Back when I used to work on print magazines, my colleagues would occasionally explain why print media is really very much better than digital media.

Given that team sizes and budgets were forever dwindling, they'd usually deliver this argument in the same strained tone that someone might use to tell you that, actually, they'd rather live in a damp, crumbling ruin than a modern apartment building.

"Our readers will read every page of the magazine", they'd sometimes say. Even at the time, this struck me as deeply, deeply optimistic. My working theory was that while most of our subscribers probably wanted to read every page, they'd likely manage 30-50 of them before casting the issue aside.

And then there are the readers we'd won on a newsstand - the people who had picked up a magazine on the basis of its cover and bought it (probably to kill time on a long journey, say). For these readers, our magazine was a functional product, a timesink that was likely cast aside once their train reached its destination (if not before).

In other words, readers might have been less engaged than we sometimes wanted to admit. And for many of us publishing online today, I think levels of engagement and attentiveness may have dropped so low that 'reader' is no longer the proper term for many of the people arriving at our websites.

I think, if we're being honest with ourselves, many of us are writing for users, not readers.

Surfin’ the web

Consider the way that many of us arrive at and navigate a website today.

• We think of a question we want an answer to ("how tall is a horse?")

• We convert our question into a search term ("average horse height") and type it into Google

• We scan the search engine results page for information that looks reliable. Most of the time, we actively try to avoid clicking through to a website

• If required, we grudgingly click on the website that looks the least shady

• We scan the page for our answer, expasteredly clicking away cookie policies, scrolling past intrusive ads, and seething at the inclusion of any information that's not relevant to our search term

• We discover that horses average out at about 14-16 hands. Nice!

• As another full-screen ad takes over the page, we wonder whether the information is entirely trustworthy.

While you do have to be able to read to do this, you'd be hard pressed to label the process as reading. This is not retiring to the drawing room to lose yourself in Middlemarch. This is a focused mission to extract specific information while engaging with the surrounding fluff as little as possible.

You might argue that this isn't the process by which people arrive at editorial online. To which I'd reply: actually, I think it largely is. Unless you're lucky enough to be writing for a site with a massive homepage audience that readers return to day-after-day in search of reading material, most outlets have to duke it out in the search engine mudpits to a greater or lesser degree.

That means that most of our 'readers' will be arriving with a specific query in mind. They will often (just like us) be arriving in an impatient frame of mind, eager to extract the one piece of information that they care about (Stranger Things 5 release date, average horse speed in MPH, 28 Years Later review, average horse weight, best backpack for laptops, best horse desktop wallpaper, etc), often wary of the authenticity and security of our website, and usually keen to leave as soon as possible.

Two truths

So, if we accept this downbeat assessment, what can we actually do about it?

As is so often the case, it starts with honesty. Anyone publishing words online should be conscious of where the bulk of their audience is coming from (if in doubt, analytics and Google Search Console should hold the answers). With that information in mind, the next step is really to just hold on to the following two true statements:

• that many people coming to your work are highly transactional, hurried, annoyed users

• that you would rather they were engaged readers, and you should probably try really hard to make that possible

Part of the job, inevitably, will often be to get new users in the door: to cover topics with wide appeal, to write stories that address popular search terms, to answer questions that large numbers of people are asking.

But the other part of the job - for anyone that is interested in the craft of writing - has to be converting your site's users into site readers. As impatient and wary as we all are when we arrive at an unfamiliar site for the first time, there is scope for the words on the screen to win us over. We start out using the site as a source of specific horse statistics, and wind up reading the site for its loving and detailed coverage of fetlocks and canters and whinnies.