Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Use annual events to experiment with storytelling approaches, form audience/content teams, and stretch resources.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel created — and continually updates — a list of newsroom activities that don’t contribute to its audience-centric strategy in an effort to find time and resources to devote to more meaningful tasks.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Bay Area News Group had moved to a digital first publishing platform but quickly realized some writers and editors were finding an audience for their content better than others. They realized they needed to get everyone on the same page — with a suite of digital content guides.
Financial support from philanthropic sources offers all sorts of new opportunities for funding journalism sustainably. It also raises some ethical questions that can potentially challenge reader trust.
Don’t attempt to create a new franchise vertical or niche site without this advice.
How to determine you are engaging the right people with the right content.
Collaborative journalism takes many forms: reporting, deepening relationships with audiences, co-collecting and sharing data or even teaming up to build technology. Learn the basics here.
You know you need to reach your targeted audiences where they are. But how do you decide where to distribute your content, how to test other platforms, and how to determine their effectiveness? Start here.
What are your organization’s gaps in producing and publishing continuously to meet audience needs? Take these assessments to find out.
Almost all of the levers we can pull to improve newsroom performance revolve around the daily work of the staff, which is a newsroom’s greatest resource.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The News Reporter, a local paper covering Whiteville and Columbus County, N.C., and Scalawag, a nonprofit magazine that serves under-represented Southerners, teamed up to produce a series (on the breakdown of mental health services and the opioid epidemic in rural North Carolina) that neither could have done as effectively on their own.
It’s not enough for news sites to be “mobile compatible” or “mobile friendly.” They must be mobile oriented.
The Guardian has transformed from teetering on financial oblivion to generating more revenue from readers than advertising.
A collection of best practices for talking to readers with practical, downloadable examples.
Consumer revenue can take many forms, including subscriptions, membership and donations. And while these three types of consumer revenue serve unique audience needs and interests, the discipline required to execute each is very similar.
The Texas Tribune’s Code of Ethics includes a section on how paid content is handled and what readers can expect.
Native advertising can be a tremendously effective revenue driver and service to audiences. If executed poorly, however, it can quickly erode reader trust.
For the uninitiated, data journalism can feel like “someone else’s job” and getting started can be awfully intimidating. But the truth is using data to tell better and more important stories is critical today, and data journalism is a necessary skill for every reporter and for every beat.
“We’re doing four times more in-depth investigative and explanatory reporting now than we did when our newsroom was three times larger than it is today. And I barely heard a peep from readers about most of the stuff we stopped doing.”
The role of video in your storytelling toolkit is complex, requiring decisions about what your audience wants and what you can provide with quality and differentiation.
Analytics platform Parse.ly provides a beginner’s guide for getting to the bottom of who your target audience is and what they need from you.
Reaching audiences is no longer just another function of marketing and circulation teams. The role of attracting readers/viewers/listeners belongs to everyone, including (and especially!) the newsroom.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Seattle Times created an open Slack channel that lowered the barriers for people to speak up about cultural issues that can arise about stories — anything from framing, missed angles, lack of context, offensive or exclusionary language or headlines.
This white paper spans the tactical elements of workflow to team dynamics and testing methodologies, all drawn from a pool of expert product-oriented pro’s assembled by API.
Making live events a potential revenue stream is a long-term strategy that requires careful and strategic planning and that should connect into the strengths of a news organization and the resonance it has in the lives of its audiences.
Take a look at a handful of common stories and imagine other ways to present those stories.
The phrase “Table Stakes” comes from poker – the amount required to have seat at the table. The Table Stakes manual is for newsrooms, identifying what’s required to play and win the game of news in the 21st century. Developed with major metropolitan daily news organizations, it is meant to accelerate journalism’s shift to digital from print, help newsrooms evolve their practices, reach new audiences and better engage their communities.
The discipline of verification is a key function of journalism. Learn more about fact-checking as a discipline, why it’s important, and how to do it right.
Match deadlines to audience windows, change shifts, and modify key editorial meetings in terms of timing, purpose and participation.
Two essential tools are key to digital transformation: a universal budget and a communications app for messaging, coordination and file access. In addition, a key role (for an individual or team) is the ‘tool master’ who continually identifies tools that work.
Print and digital platforms serve different user needs, with different cycles and rhythms, and require different organizational capabilities. But a bifurcated approach divides up labor instead of maximizing coordination and it perpetuates a losing either/or-ism (“print first or digital first”) that ignore the fact that local news organization’s must be “audience-first.”
What are your organization’s gaps in producing and publishing continuously to meet audience needs? Take these assessments to find out.
In order to overcome them, first understand the barriers to success in producing and publishing continuously to meet audience needs.
A quick grid showing the FROM > TO view of success in producing and publishing continuously to meet audience needs.
Audiences expect fresh digital news on their own schedule. Yet, too many newsrooms provide news on their own print-driven schedules.
New platforms emerge regularly, different audiences gravitate to them, anxiety about “being on” them ensue, and then this cycle repeats until the next platform emerges. Avoid this by taking a strategic view of developing and effectively managing the portfolio of platforms used by your audiences.
Consider different purposes for platforms, use criteria tailored to those purposes, and use a management process for selecting platforms.
Publishing plans for each platform begin with the audience in mind, not the platform.
You need to name specific platform “owners” — who operates as a GM or publisher — taking responsibility for all aspects of platform performance, including strategy, operations, customers, costs and revenues.
In order to overcome them, first understand the barriers to success at publishing on the platforms used by your target audiences.
There’s a wide variety of data to monitor platform performance. Avoid unnecessary complexity and also choose and monitor indicators that are not addressable by data – such as user experience, revenue and costs.
The target audience has gone elsewhere and other platforms increasingly control distribution, which means it’s now the responsibility of the newsroom to drive discoverability, reach and engagement.
If you want to shift your newsroom to an audience-first approach, then you must set and hold the newsroom accountable for audience goals. No amount of training, town hall discussions, strategy studies, brown bag lunches or other approaches to describing and encouraging audience-first changes will gain as much traction.
Audiences have choices – lots of choices. So, it is imperative that your newsroom understand the needs and interest of audiences from their perspective, not yours.
The criteria should combine assessing the audiences/platforms with the greatest revenue potential and the most readiness. Most importantly: deferring ‘getting going’ in favor of analysis runs a risk of not getting going soon enough. And, mini-publisher leaders and teams learn a lot by ‘just doing it’ – by learning about mini-publishing by being mini-publishers.
There are four keys to success: Give mini-publisher teams a charter and ask them to put together plans needed for team success; regularly review and manage team performance; require mini-publisher teams to use the team discipline for performance; and provide mini-publisher teams with the background and support they need to master “economics for journalists” basics
Today, the most important job of senior newsroom leaders is to transform their newsrooms by putting the Table Stakes in place. Absent this, the newsroom – indeed, the whole organization – cannot escape decline into irrelevance and even extinction.
What gaps do you have in using the mini-publisher perspective? Use these tools to find out.