Local newsrooms should have more fun. Your readers and your staff will thank you.

This is a series on Better News to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) share replicable tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole. 

This “win” comes from Hannah Wise, assistant managing editor for engagement & experimentation at The Kansas City Star, which participated in the Gannett-McClatchy Table Stakes program in 2019-20 and API’s Mobilizing News sprint for Table Stakes alumni in 2023.

When was the last time you felt like you were having fun with coverage in your newsroom?

For too many local journalists, it can be hard to confidently answer. The reasons we know all too well: shrinking staffs, increased polarization, uncertainty about the business model.

But what if we intentionally designed coverage that was fun for our journalists and our readers? Would it result in higher engagement from our local readers? An increase in subscriptions? Could we invest in our journalists’ job satisfaction?

Coverage focused on restaurants, local celebrities and local concerts have been victims of cuts in cash-strapped newsrooms. But our communities are vibrant places exactly because of those topics and readers crave opportunities to discover new experiences or reasons to feel local pride.

This is what my Kansas City Star colleagues and I have explored over the last two years. We’ve doubled down on local accountability journalism, but we’ve also designed experiments to explore these areas of coverage that entertain and delight our readers. We’ve done so without hiring new staff, but instead shared with our whole staff the opportunity to participate in these experiments.

And our readers are responding. Stories from these experiments see more local readership and often higher numbers of direct conversions than average for our newsroom. And our staff is having fun getting outside of their normal beats and covering more lighthearted subjects.

Here are three highlights from our most fun experiments:

Let’s Dish logo (Alison Booth/The Kansas City Star)

Invite readers to enjoy your favorite meals

What we did and why: Kansas City is filled with terrific restaurants — and no, they aren’t all barbecue joints. In our “Let’s Dish” series, our journalists highlight their favorite dish at a local restaurant and share why it is special to them. Each column featured one local restaurant, included photos and a video, and became lead items for a special newsletter. And we pay for the journalist’s meal — an added treat for our staff.

 

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What worked well: Our local readers loved these columns. We quickly heard from readers who said that “Let’s Dish” helped them discover new places to eat. The anecdotal evidence was backed up by our digital metrics. These stories have continued to be among those with the highest engagement from our subscribers. Our special newsletter list quickly exceeded 10,000 subscribers and continues to grow. The Let’s Dish newsletter now has a list size similar to our Kansas City Chiefs newsletter, while other niche newsletter lists for The Star typically have a couple of thousand highly engaged readers.

Overall, the engagement with our dining coverage through “Let’s Dish” helped us make the case to expand our dining coverage by adding an additional reporter focused on restaurant news in addition to other business openings and closings.

What didn’t work as expected: We published two columns per week for the first three months of the project. We wanted to gather enough information to make a data-informed decision. But two columns a week strained the editor coordinating the project and our visuals staff. Once we settled on making “Let’s Dish” part of our regular work, we reset the publishing cadence to twice a month and only created accompanying videos when it made sense.

Try this:

• Find something special or unique to your local community
• Give the project a name and logo that helps readers identify it — use it across all platforms
• Choose one editor to coordinate coverage and invite your entire staff to sign up to participate
• Use data to understand what is working and quickly sunset elements that don’t resonate. Don’t be afraid to iterate and adjust as needed.

Screenshots showing variations of The Kansas City Star homepage during coverage of The Eras Tour

Help local readers navigate major events, while bringing national readers along for the experience

What we did and why: During 2023, we covered a Chiefs Super Bowl victory, followed quickly by the NFL Draft in Kansas City. We invest serious resources in covering the Chiefs because our readers cannot get enough. But Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour were coming to town and we wondered if investing similar resources to covering the huge concerts would bring in new and younger readers to The Star.

We invited anyone on staff to volunteer to help with coverage. We borrowed from our playbooks for covering major breaking news and signature live sports events, combined those approaches with inspiration from other local news outlets’ coverage of the concerts and made our plan.

For several weeks ahead of the July Eras Tour shows, we published service journalism that answered questions and helped locals attend the shows. We looked for stories that highlighted unique Kansas City ties, such as a feature on Kam Saunders, one of Taylor Swift’s dancers who graduated from a local university and is the brother of a former Chiefs player. We planned live blogs to cover the concerts themselves with dispatches from reporters inside and outside of the stadium and we broke out stories that had high-potential on search and social.

Screenshots from social videos The Star created during Eras Tour coverage

We thought carefully about our distribution strategy using The Star’s social channels, newsletters and targeted alerts. We also wanted to see if we could collect email addresses in exchange for a digital download of a special “Taylor’s Version” edition of The Kansas City Star front page.

The Kansas City Star (Taylor’s Version) was a digital download The Star offered for Swifties who signed up with their email address.

What worked well: Using Google Trends and social listening to inform our story selection helped us ensure that our coverage was comprehensive and timely. Our Taylor Swift coverage brought in more than 600,000 pageviews to KansasCity.com. About 25% of that readership was local audience, which was concentrated on our service-focused stories. We saw particularly high national readership on stories that readers inside the concert. Our social media strategy led to record-setting engagement with our accounts with a younger audience than The Star’s typical digital subscriber — which we see as an investment in building a relationship with potential future subscribers.

We were surprised by how many people signed up for the digital download, which has informed our continued efforts to add unique digital art offerings like coloring pages for other major events.

An added benefit: Covering the concerts was a much-needed break from difficult news topics for some of our reporters. Giving our journalists the opportunity to cover a fun event was an investment in staff well-being that is worth making.

What didn’t work as expected: It is hard to truly plan for, but we ran into some issues with cell service from reporters at the venue. We recommend working with event organizers to access WiFi or bringing personal hotspots to try and mitigate possible issues.

We used a similar playbook later in the year covering Beyoncé’s Kansas City tour stop, but our visual journalists were not credentialed to cover the show itself. We used photos from Beyoncé’s team from the concert, which unfortunately limited the coverage we could produce.

Try this: 

• Identify local events that will dominate the conversation locally and nationally
• Consider service-oriented coverage that will help local readers navigate the experience
• Design off-platform coverage that will engage national audiences experiencing FOMO and showcase what is unique about the event happening in your community.

Highlight the unique experience, don’t review it

What we did and why: Building off the success from our Eras Tour coverage, we wondered if coverage of other concert tour stops from national artists who are not megastars would resonate with our readers. We identified key pieces of success from our Eras Tour coverage to use as a framework for this experiment: helping local people attend the concert, showing the concert through unique visuals, and focusing reporting on how fans experienced the show.

 

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What worked well: The key to success is creating a local tie with the coverage. Kansas Citians have great pride in the city, so whenever we can connect an artist that they love with the city they love it is a recipe for success.

When tickets are competitive or sold out, saying so in the headline is helpful. So is highlighting if it is the artist’s final show in town (like Barry Manilow), or their first concert in the area in several years (like Green Day), or if a highly anticipated concert is canceled (like Blink-182).

We’ve found that a service-focused preview story plus a photo-driven story and a separate reported story is a winning combination that engages a local audience that is not necessarily the same as our subscriber audience. This trio of stories from our Oliva Rodrigo coverage is a good example of our approach:

• Olivia Rodrigo to play sold-out show in Kansas City. Here’s what to know before you go
• Olivia Rodrigo spills her guts to emotional Kansas City fans in high-energy concert
• Purple, sparkles and smiles: See photos of Olivia Rodrigo’s concert in Kansas City

Each story on its own performed well in our audience metrics (each averaged more than 5,000 pageviews per story), but with the three stories we were able to demonstrate that we were committed to covering the show and giving fans plenty to enjoy. Notably, these stories are not reviews, but rather they report on the show and how fans experienced it.

 

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Similar to our “Let’s Dish” approach, we have one editor coordinating the concert experiment. We’ve leaned heavily on our service journalism team to help with this coverage, but also invited the staff to raise their hands to cover artists they are particularly interested in.

Covering a concert usually means a late night, but it is worth it when you love the artist you’re seeing.

What didn’t work as expected: The credentialing process continues to be a pain point. Some artists and venues are quick to issue media credentials and welcome the coverage. Others actively seek to minimize media presence at the concerts.

We’ve found that even for artists who do not issue us credentials, when the potential concert audience is big enough (like Morgan Wallen’s multiple nights at Arrowhead Stadium), preview coverage can still pay off.

Try this: 

• Make a potential coverage calendar and invite the staff to sign up for concerts they are interested in.
• Think about concert coverage as an investment in a potential future subscriber audience and a way to diversify how you’re covering your community.
• Be selective about what you cover. There’s no way to make it to all of the concerts, but look for artists that have active fan bases or will hit a nostalgia sweet spot for your readers.