Do you scroll on your phone for hours but then quit a meaty news story in 15 seconds? Maybe your attention span isn’t the problem!
Dr. Ronald Yaros thinks the way to get people to pay attention is better content delivery that’s designed to work with their busy lives.
Find out what actually captures and keeps our attention… and why.
Digital Engagement Lab – https://www.digitalengagementlab.org/
Ronal Yaros bio – https://merrill.umd.edu/directory/ronald-yaros
Phil Stieg
For years we’ve been told that smartphones and endless scrolling have led to dwindling attention spans. My guest thinks that’s a myth. Dr. Ronald Yaros is an associate professor of digital engagement at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, and director of the Digital Engagement Lab. He argues that the same person who abandons a news article in 15 seconds will happily binge on a six-hour television series. Yaros points to content delivery, not the audience, as the problem.
His new book, “The Digital Engagement Model: How to Capture and Keep Audience Attention,” offers a solution: the Smart Story Suite.
Rather than assuming everyone reads long blocks of text, this AI-supported approach restructures the same information into scannable nuggets of news. Readers select what interests them based on their available time, the environment, and their experiences. Today, we’ll explore what actually captures and keeps audience attention.
Ronald, thank you for being with us.
Ronald Yaros
Thank you very much for having me.
Phil Stieg
So you’re giving people the benefit of the doubt here by saying that they can actually focus if given the right motivation. Well then, what drives the motivation
Ronald Yaros
Well, the main focus of our research is the fact that the content is key, And when I talk about current content, I’m referring to news and websites that have long pages of text, linear text that everyone is expected to read. We just argue that one size does not fit all when it comes to the content, and that is what begins to divide the attention.
Phil Stieg
Sir, you’re saying that to survive in this day and age, you’re going to have to not only worry about whether your content is important and worth listening to, but you have to think about how you’re going to message it. It doesn’t matter how important your message is, you know, if nobody’s listening.
Ronald Yaros
Absolutely. You could be a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and no one’s going to know about it if they don’t read your excellent work. We know today, with all the devices and the content, obviously there’s an overwhelming amount of choices. So why are we still producing that one long page of news, which was the same format that was used in the very first long page of text to report President Lincoln’s assassination in 1857? It just is not being adapted now to the way people consume information on demand, anywhere at any time.
Phil Stieg
Everybody, I think, has a visceral sense for what you mean by engagement, but can you define it how you think about it as it relates to the digital environment?
Ronald Yaros
That’s a really good point. There is just so many ways to define it, and it’s rarely defined. It’s always used, but we really don’t know exactly what it means. To analytics folks, of course, it means the number of likes and shares on social media. Oh, that’s engagement. I don’t buy that. I believe, of course, that we’re looking at meaningful engagement. That means that you do take the time to comprehend and to understand that information. Now, it might only be a sentence; it might only be a headline if it’s informative, but meaningful engagement suggests not interactivity with your social network. It is truly comprehending the information.
Phil Stieg
So, I think you said in the book, there’s a curiosity, a momentum, and a trust level, that implies that you’re really engaged in your digital subject matter, correct?
Ronald Yaros
Yeah, and trust is a little tricky because, as we all know today, there is a lot of concern of trust in the information. So I can’t claim that this model is the silver bullet to bring trust to all of the content, but yes, we call it attention momentum. On the other side of the equation that you just mentioned is the fact that if we can structure information, and that includes AI-generated information, in a correct manner, in a way that really meets people where they are, that means their environment and the time they have to engage, then it does build ongoing attention, which is attention momentum. And you know, if you watch a young person on their phone scrolling TikTok and Instagram for hours, that’s attention momentum. They’re not looking for anything particular. They did not even know what they would get when they started, but there they are, hours at a time, consuming information.
Phil Stieg
And I think repeatedly throughout the book, you always say the audience isn’t the problem. If that’s true, what is.
Ronald Yaros
I believe that everyone brings their digital diet to the content, which is their demographics, their interests, their environment, and the T stands for time.
Those last two, I think, are really the big variables that are often overlooked. You may be very interested in the content that I’m writing, but your meeting is about to start, or the plane is about to board. Well, we’re not really producing content to satisfy that user who is interested but has limited time, and maybe they’ll come back.
We’ve collected more than 1000 instant diary reports. We would text people on their phones, and with as soon as they could, whenever it was convenient, they would report where they are, how much time they have to engage, what they’re doing, and we found that the environment in which the person is in and the time is just as important, if not more, than how interesting they found that content.
The I represents what educational psychologists call individual interest. It’s long-term things that you are interested in, you are invested in it, you have experience, maybe you have expertise. That’s different than the interest that’s generated by content that you did not expect. But oh, that’s interesting. I just looked at my social media. There’s a cute cat and a tutu dancing to a song, and it’s going to get my attention and keep my attention. That’s situational interest, and that is generated only by the content.
Phil Stieg
As I was reading through your book, I couldn’t help thinking about this is a similar problem from I don’t know how many years ago when magazines were competing for the audience. You know how to make a magazine engaging. What made Vogue bigger than something else? Is it kind of the same thing going on now, but in a digital age?
Ronald Yaros
I would say not because what you’re referring to is what we call a target audience, presumably people who are going to pick up that magazine are obviously interested in that particular topic
So we’re not looking so much at a target audience, which we argue is a captive audience. That if you have the time and the interest, you’re definitely going to be engaged. I’m more concerned about the incidental audience-younger people, well, any age now, on mobile devices that are being incidentally exposed to content. And when we have important content, it’s not entertaining, it’s not sports, but maybe it’s about climate change or about health. How do we get those people engaged when they would automatically say, “I’m not interested in this. We again argue it’s the way it’s being presented.
Phil Stieg
I have to ask: Is that generational? Because I look at my kids, and they just enjoy scrolling through on their phones looking for stuff, and they find very interesting things.
Ronald Yaros
I think with the younger people, it’s that they grew up with the device. They actually consider it to be part of them and to be without it for a minute. Oh my goodness, that’s the end of the world. So it’s a behavioral thing, I think, where habitual consulting of your device is the key. And Linda Stone, a former IBM executive, used to call it “continuous partial attention.” It’s not multitasking, but you’re continuously thinking about your phone, no matter what you’re doing.
Phil Stieg
Can you give us any data on actually how distractive having a cell phone on us or near us during a conversation or during work is on our lives?
Ronald Yaros
I can tell you about a study very interesting where they took a large class and they divided it into three different groups, and they were going to administer the same exam to all three. However, one group had their phone placed in another room, a second group had their phone placed in a backpack or their purse, and the third group had the phone right next to them on the desk, and they were able to show that statistically significant differences occurred where the closer the phone was placed to you, the poorer the exam scores were, and in all cases, here’s the kicker: the phone was off. So the students, were still thinking about the phone, and somehow the distance of the phone – the closer it got – the less intense they got in terms of their attention and their recall of information.
Phil Stieg
And I’m happy to see that you state that likes and shares don’t mean that something is important. That’s not really what measures engagement. I want to get out of you what engagement means. Is it time and stickiness? Because clearly, you don’t think that putting a thumbs up button next to something is a sign that you like it.
Ronald Yaros
Here’s how we measure it, and here’s how we confirm engagement. We did three different studies, each with about 1,600 people. We exposed half to a typical long-form news story and the other half to our Smart Story suite. And overwhelmingly, statistically significant benefits came from the Smart Story suite. People thought it was more interesting, more personalized, more interactive, and here’s the kicker: they spent more time on the linear page, but they learned and recalled more information from the Smart Story Suite.
Now it’s not long-term memory. I know that we were measuring their recall immediately after exposure, but the point is that is what engagement is? If you get people to find it to be more interesting, engaging, interactive, and they can call more information, I argue it doesn’t get much better than that.
Phil Stieg
What’s really going on in the brain within that first 15 seconds that allows me to decide, I’ve had enough, or nope, you got me hooked, and I’m going to start going into it in more depth.
Ronald Yaros
So there’s a clickbait headline. I click on it and I see a full page of text. In 15 seconds, I’m going to decide: is this important or not? Do I have enough time? What is really important is that once they click the headline, at least according to our research, is there is a set of other things other than text that will build attention momentum.
So bullet points automatically say this is a summary, short paragraphs, explanatory subheads. That means in the middle of a page of text. If I’m a scanner, for example, and my eye tracking research shows this, people will scan to those declarative sentences in the middle of the page of text, and still consume that information and learn from it, which they could not do if it was just a page of text.
Then, of course, there are visuals and charts and interactivity and maybe short videos. So we’re just arguing that strategically, not only what can you select for your content, but how you can position it in that content will build attention momentum, and it will keep you guessing every 15 seconds what’s next. It’s kind of like a movie. You know, when you go to a movie, the reason why you remain engaged is you want to know what’s happening, where is this going? There is a line. So we’re never going to make a news story equivalent to a movie, but we certainly can do a better job.
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Phil Stieg
When you describe attention, you talked about top down and bottom up. Can you define that for us, please?
Ronald Yaros
In the newsroom, they’re deciding what you’re going to see tonight or this afternoon on the news. That’s top down, and that’s gatekeeping. Bottom up means let’s turn this around to develop this new model to present information in a different way that adapts to the user, and that’s bottom up. So that means obviously the engagement is determined by your brain, by your interest, and there is a special combination of content that we have found, at least with educational psychology and cognitive psychology. It’s already been shown for years that if you combine scannable content with personalization, interactivity, curiosity, and emotion, you are going to increase the chances of that person being interested.
Phil Stieg
So with a population of I don’t know 40% that aren’t reading at age, but they all have cell phones and are all scanning the social media. What are they doing? Are they engaged? Are they getting attention, momentum? Are they learning?
Ronald Yaros
Well, we can’t really generalize to everyone there, but I think there’s a large variety. I mean, there’s definitely diverse audiences, diverse needs. Some are engaging for a longer period of time. Maybe they just saw a short video of their favorite football player, and somebody else won’t care about that. But that person is going to remain engaged. So again, we’re back to not only the content, which of course is always important. It is how it is structured. So we might be able to generate some more information and more interest in that content from others.
I do want to mention that I’ve gotten a lot of interest from the educational sector. So, from a neurodiversity standpoint, people with ADHD, autism, they’re very interested in whether or not the smart story suite, with selective ability to engage with information of most interesting to them, whether that might also facilitate better learning in neurodiversity, and we’re just starting to do some research on that.
Phil Stieg
We’ve kind of talked a little bit about the smart story suite. Explain how it describes the human-computer interaction.
Ronald Yaros
You can imagine a full page of text. Okay, once we take that full page of text and give it into our adaptive AI tool. It takes a few seconds, and then first of all, it summarizes the news story with three bullet points, one short paragraph, and then that entire story has been divided into sections. On the left-hand side of the screen, you would see red buttons that would have a declarative sentence in each that says, if you click on this, this is what you’re going to learn from the story. As opposed to having to read the full page, you can pick and choose what you want. We call it selective progression. It’s personalized for you because you’re now picking what you’re interested in.
You’re more interested because it’s interactive. You’re selecting what you’re interested in, it still has the photos. It still would have a video, and in the upper right-hand corner, it tells you how much of the original story was actually used. Most cases, it’s nearly 100 percent, 98 to 100 percent. And what we’re trying to do now is put a little note at the top to people to say “This is not generating any new information”, and the button in the lower left is instant fact checking. If you click on that, we are going to confirm the information came from this source and tell you exactly what the source was. And if you’re questioning that source, you can go to that source. But we want to, and we’re still testing this, the extent to which a person would really believe this information better if they had the ability to instantly fact check it by themselves, and so part of the Smart Story suite provides that instant fact checking.
The Smart Story Suite says we’re not going to summarize this for you, nor are we going to generate any new information. That’s generative AI, and every time I mention AI, of course, my students think only generative. No, I believe adaptive AI can give you choices and the ability for you to select is it just a short form or long form comprehension that I want to engage in?
Phil Stieg
So, for the uninformed, please explain what you mean by generative and adaptive AI.
Ronald Yaros
So, generative AI, when you type in a prompt, will give you information. Who knows where it comes from. It has the complete source of all of the information they can find in the world, but at the same time, it’s a well-known fact that it does generate errors and inaccurate information, what the industry calls hallucinations.
So what we are doing in our lab is taking that same tool but saying do not generate anything new. Here’s a news story. Keep the exact same information. Maybe a few words might be dropped at the most, but it’s restructured so that people can look instantly at different sections of the news and pick what’s of interest to them.
And I know that the argument is okay, a gain, we’re still dumbing down the audience because they’re not reading the entire story. My response is: I’d rather have them at least engage for five minutes as opposed to zero minutes.
Phil Stieg
So, what do you say about? I mean, there have been publications in JAMA, the Journal of American Medical Association, about articles that have been published that are patently false with false information, falsified data, to intentionally mislead people. Could that get into your Smart Story Suite?
Ronald Yaros
Yes, because it just takes the original content and makes it. It structures it to meet the mind.
Phil Stieg
So it’s data driven,
Ronald Yaros
yeah,
Phil Stieg
and so that’s even worse than hallucinations. That’s people being evil, as I see it.
Ronald Yaros
That’s true. If you wrote something inaccurate and used Smart Story Suite, I would not be happy because that just that just exacerbates the problem.
Phil Stieg
But I mean, that’s out there, and this is where AI can hallucinate because they’re they’re not at fault. They’re just drawing up the information.
Ronald Yaros
I will tell you this: that in your particular example, it’s an interesting question because I would suspect that the Smart Story Suite will say “this data cannot be confirmed”, but it has to appear somewhere, and the research and the statistics have to appear somewhere, so it would say “not confirmed” to the person, but it may not go far enough.
Phil Stieg
So, how are you going to approach this down the road? Is this going to be your intellectual property, and is it going to be a product that you’re going to be willing to disseminate and sell, so that the rest of us could use something that seems the way you’re describing it? It sounds very positive.
Ronald Yaros
Yeah, that has been a big question lately, and I mean, sure. I mean, I’m not in to make money, but I am in to make sure that you know I want to save my industry. Journalism is struggling. Subscriptions are down. People are not turning to the traditional news sources. So, in part, yes, if I can help the industry and sell them this or license them this code, because it’s not just produced by me, it’s produced by students at the university, so they own it too, and we would do whatever we can to promote more engagement with meaningful information.
Phil Stieg
So, you tweak my interest when you say journalism is suffering right now.
Ronald Yaros
Yes,
Phil Stieg
Are you just referring to papers and magazines, or you mean across the board digital also?
Ronald Yaros
Well, likely papers are done. Yeah. So websites are even now beginning to suffer because again, their initial strategy was to recruit subscriptions, and obviously people are saying, “Why should I pay for that when I can get it over there, so it has to be unique, exclusive reporting for it to be meaningful.
I am particularly concerned about local news organizations. That’s really the area that is taking a hit, where it cannot generate enough revenue, and consequently, and this I think it’s really serious, is that people are not getting their local news like they used to, which is important.
Phil Stieg
And is it because they’re not creating the curiosity, momentum, and trust?
Ronald Yaros
Yes. Yeah, that’s what I argue. Let’s get more people interested, and then maybe you could generate some subscriptions.
Phil Stieg
Yeah. So it seems to me when I turn on the TV, it’s more about entertainment or trying to sell me on something.
Ronald Yaros
Yeah, I try to call it interest, situational interest. You call it entertainment, and that’s what I tell my students. I say, you know, I’m not here to be a clown, or I’m not here to entertain. I’m here to generate situational interest. So I just want to stay on that plane for a while. (laugh)
Phil Stieg
We’ll stay on the higher road. So then, what makes engagement different than manipulation?
Ronald Yaros
Engagement is simply you consuming something, understanding it, hopefully applying it to your life. Manipulation means I’ve just changed your idea, or I’ve fed you some misinformation that you believe. So that’s two different things.
Phil Stieg
Yeah. Do you feel that a fair amount of digital media and social media is manipulative?
Ronald Yaros
Yes. Until we have the credibility and the trustworthy factor solved, this is all a result now the lower trust and credibility to the fact that people are feeling misled, and it may take some time to understand that they were misled once they get more information. But that initial exposure is critical.
Phil Stieg
What are your thoughts then about? Since you say that AI can certainly increase engagement, but listening to you, I’m not sure that I can trust all of it.
Ronald Yaros
Right.
Phil Stieg
From a scientific perspective, are there ways that we can design systems that will help protect us?
Ronald Yaros
Yes, and I’m not the only one that’s going to be inventing adaptive AI, but yes, those types of tools that will automatically check to make sure that the information being communicated is the original information of the author and not generate anything new will be the best way to go.
Phil Stieg
And then the corporation generating the information has to demonstrate that they’re using that kind of advancing AI to protect me, the public.
Ronald Yaros
That’s right. So it’s a process.
Phil Stieg
Wouldn’t that be marvelous? So, what’s at stake here in terms of society if we don’t take these kind of controls to protect the information that’s being fed to our children?
Ronald Yaros
Well, it’s a misled society, and I think media literacy-you know, making sure that in college, even as freshmen enter college, they get those introductory media literacy courses, and those are the courses that tell students what the red flags are for misinformation. So it’s education that’s not answering your question. You want to know what the ramifications are and or the consequences, and it’s dire. We need media literacy to immediately start educating more and more students, even in high school and middle school, so I think there’s more effort to be made there if we want to save society from being totally misled by whoever is going to produce content at that day.
Phil Stieg
I was thinking about echo chambers.
Ronald Yaros
Ah,
Phil Stieg
Not necessarily wrong information – right?
Ronald Yaros
Yeah,
Phil Stieg
But the echo chamber allows people to ruminate on things that are just so isolated, and it puts bodies of people against each other.
Ronald Yaros
Yes.
Phil Stieg
Yeah. There’s probably no way to prevent that sort of activity on social media.
Ronald Yaros
A lot of the ideas I’m talking about are coming from students. They’re the next generation of consumers. So I’m really listening to them, and one had this idea: why not have a site or a mobile app that will give you two different perspectives, two different news sources at the same time? It doesn’t mean a person’s going to read both, but at least they’re exposed to it, and maybe that would give us a little bit of a better appreciation of what the other side is doing and saying.
Phil Stieg
Dr. Ronald Yaros, author of “The Digital Engagement Model: How to Capture and Keep Audience Attention” Thank you so much for being with us today, and I’m pleased to see that you’re one of the few people out there that says we don’t have to fear artificial intelligence and social media. We have to exercise our agency in terms of controlling the product that you and I and other people will create for the consumers out there. Thank you so much for giving us your time.
Ronald Yaros
Thank you, doctor, for having me.
