Audience growth: A primer

Audience engagement and growth responsibilities have traditionally fallen to teams outside the newsroom or siloed at its margins. But modern news organizations recognize their dual role in both reporting the news and ensuring it reaches its intended audiences. 

To reach new audiences and deepen your organization’s relationship with existing readers, you will need to build empowered, collaborative, cross-functional teams that incorporate growth into both their day-to-day workflow and overarching editorial mission. Such teams harness the skills of reporters, editors, producers, social media specialists, and digital and audience development strategists to align content with reader needs and interests and ensure that it reaches the intended platforms and audiences. 

Importantly, this alignment serves both business and journalistic goals. Most news outlets consider it part of their mission to reach a broad and diverse audience, including young people, communities of color and disengaged or distrustful news consumers. Audience growth is also critical to growing revenue, whether through subscriptions, advertising or other business models, particularly as traditional news consumers age. One survey by the Pew Research Center found that seniors are almost three times as likely to consume local news as young adults are. 

It’s always challenging to ask people to change how they do things or to adjust to new goals and priorities. But news organizations that have successfully implemented collaborative audience growth teams have seen excellent results. In 2019, for instance, The Journal News launched a company-wide initiative to expand the paper’s reach in Yonkers, a growing, multicultural community in Westchester County, N.Y.

Much of that work took place in the newsroom, which added a new Yonkers reporter, formed strategic working groups and increased engagement through social media and live events. But it also relied on partnership with the paper’s marketing and consumer sales teams, which promoted the new content to potential readers through targeted ads and other initiatives. In less than a year, the project attracted more than 5,000 readers to a new Yonkers-focused newsletter and boosted digital subscriptions in five target zip codes by 50%.

“It was critical to involve the whole newsroom,” executive editor Mary Dolan and two colleagues wrote in a 2021 review of the project.