Winning the Battle for Attention

There's lots of industry conversation about making delivery more stylistically relevant, but research is showing that working at being substantively relevant may be the real key to supercharging your on-air performance.

There's lots of conversation in the television news world about how you can win the battle for attention by improving the style of presentation -- standing and moving, speaking more conversationally, ditching the ties, etc -- to look and sound more relatable, but I find myself wondering whether in the process we're missing a more critical conversation about how we need to be improving the substance of presentation. Are we talking about issues of stylistic relevance when we need to be asking whether we're actually achieving substantive relevance? After all, if your audiences cannot see the work you do as relevant and essential to their lives, you're living (or dying!) based on little more than your entertainment value. You may be good for a good time when there's nothing better to do, but you're not essential. And if you're not essential, you're certainly not going to be habit-forming.

The right answer, of course, is that you need to be both substantively and stylistically relevant. And science has some good things to say about that -- showing that the effort you put into understanding substance has power to profoundly and positively influence the way you deliver it. In other words, one of the most powerful ways to supercharge your style of delivery is to work harder at developing the substance of it.

Relevance Hunter: Dr. Ellen Langer

Harvard’s Dr. Ellen Langer has spent decades researching what she describes as a “mindful” approach to living and learning.

Mindfulness, according to Langer, is “the simple act of noticing new things.” Her research has shown that simply making the effort to identify relevance can have a profound impact on both the quality of your work and your subjective experience of it. When you work mindfully, in other words, you do better work and you have more fun doing the work.

Let that sink in. Essentially, the science is showing that working mindfully -- the practice of simply looking for relevance -- has power to supercharge your performance in critically important ways.

So what exactly does it mean to work mindfully?

In their research, Langer and her colleagues asked people to simply identify how a story or situation could be relevant to them or to others.

“This may entail thinking about how certain parts of the information remind you of past, present or future experiences, how the information could be important to yourself or someone else, or simply finding some significance of the story in relation to anyone and/or anything.”

In other words, they asked one group of people to consider information the way a good newsroom might -- considering the relevance of the information to themselves and others. Others in the study were asked simply to study and memorize the information without the burden of considering relevance.

Subsequently, everyone was tested on their mastery of the information and their ability to work with it creatively.

Here’s what happened:

People who worked with the material mindfully had more and better recall than those who simply memorized. And when they were tested again days later, their recall had actually improved. In a conventional newscast, this might be the difference between a reporter who simply memorizes a live lede and one who takes the time to think about ways the lede is relevant to the audience. Contemplating relevance somehow marinates the information, so that the ability to recall detail improves and comprehension of impact deepens.

The reporter who’s focused on relevance will remember better and remember more.

People who contemplated relevance were able to work with the material more intelligently and more creatively. When subjects were asked to essay about what they’d been learning, those who’d worked mindfully produced essays that were more creative and dealt with the material more intelligently.

In other words, thinking about relevance made people both smarter and more creative. In an era when newsrooms are almost desperately seeking news way to appeal to viewers, thinking about relevance is a tool with the power to fuel innovation.

Anchors and reporters who are hyperfocused on relevance will act and interact both more intelligently and creatively.

Arming Yourself with Relevance

There’s more to it than simply asking yourself, “How does this apply to my audience?” though that may be a good start.

Langer’s research points to three practices that may have the power to supercharge both your memory and your creativity.

Considering how the story might be meaningful to you personally. What does it remind you of? How might it be important to you? This not about taking sides. It’s simply about understanding what your own experience can teach you about the story you’re telling.

“Information that is about ourselves, about the parts of ourselves we really care about, is the easiest to learn,” Langer writes.

Considering the story from multiple perspectives. Sounds like Journalism 101, doesn’t it? In Langer’s studies, this involved challenging people to actively and consciously examine a story from multiple points of view, asking themselves what people with varying points of view might be thinking and feeling.

People who did this outperformed others on measures of recall, intelligence and creativity. Disciplining themselves to contemplate how people with different perspectives were thinking and feeling dramatically impacted their mastery of the material as a whole.

Thinking conditionally instead of absolutely. In practice, this is as simple as telling yourself that what you are thinking and saying “could be” true as opposed to being “absolutely true.” Langer and her colleagues refer to this as “conditional learning” and conclude that it is key to staying open to new insights and possibilities -- and to seeing and understanding things that others might miss.

In an era where viewers are ostensibly clamoring for journalists they can trust to be fair and honest, this may be an especially important insight. In our own research, when we asked viewers how they could tell when an anchor or reporter was honest and trustworthy, they cited the willingness to challenge assumptions and to ask questions “no matter where they lead.”

Having the discipline to look at things from this “could be” perspective is one way that journalists can prime themselves to see more expansively, listen more attentively and ask better questions. And again, while it sounds like Journalism 101, it’s a practice that’s essentially thrown out the window when questions are all premeditated and followup to answers is outlawed by story count imperatives or a fear that we might ask a question a reporter can’t answer. Essentially, this may outlaw -- or at least seriously handicap -- an organization’s ability to prove it’s trustworthiness.

A cautionary (and hopeful?) tale...

I recently asked my 27-year-old niece -- now a liberal-as-they-come young professional earning in the high five figures -- whether she regularly consumed news in any way. Her answer surprised me.

“Yes,” she said. “I watch Straight Arrow News almost every day.” When I asked why, she said she had confidence that what she would get would be straightforward and unembellished.

Eager to understand what appealed to her, I jumped online -- expecting to see an example of some kind of “new school” conversational delivery that I could learn from and use in my coaching.

Straight arrow delivery

Instead, I found the most conventionally produced, old-school news segment you could imagine.

A solo anchor dressed in suit and tie, sitting at a newsroom desk and reading a series of VOs sometimes punctuated with sound and sometimes not.

I don’t want to misinterpret or overstate the significance of this. From what I can tell, the platform’s reach is modest at best, though growing. No doubt the appeal to my niece is driven in part by the ease and convenience of accessing these segments. And it’s important not to underestimate the power of marketing. In general, mainstream journalism was anemic in its response to the relentless accusations that it was producing “fake news” -- in effect ceding the conversation to the other side until it was too late. (For a deeper discussion of this, see my blog on the idea that one of the keys to building trust is talking about it. You can find that here.) Straight Arrow News is as relentless about marketing it’s lack of bias as Fox News was originally relentless about marketing it’s coverage as “fair and balanced.”

That said, whatever my niece is seeking when she watches, her choosing clearly is not driven by a search for stylistic novelty. Something more is going on here. And if she’s reasonably representative of other professional women her age, it’s a challenge that goes deeper than simply fronting newscasts with people their age who are, ostensibly, talking more like they talk.

The point is not that newscast modernization and innovation is not important and even necessary. But it could be that the thing people value most, no matter their age, is a thing that transcends style. Getting the style right will not be enough.

The exciting thing here is the idea that Langer’s research -- especially the findings on the value of considering multiple points of view and thinking conditionally -- suggests that the hard work of articulating relevance makes for better communicators as well as better journalists. Is it too much to hope that it also may seed the kind of work that people like my niece could value enough to seek it out and keep it in their lives?

I sure hope not.