At News Decoder we publish stories intended to help young people understand the wider world they live in. To do that we look for stories in places that are underreported and on problems that many people in many places are struggling to solve.
But we don’t expect our readers to read these stories the second we publish. Young people are busy and teachers might want to focus a class on a particular topic weeks if not months after we publish. So our stories are meant to be “evergreen.”
That’s a journalism term to mean that a story is about something that isn’t just happening now. It will still be relevant a year from now or two or three years in the future.
But it is a challenge to write a story that will grab readers’ attention now and still be worth reading a year from now.
The prize is that you get new readers all the time. We have stories on News Decoder that reappear on our most-read list years after we originally published them as the topics become hot and people search for information on them.
Make your story “evergreen”.
So how do you make a story that isn’t necessarily time-sensitive grab a reader’s attention and at the same time be relevant for those who come to it much later? We’ll show you.
1. Take the time and space to explain events and their context. This way readers in the future will understand what the heck you are talking about. Right now a lot of people are talking about DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative created by U.S. President Donald Trump and led by the world’s richest person Elon Musk. But two years from now who knows? DOGE might be all but forgotten.
2. Connect what is happening now to universal concepts. Musk and DOGE are systematically going through the U.S. government laying off thousands of people and cutting funding to thousands of programs. These moves are affecting programs that involve food, health, housing, travel, education and recreation. Those are topics people are always concerned about and interested in. Chances are, a year from now a top news event will concern the government and one of those things and your story will connect to it.
3. Connect what is happening now to events in the past. In this way you show your audience how the past repeats and how the present is affected by what has happened before. For readers coming in much later they can start connecting what happened when the story was first published to what is happening in their world when they read it.
For the past year, we’ve been republishing articles that connect to something happening now. We call it our Decoder Replay. On 19 February, for instance, we republished a story about how China censors mentions of the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre that occurred in 1989 because now a Chinese artificial intelligence program called DeepSeek seems to negate any reference to Tiananmen Square.
The week before we republished a story from 2020 about the role of the World Health Organization (WHO) in fighting the Covid pandemic. Then U.S. President Donald Trump had denounced the WHO. We connected it to now President Trump pulling the United States out of the WHO.
One of the reasons many people feel disconnected from news articles is that the articles focus on “news” — what is happening now even when such things don’t have much relevance in people’s lives — isolated crimes that happen far away, for example.
So next time you decide to take on a hot topic, think about the readers who come to the story six months from now, or a year from now. How might the story resonate with them?