Audience engagement for busy journalists: raise interaction, not workload

Glide Nexa helps you make product features which raise engagement with your audiences. Can it also cut the workload on editorial teams to make those features?

by Rich Fairbairn

Published: 03:02, 11 July 2025

The drive amongst publishers worldwide is to increase audience engagement and insight, building on their First Party Data and in-house analytics to build better content and commercial models that bring content and audiences closer together. 

If you have attended or plan to attend any of the large events by orgs like INMA, WAN-IFRA, America's Newspapers, Online News Association, Press Gazette and others, the E word is firmly at the top of the agenda, alongside AI.

Engagement beefs up commercial models and helps bridge the gaps caused by falling social and search traffic - critical as those platforms keep more users on their side of the fence. Engagement is the stickiness which keeps sites and apps busy even when you aren’t producing new content.

At Glide Publishing Platform, we have used a lot of this insight to help develop our Glide Nexa Audience Interaction Platform (AIP), which is our CDP for publishers and media projects and which helps bring content and people closer together to raise audience engagement. 

Gide Nexa does this by removing technical blockers which make audience management practicalities feel quite remote from content strategies. It makes it easier for publishers to deploy real-world reader-facing features which actually promote engagement, and less likely for the ideas to be derailed by the need to make a host of other systems work in concert. 

That technical work of bringing together separate platforms is what often turns a straightforward product feature request into something that is expensive and time-consuming to do. “It’s just a button…” is a reasonable ask from editorial staff who want to add a simple feature to their app or site. But an answer of, “Yes, but for that button to work the way you want, we need to move customer data across four different platforms…” is also reasonable, in explaining why it won’t be delivered for three months, or at all.

Easy engagement strategies for editorial and product teams

A priority for us in developing Glide Nexa was helping teams achieve increased engagement without simply raising the volume of work required to do so.

At Glide we work with editorial teams as much as we work with commercial and tech teams. One of the research strands in how Glide Nexa has been built was to learn the sort of things which editorial teams want but which don’t come at the cost of big editorial budget or workflow impact, making it much easier to roll out to products and test audiences.

So here are some quick wins for editorial teams wondering how to get extra engagement with barely an extra keystroke. It’s not every method, and many are first steps to underpin a planned future strategy and get testing under your belt. But crucially, they give you back more than they take.

Favourites
Allowing readers to “favourite” articles or other content is not much more complex than allowing an on-site/in-app bookmark. It’s a tiny start, but lays a pathway to sophisticated reader-curated content and personalisation strategies based on preferences. It also sends a huge message to audience and content teams that something is hitting the mark with readers. Best of all, this one really requires no extra content at all.
Editorial difficulty: 0/5

‘Save for later’ & bookmarks
A reader can pin an article for later inside their profile, removing the need to remember each piece, or share it to themselves, or save it to a reader app like Pocket/Instapaper or browser-based Reading Lists. Not only does this encourage remaining logged-in, it also feeds your analytics pot for better similar reading suggestions.
Editorial difficulty rating: 0/5

‘Follow this topic’
Allowing a user to follow a genre or type of content sends huge signals to your audience and editorial team that this person really likes something, which is great for commercial potential. It’s another encouragement to stay logged-in, leads naturally into things like segmented newsletters, and is great research towards personalisation and self-curation.
Editorial difficulty rating: 0/5

‘Follow the author’
Just like following a topic, allowing “Follow” of writers brings lots of benefits: it signals to audience teams and writers the things people want more of, it amplifies author profile pages (great for SEO), and it’s a really good reason for a reader to sign-up for a notification or alert. Again, no extra content is needed at all - but you have a rich target audience if you want to start experimenting with premium or exclusive content.
Editorial difficulty rating: 0/5

Newsletter sign-up
Absolutely nothing extra needed here in terms of content - just let readers choose to receive emails of article summaries or headlines. You don’t need premium content, but emails are very effective at transitioning free customers to paid when you have premium content offerings for them. With regards to fears that newsletters undermine site traffic,newsletter hounds tend to be much more engaged and read more on sites not less. Obviously, resist the temptation to spam people!.
Editorial difficulty rating: 0/5

‘Ad-free’ experiences
For an ad-supported site, turning off ads for logged-in users demands the calculation of reduced ad views versus the value of having an email address of an engaged reader. It’s quite easy to calculate if you are basing your revenue on programmatic ads, and can quickly pay for itself by giving you a mailing list for future newsletters or targeted content.
Editorial difficulty rating: 0/5

Comments or feedback
Comments are rocketing in importance for signalling what users care about, and answering their questions around “what’s being said about this?”. It’s why unscrupulous AI engines are actively scouring comments as much as they are. As with the previous suggestions, this product feature adds nothing to the editorial burden by requiring extra content, and in fact having a place to see reader insight into a topic can be gold for future content planning.
Editorial difficulty rating: 0/5

Polls/Surveys
Being able to add a poll or survey to an article is great at encouraging engagement and needs little from an editorial standpoint: at its most basic, a simple “Yes/No” vote will be effective, but you can go further with more probing questions. Whatever time is spent creating the questions is rewarded with the ability to address the outcome of the poll in a follow-up article.
Editorial difficulty rating: 1/5

Want to know more about Glide Nexa Audience Interaction Platform? Read more about it here.