Deseret News: How Headline Testing Energized the Newsroom
Headquartered in Salt Lake City, The Deseret News is among Utah’s most widely-circulated papers. Its newsroom has partnered with Chartbeat since 2013, but hadn’t yet made full use of the suite’s powerful headline-testing capabilities. In 2017, testing was still an under-the-radar area of interest, with just a handful of headlines tested on live stories per day, as Web Producer Ginny Romney explained. Content Director Aaron Shill saw a clear opportunity. “Our team had seen traffic start to stagnate, and since it’s our job to grow traffic, we talked about which cultural and procedural changes we should make,” he said. “We all believed it was improving headlines — and to improve headlines, we had to test them.”
The result? A CTR increase of over 45% a month — and a newsroom even more engaged in a culture of collaboration.
“Our team had seen traffic start to stagnate, and since it’s our job to grow traffic, we talked about which cultural and procedural changes we should make. We all believed it was improving headlines — and to improve headlines, we had to test them.”
How Deseret put headlines to the test.
The initiative came out of a larger, company-wide effort, Shill said. Previously, Deseret’s digital operations and traditional newsroom worked separately: undoing that divide by integrating the teams’ workflow and operations was a necessary first step to bring about larger cultural and procedural changes. With leadership working to emphasize the value of cohesion and collaboration, it wasn’t hard to then begin popularizing Headline Testing.
