The Observer, The Salt Path and the secret roots of attention

The weekend’s incredible Observer exclusive is fascinating. First up, it’s precisely the sort of boost the new Tortoise-owned incarnation of the paper needs. The Observer finally has its own website, and I’d bet a small amount of cash that it just saw its best ever traffic day. It’s a nice, clear flag in the sand of what the new Observer will be. CJR’s Jon Allsop did a good take on the wider media implications of the story.

But I’m ever more fascinated by the way the attention it has generated defies some standard shibboleths about how “news” operates.

For the uninitiated, The Salt Path is a 2018 book of the emerging genre of nature memoir. In it a husband and wife, buffeted by the twin winds of financial adversity and a terminal illness diagnosis, go for a walk around the coast of southwest England, wild camp, and discover a better way of living. And manage to alleviate the husband’s symptoms. Hope! Rebirth! Connection with nature! People lapped it up, with over 2 million copies shifted.

A couple of months ago, this best-selling, genre-exploding book hit the cinemas in movie form, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.

The hidden origin of the Salt Path

The problem, as it turns out, is that the ill-defined financial problems that kick off the book appear to have been the author embezzling her employer. And then having to use their home as collateral for a family loan to avoid the courts. And then the relative’s business that gave the loan collapsed, causing repossession of the home.

That they obscured that sequence of events would be bad enough. I really enjoyed a similar memoir, Finding Hildasay, where the author has the decency to point out in that the horrible state he finds himself in at the beginning of the book was all his own fault. But there are also serious questions about the husband’s exact diagnosis.

Oh, and the “homeless” couple owned land in France.

Quite the scoop. It’s well worth reading the whole thing.

What’s fascinating to me is the attention dynamics of this. It’s an exposé on a seven-year-old book. “OK,” you might say, “but the movie just came out”. Well, yes, but it was released nearly six weeks ago, and actually premiered back in September. The news cycle has passed it by – but the power of a good investigation has re-ignited it.

Media theory ahoy!

Putting my pretentious media theorist hat on (it’s very ornate, and has something that’s vaguely reminiscent of a press card tucked into the side), this worked for two reasons:

1. There’s a vast sea of ambient attention available for this book. It was a genuine cultural phenomenon, and so this kind of exposé taps into that latent interest.
2. It’s also the ambient attention of the sorts of readers The Observer is targeting: middle-class, middle-aged, left of centre folks. People much like me, in fact. And yes, The Salt Path was on my to-read list, but I’m feeling slightly smug now that I never got around to it.

It’s targeted squarely at the interests and passions of a target audience, who already have a reserve of available attention for the story. This is the sort of journalism/audience strategy intersection that gets me up in the morning. It’s just delicious.

Journalism, news, and attention

It’s also a clear example to me of the public appetite for a story that’s new and interesting, rather than breaking news (in the traditional sense) in its own right. I remain convinced that we, as an industry, still overvalue the new in the sense of “breaking news” and don’t understand how compelling “new to me and fascinating” can be to the audience.

Once more, with feeling: “news” is a subset of “journalism”, and sometimes damn good journalism can trigger a “news” event all by itself, without any external timely factors at play.

So, congratulations to The Observer and Chloe Hadjimatheou in particular. Let’s hope they’ve reaped the rewards in traffic and subscriptions. They’ve almost certainly got a nice wee SEO boost from all the follow-up articles linking to it.

Right, off on a tour of bookshops, to do some guerrilla reshelving of books from the non-fiction or nature writing categories into fiction…