘I always thought arts and entertainment was a problematic name. I am more interested in arts, and a lot of what people would classify as entertainment I’m not interested in’. —Phil from Albury

Civic dancers Photo by Jim Trail ABC Canberra




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This topic is associated with personal and domestic space ie. pertaining to my safety and the safety of my loved ones. For instance Laura from ACT told us that she is interested in crime stories from Sydney because her sister lives there.

There is also a compulsive interest in stories about crime (less so law and justice). Both Peter and Annalise were compelled to click on stories about crime, but couldn’t really explain why they did so: ‘If it happens in Perth, I still have to open it, it’s so weird’—Annalise from Bungendore NSW

In one case an interest in crime was depressingly inadvertent. Nancy was interested in stories related to indigenous affairs as her children are indigenous. However, when interviewed she realised that only because Spoke groups and responds to content under that topic level was it apparent that so many of them were crime stories.

I think some places are more dodgy than others.

In an exercise in which participants were asked to freely associate the topic of Law, Crime, Justice with locations, they most commonly mentioned large metropolitan cities (especially Sydney), or their own local city of Canberra. Two people identified Albury, their local city.

In other exercises, participants were asked to freely associate topics with their local area or other places:

• Sydney was associated with ‘shootings’

• Albury generated responses of ‘crime’ and ‘drugs’

• ACT participants nominated ‘law and order issues’, ‘crime’, ‘theft’ and more obliquely, ‘hoons’ and ‘bogans’

Discussion

• Updates on big local investigations are ‘need to know’ news for many people, yet crime is interesting and relevant to us far beyond our local area. What are the implications for distributing stories outside an area of local relevance in the future?

• How might the ABC use topic analysis to provide balance when portraying certain cultural groups?

4.3.4 Crime is compelling, even if it’s not close to me.

Only 7% of stories published with this topic were local

to Spoke pilot sites, yet 9 of 15 top stories viewed in

this topic were local to one of the pilot sites.

Local crime stories are popular, but high location

alignment of viewed Law, Crime and Justice stories

was relatively low at 27% which indicates that people

looked at the majority of this topic’s stories from

outside their local area.

Updates on big local investigations such as the Palasiacs murder in Canberra were classed as category A (‘tell me this news as soon as it happens’) for almost half the surveyed participants in ACT. In Albury-Wodonga, there was interest around bikie gang activity, with updates on this—including QLD state legislation—marked as a category A by half of the respondents.




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In an exercise in which participants were asked to freely associate Education with locations, 15 participants identified the following:

• My (local) location because either my kids or I study here

• Where I’ve studied in the past

• Canberra and State capitals because my relevant education policy comes from there

10 out of 15 participants said they’d like more education news. When asked what Spoke could learn its local community newspaper, Denise from Thurgoona noted that, ‘it has a section for education highlighting activities that the schools are undertaking, celebrations, etc.’

Discussion

• There is a demand for Education content at the ‘local’ level.

• Can the ABC do more to generate stories about local schools, TAFEs and universities, as well as making state education policy more accessible to its potential audience?

4.3.5 Education is about my kids and I.While only 36 of all published Education stories had

geotags relevant to Spokes pilot sites, 9 out of the

top 15 viewed education stories did. For instance, a

top Education story for Albury was: ‘Lavington girl’s

behaviour to principal disgraceful’ from the local paper.




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Interestingly, words like ‘earth’, ‘global’ or ‘world’ were rarely mentioned in this exercise. For the survey group, Environment is more commonly perceived as a more local topic, rather than a global one but only 5 out of top 15 viewed Environment stories were local to the pilot sites. This may be an issue of supply; only about 10% of the stories in this topic area were tagged with locations relevant to the pilot sites. Als0, the top 3 viewed Environment topics were, 1) climate change, 2) alternative energy, and 3) conservation. This may indicate that people think of the environment in quite a personal and local way, but believe international policy and global change around business practices impacts the environment everywhere and tends to dominate news coverage.

Discussion

• Data raises the question about whether a media provider’s focus on covering global environmental stories like climate change could be balanced out with some more locally specific content that more closely aligns to audience’s own personal associations with this topic.

• The results of the free-association exercise indicate that people associate this topic with specific locations such as The Great Barrier Reef, as well as non-specific locations such as Oceans, National Parks or Planet Earth. If the ABC is to allow its audience to follow specific topics, we might consider allowing them to fine-tune their news feeds such as:

• Follow topic / location pairings. eg. I want to follow Great Barrier Reef + Environment stories only (not tourism related)

• Follow locations outside the standard postcode location definition. eg. The Moon, Oceans, National Parks, planet Earth, Space

4.3.6 Environmental news could also be about my local area.

In an exercise in which participants were asked to freely associate Environment with locations, they answered:

• Australian national heritage sites like Great Barrier Reef - iconic signifiers

• Local places eg. Wonga Wetlands or ‘Canberra’ were just as frequently referenced

• ‘National parks’ were frequently referred to as locations, as were ‘Oceans’




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In an exercise in which participants were asked to freely associate Health with locations, they answered:

• The location of my closest hospital and the location of major health service facilities elsewhere eg. for Albury-Wodonga participants, this was Melbourne

• Canberra, because that is where health policy comes from• West Africa, because Ebola was featured so heavily in the news over

the trial period

The West African example reflects the high profile of the Ebola outbreak in the news over the period. This is borne out by the top 5 primary locations of viewed Health stories:

• Australia• Canberra, ACT, 2600• ACT• United State• Sierra Leone

The interest the Ebola coverage provoked in our participants could arguably also be personal. Global pandemics tend to raise the public’s concern for their own safety and wellbeing.

Stories from secondary-level topics that might be described as ‘personal’ health had good traction: Diet and Nutrition, Exercise and Fitness, Obesity, Women’s health, Reproduction and Contraception and Adolescent health.

Discussion

• Health—much like Business, Education and Environment— is a topic for which the location/topic nexus could be explored further. Can I follow health policy updates for my area, or the latest on exercise and fitness?

• There is obviously appetite for content related to personal health as well as articles about local health services, and they would fit firmly into the category of ‘more local news’ requested by many participants in the three Spoke trials.

4.3.7 Health matters when it threatens or impacts me and my family.

Health as a topic is deeply personal and therefore often

locally focussed in relation to services. Only 6% of

the published Health stories were relevant to the pilot

sites, but 9 out of the top 15 viewed Health stories were

locally relevant.

Of the top 15 viewed Health stories, 5 stories were about Mr Fluffy asbestos issue; 5 were about Ebola and 3 were about hospital services. Interestingly, the Mr Fluffy asbestos issue in Canberra might equally be described as financial, or political , or legal stories. None of the surveyed participants referenced this as a health story.




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Yet, 5 out of the top 15 viewed Community and Society stories were local to the pilot sites whilst 39% of all published Community and Society stories were strongly aligned to users’ location preferences. Also, the top 5 locations of viewed stories in this topic tell a story of the demand for local coverage of this topic :

• Australia

• Canberra, ACT, 2600

• ACT

• Albury, NSW

• Albury, NSW, 2640

The top secondary-level topics of viewed Community and Society stories also tell a story:

• Religion and Beliefs

• History

• Immigration

• Urban Development and Planning

Religions and Beliefs and Immigration likely reflect the predominance of stories around Islamic migration that were published over the pilot’s duration.

Urban development and planning is an issue that was raised as important multiple times:

• ‘We’re talking about which amenities are going in and local construction. It’s about what is coming to the community that we can all enjoy’— Laura from ACT describes the topics that are discussed in the My Gungahlin Facebook Group

• Nancy, from ACT was motivated to community action by a dispute ‘about my local shops’

4.3.8 I like local community and human interest stories, plus animal stories from everywhere.

Community and Society was another very popular

subject area where demand exceeded what we

published.




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Human Interest

Only 1 of the top 15 Human Interest stories published was local to a pilot site. This might be because 59% of the stories viewed in the category were either animal related or, specifically, animal attack related. The top 15 viewed Human Interest stories included three shark related stories, two tiger related and one about a bear eating someone. The only top story local to a pilot site, was the most popular story about domestic cat containment in Canberra.

So Community and Society and Human Interest stories are vaguely defined but popular, and there is appetite for more. 50% of participants said that they wanted more news that falls into the category of Human Interest or Society. When asked what kind of topics they’d like to see more of they described topics like ‘good news’, ‘comic and light hearted’, ‘stories about interesting people’:

I particularly like stories about interesting people doing interesting things. People are doing innovative and interesting things here, there’s a chance that it’ll impact me, or that I might meet them or come into contact with what they are doing—Julie, Albury

The ABC missed an opportunity with this category, again due to poor metadata and tagging. Radio National content contains no location data, and is therefore excluded from Spoke because it doesn’t meet Spoke’s minimum publishing requirements, despite the fact that RN produces a wealth of appropriate content for people like Julie. Consider this Big Ideas story that was rejected from Spoke: ‘Revitalizing Civic – Canberra’s tired CBD’, a story with geographical relevance to Civic, Canberra and surrounds.

A note about metadata

Appropriateness of Community and Society topic tagging

There were stories that may have been miscategorised by the ABC to Community and Society. This was revealed after analysing stories’ primary and secondary topics. For example, stories that more appropri-ately belonged to Law, Crime and Justice or Disasters and Accidents were tagged under Community and Society > Death, Missing Person and Domestic Violence. Although these sub-categories are frequently tangentially relevant to Society, in these cases they were not.For example, a story titled ‘Man dies after car hits tree in Canberra’ was given the primary topic of Community & Society > Death. For its secondary topic, it was tagged Disasters and Accidents > Accidents > Road.




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4.3.9 I don’t like Sport, but I do love cricket.Only 50% of published Sports stories were ever viewed. This is partly because Sport is characteristically a subject that people tend to feel strongly about either way, and Spoke provided a way for users to either easily promote or demote Sport their news feeds.

‘And I can get rid of Sport too!’—Anna from Melbourne

Of all the news topics, Sport probably has the strongest mental associa-tions with specific places. In an exercise in which participants were asked to freely associate Sport with locations, some themes emerged:

• Competitions and championships are strongly connected to place eg. Glasgow = 2014 Commonwealth Games; Melbourne = AFL

• Sport, as it relates to new appears to be conceptually located in national and international zones, rather than local.

Discussion

• The fact that over half the stories published in Human Interest are about animals could be confusing in a topic filter. However, being able to filter by popular categories ‘human interest’ or ‘animal related’ could add value to a personalised news feed.

• Time for a review? These primary topics seem to be a catch-all for stories that don’t fit into other categories.

• Miscategorisation of stories creates via human error problems for a news presentation like Spoke that depend on the accurate categori-sation of stories in order to serve relevant content to users according to their topic preferences.

• It’s worth challenging the notion that a hierarchy of topic categorisation should even exist. For instance, who can say that a story most neatly fits into a ‘primary level 1 topic’ and then a ‘secondary level 1 topic’? These topic hierarchies are inbuilt into ABC’s publishing systems, but this creates problems for alternate entry points into content eg. a news presentation like Spoke that depend on the accurate categorisation of stories in order to serve relevant content to users according to their topic preferences.

• Can we come up with a taxonomy that is more user-centred? If the ABC is to allow people to discover and follow news and information via tags (topic, sub-groups of topics, locations & pairing of topic/location), it’s important to assess the alignment of ABC’s taxonomy and publishing workflows to the audience’s own mental models.

• Inconsistent or absent metadata, rigid taxonomies and problematic publishing workflows are not the only factors limiting the freedom on ABC’s content to be syndicated into presentations like Spoke. Sometimes content is created and published in content management systems (CMSs) that use a different framework like Drupal. This means that content from ABC Open—a potentially rich source of regional human interest and community stories— was not accessible to Spoke. Fortunately, the Radio division is currently developing content APIs that will help address this issue in the future.76




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4.3.10 I love Science and Technology but they’re not the same thing

Although published in small numbers, Science and

Technology was proportionally the most popular topic,

ahead of both Politics and Arts and Entertainment.

Two secondary-level topics— Astronomy (Space) and Computers and Technology— were vastly the most popular, representing half of all Science and Technology stories viewed.

Published Science and Technology stories had comparatively low location alignment. Only 15 stories had primary locations tagged to the Spoke pilot sites, and only 3 of the top 15 viewed Science and Technology stories were locally relevant to those sites.

Only 10% of published Sports stories had primary-locations belonging to the Spoke pilot sites, and only 1 of the top 15 stories viewed was locally tagged. Interestingly, none of the survey respondents indicated a strong interest in receiving more local sports coverage.

‘I don’t have expectations for the ABC to cover local regional sport’— Callum, Acton (ACT)Participants were vocal about what matters with Sport: the ability to filter or follow Sport sub-topics at a granular level, such as Cricket, or AFL:

• ‘I want to follow netball, not sport’—Nancy from ACT

• ‘I like cricket, but I hate AFL. I like rugby union too’—Annalise from Bungendore, NSW

Sport raised a another interesting case study for content classification in Spoke. When Australian cricketer Phil Hughes was killed, many participants didn’t see this story of national significance because they had demoted Sport as a subject they wanted to see. This was due to the way the algorithm was weighted toward stories about preferred topics and wouldn’t happen in a regular breaking news feed, which is perhaps a good argument for providing both options to the user: ‘top news’ and ‘recommended for you’ via the same user-interface.

Discussion

• As per discussion point made in relation to Arts & Entertainment: In order to increase relevance of news or information services, allow audiences to follow secondary-level or tertiary-level topics rather than just primary-level topics.

• The case study about the Phil Hughes story demonstrates that sometimes there are stories that are considered important and relevant to all people, regardless of individual interest in that topic. The Spoke model of news presentation did not handle this scenario neatly.




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One participant who is a scientist, Allison, raised a general point about this topic. She’d prefer to follow Science stories in isolation from Technology. Allison said she isn’t interested in new technology updates and she saw too much ‘internet and new iphone news’. In her opinion, Environment and Health aligned much better with Science.

Looking at the secondary-level topics breakdown above, it seems that the ABC publishes a large amount of IT and internet related stories within Science and Technology. Therefore, Technology’s pairing with Science is possibly a legacy issue from when ABC’s content taxonomy was first established. There is also crossover with the primary topic of Media and IT in Spoke (known as Information and Communication in ABC’s taxonomy). Out of 155 stories published in Media and IT, 48 were tagged Internet or Mobile Phone.

Science & Technology is mostly a location ‘agnostic’ topic. It is at odds with a recommendation algorithm that always takes location into account because a user’s priority for this topic will never usually be about location (eg. Space). If you are interested in Science, it will always be interesting to you, regardless of location.

Discussion

• There is a strong appetite for Astronomy (Space) stories.

• The ABC should consider splitting Science from IT related technology stories. Look at the crossover / double-up with Media & IT and consider creating a new primary topic for communication and information.

• Consider Science and Technology as as example of a topic that is might be location agnostic, and therefore needs special consideration in relation to designing a recommendation system like Spoke’s.

To space & beyond ABC OPEN triple j Road Trip Relay

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Participants were asked to sort 30 news headlines into four categories along a 4-point personal relevance scale; from Category A (I want to know about this news as soon as it breaks) at one end of the spectrum, to Category D (I don’t care if I completely miss this news headline) at the other end.

Here are some themes that emerged in relation to Disasters and Accidents:

• Local emergencies—a severe weather warning or bushfire— are urgent for twice as many people as any other headline in both locations . Nearly all participants marked this Category A.

• More people were happy to find out about a fire-ban in their own time in the ACT, whereas most people in Albury-Wodonga rated this a Category A.

• A local car crash, forklift accident or gas leak is category A for more participants than an Australian killed overseas, but all participants still wanted to know about both.

4.3.11 I care when it’s close, I care when it’s big. Disasters and Accidents, War, and National Security

Disasters and Accidents

Only 69 of the stories published had primary locations

tagged to the Spoke pilot sites, but 9 of the top 15

viewed Disasters and Accidents stories were locally

relevant to those sites.

Many Disasters and Accidents are international, but the users’ interests in this topic seems to be prioritised between ‘it’s local to me’ and ‘earth shattering world event’.




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Defence and National Security

Only 10 stories published had primary locations

belonging to the ACT pilot site but they included 3 out

of the top 15 viewed Defence and National Security

stories. These stories were all about the security of

Parliament or major institutions.

A note about metadata

Appropriateness of War and Unrest topic tagging

The story Well founded fear (Lateline, Nov 12. 2014) was tagged Unrest,Conflict & War>Terrorism as its primary topic. It was tagged in this way despite the fact it’s about the successful high court appeal by an Afghan asylum seeker against deportation. The nuance of the broadcast story is lost in the topic categorisation of the online story. In this case, the secondary tag Community and Society>Immigration>Refugees might have been be more appropriate. This example raises concerns about topic miscategorisation and how this may be publicly perceived as dangerously over-simplified and biased.

War and Unrest

Understandably, only 12 stories published in War and

Unrest had primary locations belonging to ACT pilot

site, and none of the top stories were locally relevant.

Terrorism and September 11 attacks were the only secondary topic of viewed War and Unrest stories across the 4 month pilot duration. Of the 793 stories tagged, 533 were tagged terrorism.




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The primary distinction between the Spoke app and

current ABC app is the way that Spoke orders stories.

The ABC app provides users with ‘top stories’ and a menu structure to navigate feeds filtered by ‘just in’ , ‘most popular’, by location, and by topic. In contrast, Spoke consists of a single feed defined by a recommen-dation system which assigns each story a position in the feed according to a combination of factors:

• User preferences: topic priorities and locations of interest

• Recency: date & time published

• ABC editorial weight

• The user’s previous 7 days of activity: which stories viewed or didn’t view, and which stories they actively demoted from their feed via the less like this demote feature.

The Spoke app was deliberately designed to contrast with the ABC flagship app so that we could test how people felt about receiving news via a content recommendation system.

Spoke 3 revealed that people don’t want to cede control to a system that learns from their behaviour unless they: 1) understand how it works, 2) receive immediate feedback based on their actions, and 3) are provided controls to adjust it or override the system completely.

4.4 Responses to Spoke’s content recommendation system

In this section:

1. It’s okay for ABC to use my personal data because I trust ABC to use it responsibly.

2. Spoke surprises me with stuff I didn’t expect I’d ever want.

3. But Spoke also gives me FoMO (Fear of Missing Out)!

4. I’m not always the same person, so how could an algorithm ever predict what I want?

5. What is a top story? I want transparency. Show me how this thing works and hand me the controls!

6. If you could sort out the other problems, I reckon this system could work well




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• ‘To not see any news on the passing of Phil Hughes seems a bit odd to me’—Tim from ACT (via email)

• ‘A day like today shows that there still does need to be some prioriti-sation based on story importance, I’ve got like eight stories about baby zoo animals and flower festivals before anything to do with the raids’ —Jack from Belconnen

4.4.4 I’m not always the same person, so how could an algorithm ever predict what I want?

One participant said that she felt as if relinquishing control to an algorithm like Spoke’s means they are giving up the chance to be flexible I might decide one day to remove disasters-and-accidents because I’m all filled up and don’t want another one. ‘It’s quite possible that I’d want to change from day to day’—Julie from Albury, NSW. Nancy said that she didn’t feel like Spoke could understand how her mood fluctuated throughout the day so it could respond appropriately.

4.4.5 What is a top story? I want transparency. Show me how this thing works and hand me the controls.Most Spoke participants were bewildered by Spoke’s news headline ordering principle until it was explicitly described to them as a personalised ‘recommended reading’ mix that was ordered by a combina-tion of factors including topic, location, recency, editorial weighting and their previous activity. Many people noted that the app didn’t feel timely enough because the ordering of stories was out of synch with publication time.

• ‘I still have an issue about the ordering of stories. I don’t understand why it is done this way’ - Julie, Albury

• ‘Spoke falls short in terms of being up-to-date’—Callum, ACT

• ‘I really missed a highlight of major stories. I wanted a quick rundown of the top stories that have happened or have changed over a day.’—Lena, Wodonga

4.4.1 It’s okay for ABC to use my personal data because I trust ABC to use it responsibly.Participants felt they could trust the ABC with their personal data (such as tracked activity, location and topic preferences) that make this type of recommended reading list possible. This level of trust may not be provided to other organisations: Knowing the ABC is behind it, there is trust. Knowing there is no advertising. Getting stories that I wouldn’t necessarily have found, I can see the benefit.—Francis, Queanbeyan

4.4.2 Spoke surprises me with stuff I didn’t expect I’d ever want.Even though people wanted the ability to control the way Spoke delivered content, many also enjoyed the experience of finding unexpectedly interesting things in their feed:

• ‘It’s good to see different stories out of place; it raises interest’.—Denise, Albury

• ‘Sometimes I would think ‘why is that there?’ and then ‘actually, I might have a look at that!’ —Brad, Barnawartha

• ‘Towards the end I would warm to Spoke. I do remember stories that I would otherwise not have found’ —Francis, Queanbeyan

4.4.3 But Spoke gives me FoMO (Fear of Missing Out)!Some participants said that they couldn’t help but wonder what kind of news they were missing out on. Most people wanted the see the big stories of the day (as per a conventional ‘top stories’ or just in’ news feed). They didn’t trust that Spoke would always supply them with this content in a timely manner.

• ‘It’s not to say that anything I’m seeing is irrelevant, but when I use Spoke I wonder what else I am missing out on?’—John from Canberra




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Discussion

In theory, the majority of participants supported the principle of the personalised recommended news reading list based on their preferences and previous activity. In fact, many of them agreed that this type of mix could work nicely as one filtering option within a more traditional or complete menu structure such as found in the ABC flagship app:

‘Yes! I’ve already designed it! I would absolutely love if instead of the most popular on the ABC app I could have my spoke mix. I never like the things you put under most popular’—Annalise, Bungendore, NSW

People wanted cues that would help them understand why they were seeing the headlines in the order that they were, yet Spoke app’s user-in-terface (UI) lacked these cues (headings, labels and other feedback mechanisms) that could have helped them intuitively understand this.

Most participants said they would have liked to decide for themselves how the headlines were ordered, whether that be by publish time, topic, sub-topic, popularity, ABC’s edited top news mix, or location (eg. local, national. Pacific, Asia, etc.)

In reference to Spoke’s customisation and story-demotion features, they would feel anxious about the potential unknown implications of their actions (What am I saying ‘less’ to? What am I saying ‘more’ to?).

4.4.7 If you could sort out the other problems, I reckon this system could work well.Interestingly, most participants said they believed that their Spoke mix became ‘moderately more responsive’ to their interests the more they used it:

• ‘I’m not sure if it learned my habits? It seemed to get more what I was interested in.’—Callum from ACT

• ‘Yes I really liked it. I find I’m not going on to Twitter or news things as much. Did you fix it as you went along?’ —Allison, Bonython, ACT

• We learned that people really liked what they got when they created a feed influenced by their personal topic and location preferences:

• ‘I think Spoke knows me quite well!’—Annalise from Bungendore, NSW




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4.5.1 Including my local newspaper made Spoke more locally relevant.

All Spoke study participants believed that the inclusion

of local newspaper feeds made Spoke seem more local-

ly-oriented and 10 out of 11 (91%) participants felt more

informed about local matters due to the inclusion of

local newspaper content

• ‘There were more stories from my local area and they were stories I was interested in reading’—Nancy, ACT

• ‘I felt the economic situation in Canberra was broadened and deepened by the inclusion of the Canberra times coverage.’ —Craig, ACT

8 out of 11 participants (73%) felt that adding their local newspapers into Spoke made their experiences using the app better:

‘I like it, It’s put my number 1 local news source at my fingertips when it doesn’t have it’s own app for my phone. Means I get more local news.’—Callum, ACT

4.5 Responses to inclusion of content from multiple providers.

Via Facebook, Twitter and RSS, the Spoke Editor cherry-picked and published 3rd party content from external, non-ABC sources including local councils, sporting teams, art galleries, museums, markets, local MPs, and local blogs like RiotACT. Across December, headlines from local newspapers were also included.

In this section:

• Including my local newspaper made Spoke more locally relevant

• Other sources add local substance to subject areas where the ABC is a little thin

• I expect the ABC to keep a close eye on the quality of content from other sources.

• It makes sense for the ABC to support the work of local media providers.




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4.5.3 I expect the ABC to keep a close eye on the quality of content from other sources.The ABC’s position as a trusted high quality news provider was the main reason why a couple of people were hesitant to unquestioningly support the inclusion of third-party content:

• ‘I trust ABC but it doesn’t help my view of ABC when there is dodgy content.’—Callum from Acton, ACT

• ‘Today I noticed that there were twitter feeds from the RiotAct which is okay because i like them anyway. But I wondered how you decide what stories to publish?’—Allison from ACT

People expect the ABC to maintain a close eye on third-party content in order to maintain quality-assurance. Some participants expect the quality of third-party content to meet ABC’s own editorial standards: ‘We watch/listen to ABC because we expect certain standards/ content and possibly even viewpoint. Otherwise we’d go elsewhere.’—Julie from Albury

Others felt that so long as ABC clearly flag that the content isn’t from the ABC, than the content doesn’t need to match the same standards, within reason: ‘It doesn’t need to be the same quality so long as it is clear in the article (and to the reader) that the content is derived from a non-ABC source, otherwise it will tarnish the ABC’s reputation’—Denise from Albury

4.5.2 Other sources add local substance to subject areas where the ABC is a little thin.Third-party content accounted for only 3.2% of all content published via Spoke, yet some of the third-party stories appeared in top 15 stories viewed overall (see Appendix A). Amongst users who saved a postcode in Canberra region, 3 of the top 15 stories viewed were supplied by third party sources. For Albury-Wodonga region it was 4 of the top 15 stories. The relative popularity of this content may be an indicator of its relevance to Spoke users.

Third-party material can fill content gaps that ABC isn’t generating, such as local events and local council information. Education, Arts and Entertain-ment and Environment topic profiles were bolstered by the inclusion of third party local coverage.

5 of the top 15 Education stories were from 3rd party sources, the top story overall was from local Albury Wodonga paper. Education was a topic area where participants had generally indicated they would like somewhat more coverage and there is demand for local coverage (9 of the top 15 education stories were locally relevant to the pilot sites).

In December, while local newspapers were included in Spoke, 3 of the top 15 Arts and Entertainment stories were from the local Canberra paper. Non-ABC stories about Environment were also proportionately popular, with 4 stories from local non-ABC sources in the top 15.

Bundgendore Wind FarmPhoto (cc) Brian McNamara94 95




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4.5.4 It makes sense for ABC to support the work of local media providers.

Spoke 1 & 2 findings revealed that there may be oppor-

tunities for the ABC to support and nurture healthy

local digital media ecologies. Our findings from Spoke

3 further supported this. 13 out of 15 study participants

felt that the ABC could take a role to support local

media by distributing content made by local media

providers, although some had reservations about the

impact this might have on news and the ABC itself.

• ‘I think the ABC would be a good platform to help local and up and coming news providers. Maybe they can give their expertise and help save some money too instead of doubling up?’—Allison from ACT

• ‘If there was a way of the ABC giving local media broader audience, that would help! Especially in even more remote areas than here.’—Phil from Albury

• ‘Yes, to address local news that people might not get to see or read.’—Denise from Albury

• ‘I don’t have a concern with the ABC helping to distribute local content per se....but in light of arguments about the ABC being publicly funded and the right wing media thinking the ABC has too much power already I would be concerned that this sort of idea would be grist to their mill i.e. another reason why the ABC should be pared back’—Francis, Queanbeyan

Implementation – decisions around content & design – makes all the difference.

Participants would prefer if Spoke could host all the story details inside the app, rather than linking out to view full details on that provider’s site. This limitation lead Nancy to believe that ‘some stories lack detail and depth’.

All participants agreed that an identifying icon in the feed was sufficient to communicate which source content was coming from: ‘I was always conscious that I was reading an outside source and read it with an understanding that quality would be different because of the nature of the organisation presenting the material’—Craig from ACT

350PPMPhoto (cc) 350.org Albury Wodonga

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5. DISCUSSION: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ABC

The following is a collation and re-organisation of all

the discussion points and recommendations raised

throughout the document.

In this section:

1. Developing effective content and design strategies

2. Addressing content and service gaps

3. Redesigning news experiences with content recommendation systems

4. Redesigning location-based news experiences

5. Addressing ABC’s publishing workflows and metadata

6. Addressing issues related to taxonomy and topic preferences

5.1 Developing effective content and design strategies

• Media organisations can use audience motivation statements (see section 4.1.1) to define the content and design strategy of existing and future news and information services. Some of these statements can also be combined to map how people’s needs might change at different points along a timeline of engagement with a particular news story. The design can respond to those needs.

• Work with (not against) the audience’s propensity to access multiple sources. This is something the ABC already handles quite well, but there’s always room for improvement. Ask why might the media provider might be an important source for a particular user at that particular point in time. The answer could inform how the content is produced and distributed.

• Understand the strengths and weaknesses of ABC’s various news and information sub-brands (News24, ABC News Breakfast, The Drum, AM/PM, etc.) and channels (tv, radio, Twitter, etc.) alongside the alternatives. Clearly articulate the audience value propositions of each, and ensure these messages are incorporated into content strategies and style-guides.

• Spoke’s unusual presentation of news content made users feel as if it contained more local stories compared with the ABC app. This is interesting because almost the same volume of local news is available to users via both apps (aside from a small number of additional local third party material included in Spoke). Local news is less prominent in the ABC app, whilst Spoke surfaces local content.




101Wodonga Arts Photo (cc) Dirk H R Spennemann

• In relation to mobile news and information, people value ABC Local content when they remember to access it or stumble upon it, but it does not appear to be front-and-centre in people’s minds as a comprehensive ‘go-to’ digital source for accessible, informative and entertaining local content. How can the ABC broaden the reach of this kind of relevant content? Maybe by looking to re-distribute outside specific destinations. For example, by funnelling geo-targeted content via ABC’s main Facebook page as well as sharing content into locally-relevant Facebook groups. More initiatives like locally targeted feeds in the ABC app are great, but Spoke shows that hiding a local feed within the broader app is a less effective method than integrat-ing it with national and international headlines.

• ABC content creators and brand managers must protect ABC’s reputation for independence and accuracy above all else, as these are highly prized and valued by our audiences. When aggregating content from multiple sources—including non-ABC content—there is a risk that these values may be eroded if implemented without care and attention to the details of content, context and design.

5.2 Addressing content & service gaps

• People—especially those based in regional areas—notice how news is produced and distributed from state capital centres. Frustrations expressed by participants further underscore how important it is to have journalists within the community reporting and investigating issues that are relevant to the local region.

• The ABC is doing a great job of coverage at a federal and state level, but there is still demand for in-depth political coverage at a local and regional level. There is an audience need for ‘explainer’ content that describes the background story to local issues, especially politics stories.

• Consider monitoring certain community Facebook pages for ideas on local content gaps. What are people asking questions about? What petitions are being distributed amongst community members? What information do they need and value right now?

• People really notice the absence of news that reflects their own world and priorities back at them in regional areas. They asked for more local coverage—explainers, fact checking, analysis and opinion— that extends to the heart of local issues such as development, council politics and big litigations. How can ABC do better at resourcing the collection, creation and distribution of in-depth local news and information? If resources are lacking, is it of value for the ABC to focus on in-depth coverage of important stories while support-ing other local media or organisations to distribute their content throughout the local community? ABC Open is one model that explored alternatives, and Spoke was another.

• Media organisations are responsible for shaping people’s perceptions of places, people, and cultures. This is a position of power must be wielded consciously and carefully. How might content providers broaden the variety or news topics associated with particular locations in order to create more positive associations (or at least balance them out), dispel and subvert subtle prejudices, promote a increased cross-cultural understanding? Perhaps via generating more human interest stories from these areas? More sport stories?

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Eamon Hamilton briefing Journos at the Heavy Lift Group, Richmond VICPhoto (cc) Grant and Steve

• Is the ABC weighted too heavily towards covering globally focussed business stories? Could the ABC invest some more resources covering more locally relevant business stories?Can we find ways to let people know when business stories are more relevant to them because they are locally relevant?

• Arts and Entertainment is definitely a topic area where local interest could be fostered. A new comprehensive digital ‘events / what’s on’ guide to replace the Big Diary could be a real drawcard for the ABC, especially in regional areas.

• Health—much like Business, Education and Environment— is a topic for which the location/topic nexus could be explored further. Can I follow health policy updates for my area, or the latest on exercise and fitness? There is appetite for content related to personal health as well as articles about local health services, and they would fit firmly into the category of ‘more local news’ requested by many participants.

• There is a demand for Education content at the local level. Can the ABC do more to generate stories about local schools, TAFES and Universities, as well as making state education policy more accessible to its potential audience?

• Data raises the question about whether a media provider’s focus on covering global environmental stories like climate change could be balanced out with some more locally specific content that more closely aligns to audience’s own personal associations with this topic.

• There is a strong appetite for Astronomy (Space) stories.

• How might the ABC use topic analysis to provide balance when portraying certain cultural groups?

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5.3 Redesigning news experiences with content recommendation systems

• Sometimes there are stories that are considered important and relevant to all people, regardless of individual interest in that topic. The Spoke model of news presentation did not handle this scenario neatly.

• Spoke has explored what might be achieved when people’s preferenc-es and interactions are individually tracked, and how their data informs which content is recommended to them. Yet Spoke’s implementation was just the tip-of-iceberg in terms of what might created. The ABC could create more personalised news experiences that take into account where a person is positioned in their journey of engaging with a specific news event or story. For instance, on any particular news subject the ABC could track which stories on that subject have previously viewed (and in which order), the keywords, opinions, quotes and facts that a user has previously been exposed to. The logical extensions of this data? The ABC might provide that person with a simple story update (instead of a recap and an update). If this is the first time engaging with a subject matter, we could recommend ‘explainer’ content to get them up-to-speed. Maybe after a little while, that user is primed for analysis and opinion. We could also help a user easily track-down the key story points, when they are fact-checking mode. Over time, we may pick up at which point a user exits out of the gloomy news and seeks something more fun to read. A good moment to recommend a lighter-news story!

• ABC R&D is currently exploring ideas around natural language processing (NLP) that provides a layer of consistent metadata to ABC content, including aspects like topic, mood and location. Doing this may allow us to look to a future of recommendation based on mood or sentiment.

• In theory, the majority of participants supported the principle of the personalised recommended news reading list based on their preferences and previous activity. In fact, many of them agreed that this type of mix could work nicely as one filtering option within a more traditional or complete menu structure such as found in the ABC flagship app.

5.4 Redesigning location-based news experiences

• When considering audience news and information needs, should the unique needs of people living in border regions whereby state-split news streams are problematic.

• Allowing people the ability to save multiple locations to their app preferences pushes up against established design conventions. In order to encourage more people to think outside the box (ie. beyond location setting = my current location), we must do a better job in design and implementation. We need to sell the value proposition as to why people might consider adding one or more ‘favourite places’ and how that might impact their experience.

• Consider allowing locations or regions to align with alternate place-meanings or frames of reference that exist for certain groups of people eg. regions from Aboriginal Australia map (organised by language/tribal/nation groups by AIATSIS).

• Expand our notion of locations to allow people to follow location-like topics such as ‘national parks’, ‘Murray-Darling’ ‘outer-space’, ‘Java Sea’, ‘The Moon’, ‘Great Barrier Reef’. Establish which location tags may overlap with new or existing topic tags, and how these might be treated in a location-based news and information service.

• For users interested in following international places, they must follow country names (eg. China, New Zealand) rather than major international regions, states or cities. Is it time for ABC to expand the location tagging model to enable people to follow global locations at a more granular level?

• Consider enabling people to follow pairings of locations. For instance, if someone has a particular interest in China-USA relations.

• The users’ location preferences data could be more powerfully used in a news and information service if we understand how people relate to each locations in their preferences. If we understood which location was a ‘home location’ vs ‘a location where someone I care about lives’ we could potentially recommend different content to them for those respective locations.




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• vBe aware of meeting user expectations when we enable them to follow postcode level locations. Some people assume they will receive hyperlocal news from within their postcode, which may not be an expectation we can always meet.

• While people can clearly articulate which topics are relevant to them in a general way, people are somewhat less beholden to firm topic prioritisation when it comes to news about where they live. Take this into account when designing location based-services eg. if location matches user’s home location, give them more business, health and education news than they might normally see for other locations.

• Considering allowing people to decide for themselves how local they wish their local news coverage to be by selecting options such as ‘within 1 hour’s drive from this location’ or ‘within 150km from this location’.

• Updates on big local investigations are ‘need to know’ news for many people, yet crime is interesting and relevant to us far beyond our local area. What are the implications for distributing stories outside an area of local relevance in the future?

• Consider Science and Technology as as example of a topic that might be location agnostic, and therefore needs special consideration in relation to designing a recommendation system like Spoke’s.

5.5 Addressing ABC’s publishing workflows and metadata

• Across the board, all ABC sources must be more consistent with metadata creation so we can do a better job of targeting relevant content to our audience. The content exists, but it doesn’t always reach interested audiences.

• Presenting content in Spoke’s unusual way revealed some weaknesses in location metadata. Sometimes location metadata was completely missing, which meant that we could not include that content at all.

• Existing publishing workflows may work effectively for one or two purpose-built contexts (such as for the AM website or for ABC News’s audio page), but aren’t suitable for syndicated presentations (such as Spoke). To free content from their original contexts and enable stories to be presented and discovered in other ways, ABC needs to be consistent in its publishing workflows, and in how it adds data and metadata to content management systems.

• In relation to the way Spoke presents content resulted in ‘clumping’ of similar stories, we must be aware of how this appears to audiences. Perhaps it raises questions for them about ABC’s investment of content-creation resources. Can the ABC reduce the frequency of the same news content being published by various news programs and divisions? Again, this comes back to what are the strengths of each news program sub-brand? What can each news program or division offer the audience that is different from the next?

• Content not available to syndicate.Sometimes content is created and published in content management systems (CMSs) that use a different framework like Drupal. This means that content from ABC Open—a potentially rich source of regional human interest and community stories— was not accessible to Spoke. Fortunately, the Radio division is currently developing content APIs that will help address this issue in the future.




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5.6 Addressing issues related to taxonomy and topic preferences

• Miscategorisation of stories creates via human error problems for a news presentation like Spoke that depend on the accurate categorisa-tion of stories in order to serve relevant content to users according to their topic preferences.

• It’s worth challenging the notion that a hierarchy of topic categori-sation should even exist. For instance, who can say that a story most neatly fits into a ‘primary level 1 topic’ and then a ‘secondary level 1 topic’? These topic hierarchies are inbuilt into ABC’s publish-ing systems, but this creates problems for alternate entry points into content eg. a news presentation like Spoke that depend on the accurate categorisation of stories in order to serve relevant content to users according to their topic preferences.

• If the ABC is to allow people to discover and follow news and informa-tion via tags (topic, sub-groups of topics, locations & pairing of topic/location), it’s important to assess the alignment of ABC’s taxonomy to the audience’s own mental models. Can we come up with a taxonomy that is more user-centred? Re-align taxonomy further towards the audience’s own content categorisation models. Research could be done around this via card sort exercises, etc. Primary topics of ‘Community and Society’ and ‘Human Interest’ seem to be a catch-all for stories that don’t fit into other categories.

• The fact that over half the stories published in Human Interest are about animals could be confusing in a topic filter. However, being able to filter by popular categories ‘human interest’ or ‘animal related’ could add value to a personalised news feed.

• To increase relevance of news or information services, allow audiences to follow secondary-level or tertiary-level topics rather than just primary-level topics (eg. follow Netball not Sport; follow Visual Arts, not Arts & Entertainment)

• People associate Environment topic with specific locations such as The Great Barrier Reef, as well as non-specific locations such as ‘Oceans’ or ‘National Parks’ or planet Earth. If the ABC is to allow its audience to follow specific topics, we might consider allowing them to fine-tune their news feeds such as:

+ Follow topic / location pairings. eg. I want to follow Great Barrier Reef + Environment stories only (not tourism related) + Follow locations outside the standard postcode location definition. eg. Oceans, National Parks, planet Earth, Space

• The ABC should consider splitting Science from IT related technol-ogy stories. Look at the crossover / double-up with Media & IT and consider creating a new primary topic for communication and information.

108 Great Barrier Reef — Photo (cc) pbpho2 109




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6. CONCLUSIONS

The Spoke 3 pilot involved four months of tracking 1296 Spoke users’ interactions, and seeking direct feedback from people living in Albury-Wodonga and ACT regions who were using the Spoke app. The research was designed to shed light on the importance of location as a factor when designing mobile news and information services for Australians. The lessons and insights contained within the report add nuance and detail to our collective understanding of regionally-based news-seekers. It challenges long-held assumptions and unpacks some of the complexity regarding how to provide relevent and valuable location-based news and information services.

Location-services should broaden beyond GPS location Mobile GPS has driven the conversation about location-based services, but when it comes to determing relevance, people have relationships with many places, and this influences their news engagement. Restricting location selection to where someone is right now, limits opportunities for that person to discover news stories that are relevant to them.

The city-state approach may need to change People can’t be easily categorised into caring about a suburb within a city within a state. The capital city-centric model of determining content relevancy doesn’t always work that well outside state capitals. In answer to the question of whether digital news services provide regional coverage aligning with that community’s local news and information needs, it seems clear that this hierarchy needs to be re-thought by most service providers. Also, different ways of defining my local area need to be considered.

Alternative presentations into news help people discover local content. The interest people expressed in ‘new’ local content via Spoke indicated that they weren’t normally exposed to these locally-relevant stories via their usual channels. Using a different mechanism for displaying stories (customisation by topic, more than one location and recommendation) showed that there is more available content than they previously knew of. The lesson is that when thinking about content distribution, look beyond existing branded channels for audiences.

Some types of content have more local relevance than others There are topics for which the level of demand changes when a story relates to where one lives. Business is a great example of this. People might be disinterested in business as a global or national news topic, but may be very interested in a local business story. More content analysis via tools like Spoke will help prioritise effort when it comes to coverage at a local level.

The source matters less than overall quality of serviceSpoke tested the level of concern felt by individuals regarding an aggregation of locally relevant sources by including third parties such as local newspapers and community Facebook pages. As long as the sources were clearly designated, and an overall ‘quality control’ approach was taken, people were largely happy to see their local sources brought into a primarily ABC news feed.

Overall, people like the idea of recommended newsThe pilots demonstrated that when a recommended news reading mix is delivered by a trusted source such as the ABC, and when implemented in a way that is transparent and the parameters are within a user’s control, then people like the idea of using a customisable, recommendation-based news service.

In an era where resources are constrained, findings like these can give support to ideas on how the media—including public broad-casters—might best focus their energies towards improving their mobile services in both regional areas and major centres.

In relation to the ABC, there is much goodwill felt by the public toward the organisation. The ABC is perceived by the public as a trusted and responsible provider of quality content and services. However, with the Spoke research we found that this goodwill does not always translate into audience value because people were not aware of the digital content that is created by the ABC that suits them.

These findings indicate that media organisations need to focus on the mission of adapting their approaches to meet people where they live, wherever that may be.

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