How news publishers are adapting post-election, with Yahoo News’s Kat Downs Mulder

Yahoo News, like many news outlets, had expected this year’s U.S. presidential election to drag on a bit longer than it did. “You have people planning to stay in the office for several days after the fact,” said Kat Downs Mulder, gm and svp at Yahoo News, on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

Fortunately, news outlets are accustomed to adapting. And with Donald Trump set to retake the Oval Office, they are having to understand how they may need to adapt to either a similar Trump Bump to the traffic increases news sites saw during his first term or a potential drop off in news interest.

“It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen in the future and whether increases will sustain and in what ways they are going to sustain. There’s readers who are leaning in; they want to know everything that’s going on. And then there’s readers who are leaning out, and they’re at that news avoidance,” said Downs Mulder, who had spent 14 years at The Washington Post before joining Yahoo News in 2022.

To be clear, Yahoo News had seen audience interest in the news increase leading up to and after the election. But it had also seen some audience members indicate a bit of election burnout.

“I think there’s probably more of that than there was in the 2016 cycle. And so our goal at Yahoo is just to try to figure out what level the person is at and customize the experience to that, meet them where they are and give them an experience that fits whatever level of interest they have,” said Downs Mulder.