Are Europeians Ghosting the EBC?
Opinion
Written by Maowi
The views of the author do not necessarily reflect those of the EBC as a whole. These statistics were correct at the time of writing.
Last Tuesday, former President Ervald asked in a Grand Hall thread whether overuse of the “like” button is leading to reduced engagement with speeches and articles. His question struck a chord with me. As a Europeian Broadcasting Corporation (EBC) staff member throughout pretty much my entire time in the region, I’ve been noticing a downturn in response numbers to EBC articles, and in an effort to confirm or refute this, I’ve analysed activity in EBC articles published within the last twelve months.
| Mean EBC Article Responses | |
|---|---|
| Total | 6.6 |
| April/May 2019 | 7.3 |
| June/July 2019 | 11.5 |
| Aug/Sep 2019 | 7.3 |
| Oct/Nov 2019 | 7.9 |
| Dec 2019/Jan 2020 | 4.4 |
| March/April 2020 | 4.4 |
(I should note that although I’ve labelled the last category March/April 2020, it does go back into February so that it’s a full two-month period.)
The data shows a fairly marked decrease in responses to articles towards the end of last year - to be expected as the holiday season hit us hard after an unusually active summer - but further into 2020 the numbers fail to pick up, with an identical mean score to the December 2019 to January 2020 period. Although some articles receive comments from a wide range of readers, many for some reason just don’t seem to attract attention, with the only people to leave a compliment or further thought being those involved in the drafting and editing of the piece. For comparison: Astrellan’s June 2019 article, Internal Affairs Satisfaction Poll Results and Analyses, received 11 responses from nine unique readers, while Istillian and Nate’s End of Term Executive Satisfaction Poll article from April 9 2020 had only two responses: one from Hezekon, who was at the time deputy minister of communications, and one from me, after I had helped out with the editing of the article. Something like this can be extremely dispiriting for a writer; a lot of consideration and effort goes into articles, and the entire purpose of writing, whether it’s to report an event, share some data, or provide a vision for the future of the region, hinges on reaching an audience.
So why the seemingly sudden decrease? Is it to do with region-wide activity, or the types of articles the EBC is producing? Well, in the September 2019 first minister election, 84 Europeians held citizenship, of which 32 turned out to vote; for the first minister election this April, we had even better numbers - 104 citizens and 43 voters. That week in April saw 122 average daily posts with 62 average daily users active, more than any other week in 2020 so far. The picture this paints is not one of a floundering region struggling to maintain decent levels of activity, and I don’t think it feels that way either - activity in Europeia as a whole can, I think, be discounted as a factor in this. So I tried sorting articles into various categories and comparing how the EBC’s output was split up in two different time ranges (interestingly, the total number of articles published across each two-month period was the same - 28).
| EBC Article Type Percentages | ||
|---|---|---|
| Type | Oct/Nov 2019 | March/April 2020 |
| Informational | 17.9 | 28.6 |
| Report | 14.3 | 10.7 |
| Poll results | 10.7 | 14.3 |
| Interview | 14.3 | 3.6 |
| Entertainment | 3.6 | 7.1 |
| Opinion | 7.1 | 10.7 |
| Weekly Update | 32.1 | 25.0 |
Under “informational,” I included anything which gave an explanation of a general concept or idea without quite being an opinion piece (example: ”Finding Foreign Affairs” by Istillian). A “report” provides the facts of any recent event, whether within Europeia or outside. “Entertainment” includes any of the more light-hearted pieces, such as Lloenflys’ “Modest Ornithological Proposal” series.
The categories with marked differences between the time periods were the informational articles, which the EBC apparently used to do significantly less, and interviews, which happened far more in October and November 2019 than they do now. However, going through the EBC sub-forum manually and comparing response numbers for each category, both of these groups gather more or less the average number of responses overall; the article types that really stand out in terms of public engagement are the opinion pieces and the entertainment pieces, both of which we did more of in the last two months than we did in autumn 2019. There doesn’t seem to be a direct correlation between where the EBC’s content focus is and how Europeians respond to it either.
By process of elimination, this all points to the last reasonable explanation I for one can manage to think of, which is simply an increase in public apathy towards the EBC. However, that seems a bizarre phenomenon to me, particularly when comparing this decline with corresponding numbers for private media. These are the mean numbers of responses to NationStates-related private media articles over the past year (only currently unarchived outlets are included):
| Mean Private Media Article Responses | |
|---|---|
| Total | 12.8 |
| April/May 2019 | 9.6 |
| June/July 2019 | 5.0 |
| Aug/Sep 2019 | 11.8 |
| Oct/Nov 2019 | 16.4 |
| Dec 2019/Jan 2020 | 8.0 |
| March/April 2020 | 11.5 |
Although there is a lot of fluctuation in this data, with private media doing a lot better than the EBC overall but dipping beneath them at specific times, we can see fairly high levels of engagement with private media these last two months that don’t seem to point to any broader reason why the EBC should be failing to attract the same depth of interaction. Perhaps the less codified approach to writing in private media means that readers find it easier to leave a comment on an article. In any case, while candidates in our latest first minister election were asked what the Ministry of Communications could do to promote private media, perhaps the question would have been better the other way around. The whole point of producing content is to inform our readers - our politicians, our legislators, our ministry workers - to keep them up to date and allow them to constructively assess the state of the region; to contribute to region-wide debate (or start a discussion) by evaluating our progress so far and stimulating further discussion; and to entertain and engage both citizens and non-citizens so that they want to get involved. If we’re struggling to attract and involve readers, we’re struggling to function.
To be completely honest, I’m not quite sure what the takeaway is here for the EBC; I hope these statistics are useful in some way. But whether or not we’re the cause of the problem, I think we as citizens need to make more of an active effort to respond to articles and feed the discussion. And even if it’s difficult to think of something substantive to add, an encouraging comment is always helpful; as Europeian Research Institute writer GraVandius said in Ervald’s Grand Hall thread, “a comment does warm the heart a little more” than a like.
