Target audiences: What success looks and feels like
Douglas K. Smith, Quentin Hope, Tim Griggs, Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative,This is an excerpt from “Table Stakes: A Manual for Getting in the Game of News,” published Nov. 14, 2017. Read more excerpts here.
This Table Stake requires a fundamental internal organizational shift in orientation – a turning of the collective eyes in your news enterprise toward external, targeted audiences. Success manifests itself both internally in skills, attitudes, behaviors and ways of working with one another and externally in how audiences and advertisers perceive and, then, put a value on your efforts.
This shift can be expressed in a series of “From-To” statements that contrast the current “as is” state with the desired “Table Stakes” state. (These From > To’s depict typical metro newsrooms circa 2016 and convey the dimensions of change required. You and your colleagues can develop your own “from/to’s” to more accurately describe your situation – which, by the way, is a good way to engage folks in identifying paths through transformation.)
| From | To | |
| Audience focus | Our audience is defined in general terms as “anyone who reads our content” | Our audience is defined as multiple audiences, each of which can be clearly described and spoken of in terms of their interests, passions, needs and problems |
| Our digital sites are known as a place to go for general news from the metro area | We are the undisputed go-to site for a defined number of targeted audience/content areas that anchor our reputation as the preferred local news site | |
| There’s no particular “content strategy” driving the work of desks, departments or verticals – it’s a mix of gut, experience, reacting to events and sporadic new ideas | There’s a defined strategy and documented playbook for every target audience, informed by audience data and including needs and interests, ways of listening, content sources, story forms, style and voice, and platforms of choice. | |
| Audience growth | Overall digital traffic is growing | In-market digital audience is growing faster than out-of-market traffic and becoming more engaged and loyal |
| Advertisers | Local advertisers view your audience in general terms and run-of-site placements are common | Local advertisers are eager for placements and sponsorships around content where they know you have a highly engaged and loyal audience |
| Audience data | Audience data is available in the newsroom but regularly looked at only by those directly concerned with “audience” | Audience data is used daily and hourly by everyone in the newsroom to inform their work and decision making |
| Audience data is available but we have to seek it out. | Audience data is visible in the newsroom on monitors and available to everyone on desktop, laptop and mobile, whether in the newsroom or working remotely | |
| Audience data is retrospective and delivered in fixed formats (e.g., last week’s traffic report) | Both real-time and historical data is readily available and easy to cut different ways and drill-down on (e.g. all stories from a desk with certain tags over the last 30 days) | |
| Newsroom | Our desks work traditional beats, established sources and set topics | We have teams focused on serving target audiences, listening to those audiences, and seeking sources and stories that address their interests, needs and problems |
| Our reporters work individually under the direction of an editor | Our reporters/producers work as a team with a team leader to reach, engage and earn the loyalty of a target audience | |
| We manage available staff resources by allocating headcount across the newsroom | We manage staff resources by focusing on productivity (the audience value of content versus the time cost of producing it) and priorities (stopping one thing to free resources to do a more important other thing) |