How news publishers are adapting post-election, with Yahoo News’s Kat Downs Mulder

Fortunately, news outlets are accustomed to adapting. And with Donald Trump set to retake the Oval Office, they are having to understand how they may need to adapt to either a similar Trump bump to the traffic increases news sites saw during his first term or a potential drop-off in news interest.

“It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen in the future and whether increases will sustain and in what ways they are going to sustain. There’s readers who are leaning in; they want to know everything that’s going on. And then there’s readers who are leaning out, and they’re at that news avoidance,” said Downs Mulder, who spent 14 years at The Washington Post before joining Yahoo News in 2022.

To be clear, Yahoo News saw audience interest in the news increase leading up to and after the election. But it also saw some audience members indicate a bit of election burnout.

“I think there’s probably more of that than there was in the 2016 cycle. And so our goal at Yahoo is just to try to figure out what level the person is at and customize the experience to that, meet them where they are and give them an experience that fits whatever level of interest they have,” said Downs Mulder.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

The election bump

We have seen an increase in interest, both before and during the election and sustained afterward. We’re lucky to have a really big user base already and pretty loyal. So most of what happens — although we do see some user growth — is a lot more depth in consumption.

The post-election news cycle

We anticipated election result time would last a little longer than it did. But we were able to really kind of slowly move people back to their original jobs. But there’s still more news than there might normally be in a regular political cycle because of all the nominations that are being made.

Reddit as a priority platform

Reddit has been a focus platform for us going back to much earlier this year. It’s a platform where people who are really interested in news are. Obviously it gives you the space to talk and link back. It has a lot of advantages as a platform. We’ve seen great pickup there from putting a social leader on that and really thinking about the programming that we’re going to do there. We did an [ask me anything] with some reporters around the election.

Threads as a different kind of platform

The audience on [Instagram’s] Threads is a little bit different. A lot of folks came from Instagram and brought their followers with them. Maybe a different vibe and a different context where the audience is expecting something different. If you can create an audience around the content that does have an interest in that specific context, then it can work. That takes a little more crafting than just jumping in there. It’s a very different platform because of the network mechanics.