The homepage was the entry point, the digital equivalent of the front page, before social media and search engines became the dominant means for readers to find content. But now that X/Twitter, Facebook and Google are directing less traffic to news sites—all while AI summaries to online queries allow readers to bypass news links altogether—news organizations have rediscovered the value of keeping readers on their own platforms.
Or as Local Media Association Chief Innovative Officer Frank Mungeam puts it: “When you build your sand castle on someone else’s beach, ultimately it’s their beach, they can change the rules, and the tide can come in and wipe out your work.”
Can the homepage be resurrected as a news seeker’s destination? Should news organizations devote more resources to an outlet’s landing page? Or has the homepage outlived its usefulness, with news outlets better off pursuing more effective ways of attracting readers?
With digital advertising down and local news business models prioritizing subscriptions and reader retention, the stakes are high for these organizations to get readers back in the habit of consuming news on their own platforms. Yet homepage traffic continues to fall.
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024, released in June, shows that only 22% of respondents worldwide identify news websites or apps as their main online news source—down from 32% in 2018. Younger respondents in particular “are showing a weaker connection with news brands than they did in the past,” the report states.
The Reuters report finds that more readers are finding news through search engines and aggregators (33%) and social media (29%) than via direct access to the websites. The report also notes that mobile alerts, which constitute another 9% of respondents accessing news, “are also generated by aggregators and portals, adding to the concerns about what might happen next.”
This trend looks even more ominous when you consider the age groups of these news consumers. “The habit of going to a news site to get your news is an older information seeker’s habit,” Mungeam says. “Younger information seekers are spending their time on social [media] and bumping into the news and have the view that the news should find them.”
Some homepages are created with more effort and thought than others. The New York Times homepage retains the feel of the print newspaper while boasting its own look and story hierarchy. It updates and shuffles stories frequently, as befits a national destination for breaking news and in-depth stories.
Local news outlets, though, lack the Times’ audience numbers and budgets, and many take a more formulaic approach to their homepages. It’s not unusual for a big-city newspaper’s homepage to have a plug-and play feel, with stories slotted into a set template where the lead headline size doesn’t vary no matter whether the story is the end of Joe Biden’s presidential run or the funeral of a sheriff’s deputy. The page also may offer an automated “Latest Headlines” rail that mixes local stories with celebrity divorces and whatever other wire pieces are coming through the feed.
“They all have ads,” Poynter Institute media business analyst Rick Edmonds notes, “and you can claim that the ads are pretty disruptive of a good reading experience.”
Given the declining importance of these landing pages amid the declining resources of local news outlets, some in the industry view skimping on the homepage as a rational decision.
Mungeam—who previously oversaw digital content at Tegna, Gannett (briefly) and KGW-TV in Portland, Ore.—recalls “micromanaging hour by hour” his outlets’ homepages and spending “lots of time and money” to design and redesign the site. “We spent a lot of time paying attention to homepage design and ranking and ordering of the homepage because direct traffic to the homepage in some cases was half of the total traffic,” he says.
Those numbers are way down, so although an outlet’s most loyal audience may still seek out the homepage, “I’d be careful about spending too many calories on it,” Mungeam says.
But Tom Rosenstiel, professor of the practice at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at University of Maryland, argues that homepages should maintain high standards even in the face of declining readership and relevance.
“In the same way that every headline should get similar care or every story should be carefully proofread, your homepage matters because it’s something that you do,” Rosenstiel says. “If only X percentage of people look at my shoes, do I decide it’s not important if I tie my shoes?”
Part of the issue, he says, is perception. If the homepage is ignoring a massive breaking story or highlighting something frivolous because no human is present to override the system, that’s a problem. “People form impressions of a news operation from many different cues,” Rosenstiel says. “What they’re most likely to notice is something that they think is wrong.”
The homepage trends affect online-only outlets as well. “People going directly to the home page is a small percentage,” Edmonds says of poynter.org, the homepage of which tends to offer a couple days’ worth of stories and columns about the news industry. Edmonds says the site’s weekly internal reports indicate that about 10% of traffic comes to the homepage directly, and about 15% are finding Poynter stories via links on the site. The rest of the traffic comes via search and social media despite the downward trends in both areas.
“Upgrading the homepage does make sense,” Edmonds said. “Part of that is deciding what you’re going to publish. The name of the game is what your own staff produces.”
“It’s a challenging time.”
Digital-only news operations didn’t come into existence with a print product to emulate, and younger ones arrived at a time when homepages were considered less important than other audience drivers. The six-year-old nonprofit Block Club Chicago receives just 12 percent of its traffic from readers visiting the homepage, executive editor/co-founder Stephanie Lulay says. Yet despite this relatively small percentage, “our homepage continues to be a valuable tool to drive traffic to our news site in an era when we need all the tools. How readers are finding us is always changing. It’s a challenging time.”
The Block Club Chicago homepage features a lead story in the top center flanked by four neighborhood-identified stories, played with equal weight. Beneath that is a “Latest News” section promoting six time-stamped stories. Lulay says “a sizable chunk of readers” utilize this tab, “which is only accessible from the homepage. Readers who access our homepage, they’re coming there to see what’s new.”
Block Club Chicago also hosts homepages for the various neighborhoods it covers, such as Englewood, Chatham, Auburn Gresham on the South Side or Jefferson Park, Portage Park, Norwood Park on the Northwest Side. Perhaps more important, the organization sends out twice-weekly newsletters about each neighborhood, written by the reporter who covers it, as well as topic-related newsletters, such as about arts and culture. Then there’s the twice-a-day Block Club Chicago general newsletter offering morning and afternoon headlines.
“We want to meet our readers where they are,” Lulay says. “Our neighborhood newsletters are tremendously popular, and the homepage mirrors and complements that effort.”
In a way the newsletter has become another kind of homepage: a curated collection of headlines where readers can discover stories. Most newsletters are less expansivethan homepages, though, with fewer portholes to the various sections and subjects. Plus, discovering a newsletter in your inbox is a different experience from habitually clicking on a homepage in search of the latest news. The news is finding you rather than the other way around.
“You want to be transitioning [readers] so you have a first-party data relationship with them, whether it’s alerts or a newsletter, so you can push without relying on them to pull,” Mungeam says.
Rosenstiel, though, warns of one potential newsletter pitfall. “Newsletters are also not a singular solution because there comes a point where I have reached critical mass and think I have too many newsletters,” he says.
“I have wondered about that,” Edmonds says of newsletters possibly reaching a saturation point. “Is it going to max out? I don’t think it has yet.”
Lulay agrees that the newsletter serves its own distinct function. “The newsletter I would not say has become the homepage,” the Block Club Chicago editor says. “That said, newsletters today are more important than ever. There is no better way for us to directly reach our readers. That’s why you see so many publishers putting so much effort into them.”
A query to the American Journalism Project about the state of homepages yielded this emailed statement from Chief Investment Officer Michael Ouimette: “Successful models for local journalism depend on developing strong, direct relationships with communities. Increasingly, as the local journalism field continues to evolve, this success starts with creating habit-forming, engaging, unique experiences for readers, through products such as valuable newsletters, engaging websites, text messaging services, and other models.”
Where Audiences and Platforms Meet
The definition of “homepage” is slippery given the rise of news consumption on phones vs. laptop and desktop computers. The Pew Research Center reported in 2019 that Americans already were more likely to get their news through a mobile device (57%) than on a desktop or laptop computer (30%). A 2022 news consumption survey conducted by the German data company Statista showed that 56% of U.S. consumers read online news on a smartphone that year, doubling the figure from 2013. Also in 2022, 41% of U.S. consumers read online news on a desktop or laptop computer, down from 71% in 2013, with tablets tallying 17% of U.S. readers in 2022, 16% in 2013.
“When I visit the New York Times, I go most often on my phone or my iPad to the New York Times app,” Rosenstiel says. “Is that their homepage? Yeah, it’s the homepage of their app.”
So even though editors in newsrooms tend to work on desktop computers, their readers are often coming to the news by other means, and that phone display is unlikely to resemble a newspaper front page.
“From a purely quantitative standpoint, you should make sure the front page of your mobile app is as good as you can make it, as smart as you can make it, as helpful as you can make it,” Rosenstiel says. “The mobile experience is the front page for many people.”
That means the app should be easy to navigate, shouldn’t shunt you off to sections you don’t want to read, shouldn’t fill the screen with pop-ups and shouldn’t create additional hurdles for you to leap. “It’s annoying if someone sends you something through social [media] or an email newsletter, and you click on the story, and the site doesn’t recognize you as a subscriber and asks you to sign in,” Rosenstiel says.
Josh Brandau, CEO and co-founder of the artificial intelligence optimization platform NotaAI, considers the discussion about how readers connect with news to be crucial to the industry’s future. “Asking about homepage importance is the right question, because it’s really a question about where audiences and platforms meet,” he says.
Brandau recalls wrestling with the homepage issue while overseeing growth for the Los Angeles Times’ publishing platforms as its chief marketing officer from 2019 through 2022. A major challenge in maintaining the Times’ homepages, he says, was dealing with a “geographic problem”—namely that Orange County constituted a “dead zone” between Los Angeles and San Diego, home of the then-Times-owned Union-Tribune. (Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong sold the Union-Tribune to Alden Global Capital in July 2023.)
“It was like: Who’s serving this part of Southern California?” Brandau says. “We are serving it at both papers, but we’re not expressing how much we’re serving it on the homepage for our loyal readers. So we should do that.”
The company explored creating customized homepages that featured “stories based on geo location of browser and mobile so that you could see stories that were related to you in the community that you were in when you were in it,” he says. “The promise was to get stories curated to each individual city within greater L.A.”
But that plan didn’t come to fruition while he was there. “It was contentious,” Brandau says. “Editorial ultimately felt that it should only be the domain of the homepage editor.”
Brandau envisions news publishers applying a new level of customization now possible through data collection and AI. “You have the opportunity to personalize the homepage just like all other points of commerce try to personalize their homepages to get as much engagement from you as possible,” Brandau says.
And what constitutes a “homepage” keeps expanding.
“We are at an extraordinary point where we have access to more stories than ever, across more media and platforms than ever, and that exponential increase in optionality is also coupled with a breakthrough in technology with AI,” he says. “That makes the front page every format and every page.
“Take the morning walk with the dog and listen to the story, transition to a video of it while you’re having cornflakes and shoot a social post featuring that story to a friend. All curated. All accessible. All interoperable. All created at the same time by the professional telling the story in whatever source the story started in.”
The key, then, may be for news organizations to strike a balance between pulling readers to their platforms while also pushing the content out into the world.
“The internalfocus on the ‘homepage’ has been outdated and out of step with the audience forsome time,” Mungeam says. “The finding methods for news are now more intermediated and indirect (search, social and aggregators); less brand-specific (especially among younger, non-brand-loyal news consumers); and far more mobile-first than desktop-oriented. So, as with every other shift in audience news-seeking behavior, it’s essential for newsrooms to refresh their focus and practices to better match howand wheretheir audiences find them.”
Article image by Anna Keibalo used under Unsplash license (Unsplash)
