The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from:

1. Ben Shapiro
2. Franklin Graham
3. Ben Shapiro
4. TheGrio
5. ForAmerica
6. Ben Shapiro
7. Top13
8. Fox News
9. Ben Shapiro
10. Robert Reich

— Facebook's Top 10 (@FacebooksTop10) July 13, 2021

Facebook has pushed back, insisting that posts with high engagement on Facebook aren’t what most people actually see. Reach is a more important metric, they insist. But the company doesn’t make reach data public, and meanwhile @FacebooksTop10 tweets on, painting a similar, Ben-Shapiro-and-Fox-News-filled picture every day now that Trump himself is banned from Facebook.

On Wednesday, Roose wrote about the battle inside Facebook “over data transparency, and how much the social network should reveal about its inner workings,” specifically in relation to Roose’s use of the CrowdTangle feature. Some executives argued that Facebook should be as transparent as possible about the content that does well on its platform. Others argued that Facebook should release only “carefully curated” reports:

They argued that journalists and researchers were using CrowdTangle, a kind of turbocharged search engine that allows users to analyze Facebook trends and measure post performance, to dig up information they considered unhelpful — showing, for example, that right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino were getting much more engagement on their Facebook pages than mainstream news outlets.

These executives argued that Facebook should selectively disclose its own data in the form of carefully curated reports, rather than handing outsiders the tools to discover it themselves.

Team Selective Disclosure won, and CrowdTangle and its supporters lost.

Last year, I analyzed the amount of political news in people’s Facebook feeds. “My survey is way too small to settle the debate,” I wrote at the time. “But the list of most-seen publishers in my sample falls somewhere between [the one ‘reach’ list that Facebook has actually released] and one of Roose’s ‘engagement’ lists. It’s topped by mainstream publishers, sure, but it includes partisan outlets too.”

[Read: How much political news do people see on Facebook? I went inside 173 people’s feeds to find out]

You should read the entire piece about this problem that has “vexed some of Facebook’s top executives for months,” but a couple highlights:

— Brian Boland, a Facebook VP who oversaw CrowdTangle and who had argued for transparency about the content that was performing well on Facebook, left the company last year after 11 years there. “One of the main reasons that I left Facebook is that the most senior leadership in the company does not want to invest in understanding the impact of its core products,” Boland told Roose. “And it doesn’t want to make the data available for others to do the hard work and hold them accountable. … People were enthusiastic about the transparency CrowdTangle provided until it became a problem and created press cycles Facebook didn’t like. Then, the tone at the executive level changed.”

— @FacebooksTop10 “drove executives crazy,” to the extent that they considered starting a competing Twitter account — based on reach, rather than engagement — that they believed would be more balanced.

As the election approached last year, Facebook executives held meetings to figure out what to do, according to three people who attended them. They set out to determine whether the information on @FacebooksTop10 was accurate (it was), and discussed starting a competing Twitter account that would post more balanced lists based on Facebook’s internal data.

They never did that, but several executives — including John Hegeman, the head of Facebook’s news feed — were dispatched to argue with me on Twitter. These executives argued that my Top 10 lists were misleading. They said CrowdTangle measured only “engagement,” while the true measure of Facebook popularity would be based on “reach,” or the number of people who actually see a given post. (With the exception of video views, reach data isn’t public, and only Facebook employees have access to it.)

Except, well, there was a problem with the “reach” metric too.

Several executives proposed making reach data public on CrowdTangle, in hopes that reporters would cite that data instead of the engagement data they thought made Facebook look bad.

But Mr. Silverman, CrowdTangle’s chief executive, replied in an email that the CrowdTangle team had already tested a feature to do that and found problems with it. One issue was that false and misleading news stories also rose to the top of those lists.

“Reach leaderboard isn’t a total win from a comms point of view,” Mr. Silverman wrote.

You may not understand why this @kevinroose piece is a big deal.

Think of every big story about disinfo you've read in the last few years. Most all relied on CrowdTangle in some way. Now it seems like Facebook wants to cut off that transparency. https://t.co/tFNkH1bM5H

— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) July 14, 2021

I’ve had a lot of run-ins with FB over the years, but the blowback I got when @FacebooksTop10 started showing huge engagement for pro-Trump pundits was unusually intense. It turns out that top execs were terrified that they’d be blamed for Trump's re-election. pic.twitter.com/0ibRZay8SY

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) July 14, 2021

All of this is even funnier when you consider Facebook *bought* CrowdTangle and spent tons of effort trying to get media people to use it so we'd make more stuff that would trend on Facebook https://t.co/JUr2gvcrhE

— nilay patel (@reckless) July 14, 2021

Lots in this @kevinroose writeup on Crowdtangle. But boy, the part where Facebook's CMO writes that more data transparency will mean more negative stories — and instead FB should basically curate data in its favor — sure doesn't sound great. https://t.co/KRzMrlhCPW pic.twitter.com/bj0wdgu68d

— Eli Pariser (@elipariser) July 14, 2021

The Center for Media Engagement partnered with Vox and Spaceship Media to explore these questions. They invited members of The Weeds Facebook group — a group for listeners of the Vox policy and politics podcast hosted by new Substacker Matthew Yglesias — to receive a one-hour training and join small group chats on Facebook messenger.

Of more than 20,000 group members, 184 volunteered and half were invited to participate. (Ultimately, 61 members actually attended a training session.) The participants were encouraged to “deeply listen to one another” and to “express kindness, curiosity, and empathy in their conversations” before being divided into six small group chats.

Every week for six weeks, small group chat participants received an email asking them to listen to a new episode of The Weeds podcast and discuss the episode in their group chat. Spaceship Media crafted discussion prompts for each week that touched on the major themes from the episodes, which included the Democratic primary, racial inequality, and how coronavirus could impact healthcare and the economy. Starting on March 25, the moderator sent the prompts to each group chat every Wednesday afternoon. On the same day, the moderator also posted the prompts in the larger Facebook group.

So how did it go?

Members of the group chats reported that they were less likely to self-censor — withhold their true opinions — in their small group chats than in the Facebook group. Overall, participants felt a stronger connection to members of their chats than members of The Weeds Facebook group and rated their fellow participants as more respectful and civil than commenters in the larger group. In the group chat, members said they were more likely to speak their mind but felt that — even in the smaller format — conversations were dominated by a few people just as often.

People in the group chats asked more “genuine questions” than commenters in the large Facebook group. There were more “sarcastic, inflammatory, and leading questions” in the comments of the large Facebook group.

People in the group chats tended to use different types of evidence to support a position than those in the large Facebook group. Those in the group chats were more likely to mention books, podcasts, or movies — and their own personal experience. (“Examples of personal information included their interactions with the healthcare system, their struggles adjusting to coronavirus-related restrictions, and anecdotes about their family, job, or friends.”) In the larger group, commenters cited numbers and percentages more often.

Group chats didn’t make participants more willing to contribute money to Vox. Exactly 12.2% of both volunteer groups — those selected to participate in the group chats and those who weren’t — said they weren’t willing to support Vox financially; the rest responded “yes” or “maybe.”

But among those who were willing to contribute, group chat participants were willing to go deeper in their wallets. About 43% of small group chat participants who answered “yes” or “maybe” said they would be willing to contribute more than $10, compared to just 11% of those not selected to participate in the group chats.

Group chat participants reported a decreased sense of loyalty to The Weeds Facebook group. The Center for Media Engagement guessed that this was “likely because nearly three-fourths of people found the experience to be better than the large Facebook group experience.” This could also be a result of asking participants to prioritize their group chats over conversations happening in the larger Facebook group.

This whirlwind tour through viral Covid-19 themes felt like the conversational equivalent of Feigl-Ding’s Twitter account, which has grown by orders of magnitude since the dawn of the pandemic. The Harvard-trained scientist and 2018 Congressional aspirant posts dozens of times daily, often in the form of long, numbered threads. He’s fond of emojis, caps lock, and bombastic phrases. The first words of his very first viral tweet were “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.”

Made in January, weeks before the massive shutdowns that brought U.S. society to a halt, that exclamation preceded his observation that the “R0” (pronounced “R-naught”) of the novel coronavirus — a mathematical measure of a disease’s reproduction rate — was 3.8. That figure had been proposed in a scientific paper, posted online ahead of peer review, that Feigl-Ding called “thermonuclear pandemic level bad.” Further in that same Twitter thread, he claimed that the novel coronavirus could spread nearly eight times faster than SARS.

The thread was widely criticized by infectious disease experts and science journalists as needlessly fear-mongering and misleading, and the researchers behind the pre-print had already tweeted that they’d lowered their estimate to an R0 of 2.5, meaning that Feigl-Ding’s SARS figure was incorrect. (Because R0 is an average measure of a virus’s transmissibility, estimates vary widely based on factors like local policy and population density; as a result, researchers have suggested that other variables may be of more use.) He soon deleted the tweet — but his influence has only grown.

At the beginning of the pandemic, before he began sounding the alarm on Covid-19’s seriousness, Feigl-Ding had around 2,000 followers. That number has since swelled to over a quarter million, as Twitter users and the mainstream media turn to Feigl-Ding as an expert source, often pointing to his pedigree as a Harvard-trained epidemiologist. And he has earned the attention of some influential people. These include Ali Nouri, the president of FAS, who brought Feigl-Ding into his organization as a senior fellow; the journalist David Wallace-Wells, who meditated on Feigl-Ding’s “holy mother of God” tweet in his March essay arguing that alarmism can be a useful tool; and former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Andy Slavitt. (“We all learn so much from you,” he tweeted at Feigl-Ding in July.) Ronald Gunzburger, senior adviser to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, even wrote a letter to Feigl-Ding attesting to how his “intentionally provocative tweet” in January “elevated the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the top of our priorities list.”

But as Feigl-Ding’s influence has grown, so have the voices of his critics, many of them fellow scientists who have expressed ongoing concern over his tweets, which they say are often unnecessarily alarmist, misleading, or sometimes just plain wrong. “Science misinformation is a huge problem right now — I think we can all appreciate it — [and] he’s a constant source of it,” said Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University and the University of Arizona who serves on FAS’ Covid-19 Rapid Response Taskforce, a separate arm of the organization from Feigl-Ding’s work. Tara Smith, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Kent State University, suggested that Feigl-Ding’s reach means his tweets have the power to be hugely influential. “With as large of a following as he has, when he says something that’s really wrong or misleading, it reverberates throughout the Twittersphere,” she said.

Critics point to numerous problems. Not too long after his “holy mother of God” tweet, for example, Feigl-Ding took to Twitter to discuss a titillating but non-peer-reviewed paper that some readers interpreted as evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab; once the authors retracted the pre-print, he deleted a series of tweets from the middle of the thread. In March, Feigl-Ding tweeted a CDC graph as evidence that young people were “just as likely to be hospitalized as older generations,” but failed to mention an important detail about the age ranges represented in the graph’s bars, which didn’t actually support that claim. In August, he tweeted his support for a proposition to allow people early access to a vaccine. After criticism from epidemiologists, bioethicists, doctors, and health policy experts, Feigl-Ding deleted a few tweets at the beginning of his thread, saying they were “confusing” and “murky.” (He also argued that his critics were “spreading misinformation about what they think I said.”)

More recently, Feigl-Ding wrote a thread about coronavirus particles in flatulence, which drew criticism from researchers.

For his part, though, Feigl-Ding says many of his critics’ disagreements with him have come down to a difference in style. “Sometimes it’s a matter of a philosophical approach about tone: Should I say ‘whoa’ or ‘wow?’” he said — adding that he thinks of those words as a type of “subject line” for a tweet. “Some people don’t like the all-caps initial thing, but it’s more of a stylistic thing. And of course, some people think: ‘This tweet is sensational.’ I’ve heard that,” he said — adding that, indeed, he has contacted critics, but always in a professional capacity. “I [direct-message] a lot of people,’ he said, “sometimes email them when I have a question.

“We have spirited debates,” he added.

But Feigl-Ding makes no apologies for trying to amplify and draw attention to the seriousness of Covid-19. Sounding the alarm — even if sometimes imperfectly — Feigl-Ding insists, is a moral obligation. “The whole New York Magazine article by David Wallace-Wells, the whole article was that alarmism is needed,” he said. “It was arguing for the case of alarmism. How do we listen to the early alarms? We could have reacted faster. It’s getting people to sit up from the chair and pay attention.”

He also argues that in some cases, his Twitter influence has helped to shape policy. Specifically, he mentions a thread — which began with the words “BLOODY HELL” — criticizing broadcast company Sinclair for their decision to air a segment featuring Judy Mikovits, the star of a popular, discredited video that surfaced various conspiracy theories about the pandemic. (The media watchdog group Media Matters for America first reported on Sinclair’s plans a couple days before Feigl-Ding’s tweet.)

That tweet got “more impressions than CNN,” Feigl-Ding said, adding that hours after making it, Sinclair announced they would postpone airing the segment. Two days later Sinclair decided not to air the interview at all. “Clearly, it had an impact. That’s what I’m going for,” he said.

“The alarmism got action,” he added.

Whether or not his critics agree with that assessment, there’s little doubt that Feigl-Ding — who, depending on the context, might best be described as a scientist, a politician, an advocate, and a self-styled public health Cassandra — continues to opine, with great emotion and inflection, on myriad Covid-19-related topics, using phrases like “I’m crying”; “whoa”; “buckle up,” and “worrisome.” And on any given day, it’s easy to find other experts picking apart a Feigl-Ding tweet, explaining what he’s gotten wrong, or what nuance he’s left out.

Sometimes, Feigl-Ding is driven to clarify his position, or even delete tweets. And where his detractors suggest that his missteps are more than mere nuisances, Feigl-Ding characterizes his critics as staid scientists who want him to “stay in his lane.” Indeed, when asked about their concerns, he often steers the conversation away quickly, saying their interpersonal issues are a distraction from what this moment needs: more people like him.

The high points of Feigl-Ding’s career have been repeatedly recounted in the news media — a point he seemed keen to emphasize in recent phone calls. “Everything I’ve ever said, there’s articles for it,” he said.

In those articles, Feigl-Ding shared versions of the same anecdotes he relayed in interviews with me. A Science article detailed his 2018 run for Congress, as well as the highlights of his childhood: that he spent his earliest years in Shanghai, before immigrating to the U.S. at age five; that he didn’t have a lot of friends growing up (“Imagine a chubby kid with a double chin,” he said, recounting how cruel classmates had called him “ching chong” and “pan face”); that instead of cartoons, he watched documentary series on psychology and statistics. And the media coverage goes much further back: A 2006 New York Times article described a JAMA study Feigl-Ding co-authored that provided further evidence that the drug rofecoxib, known to consumers as Vioxx, was associated with heart and kidney issues, after which “my phone did not stop ringing for a week, or two weeks,” he said. A 2007 Newsweek article featured the Facebook campaign Feigl-Ding started in support of breast cancer research. A 2011 New York Times article details the tumor doctors found in his chest at age 17, which turned out to be a benign teratoma, but launched Feigl-Ding’s interest in public health.

While Feigl-Ding is eager to discuss his successful public ventures, he doesn’t bring up his less vetted projects, like Happy Vitals, a now-defunct startup he and his wife created, which sold at-home breast milk nutrition tests. He said he’d rather not talk about Health Justice For All, a “grassroots movement” and political action committee, which received few contributions from anyone other than himself. (Feigl-Ding’s documented contributions to the PAC come in the form of unpaid Facebook posts, valued at $0.011 per impression.) He’s also not eager to talk about his failed 2018 political run to represent Pennsylvania’s 10th district in Congress. “If I run again, I don’t want a completely blunt exposé of how difficult it was,” he said. When asked if running again is something he’s considering, her responded: “Someday. Someday. I don’t want to — someday, maybe. Let’s just say maybe.”

Feigl-Ding also glosses over his decision to leave medical school, which he enrolled in briefly after completing his Harvard degree. “I realized life’s about what you do, not the number of letters behind your name,” Feigl-Ding said, “and at that point, I already had dual doctorates in two other things, and you know, pursuing a medical degree would’ve been a little bit overkill.” He is fond of talking about the “letters behind your name”; he used the phrase in a 2017 lecture at the University of Connecticut, as well as in a 2018 interview with the Harvard Crimson. Yet he also frequently refers to the impressive credentials of people he knows, even when they’re irrelevant to the conversation. These can include a double-inductee to the National Academies, or a Rhodes scholar who wrote a book with a former president’s child.

Perhaps more than anything, though, Feigl-Ding — who says he earns most of his income as a consultant on federal projects and is unpaid for his communication and research work at FAS — frequently steers conversation towards metrics of influence, importance, or virality. In discussing how his Facebook campaign began, for example, he says he originally created two pages through the site’s now defunct Causes application: one focusing on heart disease and stroke research and another focusing on breast cancer. Unfortunately, the former “never went anywhere,” so he pivoted to concentrating on his cancer page. Eventually, the page gave him “one-click access to millions of people on Facebook,” his first foray into social media virality. “You learn to master social networks when you have your pulse on millions of people,” he said. The word “millions” is big with Feigl-Ding — he talks about the 6 million members of that Facebook campaign, the half-million dollars he says the campaign raised for cancer research, the 14 million views on a viral conspiracy video he’s publicly decried, and the millions of impressions one needs on social media to make an impact. One night, after a lengthy telephone interview, he texted a blog’s analysis that characterized him as more influential than CNN, along with a screenshot of a one of his recent tweets — one debunking hydroxychloroquine as a Covid-19 treatment. It showed that the tweet had garnered more than 2 million impressions.

Feigl-Ding’s descriptions of his work evoke images of him as a protagonist in a quest to fix the world’s problems. He often invokes war metaphors: He’s a “tank” against online detractors, and he refers to disagreements about Covid-19 policy as an “information war” or a “battle of the minds.” When talking about the role of viral tweet threads, Feigl-Ding recounts a Chinese parable about whistleblowers. The story, as he tells it, starts with a wizard offering a man the ability to talk to animals, but only if he agrees to never talk to humans ever again. The man accepts, but then the animals tell him an earthquake and flood will devastate his village. The man wants to warn the villagers, but if he does, the wizard will turn him to stone. He decides to do it anyway. “He made a choice and he sacrificed,” Feigl-Ding said, sighing. “I don’t want to be a martyr, but I felt like it was more important to tweet this and raise the alarm,” he says, referencing his “holy mother of God” tweet. Though the research he was citing had not yet been peer reviewed, he felt it could have important insights.

He also acknowledged the blowback he received as a result, but added: “I think it was still worth it.”

Indeed, Feigl-Ding expresses frustration about the times he wished he could have sounded the alarm sooner. “I’ve had so many of these Cassandra moments, and so many of these ‘Ah, what could have been,’ moments,” he says, mentioning his Vioxx study, the issue of toxins in the drinking water of rusting urban centers like Flint, Michigan, and even the general topic of cancer prevention. He wonders what would have happened, for example, if Toxin Alert, the website he developed with engineer Pius Lee, had launched earlier, rather than more than a year after news of Flint’s water crisis broke.

This desire to warn, to be heard, is the thread Feigl-Ding uses to connect the various facets of his career — and according to him, it’s what drove him to begin tweeting about the Covid-19 pandemic. “The world needs more whistleblowers, and those [who] whistleblow early, not just after the fact or whimper at the time,” he said, pointing to what he considers one of his own triumphs in having nudged the Maryland governor’s office into action: “Gov. Larry Hogan’s office, his chief policy adviser, credits me — that my January tweet made them stand up, sit up in their seats and start preparing.”

Feigl-Ding — often referred to as a Covid-19 expert in the media — clearly has the ear of some influential people. In addition to advising Hogan’s office, claims he’s made in tweets have been addressed by Mexican officials in government press conferences, and his tweets or commentary have recently appeared in publications like The Washington Post, Vox, and Salon. After all, who could speak to the science of the pandemic better than a Harvard-trained epidemiologist?

But epidemiology is a big field, and Feigl-Ding’s previous research focuses mostly on nutrition and cancer, different sub-areas of the field than infectious disease. Popescu, the infectious disease epidemiologist, likens this distinction to different specialties in medicine. “I’m not going to go to a cardiologist to have brain surgery,” she said. “Many of us have called attention to his lack of experience or training” in infectious disease epidemiology, she said of Feigl-Ding.

“It’s really challenging to communicate when someone really can sell themselves, like, ‘I’m a Harvard scientist, I’m an epidemiologist,’” she added.

But Feigl-Ding is, indeed, a Harvard-trained scientist and a degreed epidemiologist — though his critics argue that most of his training has focused on nutrition, not infectious disease, making him prone to mistakes. An example: In one of his most popular tweets — known widely within Twitter’s science community as the “holy moly” tweet — Feigl-Ding said he was “crying for Mexico” because the country’s testing positivity percentage was 50 percent. A full half of people being tested in Mexico were proving to be infected with Covid-19, a figure even New York, Lombardy, and Madrid didn’t approach at their “worst periods,” he wrote. “Mexico may be undergoing unprecedented #Covid19.”

The message clearly struck a nerve with Twitter users, as it received tens of thousands of retweets and more than 1,500 responses. But while all of the information in the tweet was technically true, what Feigl-Ding had actually done, according to his critics, was paint an incomplete — and alarming — picture of an out-of-control outbreak without providing upfront context about what that positivity percentage actually represented: the fact that Mexico still was not testing very many people, and that most of its testing was being done on people who were already ill. Under such circumstances, a 50 percent positivity rate would not be considered unusual. Indeed, as Boston University epidemiologist Ellie Murray wrote in a tweet, positivity percentages are “used for evaluating whether you’re doing ENOUGH tests, not estimating how much disease you have.” Along with her explanation was a screenshot of Feigl-Ding’s tweet, which she called “bad and misleading.” Feigl-Ding clarified the meaning of positivity percentages in a continuation of that thread hours later — in fact, before Murray tweeted her criticism — but those tweets received only a fraction of the attention as Feigl-Ding’s original “holy moly” tweet.

Finding experts publicly correcting or critiquing Feigl-Ding’s tweets is not hard. More recently, infectious disease experts refuted his claims that the suggestion of White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci that eyewear could improve Covid-19 protection meant that things were “getting serious,” and a slew of scientists — including Popescu, University of Florida biostatistician Natalie Dean, and University of California, San Francisco physician Vinay Prasad, among others — expressed concern about Feigl-Ding’s take on releasing vaccines early to certain populations.

But others suggested that the blowback from Feigl-Ding’s Twitter supporters has deterred them from raising more concerns about his missteps. “He has a couple hundred thousand followers,” said Michael Bazaco, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland. “They’re very assertive and aggressive, and I don’t want to deal with that.”

Rasmussen, the Columbia virologist, said she was initially reluctant to comment for this piece because she similarly feared online criticism from his fans. Feigl-Ding’s followers “have ganged up on anyone who criticizes him publicly,” she said, adding that her own Twitter feed has been “clogged with Feigl-Ding’s fans calling me stupid, petty, inept, gatekeeping, etc., along with the usual gendered slurs and insults.” (A search for specific instances of these terms being directed at Rasmussen on Twitter turned up few results, though evidence of Feigl-Ding defenders offering sometimes arch disagreement — and even some vulgar commentary — is easy to find.)

Dueling with strangers, Popescu said, is “emotionally draining.”

Ahead of publication of this article, Feigl-Ding pointed to complaints from other scientists on Twitter about the online argumentation style of some of his fiercest critics, including Popescu, though he declined to elaborate. “Trying to stay above it,” he wrote in an email to me last week, “since we need science to be respectful and publicly trusted.” Asked earlier about his own followers’ behavior, Feigl-Ding acknowledged some early issues. “Some of my early followers, those who were harassing, I actually removed them,” he said, while others eventually stopped following him. But he also said he has experienced rough treatment online himself, including by Twitter users of even greater influence. And on Twitter, too, he has responded to criticism from colleagues by pointing to his own dealings with what he called “anti-science trolls.”

Feigl-Ding may not bear any responsibility for — or even have any control over — the actions of his followers, of course, but he has also been known to privately contact his critics himself. After Murray tweeted her criticism, for example, she said Feigl-Ding messaged her privately to discuss the issue. Six other infectious disease experts that I spoke to say they’ve received private messages from him, often after publicly remarking on his tweets. Some, like Bazaco, say they simply ignore such forays. Popescu says that in talking with other scientists who have accepted Feigl-Ding’s messages, she discerns a pattern. “It’s always the same: ‘I want to learn, I want to be better’ — but he spends the entire time saying why he was right, giving you articles that were written about him, and how he called this and how he’s been misunderstood.”

In addition to infectious disease experts, Mexican journalist Maria Fernanda Mora said she also received messages from Feigl-Ding after she tweeted a thread questioning his reliability as a source, based on information she’d read in several articles published about him. But Feigl-Ding’s message — which included two articles about himself — arrived via Instagram, not Twitter, where Mora blocks strangers from directly messaging her. “I was truly surprised,” she wrote to me in a Twitter message.

When asked about these various interactions, Feigl-Ding expressed frustration, suggesting that such complaints were a “distraction” from the issues. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I’ve never said anything rude. I’ve never asked anyone to send anything rude,” arguing that his stated goal was always a polite and professional dialogue. “I’ve never kind of sent any harass[ing] messages whatsoever,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

Indeed, from his perspective, Feigl-Ding said, professional disagreements ought to be considered healthy and par for the course. And science communicators are, after all, trying to accomplish the same thing. But he also said he believed that disagreements should be handled privately, to avoid conflicting information. If people see disagreement among scientists online, he reasoned, there’s a risk that they’ll ignore scientists’ messages entirely.

When this reasoning was shared with Popescu, she challenged its logic — in part because she said it seems to suggest that while Feigl-Ding can speak publicly, his critics ought not. “You’re saying we can’t disagree with you,” she added, “because we’re ‘on the same side.’”

Popescu also said she felt Feigl-Ding’s positioning himself alongside infectious disease epidemiologists toiling in the Covid-19 trenches was misleading to the public. The latter are “living it, working in it, and will continue to after this,” she said. “He’s just tweeting about it.”

Feigl-Ding says that he believes his ability to grab people’s attention is an asset, and his unique contribution to an inherent and ongoing conflict — he called it a “battle” — between science and misinformation. “Tweeting is an art form,” he said.

“If your initial tweet does not draw them in,” he added, “you’ll get maybe a respectable four or five hundred retweets. I just call that respectable, but that’s not impactful. Anything impactful, you need a thousand retweets, at least.” Once you’ve got an audience’s attention, he said — that’s when you can get “into the weeds” or use a thread to “give information that goes beyond the headlines.”

Some experts consider that a savvy formula. Nouri, the president of the Federation of American Scientists, first reached out to Feigl-Ding in February, when the organization was thinking about how to debunk disinformation around Covid-19. “Eric is one example of somebody who has managed to break through the noise,” he said. (Feigl-Ding’s Harvard affiliation has ended.) Feigl-Ding, Nouri added, not only has a large following, but his tweets weigh in on the latest news quickly. “Speed is very important when it comes to countering disinformation,” he said, noting that Feigl-Ding is also prolific, “constantly pushing material out on social media.”

Devi Sridhar, the chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, agrees that Feigl-Ding’s tweets have value. While she doesn’t agree with everything he tweets, she said, she believes he’s acting in good faith. With so much misinformation out there, it’s “all hands on deck,” said Sridhar, and at the end of the day, Feigl-Ding is on the same side as many of his critics. “Whoever wants to counter that misinformation — I’m not going to criticize them on style or their tone,” she said. “We’re all trying to get a handle on this and spread good information.”

And to be sure, there is some evidence that Feigl-Ding’s tweets have contributed to positive outcomes, and he pointed to some potential successes: He says, for example, that the day after one of his tweets about Arizona’s rising cases went viral, the state’s governor permitted local governments to create and enforce local mask orders.

Just how direct the line is between a Feigl-Ding tweet and an action in the world, of course, is difficult to discern — and not all the impacts have necessarily been in the direction Feigl-Ding would hope. Nicholas Evans, a bioethicist at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, for example, said that within 24 hours of seeing Feigl-Ding’s tweet about the results of the since-retracted pre-print which many touted as evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, he saw Feigl-Ding referenced in support of the conspiracy theory that the virus was intentionally released by China. And Mora, the Mexican journalist, says that Feigl-Ding’s tweets about Mexico’s positivity percentage have been used by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s political opponents to criticize his administration’s handling of the pandemic.

But the central and long-running critique of Feigl-Ding — that the high profile he’s cultivated through arguably sensational, often imprecise, and above all, relentless Covid-19 messaging is problematic — suggests that many scientists simply don’t buy the notion that the urgency of the moment necessarily outweighs the need for scientific precision in public messaging during a crisis. Scientists need to be especially careful when explaining new research, said Jason Kindrachuk, a virologist at the University of Manitoba. Studies might be interesting without actually telling the public anything new about the state of Covid-19, for example. “That’s where we science communicators really have to do our diligence in providing that context back to the public,” he said. Kindrachuk is concerned that, among other things, “sounding the alarm bell too much” could needlessly concern people over trivial findings.

It also, some experts said, could lead the public to become desensitized to scientists’ concerns entirely. Paige Jarreau, a science communication scholar and vice president of science communication at the software company LifeOmic, suggested that there’s an important balance to be struck between speed and accuracy. Communicating complex ideas and nuanced arguments around the latest Covid-19 findings is indeed difficult, she said — but that makes it all the more important to think carefully about how to communicate it.

“If you’re trying to be really fast and sexy, and you put out something that breaks someone’s trust in you, maybe you ended up having to take it down because it was wrong or you were too quick to jump to sharing something and it wasn’t actually correct,” Jarreau said. “Then you’ve broken the audience’s trust.”

Feigl-Ding concedes he’s made mistakes — just as many public health experts have, he says — pointing by way of example to Anthony Fauci, who in the earliest days of the pandemic suggested that Americans needn’t be immediately alarmed about Covid-19 (though he added the situation was serious and could quickly change — as it did). Still, sometimes scientists just don’t have definitive answers to questions the public is asking, Feigl-Ding added: “We’re always trying,” he said, “to push the best available information.”

The researchers developed an online news literacy game called “Fakey” that “simulates fact checking on a social media feed”; it’s available in a web browser or as an Apple or Android app. (Yes, you can play it!) Between May 18 and November 2019, the researchers recorded game sessions from 8,606 players with 120,000 news articles, about half of which were from “low-credibility sources.” 78% of the players were from the U.S.

Each time the players were presented with an article, they could choose to share, like, or fact-check it. (They earn points when they like or share news from mainstream sources and when they fact-check news from suspect sources; there’s more in the paper on which sources were included.) Here’s an example:

The researchers write:

Player behavior in the Fakey game shows near-perfect correlations between displayed social engagement metrics and player actions related to information from low-credibility sources. We interpret these results as suggesting that social engagement metrics amplify people’s vulnerability to low-credibility content by making it less likely that people will scrutinize potential misinformation while making it more likely that they like or share it. For example, consider the recent disinformation campaign video “Plandemic” related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results suggest that people may be more likely to endorse the video without verifying the content simply because they see that many other people liked or shared it.

This research coincides well with Facebook’s recent griping about New York Times tech reporter Kevin Roose’s posting of the most-engaged news stories on Facebook. On Twitter, Roose regularly posts the top 10 news stories on Facebook according to CrowdTangle. The Verge’s Casey Newton wrote recently:

[W]hat he has found, for the most part, is that the most popular stories come from right-leaning publishers and pages. On this day in June, the top stories came from Donald Trump, Franklin Graham, Fox News, and Ben Shapiro. Later that month: Franklin Graham, Fox News, Mark Levin. On [July 20]: a sea of Fox News and Ben Shapiro, punctuated by a lone link from the liberal page Occupy Democrats.

Roose’s tweets in this format go — if not viral, exactly, then at least further around the timeline than your average publisher data set. Let me say: I have retweeted these tweets. I have retweeted them because, in an era where Congress has held multiple hearings inveighing against “bias” against conservatives on social networks, the data suggested that the opposite has been true all along: that social networks have been a powerful ally to the conservative movement, helping it to reach a much wider audience than it ever would have otherwise.

It is also true that these tweets have been driving people at Facebook absolutely crazy. And the reason is that the way CrowdTangle measures the popularity of partisan links is not the way that Facebook, which owns the tool, thinks that we ought to be measuring popularity.

John Hegeman, Facebook’s VP of News Feed, pushed back, saying that while, okay, CrowdTangle is accurate, the most engaged-with content on Facebook isn’t actually the stuff that most people see.

5/6 Here’s a view of what's getting the most reach on Facebook in the US, and it's not as partisan as your lists suggest. It’s a mix of news from mainstream outlets, gifs and other pop culture content.

— John Hegeman (@johnwhegeman) July 20, 2020

6/6 As you've noted, some authoritative sources on COVID information (ie UNICEF, AARP) get more amplification by us. We are removing them from this list since you did, but the fact remains that these posts still get high reach and would otherwise be included in the Top 10. pic.twitter.com/92dWtpKtii

— John Hegeman (@johnwhegeman) July 20, 2020

Facebook has continued doling out some proprietary data on Twitter.

Some more proprietary data, courtesy of a Facebook spokesman's Twitter reply. https://t.co/iHNOatued4

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) July 24, 2020

But until all this is available publicly, we’ll have to rely on the CrowdTangle data. Roose created a separate Twitter account just for that, and you can follow it here.

Today, 7/31, the top-performing Facebook link posts by U.S. pages are from:

1. Fox News
2. David J. Harris Jr.
3. Barack Obama
4. Ben Shapiro
5. Ben Shapiro
6. Dinesh D'Souza
7. Billie Eilish
8. Ben Shapiro
9. Dan Bongino
10. Dan Bongino

— Facebook's Top 10 (@FacebooksTop10) July 31, 2020

It’s an initiative recently tweeted out by the Times’ editor of digital storytelling and training and digital transition editor, with the pure headline “Help Us Cover The News”:

The perspectives of our audience are invaluable to our journalists, helping us better understand the news and our world. This year, we are expanding our efforts to include readers’ experiences, and we would love to add your voice…

We hope that you’ll sign up to participate in our future reporting projects. The questions below will help us know what kinds of stories you might be able to help out with. Our journalists may contact you based on your answers, but we promise that the information will only be used for journalistic purposes.

That means the Times’ advertising department won’t be using the Facebook profile links and email addresses to target running shoes or swim goggles in the sprint triathlon-ers’ newsletters, as per the reader submission terms: “Your phone number(s) and email address (‘Your Contact Details’) will not be published by us, nor will they be used or disclosed for any marketing purposes.”

A spokesperson said the initiative (and the form) is being run by journalists with the Interactive News team and Reader Center, beyond “The Times is always experimenting with how we engage with our readers.” (I filled out the form, FWIW, though it was weird to try to explain my relationship with religion to a news organization’s database field.)

The New York Times has achieved huge success signing up digital subscribers, a group that likely includes a healthy number of potential sources. (Though of course Times subscribers — wealthier, more educated, more liberal — are not a particularly representative sample.) It’s also a sign of readers seeking more of a voice in the organization’s reporting responsibility and process. The Times’ 2020 innovation report noted:

Our readers must become a bigger part of our report. Perhaps nothing builds reader loyalty as much as engagement — the feeling of being part of a community. And the readers of The New York Times are very much a community…

Asking readers to invest their time on our platform creates a natural cycle of loyalty. Network effects are the growth engine of every successful startup, Facebook being the prime example. But the Times experience doesn’t get more interesting or valuable as more of a reader’s friends, relatives and colleagues use it. That must change.

The Times is not the first in this area. We wrote in 2012 about American Public Media’s then-nine year old Public Insight Network, which today holds a database of 233,262 sources serving up insight for newsrooms including KPCC, Marketplace, and Minnesota Public Radio. The Times highlighted its reader response-infused journalism about evangelical millennials and politics and personal experiences with Jerusalem. PIN is helping the public media outlets report on “12 ways your fellow Angelenos are reducing their plastic waste” and “what makes your favorite lake” — out of Minnesota’s 10,000, obviously — “so special”.

Krautreporter, a crowdfunded digital magazine based in Germany, has also asked its users to create a profile about themselves to help the journalists pin down experts in their own database. Theirs is only five questions, though, compared to The New York Times’ 20.

The accelerator’s report, compiled by Madalina Ciobanu, Kathryn Geels, and Ben Whitelaw, pulls together five recommendations from the convening of 30 engaged journalism practitioners (and includes their detailed process of developing the summit). It also highlights specific examples of European newsrooms making progress with engagement that are worthwhile to consider elsewhere.

Warning: These findings are explicitly for people who already buy into the importance of engagement journalism, the process of involving the community/audience in the reporting process from ideation to distribution. But hey, if you’re unfamiliar or undecided, here’s an explainer, some more recent highlights, and a database of 100 European outlets already putting engagement into action.

The recommendations:

• “Make internal culture change a priority”: Articulate your organization’s values, use your community as active citizens instead of product users, and set up steps to hold others in your organization accountable for engagement
• “Face value speaks louder than online tools alone”: Bring your community together with in-person events — and stay present in person or online spaces to encourage others’ participation
• “Simplify the language you use and enhance accessibility to your work”: Show your work instead of just talking about your work (and the work of journalists in general). Additionally, engagement journalism has a measurement problem; consider measuring “your success or progress based on how your community talks about you — what language they use to describe you and how they feel about you”
• Plant, don’t parachute: “Ensure that the impact you’re aiming to achieve is reflective of both internal for your organization, and external with and for your community, and that these are aligned”
• See what connections you can make between trust and revenue in your own research, for the good of the aforementioned mushy metrics.

Some of the examples:

Bureau Local has built a network of more than 800 members across the UK – some are journalists but most are lawyers, technologists, teachers and other members of the public. The Bureau announces a new issue they are looking into (they recently announced they were looking into the sale of public spaces by local authorities in England) then bring the data and the journalistic know-how to collaborative hack days, in person or on Slack, where they work with people in their network to dig into the information and find stories. They have also started holding regular ‘open newsrooms’ on Slack for members to solve a problem together or enable them to ask for help or offer a specific skill.

Krautreporter asks each user to fill out a profile when they register, answering five questions, including ‘what do you study?’, ‘what is your field of expertise?’ and ‘where do you have people you can contact in different countries?’, which enables them to find sources of expertise within their own member database. They also survey members regularly, with a simple question: “What is it that you don’t understand?” People are given type-forms with 160 characters to broadly outline an issue, after which they get 500 characters to flesh out their question. Krautreporter conducts the surveys on its website, as well as on Facebook and Twitter.

In June 2018, Civio published an article about the number of households in Spain who were not claiming electricity subsidies despite qualifying for it, and the risk of no longer being able to claim once the new system would be implemented in October 2018. Civio, together with the CNMC, developed a web application where users could find out if they were eligible for electricity subsidies by answering a few short questions. Civio also arranged a meeting with government representatives to communicate findings from their investigation and highlight the considerable number of people who were qualified for the subsidies but had not applied for them. In October 2018, the government announced it was going to allow people who changed to the new system before 31 December 2018 to retroactively receive the subsidies, and that electricity companies were obligated to contact all their consumers within 15 days to inform them about the required change to the new system.

Ukraine-based Tvoe Misto held an event with their community at the end of last year, inviting people to give feedback about the work of the organisation, and they heard some interesting ways in which people perceive parts of their reporting. For example public officials receive Tvoe Misto’s weekly newsletter, which is divided into topics. A participant working in the healthcare sector said that if they only see one story about healthcare in the newsletter, they see it as a KPI that their department has done something wrong, or insufficient. Indirectly, that can become a KPI for Tvoe Misto, as this means people take action on the back of content produced by the organization.

The Engaged Journalism Accelerator is funded by the News Integrity Initiative and Civil. The full report is available here.

“When I worked for a number of years in the Bay Area, we had people throwing themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge quite frequently. It was always a ‘police activity’ and we never reported it as suicide,” Cap Radio’s managing editor for news and information, Linnea Edmeier, said. “When Robin Williams committed suicide, I felt like it was the first big moment where nobody could turn away from that…. We realized it wasn’t salacious to open up the topic as long as we did it in a way that wasn’t salacious.”

Edmeier is unfortunately well-versed in the situation in Amador County — she grew up there, lives there today, and can off the top of her head recite connections to five different people in Amador County who died by suicide. She felt it was especially appropriate for Cap Radio to take a more active stance: “This is almost a plague in this county. Why wouldn’t we want to raise awareness and do it in a way that really had an impact?”

With $3,000 in grants from USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism, reporter Sammy Caiola and senior community engagement strategist jesikah maria ross designed an approach to familiarize themselves with the Amador County area, dig into the situation and open discussions on it, and create a tool for residents to take home and bring the project full circle. It’s a lot for a public radio station to take on, especially when the community in question is not a core part of the station’s audience. But 88 percent of respondents to a survey after one of the station’s events in Amador County said they were motivated to address the challenges with the suicide rate in the area and 83 percent said they were more comfortable talking about suicide and its symptoms with friends and family. Here was Cap Radio’s blueprint:

• Write up a plan.
• Reread and revise it often.
• Introduce yourself and involve trusted sources of information.
• Ask local experts to frame the issues and solutions.
• Act on community feedback.
• Stay in touch.
• Find opportunities for synergy.
• Evaluate what happened.

Caiola had been exploring the data from the California Department of Public Health’s 2018 County Health Status Profiles since early 2018, finding that the 37,000 people in Amador County experienced 85 suicides between 2010 and 2017. She started spending more time in Amador County to get to know the community in April 2018, beginning with a booth at a suicide awareness 5K race.

.@CapRadioNews is out in Amador County for their annual suicide awareness 5k. Come say hi if you’re in the area! pic.twitter.com/NlgPd6Wey7

— Sammy Caiola (@SammyCaiola) April 21, 2018

“When we first put together the plan, it was a very loose outline based on some ideas that we had thought through ourselves. Part of our community engagement methodology is to build in collaboration with community partners,” ross said. They found the behavioral health department of Amador County, shared the plan, and started revising. (The department would also become helpful in passing off the project to a local committed group at the end, but we’ll get there.)

A major way Caiola built connections was through call-outs in the local newspaper (yes, they still have one!), the Ledger Dispatch, and interview spots on the local AM radio station KGVC. She followed up with contacts from the call-outs and the 5K and focused on getting to know the area, as a self-proclaimed city kid reporting on rural issues.

“I’m the reporter that likes to be upfront when I’m coming in without a knowledge base. I like to admit what I don’t know. It tends to make people more open to talking to me,” she said. The 5K, a Fourth of July celebration, and other visits from early April to July helped Caiola develop a sense of Amador County. Ross and engagement editor Olivia Henry from the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism described the relationship with local media in a piece for Current:

Working with local media would become an indispensable part of this project. Amador County, while inside CapRadio’s broadcast footprint, is not the subject of regular coverage. Residents told us that the station didn’t have much traction in the area, which was a barrier to trust. With that in mind, we appeared multiple times in the Ledger or on KVGC — sometimes with a task or a request, but other times just to check in. We were and remain very grateful for their help.

A community-driven convening, a road map of angles for Caiola to pursue, more local media spots, and a capstone planned convening centered the rest of the team’s project, resulting in a four-episode podcast, aired both on Cap Radio and Amador station KGVC during National Suicide Prevention Week in September, and 15 online pieces in Cap Radio’s Rural Suicide package. More than 100 people came to the final gathering, two weeks after a local murder-suicide took place, and discussed the stories and resources. That was the meeting after which more than eight in ten respondents said they were more aware, more comfortable, and more motivated to talk about suicide among friends and family in Amador County.

After working with the community to figure out how to approach the topic, though, Cap Radio wanted to give them something tangible back in return. While Amador County is in the station’s footprint, it isn’t part of their main coverage are, and once the grant ran out there weren’t plans to maintain the same level of presence (aside from managing editor Edmeier’s home, of course).

“What we heard in various engagement activities, including Sammy’s one-to-one reporting, was that people really wanted some way to open conversations on this taboo topic and with very specific communities,” ross said, highlighting veterans groups, youth groups, and Native American communities. The conversation kit they created includes a guide to framing a gathering to talk about suicide, snippets of audio from Caiola’s reporting, discussion questions to unpack the issues mentioned. ross visited Amador in November to demo the process.

“There has to be a way to wrap a particular project so everyone feels that sense of closure,” ross said. “By having some tools and processes and evaluation measurements in place, our partners can take what we’ve created, sometimes by us or in collaboration with our partners, and move forward.”

The @CapRadioNews rural suicide project hits on a tough topic. We've also put out a "conversation kit" to help schools, churches, and other organizations host talks about suicide using stories I collected on the ground. Find it here: https://t.co/GiQxi0F0i6

— Sammy Caiola (@SammyCaiola) September 20, 2018

Looking for more resources? Give these a click:

• Tips for what to do — and what not to do — when reporting on suicide
• Fewer mugshots, less naming and shaming: How editors in Cleveland are trying to build a more compassionate newsroom
• Reporter Sammy Caiola’s reading list and research steps for this project

We’ve seen relationships between news organizations and news consumers expand from tossing in a few bucks for a subscription to chipping in a few more for the journalistic mission to even volunteering their services in support of the news cause. City Bureau’s Documenters program has taken another tack, coaching and paying $15/hour to residents to attend and record notes from public meetings to build a stronger public record — and asking volunteer civic coders to help construct its scraping system.

Now its tool for scraping, tracking, and documenting meetings is centralized and accessible for anyone else who wants to use it — but the journalists are still trying to figure out the best way to incorporate it into newsroom workflows.

“We’re able to source that information and summarize it and package it in a way that allows organizations to get at it earlier, when people can still attend a meeting, call a mayor, convene a group of their block club around an issue,” Darryl Holliday, City Bureau’s cofounder, said. (City Bureau is supported by organizations like the MacArthur Foundation, individual donors, and its Press Club membership, for which I pay $8/month.)

Here’s what the tool looks like (on desktop — go to documenters.org to poke around:

The Documenters tool could help City Bureau — fresh off its first year of a pilot in Detroit — expand its approach beyond Chicago and the Midwest. The organization spent 2018 working with public radio station WDET and nonprofit civic engagement group Citizen Detroit to test Documenters in another city, gathering 41 applicants and ultimately 11 Detroiters in the field recording 12 education-related public meetings over two months. (I noted last year that the Chicago Documenters had only recorded three dozen meetings in two years, though they’d garnered 300 participants.)

First @city_bureau #PublicNewsroom in Detroit with @wdet and @CitizenDetroit kicking off our Detroit Documenters pilot.

Warming up the room by having folks share what they love and would change about their city: pic.twitter.com/7nUUeE3bQs

— Andrea Faye Hart (@lenifaye) August 13, 2018

Holliday and Michelle Srbinovich, WDET’s general manager, had warned of meeting fatigue among the city’s residents. But Candice Fortman, WDET’s marketing and engagement manager, who spearheaded the partnership, said the battle was “meeting fatigue without any noticeable solutions. I don’t think that people are not motivated to go to meetings; I think they’re motivated to go to meetings when they understand the purpose of them and they also understand what action they can take after coming out of them. For Documenters, their action is to go back home and complete the notes.”

In addition to the app, City Bureau is developing a weekly watchdog newsletter of news tips from the scraping and documenting compiled by a local reporter on a contract basis — and will potentially charge for it. The scrapers, though, are open source.

Hi, I'm Grenadine. I’ll be live-tweeting the regular meeting of the Detroit Public Schools Community District Board of Education at MLK High School on the East Side #DetroitDocumenters @city_bureau

— Dr. Pepper Hot Tub (@grenadine) September 11, 2018

4.04 (approval of additional expenditures) included a discussion of where the funds will go. Appears it will go towards air and water testing and demo of Duke Ellington School.

Note- this is also the same company (ATC Group) that provides hydration stations in DPS schools.

— SoulRepublic (@SoulRepublic) October 26, 2018

Vassillis Jacobs, a senior policy associate at Citizen Detroit, worked on his organization’s Observers program, a Detroit predecessor to Documenters that started about a year ago. They helped about a dozen residents find and attend public meetings of interest to them— without pay, as volunteers. Citizen Detroit wasn’t on the first grant but was introduced to City Bureau by the Knight Foundation as a common funder and shepherded some of its Observers to the Documenters program.

Detroit Documenters have an average age of 37 and many came on board because they were familiar with WDET, Fortman said. Eleanore Catolico is in her 20s and moved to Detroit, and her home state, in April after spending ten years in Chicago and getting involved with City Bureau in 2015. She has a day job outside of journalism and freelances on the side but went to a charter school board budget meeting in October as a Documenter.

“It’s a great outlet for me to get engaged and involved in a capacity where I feel safe and supported to learn more about politics and be more engaged, without feeling self-conscious that I’m still learning,” she told me. “I grew up in Michigan, and growing up I heard ‘you stay in the suburbs’…. There’s still a very strong anti-Detroit bias that’s percolating. The work of Documenters is working to subvert that.”

WDET, City Bureau, and Citizen Detroit recently were awarded a $76,000 grant from the Community Foundation of Southeast Michigan to continue Documenters in 2019. But as the first traditional newsroom partner, WDET is still sussing out how to use the Documenters’ efforts as part of its 12-person news operation.

“Will there be a reporter in your newsroom working directly with the content that comes out of those notes? Is there a commitment to using those notes in a way that informs your reporting in any way? Is it a project of your newsroom or is a part of your newsroom?” Fortman said, suggesting questions other news organizations can consider with Documenters. For WDET, “it is a project of our newsroom.”

That fluctuation, Holliday, said, is intentional — Documenters isn’t supposed to be all about the benefit to the news outlet: “The goal is not to produce content for media outlets. It’s to repair broken bridges with local government, to get people to the meetings, get their voices heard, and figure out the line between where the active citizen and journalist is.”

The program also helps remind those leading the public meetings that someone’s watching: “Somebody went to a charter school board meeting — rarely do the public go to those — and the board was very concerned where the information would go,” Jacobs said. “We had other boards that were offering water, asking if you’re comfortable, [and] one even asked an Observer to come sit at the table to be part of the discussion.”

INMA’s November Consumer Engagement Summit (led by 2016 Nieman Fellow Grzegorz Piechota, currently INMA’s researcher-in-residence) looked at how newsrooms can move people from readers to subscribers to lifetime customers; that summit was summarized in a recently released INMA report. Here are some key bits and recommendations.

— News organizations say engagement is important, but they don’t always allocate resources that way. INMA says “consumer engagement is the most important factor in consumer revenue success,” but when it ran a survey of 60 companies ahead of the engagement summit, it found that 59 percent of them spent less on engagement than on consumer acquisition. The Financial Times is an outlier here, spending three times more on engagement than on acquisition, and INMA says “best practice [is] heading towards investing between three to 10 times [as much on] engagement [as on] acquisition.”

— Pick an engagement metric and stick with it. The Financial Times, for instance, defines engagement as “recency + frequency + volume.” The Wall Street Journal focuses on monthly active users. The Telegraph in London focuses on total subscriptions. Lenfest’s Matt Skibinski defines engagement simply as “when your readers find your content, products, and brand valuable enough that they are willing to pay for it.”

— Figure out how to build habits, says Charles Duhigg, New York Times columnist and senior editor and author of bestsellers like The Power of Habit. Duhigg:

In our industry, we should look at what rewards readers are giving themselves. When you study analytics on readers or customers, what kind of content are they looking at? What are they doing with the website that isn’t captured in your model? What rewards do they give each other?…

The New York Times, for instance, has a model where we look for people visiting at least twice a week and looking at three different topics. Once they do that, we know it is someone primed to get them into a subscription. They are developing a habit on their own and shopping for rewards.”

Duhigg talked about the power of emotion in building habits. Hate-reading is habit-forming; is there something more positive that can replace it?

‘If we look at the last two years, the amount of anger in the news has boosted our traffic,’ Duhigg said, referencing coverage of U.S. President Donald Trump. ‘It is the most high-arousal emotion on earth and nobody expects they are going to enjoy it. The trouble is the kind of arousal we most dislike when we can anticipate it is anger — the emotion news usually causes. If you say to somebody “Would you like to be angry?” they will universally say no. Then they read something on Twitter that makes them outraged, they will share it and read it again and again. We have to find other emotional rewards to deliver something sustainable.”

News media’s historic emphasis on selling their products with an ‘eat your vegetables’ mentality — expecting people to buy because reading the news is ‘what’s good for you’ — lacks this emotional reward. Said Duhigg: ‘For the health of the nation and the world, the vegetables are important. I am not saying we shouldn’t do vegetables. But for the financial health of our organizations, the rewards are candy. If we’re not taking the vegetables and dipping them in caramel, we’re making some hard choices.’

The Wall Street Journal, for instance, measures “active days” — the number of days a reader engages with content. Its “Habit Project” focuses on “16 different engagement opportunities” that make subscribers stay on the site longer.

— Nudge, nudge, nudge. When Canada’s Globe and Mail began emailing subscribers with the highest propensity to churn, it reduced churn by 140 percent. Emailing subscribers who hadn’t logged in for 30 days reduced churn by 27 percent.

— What if you just…got rid of the content that nobody reads? The USA Today Network ran an internal campaign designed around this concept: “Stop doing things readers don’t want.” It built a tool called Pressbox to show its journalists how their stories are doing based not just on pageviews but on “volume, engage time, and loyalty (return frequency).”

By examining the ‘bottom half’ of content that wasn’t performing well, they were able to determine that only six percent of the audience was reading that content.

‘We could eliminate half of our journalism and our traffic really wouldn’t change — if we replaced it with nothing,’ said [Josh Awtry, senior director for news strategy at USA Today Network]. ‘What if we replaced that with content readers really wanted? We knew early on we didn’t just want it to be about pageviews…We are publishing 2.7 percent less monthly while the article pageviews have gone up.”

The UK’s Times Newspapers, meanwhile, decided to get rid of content that simply duplicated what was already available from the BBC, which 98 percent of Times readers already use on a weekly basis. “We effectively retired from breaking news,” said Times managing editor Chris Duncan. “Our readers didn’t really value it. So why compete on something our customers didn’t value?”

— People like surprises. The Atlantic tries to find random little rewards for subscribers, said Emilie Harkin, the company’s senior director for customer marketing and growth. Two examples: Sending a reader a baby present, and recreating a digital version of a special Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. newsstand print issue for digital subscribers.

— $9.99 > $14.99. At least in the experience of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which tested three follow-up rate offers after a $0.99/month sale. Here’s what they found:

— Retention rate for the $9.99 rate was 41 percent higher than the $14.99 price.
— Lifetime value was highest for the $14.99 price.
— The $19.99 offer had almost no difference in retention to $14.99.

The team also tested quarterly billing versus monthly billing. The one-year retention rate for quarterly billing was 28 percent higher than the monthly billing group — 39.4 percent retention for quarterly versus 30.7 percent monthly.

Another example of little things helping: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution improved retention by setting up a campaign to get subscribers set up for auto-pay. Forty-five percent of its subscribers had still been receiving print bills.

The full report is available to INMA members here.

Younger Americans are paying for news in greater numbers. Younger generations are better at telling fact from opinion, though adults under age 29 are also the only age group to think “most news reports are fairly inaccurate.” Younger Europeans are turning to newspaper websites over TV news. And, unsurprisingly, younger Americans are the ones who are more likely to skip voting. (Though they did a bit better yesterday than in previous midterm elections.)

The media industry is still adjusting to serving those tricky millennials with the type of news and information that will get them informed to participate in democracy. (We’ll handle Generation Z, or whatever you want to call them, later, after their influencer Venmo deposits come through.) A Tufts poll drawing on 2,000-plus Americans between ages 18 and 24 recently found that of the 34 percent who are extremely likely to vote, 40 percent said local news had helped them prepare for the 2018 elections — though 40 percent said it wasn’t helpful. Overall, 31 percent of those polled said local news media has helped them warm up for voting, but demand is one thing and supply is another.

Are there robust enough local news sources to adequately inform them? In the past couple of years, a few news ventures have popped up to seize the civically-interested-millennials market:

• WhereBy.Us, based in Miami with branches in Orlando, Seattle, and Portland, encourages folks to “live like you live here” via peppy newsletters and social accounts curating other local reporting. It’s funded by advertising, events, and crowdinvesting, encouraging individual participation on top of traditional investors.
• Spirited Media, run by Jim Brady, launched brands in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (though had to lay off nearly a third of its ten-person staff a year ago), merged with Denverite, and is now pushing a membership model. Denverite, Billy Penn, and The Incline do their own original reporting alongside lots of aggregation (including participating in collaborations with other local outlets).
• And the owner-operated Charlotte Agenda found profitability but laid off staff after launching a short-lived sister site in Raleigh.

Add one more entrant to that local/young news space, this one popping up across the Southeast, from Lakeland, Florida to Asheville, North Carolina. 6AM is a network of six sites structured around daily newsletters and Instagram Stories of what are the cool kids in town up to, with a civic engagement flair. But instead of using venture funding or starting from scratch, 6AM is a spinoff of (gasp) a legacy print company: Community Journals Publishing Group, a small chain of business journals and magazines based in Greenville, South Carolina.

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Here’s a friendly reminder: don’t place your pumpkins on the curb with other yard waste – they can clog the vacuum truck. Instead, compost them. They make for great fertilizer. // : @heatherjayde

A post shared by GVLtoday (@gvltoday) on Nov 1, 2018 at 12:06pm PDT

“This was built out of the need for Community Journals to innovate but also for our passion to really make economic impact in our communities. A lot of times things are lost in the market because people just don’t know what they don’t know,” Ryan Heafy, 6AM’s director of operations, said.

That, yes, of course, is a noble cause. Here’s another way 6AM frames it: “We like to say that our audience is local, vocal, and social. We try to position our brand as a community influencer,” said Ryan Johnston, 6AM’s managing director and former executive vice president of Community Journals.

In each of its six local markets, 6AM has two multimedia producers (they take turns preparing the newsletter) and one engagement editor. The initial team launched the Greenville site, GVLtoday in July 2016 and expanded to Columbia in April 2017 to test its scalability. In February, Asheville and Charleston came onboard, followed by Lakeland in September. In late September, Chattanooga’s seven-year-old NOOGA.com became NOOGAtoday. 6AM plans to grow audiences in its existing markets for the rest of the year, though further expansion’s planned for 2019. Its total staff count currently sits at 24.

“I think those communities where they are not big enough to have multiple daily papers, yet they are big enough to have a huge life force and a huge heart, they just want to be connected to their own community,” said Mary Willson, 6AM’s first editorial hire.

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Leading up to election day, we will be highlighting what you can expect to see on this year's ballot, providing details on how to register (this Wednesday, Oct. 17 is the deadline!), and letting you know where you can hit the polls. // As making our voices + opinions heard is one of the greatest things about our democracy– we want to hear yours. Share your reasons for voting (plus your "I voted" sticker pics + all things related to the election) using the #CHSvotes or in the comments below. We will be selecting four lucky candidates to receive a gift card for participating in their civic duty.

A post shared by CHStoday (@chstoday) on Oct 15, 2018 at 9:21am PDT

Heafy and Johnston said 6AM is profitable as a company, though individual markets are still shaking out as they launch and gain traction. The finances are reliant on ads and local business partnerships. (No, they’re not going to try subscriptions, probably never ever, they told me when I asked about memberships. Remember, those are two different things.) In total, 6AM has over 150,000 email subscribers and a 25 percent open rate; they’re on pace for more than 10 million email opens this year. And yes, the emails are sent out at 6 a.m. each weekday.

Willson’s first day on the job was the same day the first newsletter went out. After working in newspapers, she now onboards other staffers while serving as engagement editor in Asheville. “I see my role as engagement editor as a mixture of connecting readers with our product, our producers with our products (coaching, our producers have the systems and the support they need), also connecting our partners to the content,” she said. “The way I see the actual word ‘engagement,’ I would say is ‘user-focused strategy’.”

The teams write one original piece a day, the Ryans and Willson told me — that’s the intro to the newsletter — but also curate a good amount of news reported by other local outlets in the “News Notes” section. For example, the News Notes in Asheville’s newsletter from Halloween includes the weather; an item about a judge directing Bird to remove its scooters and a sentence about their current status, from the Winston-Salem Journal; a bit about a master plan for a redeveloped park, from local TV station WLOS; an update about an Asheville restaurant; and notice of an application for Habitat for Humanity assistance. I appreciated how each bullet point presented the information but then also clarified possible next steps (“A final draft plan will be presented to the RiverLink board of directors for voting and a funding push in December.” “Check out this week’s color report here.” “Here’s your election guide.”) And yes, almost every point has its own emoji, a motif familiar to Evergrey readers.

Between some ads (from a real estate company, a bank, UNC Asheville, and a food-and-wine festival), the newsletter also shares the #MustDo fun stuff — unless you also count the civic updates as fun stuff:

Willson gets a lot of leeway to experiment. The Ryans gave her the green light to start a podcast, but she decided to table it after only two episodes — she was too occupied growing AVLtoday’s Instagram from zero to 10,000 followers over ten months. 6AM’s sites are active on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit too, but the funnels often start with Instagram. “Sometimes it’s easier to eat your vegetables if you put it in a casserole, just like it’s easier to get people down into the newsletter about their city if they have seen it on Instagram as this entity that represents all of the city,” she said.

To get the lay of the land in AVLtoday’s second month, Willson asked readers to send in their questions about Asheville. “As we enter our second month of publication, we want to plan our content around what ideas you have, and questions you want answered. Our goal is to help you be more engaged + entertained,” she wrote. Then Willson organized the 100-plus responses into categories on the site — with topics like “local happy hours” to “How long do affordable [housing] units stay affordable?” to “Will the north side of Asheville ever get a movie theatre?”. The producers and editors follow up on a couple of responses each month and update the master list with the link when answered.

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As a city with offices from some of America’s favorite companies (you know, like Publix + Amazon) to the hotspot for local entrepreneurs (hey, Catapult members), Lakeland is continuing to sprout with growth. But even with all it has to offer, it can still leave something to be desired. So we asked. And you answered. “What developments would you like to see come to Lakeland?” Responses are in the link in our bio. If you didn’t get a chance to respond, comment below // : @thecollectionlkld

A post shared by LALtoday (@thelaltoday) on Oct 19, 2018 at 7:48am PDT

The overwhelming sense I got from the Ryans and Willson was their focus on the POSITIVE VIBES of a community. The EXCITEMENT. The PRIDE IN PLACE. They want to help these sites — the geographic sites, not just their own websites — shine by getting the community amped up about it.

When 6AM is considering a new market, they examine the revenue potential but “the bigger thing for us is focusing on pride in place. It’s a term we’ve coined and is a measure, in a lot of different ways, of how excited people get when a new business opens, when a new entrepreneur emerges in the community, when a new restaurant comes to town and they’re all amped up and excited, how much charitable giving per capita there is in in the market,” Heafy told me.

“People wanted a clean way to experience their city and be excited about it and understand how they could participate,” Johnston said. They emphasized the need to keep 6AM newsletters feeling like a positive experience for both readers and advertisers.

Not to be a Negative Nancy (I know, I’m such a millennial), but does that positivity provide the full picture of a place to 6AM readers?

“From day one, we decided to turn down political advertising. We don’t cover crime and punishment,” Johnston said. “We only really wanted to create a positive sentiment around the challenges that all growing cities have and approach them by crowdsourcing solutions and creating a brand that’s known to be a rallying cry to bring the city forward through getting people fired up about participating locally.”

(Local news can use all the positive sentiments it can get, as long as it’s not just fluff — or newsletters for business class telling us to be smart! or only telling me about the Instagram-worthy events this weekend. Just give us the important local news that isn’t all car crashes and drug busts but can actually help us feel more like a part of our communities and not so alone in the world. Why make getting informed about my local community harder than voting? Soapbox: off.)

young people today have it the best and the worst. there's so much to process and very few trusted, accessible outlets to process it all through. so they go to memes. they go to obscure or absurdist humor. they go to frozen meat companies on twitter. end rant

Steak-umm bless

— Steak-umm (@steak_umm) September 26, 2018

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#DYK the @scstatefair was ranked #6 on a list of the 21 Most Affordable State Fairs in the country for 2018 – with a total cost of $106.95 for one adult + one child to park, pay admission, buy a ride wristband + corn dog and for any accommodations. // Gates open today at noon – but ride operators are keeping a close eye on #HurricaneMichael and will make adjustments as needed. Food vendors + other attractions will remain open in the event that we just get rain. // : @lbzzphotography

A post shared by COLAtoday (@colatoday) on Oct 10, 2018 at 8:43am PDT

There’s no punchline — they just all listened to each other. The American Press Institute gathered representatives from three dozen news organizations to brainstorm about deep listening strategies and how journalists can continue to build relationships with their audiences. A report from media consultant Cole Goins, formerly of Reveal and the Center for Public Integrity, shares the lessons from that gathering (yes, there was lots of l i s t e n i n g involved) and how you can build those strategies into your own “culture of listening.”

Here’s how the group defines that culture of listening, no Merriam-Webster dictionary included:

When API says “listening,” we mean the process of seeking out the information needs, feedback and perspectives of the people in our areas of coverage. In particular, this emphasis on listening is meant to expand our attention to people and communities who feel alienated or have traditionally been marginalized by news coverage.

Here are some highlights from the gathering (read all the takeaways in the full report here:

• Ask for networking recommendations: Starting in 2014, executive editor Dennis Anderson met with individuals from his readership at the Peoria Journal Star and asked each one to recommend five more people he should connect with:
  

  He formed an advisory board of representatives from the community, who began contributing their perspectives and ideas for the Journal Star’s coverage. The Journal Star also began hosting monthly meetings throughout the neighborhood, welcoming locals to come and share their ideas and insights for stories that the newspaper should tell about their community.

  Fast forward to 2018. Anderson says he now gets regular calls from people in the neighborhood who never would have dialed up the newspaper before, sharing tips and feedback on the newspaper’s coverage. His newsroom still hosts monthly meetings on the South Side, and sends an email to about 150 people in the neighborhood twice a month to update them on stories and remind them about the gatherings.

• Auditing your staff, your sources, and and even what assets are in your community: Each year, PRI conducts an audit of its staff and its work to evaluate what kind of people are quoted — and who isn’t. Other public radio stations have also created mechanisms to track the diversity of individuals represented in their broadcasts.

  Participants also suggested asset mapping, or sketching out the flow of information through different community hubs like church groups, barbershops, Nextdoor groups, and more to get a better sense of why people trust these groups and how they are communicating information.

• Talking to your ex-fans: If someone subscribed to you once, chances are they might do it again. But why did they cancel their subscription? Two participants advocated for ways to mine the minds of those how have left or those who just outright dislike an organization’s coverage.
  

  Emily Goligoski of the Membership Puzzle Project talked about the learning opportunity from conversations with people who stopped subscribing or donating to your news organization. Ask them: What drove them away? How could your newsroom regain their support?

  David Plazas, opinion and engagement editor at The Tennessean in Nashville, has hosted several listening sessions with groups who feel particularly marginalized or misrepresented by the news, such as gun owners and young American Muslims. Their feedback has helped his newsroom understand nuances in its reporting, and how The Tennessean can tell stories that are more true to lived experiences.

• Not being an ‘askhole’: Coined by Jennifer Brandel of Hearken and Andrew Haeg of GroundSource, the gathering drove home the point of engaging without being extractive:
  

  In most newsrooms, journalists don’t often have time to spend in conversations that aren’t directly related to a story, and the news cycle demands that reporters gather quotes and information quickly. But by investing more time in listening, newsrooms can open doors ahead of time. They will have stories and connections that they may not have gotten without a willingness to listen and learn. This can break the cycle of being extractive….

  Though maintaining one-on-one correspondence isn’t scalable for journalists, there are plenty of ways you can stay touch in with communities and keep them updated on how your reporting is addressing their needs and experiences.

  The Journal Star sends emails twice a month to people from the South Side who have signed up to receive stories about their neighborhoods. Ashley Kang of The Stand in Syracuse cited a practice by the Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, Ind., to invite people who had submitted a letter to the editor to a big picnic hosted by the newsroom, as a way to thank them for their contributions.

A culture of listening also includes being empathetic in your reporting, as an API report from P. Kim Bui noted in the spring.

Want more specific examples? Find them here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/follow-up-with-your-fans-and-your-ex-fans-heres-how-to-create-a-successful-culture-of-listening-in-your-newsroom/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/after-crowdfunding-success-swiss-magazine-republik-charts-a-course-to-reclaim-journalism-as-a-profession/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/after-crowdfunding-success-swiss-magazine-republik-charts-a-course-to-reclaim-journalism-as-a-profession/#respond Tue, 22 May 2018 14:32:52 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=158636 In its first seven hours of existence, the Swiss online news magazine Republik — a startup with the allure of in-depth journalism and membership transparency — gained 3,000 subscribers and 750,000 Swiss francs. But that whirlwind of support created a new pressure: delivering on its promise.

Thirteen months (and thousands more members) later, Republik is living up to the hype, reporting substantive investigations and finding new ways to engage and collaborate with readers — like virtual “dinner parties” to discuss the impact of its work.

“If you don’t have democracy, if you don’t have really good information that you can cite, there’s a problem,” Susanne Sugimoto, Republik’s CEO, told me. She calls 20 Minutes, the free Tamedia tabloid read by about half the country each week, “a business success story, but it’s not a success story in terms of journalism with a deep quality.”

Members of the Republik founding team had been talking about business plans and editorial goals for several years; the threat of looming layoffs in the legacy media industry helped them commit to turning the idea into something real. Constantin Seibt, a high-profile Swiss journalist twice named reporter of the year, and Christof Moser, a professor and journalist, “had had enough,” Sugimoto said, and left their jobs to devote their energy to Republik. While they’ve been able to convince a remarkable number of Swiss to pay for their content as crowdfunders and members, Republik will need to continue selling the public on it: Only 11 percent of Swiss pay for online news.

“We can do it together, or not at all,” is the German-language site’s refrain, repeated by Sugimoto in our talk, in her presentation at WAN-IFRA’s conference in Copenhagen in April, and frequently throughout the Republik site. A membership costs CHF 240 per year. (The Swiss franc is almost exactly at par with the dollar, so you can safely imagine a $ in front of the numbers here.) Sugimoto said the team needs 25,000 members to break even within the next year; it currently has 21,000.

“We believe people don’t pay for articles anymore. They pay to be part of the community,” Olivia Kühni, one of Republik’s journalists, told me.

Republik is built on the idea of public debate on political, business, and societal topics; to encourage that, it zeroed in on ensuring its members (or publishers, the term they prefer) thoughtfully absorb the reporting — and then participate. “We are reclaiming journalism as a profession,” the magazine’s manifesto states, according to Google Translate. “Our job is to lead a reasonable life (with family, job, hobby) as we work through the noise of the world…Republik is financed without advertising: Our readers are the only customers. And consequently our bosses.”

The rallying cry resonated with the Swiss, as evidenced by Republik’s crowdfunding success (it’s also being backed by several investors). The founding team members had established reputations and social media followings already, and they’d been encouraging interested potential members to submit their email addresses before launch. Along with those impressive opening hours of crowdfunding, they raised CHF 3.4 million within five weeks. But they don’t just pour that money into Republik: In a nod to their public focus, the team developed Project R, a nonprofit cooperative for funding more journalistic projects and training to help build sustainability for journalism in Switzerland.

The cooperative was the proverbial chicken before the Republik egg, the latter introduced as the first initiative from Project R. In March 2017, the cofounders outlined Project R’s purpose as “everything institutional” versus Republik’s as “all journalistic.” The starting team of six built out the branches before the magazine’s launch in January 2018. Republik’s roster now includes 34 people, though not all are full-time.

The first few months of a live Republik witnessed growing pains — but the reader support has, in a way, helped carry some of the burden.

“We had the problem in the beginning that everyone was trying to do the ultimate piece, their best piece ever,” Kühni said, stressing them out and preventing them from doing good work. But “there was this fandom in the beginning and that kind of made us skeptical, because we want critical and supportive readers but not fans. That has changed a bit now — people are still supportive, but they’re also giving us a lot of constructive, detailed criticism. They really participate in the quality of the product.”

Kühni, who joined Republik from a slower-paced monthly magazine (Republik publishes one to three pieces a day), was drawn to the intersectionality of coverage. For example, she’s working on a project with software engineers focused on the future of work in the automated world and a separate trilogy on the past, present, and future of the drug LSD. “We’re working together with two journalists and a chemist and somebody from the visual department,” Kühni said. “We try to build this interdisciplinary team and try to look at the topic from different perspectives. I think that’s very different than how journalism here used to function.”

One of her favorite aspects of the Republik community has been the discussions with readers about her pieces. After publishing an article, Republik will set up a window of time for the reporter to be online and participate in debates with the readers, digging into the details behind the story. Between 25 and 400 members have participated in a debate at one time, she said.

“We don’t just put up a comments section. We’re actually present there from a certain time to discuss with the readers. It’s not something you keep open forever — it’s more like a dinner party,” she said. “The debates I have done with the pieces I wrote, that was when I got a feeling for the community and got to talk to the readers.” They asked her about her sources and potential flaws in the data, and she was able to reap some future story ideas as well.

A major investigation into racketeering in a tourist town outside the main metropolitan areas of Switzerland also helped build the site’s credibility beyond city dwellers, not to mention caused a candidate to drop out of a governor’s race. “We did a lot of foreign policy, and we did some politics and analytical pieces. We have a lot of people good in that,” Kühni said. “But what we didn’t have so far was a real muckraking story from the countryside, where people live every day. It showed that we’re not just these progressive people in the city talking about debates.”

“I think the secret about this is really about the community,” Sugimoto said.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/after-crowdfunding-success-swiss-magazine-republik-charts-a-course-to-reclaim-journalism-as-a-profession/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/is-audience-engagement-a-mushy-construct-based-on-anecdata-or-something-audiences-actually-want/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/is-audience-engagement-a-mushy-construct-based-on-anecdata-or-something-audiences-actually-want/#respond Mon, 30 Apr 2018 19:08:45 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=157771 Is the importance of audience engagement largely anecdotal and abstract? What is it actually delivering? Do audiences want a direct connection with journalists as much as the startups that focus on engagement claim that they do? In a paper published in Digital Journalism last month (summarized on CJR on Monday) Northwestern Ph.D candidate Jacob Nelson looks at three engagement-based startups and is left skeptical about whether they are fixing a problem that real people actually have or are largely just appealing to journalists who have an unquantifiable sense that something is wrong.

Nelson embedded with Hearken, a startup that helps newsrooms create engagement strategies, for three months. In his paper, “The Elusive Engagement Metric,” he argues:

Hearken’s pitch to newsrooms relies primarily on appeals to intuition. Its employees argue that their interpretation of audience engagement will lead to a better quality of journalism, which will inevitably result in increased audience revenue as well. Though some newsrooms refuse to invest in Hearken’s offerings without proof they will yield some measurable return, others seem eager to take the chance…

As a result, Hearken’s appeal to these newsrooms is more or less, “Our way is better. Trust us.”

As things stand now, Nelson writes, there’s no standard definition of audience engagement. Does it mean “audience attentiveness,” or journalism that is “more interactive or participatory,” or journalism that “encourages audiences to participate in civic life”? Does it build loyalty? Does it change audience preferences? (“Although many in journalism assume that audiences are inherently uninterested in public affairs news, some audience engagement advocate think that audiences would eagerly tune into these stories if they felt more included in the reporting process.”)

Hearken’s method has been to invite readers into the reporting process by inviting them to submit questions that they think should be investigated and then, down the line, possibly even including them in the investigation process. An annual Hearken subscription fee is around $8,500. Nelson spent three days a week in Hearken’s offices for three months, read internal memos, monitored its Slack channel, sat in on Hearken’s pitches to newsrooms, and interviewed several employees multiple times.

Here are some of his observations from the full paper:

— “While the newsrooms participating in the pitch meetings I observed often immediately pointed to pageviews as a primary indicator for story performance, some did so more sheepishly than others. For example, one journalist from a west coast, daily newspaper responded, “We look at pageviews…but we don’t apply a measuring stick to too many things. We’re trying to look at the big picture.”

— “When Hearken staff would pitch their services, they would first try to convince potential clients that a small news audience was not their primary problem, but a symptom of their failure to adequately engage the public. Because the claim that news organizations are struggling to attract large audiences is easily verified by journalism’s currency, it goes all but unquestioned throughout the news industry. Hearken’s claim that the solution to this problem is to increase audience engagement, on the other hand, is more or less based entirely in the intuition and experiences of Hearken’s founder and staff.”

— One employee: “The only data that we have, that we, like, own, you know, is how many questions are they getting, how many votes are they getting, which I don’t actually think is that important, honestly.”

— “Hearken’s staff could not cite an engagement metric to demonstrate the impact of its tools and services because no such metric that has industry-wide backing currently exists. Instead, the company’s employees would draw on anecdotes that similarly functioned as appeals to intuition.”

— “There is so much confusion within the current news media landscape that Hearken’s pitch of ‘Journalism’s relationship with the audience is broken. We can help you fix it,’ ends up having a profoundly effective appeal. As [cofounder and CEO Jennifer Brandel] put it during one of our interviews, ‘We have to try something’…Sometimes Brandel seemed exasperated by what she saw as the news industry’s focus on metrics at the expense of common sense. In our final interview, she asked, “What things should we just say, ‘You know what? There doesn’t need to be data. We all know this to be true.'”

Reading this, I wondered why Hearken let Nelson hang with them in the first place. This paper couldn’t have been the result that they were hoping for. But how fair is this criticism? Nelson could have looked harder for studies about what audiences want from the news and incorporated them more fully into his paper; one of his big criticisms is that Hearken doesn’t present enough of these data points to potential newsroom partners. (Brandel says that Hearken does indeed have this data, posted in case studies on its website.) But a lot of audience engagement projects are difficult to quantify, which doesn’t make them less worthy.

“We enjoyed having Jacob around the office last year to study Hearken. Having been a reporter himself, he understands engagement and journalism in ways few other academics do,” Brandel told me in an email. “That said, he was only with us for a short period last year, and like all young companies, we’ve grown up, matured and evolved a lot since then…The return on investment for engagement work is something we think, talk and learn about every day, alongside many other great minds in the industry.” She pointed to case studies that Hearken has added to its website recently.

“How could we empirically measure a parent’s love?” Brandel wondered. “And in the absence of hard data, would we have to conclude that it’s not valuable? The tyranny of the quantifiable is something we at Hearken, and many others doing this work, are trying to both acknowledge and transcend.”

Here's some data for you! https://t.co/SciV9T0L53
Jacob's study is great – it's just that academic research and gathering data takes a long time. Many things have changed since he studied us, and we have results.

— Jennifer Brandel (@JenniferBrandel) April 30, 2018

Nelson ultimately bemoans the lack of a single “engagement metric…with industry-wide backing,” but it’s not Hearken’s fault that one doesn’t exist; this is something that news companies have been grappling with for a long time.

If you want to call Hearken's model unproven, fine. But to say that audience engagement may or may not be a thing would basically argue that every modern media company has just been going by "gut" for all these decades.

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) April 30, 2018

This article is a real disappointment – it ignores all kinds of data, research and work happening in audience engagement. Hearken has lots of data (not cited here) about how their stories consistently outperform non-Hearken stories, plus a revenue study w/ @BitchMedia. https://t.co/y3zzPmHv3a

— Molly de Aguiar (@MollydeAguiar) April 30, 2018

The Bitch Media study actually is mentioned in Nelson’s full paper, though not the CJR post. In that 2017 study, Bitch Media found that:

“Looking at all the readers on its email list, Bitch Media found that just 1.35 percent of them converted to membership during the year-long study. But when it focused on those email list members who had engaged with the Hearken platform, the conversion rates surged to 7.17 percent. Readers who signed up for the email list for the first time after reading a Hearken-prompted story, meanwhile, converted to membership at a rate of 2.02 percent — nearly double the rate for users who signed up from the email list through another non-Hearken path….

[Bitch Media] expects to generate a total of $11,900 in Hearken-related extra membership support in its 2017 budget year — or nearly $6,000 in extra money after paying for the platform.

“The process by which Bitch Media’s staff made this discovery was onerous, which is likely one of the reasons it has not been replicated,” Nelson complains. But isn’t this the exact kind of data he claimed he was looking for? How else were they supposed to measure it? It’s gonna be onerous.

People who want quick answers and clear metrics to building trust that has never existed in many communities are going to be disappointed.

— Molly de Aguiar (@MollydeAguiar) April 30, 2018

ProPublica’s Dick Tofel thinks that the criticism is valid — but also acknowledges that ProPublica’s lauded engagement efforts are mostly judged on anecdotal evidence too.

I think this piece poses a real challenge, Molly. I hope Hearken will respond directly, and with the sort of data you mention. This emerging field is long on rhetoric, and could use some more rigor.

— Richard Tofel (@dicktofel) April 30, 2018

some, but mostly it's anecdotal, tbh.

— Richard Tofel (@dicktofel) April 30, 2018

Chairs of different colors, by Steve, used under a Creative Commons license.
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/is-audience-engagement-a-mushy-construct-based-on-anecdata-or-something-audiences-actually-want/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/the-new-york-times-has-signed-up-a-lot-of-subscribers-heres-how-it-plans-to-keep-them/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/the-new-york-times-has-signed-up-a-lot-of-subscribers-heres-how-it-plans-to-keep-them/#respond Tue, 17 Apr 2018 17:18:50 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=157307
The Idea: We remember reading about the kids’ section in Nieman Lab! It said it was for just a year. Are there any plans to extend it based off of feedback?
Cotton: The feedback has been really strong so we’re evaluating that over time, but absolutely, if we continue to think it’s doing well, either that or things like it are things we’d want to continue doing into the future.
The Idea: You’ve worked in several consumer revenue roles at the Times since 2016. Are there any acquisition or retention levers you’ve discovered to be particularly effective?
Cotton: All the work our brand marketing team has done over the last couple of years to start to tell the story of the Times in a more proactive way has been really fantastic. Showing either existing subscribers or prospective subscribers real-life cases of our journalists out in the field and how they really do go the extra mile to get a story in the way that I think reporters at most other news organizations aren’t able to do in the same way, has gone a long way to tell more people about The Times and Times’ journalism, why they should be subscribing, and why they should keep subscribing. So I think that’s been a huge lever that we’ve all been really excited about.

We’ve also had a lot of success in the last year-plus from our Crosswords product and our Cooking product, which are now also subscription products that you can pay for on their own or as part of a bundle. We’ve seen a lot of success using those in every way: We’ve gotten people who don’t want to subscribe to the Times otherwise but do use one of those products to become a Times’ customer, and we’ve gotten a lot of people to subscribe for more money by bundling all those things together in one package or special offer. We’ve also seen success in trying to get current subscribers to use those products in a way we think can drive retention.

The Idea: Is it typical for someone to convert from a subscriber of a standalone product into a full Times’ subscriber?
Cotton: It’s a little early to say. Cooking has been a subscription product for less than a year, so the focus of those products is on getting as many people who use those products and don’t subscribe to start subscribing — with the thinking that over time if we have more people in the Times’ ecosystem, it will give us more opportunities to cross-sell people on other products or upsell them to full subscriptions.
The Idea: What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen from a media outlet other than The Times?
Cotton: I’m a big fan of media outlets pursuing subscription models that focus on a particular niche and making something that people passionate about that niche will think is worth paying for. There are examples of this popping up frequently now, which is exciting, but a few that come to mind are The Information for technology, The Athletic for sports, and Stratechery for tech/media strategy.

Meena Lee and Sarah Guinee are strategy research fellows at Atlantic Media.

Photo of the New York Times building by Anthony Quintano used under a Creative Commons license.
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/the-new-york-times-has-signed-up-a-lot-of-subscribers-heres-how-it-plans-to-keep-them/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/what-a-failed-media-startup-can-teach-us-about-involving-readers-in-reporting/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/what-a-failed-media-startup-can-teach-us-about-involving-readers-in-reporting/#respond Wed, 04 Apr 2018 16:18:58 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=156801 When OpenFile launched in 2010, the tight-knit Canadian media community reacted with slightly skeptical enthusiasm. Legacy newspapers including The Globe and Mail and National Post said OpenFile was going to revolutionize online news…or at least “redefine” it.

Behind the headlines was an elegant concept: Ask readers to tell you what they think is important and make editorial decisions around that. Two years later, the media industry watched with equal fascination as OpenFile suspended publication, went through a bitter fight with unpaid freelancers, and eventually shut down its site.

“Canada doesn’t try things twice,” said former OpenFile editor David Topping. When a media company attempts something new and fails, it’s used as an example for why that idea should never be attempted again. Yet the organization produced lots of compelling stories by putting its audience at the center of its work, proving that citizens who are media savvy and engaged in their communities will participate if a path is cleared for them. The part that OpenFile didn’t figure out — and serves as a warning to media startups today — is how to fund reader engagement so that journalists can dedicate more time to reaching larger segments of their community.

Huge value in local knowledge

The idea of opening a file has a certain charm to it. Digital files were supposed to accumulate knowledge as readers added links, comments, photos, videos, and documents about issues in their communities. On good days, that’s exactly how OpenFile worked. Using postal codes as geolocators, readers in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Halifax, and Ottawa could open files and readers who lived close by could add information. If the file ticked the usual editorial boxes for a good story, an editor would assign the file to a reporter.

Right away, OpenFile found “huge value” in local knowledge the legacy media were missing, said Wilf Dinnick, OpenFile’s founder. Reporters also started off further ahead in their reporting, he said. “We had contacts, direct emails, and a whole bunch of information.”

Once a file was opened, it never closed. Journalists were encouraged to update their stories, make corrections transparently, and even publish stories before they were finished. Lorax B. Horne, a journalist for OpenFile in Halifax, described each story as “a link in the chain that could keep linking forward in time,” eventually building an “archive of local news knowledge that could grow over time.”

These reader-initiated stories disrupt the traditional media model for telling stories. At stage one of the model, a single person opens a file. In OpenFile’s case, this person is usually someone highly engaged in their community, educated, and media-savvy. Once that person opens a file, they have an incentive to share it with others (stage two), including stakeholders who are less engaged but might add their own ideas. OpenFile’s main contribution occurs at the model’s third stage, where a local issue is transformed into a story relevant to a wider audience. The hope is that some of the people in the third stage will then move to the first stage and start the process over again. If each stage works together, “you end up with a really effective model,” Dinnick said.

In traditional journalism practice, a journalist and/or their editor decides what the story will be and then shares it with the wider community, Dinnick said. “Very often, the story that you start with at the beginning of the day looks a lot like the one you end up with in the newsroom.” When that model is flipped on its head, stories that sometimes seem ridiculous reveal themselves as important. “We learned that we shouldn’t dismiss [a story] just because it’s not articulated in a way that we would as journalists,” he said.

Today we're introducing a new feature: Cross-country stories. Now you can read stories from all our markets! pic.twitter.com/SYRcgfxr

— OpenFile.ca (@OpenFile) January 20, 2012

Many OpenFile alumni point to the 204 Beech story as an early sign of success. (Note: The site’s content wasn’t well archived, so all we can link to is stripped-down versions at the Internet Archive.) It began with a 100-year-old cottage on a large lot in The Beach neighborhood on Toronto’s east side. Geoff Teehan, cofounder of digital agency Teehan+Lax and now a product design director at Facebook, had purchased the property a few months before. He planned to demolish the house and build a new one that could accommodate his wife, who had been diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder that required her to use a wheelchair. They were about to apply for a building permit when the neighbors got wind that the property would be destroyed and claimed that the house had historical value and shouldn’t be changed.

Jon Lax, Teehan+Lax’s other namesake cofounder, opened a file on 204 Beech and had the first story in his inbox a week later. OpenFile was “super responsive,” Lax said. “It was reassuring to know that someone was paying attention. Having a third party say ‘this is important enough to talk about’ is pretty important.”

Josh O’Kane, the reporter assigned to the file, ended up covering 204 Beech for most of the summer, culminating in a story that illustrated a wider problem in the city’s heritage department. O’Kane obtained city staff correspondence showing that the department was understaffed, with only a sole employed researcher at the time who could review contested buildings — illustrating Teehan’s point that the heritage department was “in dire need of a makeover.” Because the OpenFile editorial team refused to drop the issue and continued to devote resources to its investigation, O’Kane was able to write a local story that highlighted a citywide problem that transcended the standard Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) debate. “It showed me there is no story too small to keep in contact with people, because you never know if that story has another thread that you could be writing about,” he said.



Lax credits the website’s design and the quick response of editor-in-chief Kathy Vey for his positive experience with OpenFile. Without such a simple process, he doubts he would have known how to suggest a story to a journalist. While he is aware that other news organizations include “suggest a story” forms on their websites, he thinks it would be difficult to find and that it might lead to an unmonitored inbox. Even if the reporter had come to a different conclusion, Lax said he still would have considered the story a success because the system worked as he thought it should.

Craig Silverman, who helped launch OpenFile as its digital journalism director (and who has since gained attention as BuzzFeed’s chief reporter on fake news), remembers the 204 Beech experience as “exhilarating.” It was one of the first times OpenFile saw the full potential of its model: People were coalescing around a geographic area, and the people who lived in the neighborhood wanted to know more and to contribute to the reporting. They also wanted to see the story spread outside of the community, showing that the more people you involve in your journalism, the bigger your network becomes. “We felt like, if a lot of the stories we did were like this, then OpenFile would be a really powerful thing,” Silverman said.

Ron Tite, a creative director and now CEO of ad agency Church+State, was the reader behind another successful story in 2012. At the time, Ron lived near Liberty Village, an up-and-coming neighborhood on Toronto’s west side that was becoming well known for its trendy bars, cafes, and creative residents. The only problem was the abattoir where thousands of pigs came to be slaughtered each day. The stench that wafted from the building on a humid summer’s day was enough to make people nauseous. Ron wondered why the city would promote urban development in a neighborhood that housed something so horrible. So he opened a file.

Tite received a phone call from an OpenFile reporter and heard from Mike Layton, the city council member for his ward, who reiterated the city’s perspective on the abattoir. From the OpenFile story, Tite learned that the slaughterhouse was the only downtown employment opportunity for many of the people who had lived in the neighborhood for decades — long before he and his trendy neighbors had arrived.

Tite found himself sharing the story with his community and explaining the value of the abattoir whenever he heard someone complain about its smell. More importantly, Tite said, the experience “took the blinders off” and gave him a greater appreciation for the place he lived. “I didn’t know anything about the large immigrant population that lived in the area and worked [at the abattoir],” he said. “There was this whole section of the community that I was willing to write off because of a smell.” (The abattoir eventually closed in 2014 and may soon be converted into condos.)

A few other OpenFile stories of note

• Forever21 comes to Ottawa: A reader in Ottawa asked why a storefront in an Ottawa mall had been closed for so long. An OpenFile reporter called the general manager of the mall who told her it was going to become a Forever21 store. OpenFile broke the story before Forever21 had a chance to make its announcement, making it one of the bureau’s most popular stories.

The most-read story from @OpenFileOTT was about Forever 21 coming to the Rideau Centre http://t.co/pWK7HwGC #OpenFile11

— OpenFile.ca (@OpenFile) December 31, 2011

• BikeFile: The city of Toronto released statistics on cyclist deaths in the city, and OpenFile decided to portray the problem nationally using an interactive map. Some cities wouldn’t release their data, so OpenFile asked readers to fill in the gaps in their communities.

CYCLISTS: Really nice tool by OpenFile to find out where the safest and most dangerous spots are on your route. http://t.co/MVWmM0af

— Sustainable Alberta (@yycCommute) July 27, 2012

• The Missing Poppy: OpenFile placed poppies on a map of Toronto to show where soldiers lived before they fought and died in World War I. A reader wrote in to say that her uncle was missing from the map, leading OpenFile to publish a story about a soldier whose life was almost erased from the public ledger.

OpenFile's Poppy File brings home Remembrance Day. Seven war dead lived within one block of my downtown Toronto house. http://t.co/QqaZjVq1

— Robert Benzie (@robertbenzie) November 10, 2011

Problems in the pipeline

J-Source recognized Dinnick as Canadian Newsperson of the Year in 2012 for “engaging citizens with local, public service journalism in an independent environment, without the backing or safety net of working within an established news organization.”

But while OpenFile was celebrating its journalistic successes, the company was still trying to figure out how to make money. OpenFile started with several million dollars in investment from an anonymous angel investor. By Dinnick’s calculations, it cost a newspaper about $1,000 to print a story. He hoped to produce stories for slightly less and sell them back to the newspapers for a profit. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get it off the ground fast enough to keep OpenFile running.

In September 2012, OpenFile suspended publication. Today, it only exists as a homepage and a Twitter account frozen in time.

These are the three key engagement lessons we think can be gleaned from OpenFile’s sudden departure from the Canadian media scene.

OpenFile Takeaway No. 1: Know what you are

Before you can ask for a moment of someone’s time — be they a source, a volunteer, or a colleague — figure out exactly what you want to achieve and build an organization that is powerfully designed to make it happen.

If he could do it again, Dinnick said he would have spent the first few months focusing on how to make the user flow intuitive — before raising any money — and he would have then sold that product to other media companies. “It would be all about utility: getting the OpenFile widget on to as many news websites as possible, and nailing down the user flow to make sure that anybody can suggest a story,” he said. That’s not to say that the editors and journalists weren’t providing value for the company and the community — but producing stories pulled focus away from OpenFile’s true intention, which was to improve community engagement and get those stories into the world as efficiently as possible.

OpenFile Takeaway No. 2: Community engagement is a full-time job

Be realistic about the amount of resources that community engagement requires and measure success based on what you are trying to achieve (see Takeaway No. 1).

The struggle to find a revenue stream pushed OpenFile to focus on clicks to attract ad dollars. At some point, OpenFile started to shift into something different, said Neal Ozano, the site’s Halifax editor. It wanted to be “this community-minded thing,” but it also wanted to be competitive with other media outlets; that meant content needed to be pumped out daily, which didn’t fit the speed at which community-suggested stories evolved. Editors were trying their best to drum up story ideas from the community, but they were also busy assigning stories, editing them, and interacting with readers on social media.

Eventually, it became apparent that it would be impossible to forge strong community connections with only one editor in each city, so OpenFile hired additional editors for each city and a community editor in Toronto responsible for social media outreach. But even with the new hires, Silverman said OpenFile asked too much of its editors and writers.

“I think a lot of news organizations have realized that community engagement is a full-time job,” he said. If you’re going to expect journalists to engage with the community, you have to appreciate that it takes effort and certain skills. Editors need to figure out ways to help journalists do this type of work, perhaps by forming teams that can buttress the amount of work that is required, he said.

It’s also important for editors to be realistic about output, Silverman said. If editors only focus on the number of stories that a journalist produces, they’re ignoring other important indicators, like the amount of engagement that a community has around that journalist’s work. The infrastructure of managing and rewarding community engagement properly is “the big thing” that editors and managers need to think about, he said.

OpenFile Takeaway No. 3: Meet your audience where they are

Identify your audience and go to the places where they hang out, both online and in person. Keep in mind that this takes a lot of time (see Takeaway No. 2), so be thoughtful about how you use your resources.

“We underestimated just how hard it would be to attract new readers and new story ideas. I found that social media and word-of-mouth weren’t nearly enough for what I was trying to do in Toronto, which I hoped they would be,” said Topping, the Toronto editor. It’s not necessarily the case that if you build it, they will come. “There’s a step before they find your publication that you might be incredibly disconnected from,” Topping said. It’s not that people don’t want to help or don’t have enough useful information — but “you have to make an effort to reach them where they are,” Silverman said.

Consequently, the people who were finding OpenFile’s website were only a subset of the audience that editors hoped to reach: mainly the sort of engaged, educated, and media-savvy people who had the time and interest to suggest a story. That made it more likely that OpenFile would receive a certain type of story idea, making it more of an urban issues website than a broader news site that gave underserved communities a platform.

The reader-suggested stories that OpenFile did produce had the ability to “foster an understanding and caring for the places that people live,” Topping said. Done well, those stories also produced empathy and engagement for the journalistic process. But in the end, OpenFile couldn’t maintain the flow of reader-suggested stories that it needed to sustain the site. “For a while [story suggestions] came in, then they sort of petered out,” said Ozano, the Halifax editor. It became easier to run the website like a regular news site and push freelancers to find more stories.

As for journalists who want to integrate community engagement into their work, Silverman’s advice is simple: “Introduce yourself with a sense of openness and humility, and say: You know more than I do. Here’s what I want to try. Here’s how I would love it if you could help. What might you be able to do?” It’s not about throwing up a form and expecting magic to happen, but actually doing the work to get out there in front of people and meet them.

Some of the people we spoke to describe an OpenFile-shaped hole in journalism that has never been filled. Others are more optimistic that new companies like Hearken have stepped in to fill the gap and journalists are becoming more engaged with their audiences on social media and live events. Regardless of its mark on the media landscape, OpenFile shows that communities have untold stories they are eager to share — and that journalists can work with them successfully when they’re given resources to engage with readers in prolonged, sustainable ways.

Ashley Renders is a video producer for the National Post and a freelance journalist based in Toronto.

Jessica Best, Emily Goligoski, Leon Postma, and Jay Rosen contributed to this post, which originally ran at the Membership Puzzle Project at NYU.

Photo of file folders by Mary Hutchison used under a Creative Commons license.
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/what-a-failed-media-startup-can-teach-us-about-involving-readers-in-reporting/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/what-strategies-work-best-for-increasing-trust-in-local-newsrooms-trusting-news-has-some-ideas/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/what-strategies-work-best-for-increasing-trust-in-local-newsrooms-trusting-news-has-some-ideas/#respond Fri, 16 Feb 2018 14:20:45 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=154630 After six months of investigating thousands of disciplinary cases in dozens of police departments around Cincinnati, Scripps TV station WCPO was almost ready to share its findings on air and online. But the team decided to add one more thing to their to-do list: an on-air segment and online letter about why and how they did it.

“Our motives are simple: We want to make sure the people who protect us and enforce our laws are worthy of the high level of trust the public gives them,” wrote Mike Canan, then WCPO.com’s editor.

“Our goal is to show you if police departments are transparent about how they respond to findings of misconduct, if the punishment fits the behavior, and what can be done to provide a better system of checks and balances that benefit police — and our community,” explained Craig Cheatham, the station’s chief investigative reporter, in an on-air preview of the investigation during the evening news.

This new approach was spurred by WCPO’s participation in Trusting News, an initiative created by engagement strategist Joy Mayer and supported by the Reynolds Journalism Institute, Democracy Fund, and the Knight Foundation. (Disclosure: Nieman Lab also receives support from Knight.) In an interview, Canan said if WCPO hadn’t been working with the project to carry out strategies focused on telling your newsroom’s story, engaging authentically, and deploying your fans in a measured way, they likely wouldn’t have thought to put it on air. “That transparency piece…really helped set the table for what we were trying to do,” Canan said. “Ultimately, I think our series was better received by even skeptical audience members.”

WCPO is one of thirty newsrooms signed up with Trusting News in its second round of experimentation with trust-building strategies, currently testing and analyzing seven methods for increasing transparency and building respect on both sides of the reporting process. The first round kicked off in the spring of 2016, as 14 newsrooms (including WCPO) pledged to use social media to build trust by adopting specific guidelines Mayer researched and developed. The project also recruited newsrooms to solicit feedback via a survey — which received 8,700 responses across 28 newsrooms — and then meet in person with a representative slice of the respondents to talk about their feedback.

With two-thirds of respondents to an international survey citing concerns of bias, spin, and hidden agendas as reasons why they often don’t trust news outlets, national outlets like The Washington Post have taken steps to increase understanding. Local news has a wee bit of an edge over national news in (still-low) trust polls, and Trusting News primarily works with local news organizations, which often drive audience members’ first personal interactions with journalists.

“A lot of what people say they want is what ethical journalists would say they are already doing…The fact that people don’t see that we’re doing it means that we’re not doing our job,” said Mayer, who spent two decades reporting in newsrooms and studying engagement at the University of Missouri before launching Trusting News in 2016. “It has to be on us to rebuild that relationship rather than just hoping that if we continue to do good work, they’ll notice it.”

The rebuild has been under heavy construction recently, with initiatives such as the The Trust Project (no relation to Trusting News, works with outlets with more of a global focus, includes tech giants), the Knight Commission (a high-profile group to help inform policy and funding decisions on trust in news), and the News Integrity Initiative (which doles out grants to more projects on increasing trust and inclusivity and decreasing polarization). Trusting News gives attention, not money, to local newsrooms, providing them with tangible, thoroughly researched strategies to implement for real-world testing in a continual cycle of experimentation.

Many of the strategies have been implemented through Facebook comments, in addition to broader initiatives such as Canan and Cheatham’s messages introducing the WCPO investigation. Mayer introduced these guidelines before Facebook made them required reading this year with the tweaks to its News Feed affecting publishers and emphasizing “time well spent.” She noted that being responsive to questions and comments on Facebook posts is in line with building engagement and meaningful interactions that Facebook suggested will be boosted with the News Feed changes.

“It’s not so much about gaming Facebook’s algorithm or working with the Facebook changes as much as it is taking advantage of Facebook as a truly social platform,” Mayer said. “Way too many journalists use social media to broadcast rather than being social. Being social involves listening, responding, and adjusting what you’re doing based on the feedback you’re getting…The biggest way newsrooms in this project are having success on Facebook is by participating in the conversations that happen there and using every interaction as an opportunity to explain their credibility.”

For Sarah Binder, working as the community engagement manager at the independently owned Gazette newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa meant leading a culture of engagement experimentation. Binder leads the Iowa Ideas live event series for the Gazette. When the Gazette joined Trusting News, comments on its Facebook post announcing its participation ranged from

• “Thank you we appreciate the service you do for our communities” to
• “I do trust the Gazette. As a conservative I do see where you have opinion from both sides. The national feeds are another thing as they mix opinion in with news articles. But that may be the nature of that beast” to
• “Your anti-gun agenda is disgustingly ignorant and offensive to the majority of Iowans. Report factual news, quit trying to tell Iowans how we should think and feel or what we should believe.”

“I think sometimes the people who are the most fired up and angry are the loudest and sometimes we just hear those voices,” Binder said. “Those voices are also sometimes the easiest to dismiss because you just think ‘I’m never going to win that person over, they’re never going to want to have a reasonable conversation, they’re just upset.’ But when you see the variations in the responses and see that there is some thought behind some of them…it makes you think about it a little bit more.” (The Gazette responded to the comments with a note about its newest conservative columnist and the fact that its national news comes from wire services.)

“It’s really easy to blow off individual comments,” Mayer added. “But the comments and feedback often add up to really big gaps in understanding.”

Across North America, participating newsrooms range from independent outlets like the Gazette to nonprofits like CALmatters, to startups like Discourse Media, to national brands like USA Today, to broadcast companies like WCPO. (Two of the original testing newsrooms were unable to complete the project after their point people left for other jobs or had reassigned responsibilities.) The top-line findings of the first round of testing, in 2016, found that participating newsrooms had best results when social posts “read like they were written by real people,” “invited people to be their best selves,” and “were framed around what the organization could do for the user.”

For the second round of testing, starting in November with additional newsrooms coming on in January, Mayer fleshed out more strategies and grew the testing group. She wanted to bring in more broadcast voices, considering that a significant portion of the American population gets its news from local TV. So the team added Lynn Walsh, the former president of the Society of Professional Journalists and the then-executive investigative producer for NBC San Diego, to share the broadcast perspective and work with newsrooms to implement the strategies as project manager. Now, the 30 newsrooms are testing seven types of strategies from “showing how you are distinct from ‘the media’” to better labelling stories, for a four-month period ending this spring. Mayer and Walsh will reevaluate the project in the summer and figure out next steps, with potentially a third round of testing. (Interested groups can get in touch with Mayer for more information.)

Binder and WCPO’s Canan both said that the external layer of accountability from Mayer and Walsh encourages creativity, check-ins, and organizational reflections that otherwise likely wouldn’t have happened.

Sarah Walsh, a WCPO digital web editor, noticed a couple of viral videos “making the rounds in our community…that were designed to be inflamed and sensational,” Canan said. Despite viewers sending in the clips, the station decided against covering them because they were “bogus hoaxes.” Instead, Walsh chose to write about the context and facts behind the misleading videos. Readers were impressed: “Good job WCPO!! Way to set the record straight!! And they said journalism is dead, proved em wrong didn’t ya!,” one wrote. Another comment received 73 likes and three love-reactions: “Thanks for doing your job WCPO! Not use to news media taking a step back to investigate anymore.”

“That was literally just one employee having heard about the [Trusting News] project saying this might be something good to do,” Canan said.

Canan left the WCPO newsroom in January to work as Scripps’ senior director of content strategy and has encouraged other stations to integrate journalistic accountability and trusting news strategies. “People are hungry for this,” he said.

In Binder’s month and a half with Trusting News, “we have seen those small wins [through] the commitment to keep doing those steps and keep experimenting. Maybe over time, the small wins add up to something bigger,” she said.

And Mayer wants to keep the momentum going: “We would love for newsrooms to steal as many as these strategies as possible.”

Image from WCPO’s on-air preview explaining the motives and process of their investigation.
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/what-strategies-work-best-for-increasing-trust-in-local-newsrooms-trusting-news-has-some-ideas/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/groundsource-switched-from-an-email-newsletter-to-a-sms-newsletter-and-actually-got-responses/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/groundsource-switched-from-an-email-newsletter-to-a-sms-newsletter-and-actually-got-responses/#respond Thu, 15 Feb 2018 18:45:13 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=154696 Want to connect with and update audience. Spend time perfecting email newsletter. Ask subscribers for responses. Receive zero responses. Sound familiar?

This is the trap into which GroundSource, a platform known for its messaging-based engagement tools (now also offered to newsrooms as part of the Community Listening and Engagement Fund), recently fell with its email newsletter (GroundSourced). So they launched an SMS newsletter instead.

Their prompts within the email newsletter had been pleasant: “This newsletter is all about helping you better engage your community. Each week, we’ll share news, tips, and answers to questions you ask. Let us know your engagement questions by replying to this email. We’ll find a solution and share it with you and 1,500+ GroundSourced subscribers.” But nobody was taking them up on the offer.

“It’s been a thing on the to-do list to restart the email newsletter, and we wanted to make sure it wasn’t just another marketing ploy,” Simon Galperin, an engagement advocate at GroundSource, told me. “We thought ‘how can we be useful to folks, let’s take what we do and put it in email form’…. We talked with some folks and sensed it was the right approach, but we weren’t getting the right feedback to maintain.” He outlined the situation in a subsequent email to subscribers:

The Problem:
How can we the increase response rates for GroundSourced?

What’s our goal?
To serve as engagement problem-solvers for subscribers to GroundSourced.

What have we asked of our community?
To submit their engagement challenges for us to solve.

What’s our metric for success?
Response rates to GroundSourced call outs.

Are we succeeding?
No. We have received zero responses over 21 days.

The Resolution:
We have a classic email newsletter problem.

They tested the subject line, schedule, and format over a few weeks to no avail. So texting it was.

On Tuesday evening, they sent out the first message to 444 phone numbers, some of whom had demoed GroundSource at a conference with GroundSource founder Andrew Haeg, others (like me) who had heard about it through the GroundSourced email newsletter announcing the text version. Of that total, 26 opted out, 64 responded to at least the first prompt (out of four; two were substantial questions of “What’s one way you’d like to improve community & audience engagement at your org?” and “What’s getting in the way?”, and the others were for navigating in the messaging), and a dozen specific questions about engagement were sent in. “We’ve got momentum!” Galperin wrote in an email newsletter on Wednesday debriefing the experiment.





Here they asked the aforementioned more substantial questions — I’ll spare you the read.



Average media email newsletter open rates can vary, depending on the type of editorial content, from around 50 percent to 20 percent, but Galperin and Haeg said messaging open rates are in the high 90s. (Think about it: Do you have any unopened text messages? Anyway, there are other sources out there that support this claim, though many of them are from texting marketing companies.) But texting, unlike the filterable email inbox, can be a sacred space for family and friends. What business do companies or news organizations have inserting themselves in there?

Haeg said a few news organizations have already been trying out an ongoing texting relationship, like WAMU’s 1A podcast: “If you want to know what we’re planning, our shows page is updated daily, or you can text 1A to 63735 to get about one message a day on what we’re planning (standard message rates may apply, and you can text STOP any time to end the messages),” their contact page says. 1A sends out messages to 4,500 signed-up phone numbers and receives 400 to 600 responses when they send a prompt. The details on frequency, content, and option to leave help, Haeg says.

“There’s a fair amount of thought that needs to go into these before you start one,” he said. “A lot of it has to do with building that relationship with your audience and being genuine about it, not about distributing all the great stuff you’ve been doing.”

GroundSource will continue its email newsletter, but they’ll be building out the texting newsletter as well.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/groundsource-switched-from-an-email-newsletter-to-a-sms-newsletter-and-actually-got-responses/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/a-new-report-offers-a-primer-and-a-reality-check-on-the-news-membership-model/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/a-new-report-offers-a-primer-and-a-reality-check-on-the-news-membership-model/#respond Thu, 08 Feb 2018 14:00:10 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=154309 News organizations across the board have largely embraced the notion that the future of digital news will be lighter on advertising and heavier on subscriptions and other forms of reader support. Less clear, though, is what that ideal audience revenue model will look like, and, for the organizations that currently lack one, the best route to make the business shift happen.

A new report from from Elizabeth Hansen at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Emily Goligoski at the Membership Puzzle Project offers more clarity. A product of hundreds of conversations with newsroom managers, reporters, and even members themselves, the 121-page report offers a lot of insight into what makes an effective reader revenue model work, and a framework for how news organizations can implement their own.

The report was written to give news organizations a clearer picture of “the limitations and sheer amount of effort that goes into developing reader revenue models,” said Goligoski. “We obviously want to shine a light for people new to the space, but we also want to give them a realistic picture of what the whole process takes.”

Here are a few of the takeaways from the report, which you can find in full here.

— Members don’t really care about tote bags or other swag. Talking to dozens of members of news sites’ membership programs, Hansen and Goligoski found that few people said that they were enticed to sign up by physical perks like tote bags or t-shirts. Instead, many said that they were mostly interested in supporting the cause of the organization itself. This is an appeal that many news organizations have leaned into. The Guardian, for example, said that its shift to an “emotional, service-based request” helped boost its membership efforts to 800,000 supporters in the 18 months after launch.

— There’s still no perfect community management system designed for news organizations. Running a membership- or donation-based business involves a lot of complexities when it comes to customer data. Not only must sites collect basic data about their users (email addresses, payment information, etc), but they also have to match that data with specific messaging campaigns and even specific stories to determine what is most effective at driving subscriptions.

While the lackluster state of news-focused customer resource management products is what helped birth the News Revenue Hub (which we covered last year), there are still some gaps in the market, said Goligoski. “I was surprised and disappointed to see how ill-served people are with the current set of CRM, which to me suggest a major market need. The amount of hacked-together solutions that we’ve seen people come up with has been a little shocking.”

— Membership programs without content-engagement strategies aren’t really memberships. One of the core arguments made in the report is that membership models require some degree of back-and-forth engagement with members. Some of these models can be “light touch” or “thin,” with features such as reader forms and member-only newsletters, while others are more “high touch,” with more pronounced interactions. Some publications’ membership programs, on the other hand, “are membership in name only and operate much more like subscription strategies, with little or no audience engagement,” Hansen and Goligoski write.

The report also stresses repeatedly that deep engagement with readers needs be a core part of membership products if they’re going to be successful. In concrete terms: “Sites such as De Correspondent in the Netherlands anticipate that its reporting staff will spend approximately one third to half of its working time in communication with readers.”

— Embracing membership models often requires a real culture shift. Despite the Internet’s ability to facilitate direct communication with readers, many reporters still cling to the pre-web ethos of speaking to readers rather than hearing from them. That’s slowly changing, especially at places like ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, but there’s still often an overall discomfort among reporters newly encouraged to break down the wall between them and their readers.

But one of the most challenging cultural shifts on this front isn’t how reporters talk to readers but how news organizations talk about themselves. “For most publications, this is a new muscle they have to build,” said Hansen. “They have to excel at telling their own story as a publication and as an organization. That’s been one of the things we’ve heard most that people have been wrestling with.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/a-new-report-offers-a-primer-and-a-reality-check-on-the-news-membership-model/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/01/opinary-is-building-new-tools-to-help-news-orgs-use-polls-to-inform-their-coverage/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/01/opinary-is-building-new-tools-to-help-news-orgs-use-polls-to-inform-their-coverage/#respond Wed, 31 Jan 2018 15:00:02 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=154007 News organizations have spent a lot of time talking to their readers; these days, they’re getting a little bit better at listening. Increased adoption of tools like Hearken and GroundSource over the past two years have shown that more newsrooms understand how direct feedback from readers can help drive their coverage.

Germany-based Opinary has also benefited from this shift in outlook. The company, which develops polling tools that publishers can embed in their articles, recently raised €3 million ($2.7 million) both to build its product and to fund its expansion into the U.S., where it already has a small foothold. In addition to landing most of the top news organizations in Germany, Opinary has attracted the likes of The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times, and The Independent in the U.K. and Time, Fortune, Forbes, HuffPost, NBC, and NPR in the U.S. Over 60 media companies are currently using Opinary.

These organizations are also publishing more polls than ever: In the company’s early days, Opinary saw an average of 10 polls published each day. Today, that number is closer to 2,000 across all the newsrooms using the tools.

Opinary CEO Cornelius Frey said that while the company itself has grown, its mission has stayed the same. “The whole idea is to give readers and communities a voice within journalism, and to show a multitude of opinions and views on a topic in a simple way so that it’s easy for users to engage in a differentiated way,” he said. “The static cycle of news production gets broken and users feel invested in the process. It makes a real change in how the newsroom thinks about putting out new pieces.”

Opinary’s earliest efforts at this were Pressekompass and Speedometer, two tools that let users share their thoughts on specific issues — stock performance and policy proposals, for example — and see how their positions compare to that of other readers or analysts.

Frey said that Opinary’s tools work best when they’re part of a process that involves asking readers what they think, then using that feedback to inform future coverage. Over the past few years, more newsrooms have taken advantage of this potential. Stern in Germany, for example, used Opinary to poll readers on their happiness with the results of the German election in September. The site then published those results, digging into how different demographic groups responded. Bild did something similar, printing the result of a poll on Donald Trump in its print edition.



This is an idea that Opinary wants to build on with its “insights dashboard,” which is designed to offer news organizations more granular data on what readers are thinking, but in real-time. Editors can see, for example, which topics are most polarizing for readers, or ones that readers are indifferent to, and use those insights to inform future coverage. “If it’s a situation where people are divided, maybe you would want to put out another explainer piece,” said Frey. “If people aren’t divided and are instead in the middle, you can say ‘maybe this is time to put two opposing opinion pieces out there to give people the chance to take a stance.'”

Opinary is also interested in figuring how out its polling tools can serve as conversion tools for publishers’ newsletters or paid products. Because readers who vote in polls are, by definition, generally more engaged than those that don’t, they’re also likely to be more willing have a deeper relationship with the publisher. Money.com, for example, recently used Opinary to ask readers whether they would purchase bitcoin. After displaying the results (over 75,000 people have voted so far), Money.com asked readers if they were interested in subscribing to the site’s newsletter, or follow it on Instagram. Frey said that this feature was a response to a common complaint among publishers who wanted the tool to offer more than “nice-to-have” engagement metrics.

The company is also exploring monetization options for publishers. Sponsored polls, which it’s already trialed with HuffPost and others, are one way the company is trying to pull this off. The pitch here is similar to the pitch for Opinary overall: Readers who take the polls are more engaged and more likely to be willing to engage with brands. “Right now, there’s so much invasive push advertising — autoplay videos, banners, and page takeovers. This, to us, is something that’s much more like a conversation,” he said.

Distribution, too, is a big focus: While publishers can build their own polls, they can also use ones produced by Opinary itself, which can distribute them to relevant pages across the network of publishers using its tools.

Ultimately, Frey said that Opinary’s mission is to offer news organizations (and, yes, brand advertisers) an alternative to Facebook, both by letting all parties learn a bit more about what drivers readers, and by giving those readers different ways to talk back.

“Facebook offers publishers a fantastic way to have a large following, but the truth is that’s not your audience. It’s Facebook’s audience. You should have a clear way to build your own audience and understand it deeper,” Frey said.

Photo of a polling sign by John Keane used under a Creative Commons license.
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/01/opinary-is-building-new-tools-to-help-news-orgs-use-polls-to-inform-their-coverage/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/06/with-its-new-reader-center-the-new-york-times-wants-to-forge-deeper-connections-with-its-readers/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/06/with-its-new-reader-center-the-new-york-times-wants-to-forge-deeper-connections-with-its-readers/#respond Wed, 14 Jun 2017 13:55:55 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=143497 When it comes to hearing from readers, The New York Times wants to go a lot further than just letting people chime in at the bottom of some articles.

Last week, the newspaper announced The New York Times Reader Center, a new initiative focused on finding new ways to connect with Times readers and deepening the connections it already has. The team, whose “exact size is still taking shape,” according to a Times spokesperson, will be staffed by a handful of journalists who will work with various Times departments — including interactive news, social, and even marketing and branding — on various reader-centered projects.

“Our agenda is not for our little team to make a splash. Our agenda is for The New York Times to have stronger connections with readers,” said Hanna Ingber, editorial director of the Reader Center. “In order for us to be successful, we need to work with everyone. The Reader Center will be a way to convene all those people to make the most of all the work that’s already happening.”

The Reader Center has already pushed out a handful of projects. Last month, it invited a small group of Times subscribers to receive text messages from White House correspondent Michael Shear as he travelled with President Trump on his first international trip. (The project is similar to a Times effort last summer that let readers receive texts about the Rio Olympics from Times deputy sports editor Sam Manchester.)

In another project, as part of a story by Times reporter Claire Cain Miller about how parents can raise feminist sons, the Reader Center asked readers to share their own experiences raising boys, and included many of their comments in a follow-up piece. That project was modeled in part after an initiative Ingber helped run in conjunction with “Ladies First,” a Times documentary about women in Saudi Arabia who were able to vote and run for office for the first time. After the Times ran the piece, Ingber made a call out to Saudi women, asking for stories about their lives. Over 6,000 of them replied, and the Times used some of their responses in a follow-up story. “That was good journalism,” Ingber said. “We used these voices to better understand what their lives were like and what their hopes were.”

With the Reader Center, the Times is the latest news organization to make deeper reader engagement more core to its editorial processes. Some organizations (The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, the Times itself when it comes to podcasts) have turned to Facebook groups, while other efforts (New Hampshire Public Radio’s Civics 101 podcast, The Texas Tribune’s community editor) are using reader input to influence their editorial decisions. While these efforts go beyond article comments in an effort to engage readers, comments, too, are a big part of the equation. As my colleague Shan Wang reported earlier this week, the Times aims to open 80 percent of its articles up for comments this year, up from 10 percent, using algorithmic tools to help evaluate them in bulk. The Times also plans to amplify reader voices by regularly producing comment roundups.

“We want to do everything we can to hear more of those voices and amplify them,” Ingber said.

It isn’t clear yet how much overlap the new Reader Center will have with the responsibilities formerly assigned to the Times’ public editor, a position the newspaper eliminated this month. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in a memo to Times staffers last week that readers around the world “collectively serve as a modern watchdog,” and are “more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be.”

Ingber said that while the Reader Center isn’t designed to replace the public editor, the new initiative is similarly built around the mission to create greater transparency into how Times stories are produced, and to hear directly from readers on how it can improve its processes.

“Our goals are to make our journalism more transparent and to change the relationship between readers and journalists, by empowering journalists to do more to connect with readers, to respond to readers, and to be more engaged with readers,” Ingber said. “Ultimately this will not just lead to better journalism, but also to more accountability and to the elevating of the position of our readers.”

Photo of a woman reading the New York Times by Eflon used under a Creative Commons license.
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/06/with-its-new-reader-center-the-new-york-times-wants-to-forge-deeper-connections-with-its-readers/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/04/with-its-new-no-bullshit-tone-on-social-propublica-is-meeting-realdonaldtrump-where-he-lives/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/04/with-its-new-no-bullshit-tone-on-social-propublica-is-meeting-realdonaldtrump-where-he-lives/#respond Wed, 12 Apr 2017 14:52:38 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=140245 By the time White House press secretary Sean Spicer called ProPublica a “left-wing blog” in an attempt to delegitimize its reporting on changes to Trump’s trust, ProPublica was ready.

“Since we’re in the actually in the biz of facts, we figured we’d respond w/ a few…” ProPublica began on Twitter on April 3, launching into a 16-tweet tweetstorm filled with facts on how it’s held people in power accountable. It ended with:

…and for all the new followers who found us today thanks to @seanspicer, do sign up for our fact-based newsletter: https://t.co/8aC8QGlYo6

— ProPublica (@ProPublica) April 4, 2017

Most of ProPublica’s tweets sound like this these days: They’re chatty and knowing, authoritative but not formal. Sometimes they link back to stories on ProPublica’s site, but just as often they can stand alone, sharing reporting from its reporters or other news outlets. They sound the way people talk on the Internet. (It feels a little like a more advanced, institution-wide version of the type of crowdsourced reporting that Andy Carvin did during the Arab Spring, but it’s more explanatory.)

This isn’t an accident: It’s part of a concerted effort, beginning last fall with Trump’s election, to revamp ProPublica’s entire engagement strategy by rejiggering the team that used to be called “social.”

“The conversational vernacular, the no-bullshit-and-speaking-bluntly vernacular of social, is a very good way to tell stories nowadays,” deputy managing editor Eric Umansky said. “We’re in an age where there’s lots of misinformation, there’s lots of absurdity. To speak bluntly and accurately and fairly, but not mutedly — it’s perfectly appropriate for the time and the reality that we live in.”

Umansky oversees an engagement team that also includes engagement editor Terry Parris Jr. and engagement reporters Adriana Gallardo and Ariana Tobin. Previously, social was the job of one person. Now Umansky, Parris, Gallardo, and Tobin rotate, each taking the accounts for a week at a time. (During the weeks that they aren’t on social, the team members work on reporting projects, helping other reporters to collect audience data and get readers involved. Parris, for example, led an investigation into the usage of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Tobin led an effort to compile White House staffers’ financial disclosures on a public Google Drive after the White House refused to release them publicly. Gallardo, for an investigation into U.S. women who die in childbirth, has gotten more than 2,500 responses.) “It’s their sandbox for the week,” Umansky said. “It gives a sense of ownership, but also tries to avoid the monotony of the Twitter hamster wheel.”

ProPublica used to require reporters or editors to include, with each story filed, five tweets that could be sent out and also used on Facebook. (This is an example of what ProPublica’s Twitter feed looked like at around this time a year ago; it’s much drier, and the likes and retweets on most tweets are notably lower than they are today.) Last month, though, Umansky put a end to that practice. “I don’t think it led to the best social posts,” he said. “If we’re thinking about Twitter or Facebook as a destination for journalism, that means we need to think of our social media posts as tiny little stories that can be self-contained. That often means more than 140 characters. It means a blurb plus a screenshot, or a blurb plus a chart, or whatever.”

Instead, reporters and editors are now asked to highlight the “juiciest nuggets” from their stories when they file them, whether it’s the upshot, a telling quote, a couple of paragraphs, or whatever. The engagement reporter on duty then turns those highlights into compelling social stories.

1/We've mapped out all 106 of the bomb threats to Jewish Community Centers and organizations since Jan. 1: https://t.co/kFaCq27j7V pic.twitter.com/mbggAXMrVn

— ProPublica (@ProPublica) March 1, 2017

In addition, Umansky stresses the notion that some stories never actually need to make it to the website at all. In January, when the Trump administration announced its refugee ban, Umansky was on the social rotation and wondered how refugees were already being vetted. “I could have done that as a post, but the truth is, I had neither the time nor inclination to do that,” he said. “Rather than taking four or five hours, I thought the more efficient thing would be to take 45 minutes and put together a tweetstorm.” There, he explained how the U.S. currently vets refugees, linking to reporting from The New York Times and This American Life and to research by Pew.

To get a sense of the incredibly arduous path refugees must navigate, listen to this @ThisAmerLife episode https://t.co/66bIj015Y5

[End]

— ProPublica (@ProPublica) January 26, 2017

“Back in the day, we would either not have done it at all, or we would have had it move much more slowly through our editorial process and it would have existed in a quite different form,” he said. Swapping a tweetstorm for a full post “is not right all the time. But it gives you another option.”

The engagement team is also looking for new ways to promote ProPublica reporters themselves. For Inauguration Day, Gallardo and Tobin did a tweetstorm explaining ProPublica’s renewed mission of accountability journalism in the Trump era, including tweets with reporters’ head shots, contact information, and their individual “asks” for the audience. When ProPublica tweeted out the cards on Friday afternoon, the individual reporters got “a huge influx” of new followers, and ProPublica’s account also picked up about 10,000 new followers. “We’re being very forward about what we need,” Gallardo said.

6/And reporter @AnnieWaldman wants any information you have on charter schools and vouchers. pic.twitter.com/TVXnldeK9H

— ProPublica (@ProPublica) January 20, 2017

As for that “Spicey Sauce” tweetstorm, as Umansky referred to it: That first “Since we’re actually…” tweet has been tweeted a little over 24,000 times, as of this writing, and liked nearly 40,000 times. ProPublica gained more than 100,000 new Twitter followers and 50,000 new Facebook followers in the few days after it.

“We are never going to sit and tweet out the latest news of X, Y, Z happening in Washington,” said Umansky. “A lot of journalism is synthesizing and contextualizing information. Flagging the most remarkable bits of a story. It adds a lot of value.” And there’s something about the tweetstorm, he feels, that fits particularly well in this moment.

“You know,” he said. “It’s become the modern smackdown.” And on Monday, when it won its fourth Pulitzer Prize, ProPublica was tweetstorming again.

1/ A little more news on the Pulitzer front: Our investigation into algorithms—led by @juliaangwin—was a finalist for Explanatory Reporting. pic.twitter.com/CeiqkxC5aG

— ProPublica (@ProPublica) April 10, 2017

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/04/with-its-new-no-bullshit-tone-on-social-propublica-is-meeting-realdonaldtrump-where-he-lives/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/from-the-unbanked-to-the-unnewsed-just-doing-good-journalism-wont-be-enough-to-bring-back-reader-trust/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/from-the-unbanked-to-the-unnewsed-just-doing-good-journalism-wont-be-enough-to-bring-back-reader-trust/#comments Wed, 29 Mar 2017 14:56:03 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=139410 Does any of that sound familiar to those of us in the media? The decline of print newspapers has replaced a set of trusted local businesses with distant giants in places like New York and D.C. The power of personal relationships means the quality of the friend sharing the news story on Facebook can seem more important than the quality of the news outlet producing it. The price of reading a print daily newspaper has soared as customer bases have shifted upmarket; most news sites are still free, but an increasing share of the best have put up paywalls. Swapping mass for niche media means there are plenty of top-notch news outlets targeting well-off, highly educated people, or demographically appealing young people — but fewer targeting everybody else. And as people feel increasingly disengaged from traditional institutions, the incentives to invest time in consuming high-quality news shrink. If you can’t really make a difference by becoming more informed, why not just take in “news” that’ll flatter your existing notions and give you the jolt of rage/pity/victimhood/schadenfreude you want?

One lesson I learned early on in news is that what journalists value and what their audiences value are often frustratingly misaligned. We see high-quality news outlets and low-quality ones and wonder why anyone would choose the latter over the former — just as a VP at Bank of America might wonder why anyone would use some place called EZChekNow instead of his tastefully appointed branch a couple strip malls over. But the decisions of customers aren’t driven solely by perceptions of “quality”; they’re also derived from more prosaic factors like customer service, cost, feelings of community and personal connection, and a sense that both sides of the transaction have similar interests at heart. In an environment where trust is no longer the default — where reading your local daily in the morning and watching a news broadcast at night have moved from standard to niche behavior — doing great journalistic work isn’t enough.

Photo of a payday lending store in Seattle by AP/Elaine Thompson.
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/from-the-unbanked-to-the-unnewsed-just-doing-good-journalism-wont-be-enough-to-bring-back-reader-trust/feed/ 8 https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/avid-consumers-of-local-news-are-often-also-more-engaged-members-of-their-local-communities/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/avid-consumers-of-local-news-are-often-also-more-engaged-members-of-their-local-communities/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2016 14:00:19 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=132898 Clinton vs. Trump (vs. Johnson vs. Stein vs. McMullin?!?!?!?!?!?!) is just one decision voters need to make next Tuesday on Election Day. Down-ballot races and statewide referenda are also critical to daily life in local communities, and local news outlets can be a critical source of information for voters. Are the people who are close followers of local news also more civically engaged members of their communities?

Those who always vote in their local elections and those who are very attached to their local communities often have a strong affinity for local news, according to a report on civic engagement and local news habits released Thursday by the Pew Research Center along with the Knight Foundation (disclosure: Knight is a supporter of Nieman Lab). These two characteristics are most strongly associated with strong local news habits — from interest in local news to number of sources followed and attitudes towards local news. The Pew data, however, doesn’t indicate whether closely following local news actually drives more civic engagement, or vice versa — just that these traits are linked (womp womp).



59 percent of U.S. adults who feel highly attached to their local communities also follow local news closely (more than twice the share of those who don’t feel similarly attached). 44 percent follow news “regularly” from three or more different local sources (17 percent do among the unattached), and 35 percent say their local outlets do a good job of keeping the public informed (only 13 percent of unattached think the same).

People highly attached to their communities are much more likely than those less attached to closely follow locally relevant news topics like crime, government, and politics. (The outlier topic, which both groups followed equally? Sports.)

Those who know all their neighbors — another indicator of one’s attachment to a local community — are associated with strong local news habits: 71 percent of those neighbor-knowers say local media outlets are in touch with their communities (vs. 49 percent for those who don’t know all their neighbors).

Always voting in local elections, too, is linked to strong local news habits: 52 percent of those who always vote follow local news closely (31 percent for those who don’t always vote). Regularly voting in just national is not linked to stronger enthusiasm for local news.

These two groups of people (the always voters and the very attached) also overlap a bit: 32 percent of regular voters say they’re highly attached to their communities, and 45 percent of those highly attached are regular voters. Other attributes Pew looked at, such as living in more politically diverse communities or actively participating in civic groups and political activities, were not quite so strongly connected to avid local news consumption.

The survey was conducted between January and February of this year, with 4,654 U.S. adults ages 18 and older. You can read the full report here.

Photo of voting booths in 1966 from the Clackamas County Historical Society used under a Creative Commons license.
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/avid-consumers-of-local-news-are-often-also-more-engaged-members-of-their-local-communities/feed/ 1 https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/03/newsonomics-the-new-york-times-re-invents-page-one-and-its-better-than-print-ever-was/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/03/newsonomics-the-new-york-times-re-invents-page-one-and-its-better-than-print-ever-was/#comments Mon, 07 Mar 2016 17:12:49 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=120681 Ah, the art of the broadsheet Page One, with its mystical above-the-fold, below-the-fold double secret handshake code, its photo telegraphing The Big Story, its fonts delivering nuance, and its italics offering their own sweet siren song of understanding? Our never-thought-about assumption: this is what newspapers should look like, and they did, city to city, nation to nation. We hardly considered it design; it just was.

Then, 20 years ago, many of us starting working on online news. In my early Knight Ridder New Media days, I remember vendors pitching me on the earliest e-editions — “digital replicas” of the print newspaper. To this day, many papers offer the easily produced replica (and replica-plus products), which maintain a surprising popularity with the older demographic. We knew, though, that the digital form had to be different than the print form. We figured we would figure out what that new form was fairly quickly. We didn’t.

We all now know that the digital revolution hasn’t been good for the newspaper-based business, with unending losses still defining the press. What we haven’t talked much about is how our failure to create a new, intuitive digital news reading metaphor has contributed to the chaos. Over 20 years, the desktop problem has persisted: Newspapers did not have a good way to let digital readers know the full breadth and depth of their daily production.

News, too often, dominated features and “lifestyle.” Our LIFO (last in, first out) headlining — each in the same typeface, at the same size — never conveyed the richness of the content, that stream of news that any good news organization offers its readers. Digital presentation oozed artlessness. Newspapers too often simply mimicked Google News, which had reproduced its snippetized “news” into a deadening list, letting its algorithms muddy meaning and value. Recency trumped relevance.

While the semi-beloved Page Ones, as limited as they were, offered an orderly, logical news report, Internet-delivered news has often reported in digitally drunk and disorderly.

Today, though, I want to celebrate a breakthrough. The New York Times smartphone products now have redefined Page One for the digital era. Finally, we have a model. Mobile can be harnessed to share the day’s news, and works far better to keep us informed than newsprint ever could.

For the first time, I see a newspaper-created product that seems utterly comfortable with the digital medium. It’s casual yet serious, with the hardest news of the day sidling up to winning features, commentary making an appearance where it makes sense and visuals of every variety — maps, graphics, photos, and illustrations — sized appropriately for a small screen. It’s information-dense, but not leaden. In a scan or a scroll of the moment’s news, readers can get a broad sense of what it indeed is happening. We also feel something we rarely have felt with digital newspaper products: playfulness.

“Obviously, it’s different,” said Steve Duenes, the Times associate managing editor for graphics. (See my separate interview with him this week.) “I mean [the print] Page One is [the important news of] the day, but this is…the Page One of the moment, in a way. For example, if you were following the coverage of the Paris attacks, you could see the scale of the story grow. You could see the different strands of the story that were getting covered and their presentations sort of settled into a logic for how we wanted to communicate that story.” Page One is a tough metaphor, but Duenes, 17-year Times veteran, made the association tangible. Speaking of the coverage of those attacks, he says, “We were able to introduce a hierarchy typographically, and then package parts of stories together with the team, for the phone. I think someone in the newsroom made a comparison to Page One.”

Now, dependably, topping the Times page is the Your Morning Briefing or Your Evening Briefing, doing in 10 or so points what Page One could never do. And tying it together is typography, too often the forgotten stepchild of our digital times. On the smartphone, the Times’ typography is elegant and used to signal differing kinds of content. For example, a bolder sans serif face tells you in an instant that a Sunday Magazine story is being released midweek.

The Times app is a harbinger of how the digital age can reward readers, journalists, and the business of journalism going forward. Over the past couple of years, we’ve also seen other newspaper-based design innovations. Two of the better ones have contributed to this next age. I find The Washington Post’s mobile display winning, but it’s a magazine scroll, lacking the proportion and editorial judgment that the Times has figured out how to introduce and maintain daily. The Guardian has figured out how to get a lot of its great work onto the page, but lacks the nuance and lightness of the Times. Buzzfeed, Vox and Slate, among others, all offer spirit and variety, but still look and feel boxy and/or listy.

The Times experience may be a good one, but does it drive the business forward? While the majority of news reading is now mobile — 55 percent or more — publishers have decried the lack of associated revenue. The Times, with its emphasis on reader revenue, believes it is cracking a code here: It is satisfying mobile audiences, and seeing subscription results. The company provided some key data points:

• “Based on our mid-spring [2015] iPhone homescreen redesign, we saw an increase in frequency of visits as well as higher article views and average time spent per user;
• Following the initial iPhone homescreen redesign, our new user retention improved with a lift of 20 percent at the first month; after six months, the new user retention has improved by 60 percent vs. the same period the prior year;
• In addition to mobile apps generating subscriptions, subscribers (print as well as digital exclusive subscribers) are accessing mobile at growing rates. In addition to viewing more content, subscribers who access mobile retain at a higher rate. On average, digital subscribers who use mobile have a 12 percent lift in one year retention vs subscribers who only use the desktop site (based on 2015 retention of 2014 starts).”

Kinsey Wilson, the Times’ executive vice president for product and technology, summed it up this way: “Part of the reason people subscribe is the breadth of our coverage, not just the depth and the authoritativeness of our reporting. Exposing that breadth is really important.” This is the moral of our little story: There’s a clear line we can draw between better products and growing revenue.

Most of the money comes from a few of the readers

Consider engagement and mobile innovation. While publishers may still talk unique visitors, they have finally come to realize that much of the money in the digital business is still to found from as little as 15 percent of the digital readership. The Times has found that about one out of eight digital readers drive its business. It’s no surprise that the only people who will pay are those who use the product.

So engagement — more minutes, now especially in mobile — drives subscription sales, retention, and the ability to increase prices over time. The Times now has that data, and the engaging nature of its smartphone products aligns nicely with its reader revenue strategy.

Can the Times hit CEO Mark Thompson’s goal of doubling its digital revenue to $800 million by 2020? Yes, according to the numbers I’ve crunched — but only if that engagement with the top 10 percent of the digital audience gets deeper and deeper over time.

This is an old-fashioned business philosophy: Give the customer more when you ask them to pay more. Amazingly, too few publishers today embrace that age-old tenet. The Times’ surpassingly high-quality content is worth the price of admission, but it’s in the product experience itself that the value of that content gets proven out.

In a very real sense, the digital display of news organizations has long masked their wealth of production. When Kinsey Wilson first arrived, and then quickly ascended, I asked him what he was making of the new experience. He said he hadn’t realized the breadth of what the Times produces every day. The Times produces 150 stories a day, 250 on Sunday. Yet most people will only read a minority of those stories.

If the Times can get readers to go deeper, and sideways, it will surprise them with all kinds of content they never knew was buried in the digital ether. In fact, another Times metric — one I haven’t heard cited by other publishers — is that a reader who reads two kinds of content regularly is more likely to become and stay a subscriber than a reader who reads only one, even if the number of pageviews is constant between the two. Variety may not only be the spice of life, but of subscription. As Mark Thompson has put it to me, “We are working the engagement curve.”

On the app, “we have gradually moved away from a more traditional top-story layout to one that is intended to make a statement about what the Times is all about and to give people a sense of the richness that’s there,” Wilson told me recently. “The implication is that the front screen is going to present the breadth and depth of The New York Times, as well as the most important stories of the day.”

In other words, it’s not a newspaper gone digital. It’s something else.

“We look at the way in which headlines and photos are handled so that an in-depth feature or a lighter piece gets a different treatment than a hard news story,” Wilson said. “You also need to build into your layout as much familiarity and predictability as you can, even though news is inherently unpredictable and changes all the time, so readers know what to expect when they go deeper.”

It’s all back to that engagement question, and how hard it is to gain — and keep — readers’ attention.

“There is so much that goes into getting somebody to click on a story,” said Wilson. “First, you need to telegraph as much as you can about what’s in the story that a reader won’t want to miss. One way to do that is to put the most essential element of the story, whether it’s a headline, a photo, or a pull quote, on that front card. We’re not all the way there, but that’s how we are approaching it.”

How the Times got here

It’s been a tortuous path, involving the reworking of content management system tools, newsroom workflow, and product capabilities across the company.

“Our 2015 redesign brought our codebase up to speed in many ways, but also helped us develop new technical and design approaches that we’re now spreading across the platform ecosystem,” Kate Harris, who has directed the Times’ mobile product development for four years, told me. Behind the scenes, it’s product development tools that make a difference. “Over time, we’ve been developing more and more tools to give editors the ability to express a story in a card format.” It’s not a discrete toolbox, ready to be plucked from for a breaking story. It’s more a shared way of doing things, a new newsroom/tech culture still developing.

Credit must go to the too-much-criticized NYT Now (“The newsonomics of NYT Now”). That product, launched in 2014 with a focus on millennials, failed to find a substantial new paying market, but its briefings-based, sharing-oriented way of presenting the news crunched new ground for the Times.

NYT Now founding editor Cliff Levy, who had iterated some of those innovations at a previous experiment (New York Today), deserves a nod here. Wilson credits NYT Now with several major innovations that are now being integrated into the main New York Times:

• Presenting a greater cross-section of what the Times publishes spanning culture, opinion, and sports;
• Using that fuller toolbox of typography, thumbnails and visuals to better express the range of stories offered;
• Presenting a finite list of stories so readers have a sense of completion
• Combining a select list of outside stories with Times content

That should be a four-point checklist for any news publisher. While the Times is the Times, the principles are sound.

The Times’ current smartphone product isn’t an endpoint; there’s plenty of work ahead. While the Times has managed to maintain much of the spunk of the NYT app (iOS and Android) in its browser products, its Kindle app suffers in comparison.

For now, though, the Times not only gives us a new Page One. It offers the first accessible model for the next generation of smartphone-delivered news. Further, it not only repairs the loss we’ve suffered with the decline of print, it points the way — finally — for how digital delivery of news can be smarter, wider, deeper and, eventually, more lucrative than what came before.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/03/newsonomics-the-new-york-times-re-invents-page-one-and-its-better-than-print-ever-was/feed/ 6 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/12/investigating-the-network-the-top-10-articles-from-the-year-in-digital-news-and-social-media-research/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/12/investigating-the-network-the-top-10-articles-from-the-year-in-digital-news-and-social-media-research/#respond Fri, 11 Dec 2015 18:57:39 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=118673 A nice piece of targeted empirical research with implications for news website UI and UX design, the study showed how site traffic could increase massively based on the aesthetic/functional qualities of the site — 90 percent in some cases. The study compared a contemporary “cleaner, photo-heavy scheme” versus a “more classic print-style layout.” The researchers also found that contemporary design could increase audience recall of the news content: “Layout matters, and it is consequential in terms of pageviews and what people recall from the news…Broadly, these results support news organizations experimenting with changes to their homepage, and considering a move from a more classic to a more contemporary design.” For more, see the Lab’s more detailed review.

The paper is meant as both a reality check for local news organizations and as a how-to for dealing with certain realities, namely: “The typical local newspaper gets about five minutes per capita per month in Web user attention, less than a local TV station earns in a single hour. Local newspaper traffic is just a rounding error on the larger Web.” Hindman notes that the “bottom line is that any successful strategy for digital local news requires sites to grow their audience…Audience growth is just as essential for plans that rely on selling subscriptions.” His recommendations including focusing on load times and personalized recommendation engines, as well as practicing A/B testing and optimizing content for social media. “The plight of newspapers is far worse than many journalists and editors realize,” Hindman concludes. Overall, his prescription is to focus on how to build consistent, repeat visitors, the idea of compounding “stickiness”: “Newspapers…need to rethink what they are optimizing for: not raw traffic, but audience growth. Small gains in stickiness can compound enormously over time.”

“Beyond Memorability: Visualization Recognition and Recall”: From Harvard, MIT and the University of Michigan, published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. By Michelle A. Borkin, Zoya Bylinskii, Nam Wook Kim, Constance May Bainbridge, Chelsea S. Yeh, Daniel Borkin, Hanspeter Pfister, and Aude Oliva.

The study provides some useful insights for news data visualization, and it serves as a good reminder that audiences need some help when interpreting visual information. The researchers conduct lab experiments with a variety of real-world graphics, including many from news organizations, and find that titles and text really help viewers interpret visuals and then recall information afterwards. Like them or not, pictograms — when done well — also facilitate recognition and recall. The keys to good data viz, according to the study, are: “having a good and clear presentation, making effective use of text and annotations, drawing a viewer’s attention to the important details, providing effective visual hooks for recall, and guiding the viewer through a visualization using effective composition and visual narrative.”

“Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook”: From Facebook and the University of Michigan, published in Science. By Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada Adamic.

This paper speaks to the ongoing debate over the power of algorithms and audience “filter bubbles.” It might seem strange for a company to need to study its own algorithm, but it’s a dynamic, complex software system. The researchers find that, although the algorithm does tailor news based on liberal or conservative leanings (and prior behavioral patterns), the filtering problem is minimal: “After [algorithmic] ranking, there is on average slightly less cross-cutting content: conservatives see approximately 5% less cross-cutting content compared to what friends share, while liberals see about 8% less ideologically diverse content.” The study took some heat for its methodological design and approach. See here and here for critiques. But overall, it stood as an important contribution that set the agenda for more discussion of algorithms and impacts.

“Tweeting From Left to Right: Is Online Political Communication More Than an Echo Chamber?”: From New York University, published in Psychological Science. By Pablo Barberá, John T. Jost, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A. Tucker, and Richard Bonneau.

This big data study joins a conversation about ideological segregation on Twitter that has taken place for several years now (see this column last year.) The sample size is enormous: almost 4 million Twitter users and 150 million tweets. The researchers find that ideological segregation — the proverbial “birds of a feather” phenomenon — is much more visible with explicitly political issues, and that on other national events, left and right often speak with one another. Two important other findings: “With respect to both political and nonpolitical issues, liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in cross-ideological dissemination,” and “previous work may have overestimated the degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage.”

“Interacting Is Believing: Interactivity, Social Cue, and Perceptions of Journalistic Credibility on Twitter”: From Hope College and Lehigh University, published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. By Mi Rosie Jahng and Jeremy Littau.

This study, which is based on an experiment involving about 150 students, suggests that journalists who engage more with audiences on Twitter increase their perceived credibility. Obviously, the results are limited by the experiment’s sample demographic. But it’s intriguing to contemplate how the very act of replying to the audience itself may bolster the standing of journalists. However, another 2015 study of journalist interactivity on Facebook — by Jayeon Lee of Lehigh, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication — produced somewhat contradictory findings and finds it can be a “double-edged sword”: In terms of professional dimensions, audience engagement diminished perceptions of journalists and associated news products.

“Changing deliberative norms on news organizations’ Facebook sites”: From the University of Texas at Austin, Purdue University, and the University of Wyoming, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. By Natalie Jomini Stroud, Joshua M. Scacco, Ashley Muddiman, and Alexander L. Curry.

This study looks at how journalists might promote better, richer, and more reasoned civic discourse about news by playing a stronger role in comment threads. The strength of the research is that it leverages a real-world field study and randomization to pinpoint effects. The researchers found that “reporter involvement was related to lower levels of incivility and greater use of evidence from commenters.” Overall, the study “provides evidence that an individual can affect norms in online comment spaces. And to a goal of promoting deliberative discussion online, this study offers support for a practice that can be enacted — engaging with commenters.” The research is part of the Engaging News Project’s important ongoing investigation of comment threads and the effects of journalistic engagement on civics and democracy.

Photo of students on their smartphones by Esther Vargas used under a Creative Commons license.
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/12/investigating-the-network-the-top-10-articles-from-the-year-in-digital-news-and-social-media-research/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/10/we-used-a-twitter-poll-to-ask-our-followers-if-they-use-ad-blockers-heres-what-we-learned/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/10/we-used-a-twitter-poll-to-ask-our-followers-if-they-use-ad-blockers-heres-what-we-learned/#respond Thu, 29 Oct 2015 19:28:47 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=116742 Twitter last week released its new poll feature, and users — at least the ones who’ve gotten access — have been asking their followers all sorts of important questions.

What should I eat for lunch today? Here's what I've found in the office kitchen:

— Joseph Lichterman (@ylichterman) October 26, 2015

Which wizard would you want on your squad

— Tweeted Polls (@TweetedPolls) October 27, 2015

Yesterday, we decided we wanted to try out a Nieman Lab poll, so we asked the big question of the day in medialand: whether our followers use an ad blocker. The poll was live for 24 hours; here’s what some of them had to say:

We're curious: do you use an ad blocker?

— Nieman Lab (@NiemanLab) October 28, 2015

The responses were almost even: 52 percent said they did use an ad blocker while 48 percent said they didn’t. (And, for the record, Shan Wang was the closest in our staff predictions oft the results.)



Though the results are far from scientific — our pool of 918 respondents was self-selecting and limited to Twitter users who came upon @NiemanLab in their feed — but they offer up some interesting insights into both ad blocker usage and the limitations of the Twitter poll tool.

It’s hard to know how many people use ad blockers — not least because the technology that blocks ads also often blocks the analytics tools one might use to measure the behavior. A study released this summer by PageFair and Adobe said nearly 200 million people globally use ad blockers, an increase of 41 percent from the year before. Still, just a minority of Internet users are actually using ad blockers: 16 percent of U.S. Internet users block ads, according to the report. Those percentages are slightly higher in Europe though. In Germany, 25.3 percent of Internet users block ads and 20.3 percent of British Internet users are using ad blockers.

All that said, PageFair sells ad-blocker-blocking services to publishers, so they’re not a neutral party here. And their study was conducted before Apple launched ad blocking capabilities in the latest iteration of its iOS mobile operating system, so those figures are surely higher now.



Ad revenue supports many online publications, of course, which use that money to employ journalists. Those journalists then, in turn, make up a healthy slice of Nieman Lab’s audience — and presumably of the respondents to our Twitter poll. /giphy irony!

Twitter polls are anonymous, so we don’t know who responded to our question. They’re also limited by the fact that you can only ask questions with two answers — so forget about squeezing any nuance out of the data. Another downside: They currently only show up on twitter.com and in the native Twitter apps, so if you’re using TweetDeck or a third-party Twitter app, you won’t see the poll.

Perhaps in part because of those factors, many users replied to our tweets with their answers instead of/in addition to answering the poll:

@NiemanLab yup, but I turn it off on the sites I choose to support

— Chris Sutcliffe (@chrismsutcliffe) October 28, 2015

@NiemanLab @caseyjohnston in defensive mode, yeah. Blacklist the baddies, but give em a chance first.

— Owen Williams (@ow) October 28, 2015

@NiemanLab yes, essential for privacy protection and anti malvertisement

— Markus Karlsson (@MarkusKarlsson) October 28, 2015

@NiemanLab no, religious reasons

— Eric (@eric_analytics) October 28, 2015

@NiemanLab I do. I recently switched if off for The Guardian when a message came up on their site telling me it threatened their business.

— cornelius spark (@corneliusspark) October 28, 2015

Despite the limitations of Twitter polls, they’re still a fun way to engage with your followers on Twitter and at least ask basic questions.

Twitter just added polling abilities to my account, and the timing couldn't be better! December Fed hike?

— Pedro da Costa (@pdacosta) October 28, 2015

You can help choose our Twitter cover photo! Which photo would you like to see win? Have your say in our poll. #COYS

— Tottenham Hotspur (@SpursOfficial) October 26, 2015

And, while we’re at it, we’ll leave you with one more poll to answer:

We wrote an article about Twitter polls. Will you read and share it? https://t.co/kQ69fzmBbe

— Nieman Lab (@NiemanLab) October 29, 2015

Photo by Matt Brown used under a Creative Commons license.
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/10/we-used-a-twitter-poll-to-ask-our-followers-if-they-use-ad-blockers-heres-what-we-learned/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/09/newsonomics-at-the-times-the-need-for-a-private-owner-is-l-a-consequential/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/09/newsonomics-at-the-times-the-need-for-a-private-owner-is-l-a-consequential/#comments Fri, 18 Sep 2015 13:45:52 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=114731 It’s a trademark line of Austin Beutner’s: “I cannot imagine Los Angeles without a vibrant L.A. Times.”

As anyone who follows media knows, the Los Angeles Times publisher’s imagination short-circuited the day after Labor Day, when he was fired by Tribune Publishing CEO Jack Griffin (“Tribune to fire L.A. Times publisher Austin Beutner”). Unfortunately, too many citizens and readers can imagine that day. Today, the Times can only claim a household reach of 7.4 percent in the L.A. designated market area. That’s right: Only one of 14 households take the paper. Yes, the Times’ digital reach is much greater, but that print reach number tells the story of civic decline.

It’s the place of the Times in greater L.A. — the digital, print, and in-person Times — that should drive the Tribune/Times story forward. Don’t be distracted by the sometimes-cartoonish depictions of the drama. We’ve seen all the familiar storylines quickly dusted off: Chicago vs. L.A. Chain vs. local. CEO vs. publisher. Tyrant vs. hero. Billionaire philanthropist vs. corporate chieftains. While each offers elements of truths, they don’t offer the insight we need.

In short, it’s the Austin Beutner model — however flawed anyone thinks its execution was, or would be — that should compel us. It’s what makes this particular tale of newspaper chaos distinguishable from the long list of examples elsewhere. It’s what makes the L.A. Times case consequential to news publishers everywhere, and what makes the coming fight over the Times’ ownership a point of national interest.

The civic argument

Yes, the words “community” and “Los Angeles” haven’t been a perfect duo.

Yet, at the Times, that word — even, in Los Angeles, the place Dorothy Parker (perhaps apocryphally) called “72 suburbs in search of a city” — assumed a central editorial and business role in the short Beutner era.

In his Facebook post upon being fired, Beutner laid out his strategy once again:

I agreed to become the Publisher and CEO of the Times because I believe in Los Angeles and recognize the unique role the Times plays in our community. It is the civic conscience which holds accountable those with power in Los Angeles, helps celebrate what is good in our community, and provides news and information to help us better understand and engage with the world around us…the Los Angeles and California story really does begin here at the Times.

In a matter of months, Beutner mapped a different, involved future for the Times. His own one-hour televised and streamed interview with Gov. Jerry Brown on California’s drought drew the most attention. What drew less was a budding business motive that sprouted from it, a possible topical focus on water. Some new ad money from irrigation and drilling companies literally opened a small but intriguing tap of new revenue.

He intended that Brown forum to be a prototype for a series of Times forums to shine light on community issues, to be accompanied by to-the-point Times’ journalistic coverage.

On a more enduring issue, the Times announced its new education focus with the August-launched Education Matters. The intention: Serve the audiences of parents, educators, and children as distinct ones, and to pivot coverage accordingly. Some detractors may paint it as naive, but read through the announcement and see what you think of this idea to make L.A. Times newly essential to its communities.

Essential: That’s a key word in the strategy. In fact, the Times’ first big newsletter foray is called Essential California, and it has already begun building a list of known readers — the same strategy now being successful plied at best-practice national sites from the New York Times to Quartz.

Being essential served as Beutner’s attempted antidote to the Times’ increasing irrelevance to the wider community. (How much has the Times lost its central importance to a city whose agenda it once, for good and bad, set? Consider that in 1999, it had “more than 1,000 staff members — editors, reporters and photographers,” a daily circulation of more than a million and a Sunday circ of 1.3 million. More here on the 1999/2015 comparison at Kevin Roderick’s L.A. Observed.)

If all of that seems goo-goo nice-making, let’s note that a profit-making motive rode alongside. In the few months the strategy has been in place, it may be able to count just a couple to several new millions of dollars of revenues, if that. The bigger plan, which I outlined in May (“What are they thinking? Austin Beutner’s California turnaround plan”) included new ad sponsorships, native advertising, events income, general and niche reader subscriptions and more, largely again borrowing from the playbook of what we’ve seen nationally. In that column, I noted Beutner’s plan would easily take three to five years to be tested.

Beutner also reached out more widely to L.A.’s majority non-white communities, both in his hires and in his intended products. His new emerging teams at the Times sometimes left him, ironically, the only older white guy in the room.

It’s noteworthy that both Latino communities and African-American politicians have supported him publicly since he was fired; the Times hasn’t always had the greatest relationships with the new L.A.

Word is that even parts of the newsroom were coming along, although it’s hard to how big those parts were — or may be. (Anyone who’s been around this business knows that waiting for whole newsroom buy-in is an impossible proposition.)

All of these initiatives raised eyebrows at Tribune’s Chicago HQ; they weren’t part of Griffin’s own turnaround plan. They were audacious and could only be led by someone with as big an ego as Beutner. Beutner was doubly the man for the job.

Now, maybe Austin Beutner may not be the best guy to lead a rededication of the Times as a muscular player in the journalism and life of the city. Though everyone proclaims him to be “the smartest guy in the room,” he had never been a publisher, or a media guy, before. Some say his inexperience with the basic blocking and tackling demanded of a publisher complicated the change he sought, and that he hadn’t yet figured out how to line up his commercial management ducks in a row. None of that would be surprising, and I’m sure it would be vexing to any involved. At the same time, let’s remember that the Times had seen only one year of this kind of change — though God knows it’s been buffeted by so many changes in management over the years as to turn even an optimistic analyst cynical. Importantly — to the point of the civic strategy — he’s the guy who stepped forward.

What is L.A.’s civic interest worth, to whom?

This question of the Times’ future is still open; expect it to be resolved in weeks rather than months. Businessman/philanthropist — and friend of Austin Beutner — Eli Broad has already tried to buy the Times and its now-sister San Diego Union-Tribune, which was bought by Tribune and put into a single California News Group company four months ago (“Newsonomics: Tribune Publishing wraps its arms around San Diego — and all of Southern California”). In fact, the Tribune board rejected his expression of interest at the same meeting two weeks ago at which Beutner was fired. This week, the 82-year-old Broad is fixated another big project: He’s opening the Broad Museum, a $140 million investment that will house the art collection of Broad and his wife Edye.

Behind the scenes, though, there’s much strategizing. Broad signed his name, along with the 50-plus other L.A. leaders, including two former mayors (though not, conspicuously, the current one) in calling for Tribune to return to local control of the paper. His interest remains, and his pockets are deep, at a net worth of more than $7 billion. In a cash game, Tribune can’t play. But it’s not yet a cash game. The Tribune board rejected Broad’s overture — he didn’t name a number, wanting to see current financials — and last night Tribune issued a statement saying it was “deeply committed to…the communities of Southern California” and called the Times and U-T “a cornerstone of our Company’s portfolio and a key component to our success in the future.”

But that’s likely just a first step in this process. If Broad is willing to consider a bid for all of Tribune’s nine properties, the game will be on.

Two years ago, Broad — then partnered with Beutner — was willing to buy all the Tribune’s papers. Then, you’ll recall, the apparition of Koch Brothers jittered the landscape, and Tribune decided to spin the papers into a separate company rather than sell them.

Given the spirit and possibly letter of the Revlon principle, Tribune’s board must listen to legitimate bids that are in its best interest. Whose best interest? Not the readers’, or the community’s, of course; we haven’t yet found that legal principle in U.S. law. What matters is the financial interest of the Tribune’s shareholders. The largest, at 15 percent, is Oaktree Capital Management, headed by Bruce Karsh, himself a significant L.A. player.

A sale would undoubtedly force change in Tribune management, and likely in its current strategies, but it’s the price — the number — that will matter most if Broad proceeds. Even if he doesn’t, there’s now much stir in L.A. about local ownership, Beutner having shown a new light on what may be possible for a revivified Times. Could Beutner himself be a funder of the deal? He’s got at least some of the money to get a deal done, but may not want to go it alone.

What’s TPUB worth? Less than it was a year ago. Its share price is down by about 60 percent. With a market cap of $285 million and debt, after cash, of about $360 million, it will take less to buy Tribune papers than it did a year ago. We can figure that the new combined Times/U-T may be worth a third to 40 percent of the company.

Tribune, unsurprisingly, has been very quiet, saying publicly that it was “grateful” for the rush of civic concern that’s made itself known over the past week. Then, Thursday, its board issued a “vote of confidence” in Jack Griffin’s plan and Beutner’s successor, new publisher Tim Ryan.

Civic leaders, the L.A. City Council, and L.A. County of Supervisors have all recently run to the barricades to demand local leadership and ownership, plus the restoration of the Beutner order. Meanwhile, Ryan, who came directly from Tribune’s Baltimore Sun, owns the unpleasant task of implementing deep budget cuts that Beutner wouldn’t. By the end of the month, we expect newsroom cuts nearing 10 percent of the 500-strong workforce, in addition to other organizational efficiencies.

While community and civic interest may be the biggest story here, the question will turn out to be: What is L.A.’s civic interest worth, to whom? (And we should note, despite Beutner’s strategic intentions, the city of San Diego — California’s second largest — has become a bit player.)

Newspapers’ public face

Tribune Publishing has assumed the role of the heavy in the so-far largely local drama. National media are working angles, while the Times’ coverage of the intrigue has been fair but meager, and certainly not ahead of the story.

In my early conversations with Jack Griffin, I could hear his intention to make both the journalism and the business better. Now, though, in the pressure-packed, quarterly-earnings-driven world he’s chosen to live in, time isn’t on his side. Unlike Beutner, Griffin didn’t believe he had much time to spend on imagining. Instead, he’s had to deal with financial analysts and investors who care only a little about 2017 and who, in some cases, understand next to nothing about the local newspaper business.

It was a year ago that Griffin took on the near-impossible task of turning around a single-class public newspaper company, in public, on a digital dime. His five-point transformation plan hasn’t yet shown transformative results. While Beutner had plotted out the longer-term vision, beginning to put a team into a place that could achieve it, he refused to play his bosses’ shorter-term, care-about-the-quarterlies game. Further, suffering fools, or company foolishness, is not one of Beutner’s core competencies, and, he does little to disguise it. All that explains why this arranged marriage — put in place by Tribune Publishing board chairman Eddy Hartenstein, the Times’ former publisher who has made himself noticeably scarce since the firing — was fated to fail. That it lasted a year is remarkable, though the increasing financial pressures and corporate organizational changes I’ve noted brought it to a head.

Consequently, the public sees a Tribune — despite Griffin’s best efforts — playing a lot more defense than offense. Beutner is all about offense, and not much of a team player for a team he never really wanted to be on.

Consider the wider context. Consider all the publishers nationwide taking meat cleavers to their 2016 budgets. That’s the context in which Griffin and Tribune must try to move forward. In general, the newspaper business is worse off this year than last year, down maybe two or three points of revenue from 2014, something we know from both public newspaper company financials and many conversations.

How bad is it? Well, newspapers’ trade group, the Newspaper Association of America, still hasn’t published its final 2014 data, now four months late. Just in the last two days, we’ve heard of one of Montreal’s two big dailies dropping daily print, of the New York Daily News considering the Advance model of non-daily printing — and of Advance itself, at New Orleans’ Times-Picayune, cutting another 21 percent of its newsroom, telling us its model isn’t working out quite as well as planned.

At the same time, the big national publishers are investing in technology to gain leverage in advertising sales, in analytics, and in content creation and distribution. This Age of Distribution (“BuzzFeed and The New York Times play Facebook’s ubiquity game”) heavily favors scale, as in national and global. That’s a further blow to regional publishers operating on a shoestring. As the Lab’s Joshua Benton recently summed up the current condition so well: “As giant platforms rise, local news is getting crushed.”

Crushed.

Josh and I are among those who’ve been searching for words to describe the devastation we’re witnessing. I’ve tried to describe it in numbers (“Newsonomics: The halving of America’s daily newsrooms”) and in prose, out of the ongoing Digital First Media debacle (“Newsonomics: When news companies are no longer built to last”). Folks, fellow citizens, this is a news emergency. As our eyes fixate on the Trump circus, we know less and less about our communities every day.

Private, long-term

Language alone would seem to imply that a public news company would operate in the public’s interest. Given the industry’s turmoil, though, we’re seeing nearly the opposite. You might think that a public company would think long-term, but that’s not the way public markets work.

So we get to the word private. A not-very-public-service seeming term, right? We’re used to nonprofit, maybe, signifying a public good, but other than two handfuls of great nonprofit news organizations (think ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, and the Center for Investigative Reporting nationally, and Texas Tribune, MinnPost, and Voice of San Diego regionally) news nonprofits of scale have filled only a small part of the vacuum created by newspapers’ decline.

One of those nonprofits making a major contribution is L.A.’s KPCC public radio station, which pays a staff of 100 to cover L.A. In his own recent Facebook post, KPCC president Bill Davis said:

The point is that newspaper publishers who don’t meet their revenue and margin targets rarely stay in their positions very long. Newspapers are for-profit, commercial enterprises. I liked Beutner’s championing of local coverage, civic engagement and even membership — probably b/c a lot of it could have been lifted straight out of KPCC’s strategic planning documents. But I also know that the public media model is profoundly different from the commercial model and doesn’t translate well into for-profit structures.

Davis’ point is on the mark, but describes a world that is now vanishing: publicly owned, profitable newspapers that could also do a lot of community good. I think we’ve got to revisit these notions of expected community service and what private now means.

Private. I’ve sometimes made light of the small — but significant — trend of billionaires buying newspapers, calling it Billionaire Bingo. It’s a lottery of sorts. Every billionaire, like every chocolate in Forrest Gump’s box, is different, and you don’t know what you may get. We do know, two years into billionaires trending, that the news readers of Washington (Jeff Bezos’ Post), Boston (John Henry’s Globe) and the Twin Cities (Glen Taylor’s Star Tribune) are better off for the billionaire buying of the local paper. They are the 50/50 men — strong business instincts married with civic interest — and they may be the best current hope on the landscape. At Bloomberg View, Justin Fox explains well why he’s come around to the same point of view.

Which brings us back to the Los Angeles questions, of truths and consequences. At this point, it’s harder to see a better consequence for the readers of the Times under public Tribune control than under private ownership, led by Eli Broad or someone else. We know the former is likely to bring a big newsroom cut and, given all the history of the last eight years, more cuts to follow. That’s the only sure way that Tribune — just like its peers — can promise an even future cashflow to increasingly skeptical investors. We know that the latter — assuming Austin Beutner and his civic strategy return — may create a better future. We also know that without that return, we’re unlikely to see this kind of laboratory in civic-building business transformation tested elsewhere soon. And that would be just another small tragedy in the extended, tragic decline of the American local press.

Photo of L.A. skyline from Griffith Park by Darin Kim used under a Creative Commons license.
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Editor’s note: Public media relies on its users — its listeners, its viewers, its readers — for much of its support. But as the disruption of media continues apace, there are some who are concerned those patterns of support may not carry over as users’ habits shift.

Melody Kramer has spent several weeks here at the Nieman Foundation as a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow, examining a set of questions around that issue. How can the bedrock concept of public media support — “membership” — be broadened and strengthened? How can people contribute to their local stations through something other than money? And how can public radio and television become more ingrained, more essential, to the communities they serve?

I’m pleased to share her report with you — I hope it’ll be read widely both inside and outside public media. If you’re interested in what she’s launching out of her research, Media Public, sign up here.

Executive summary

Executive summary

Key findings

Introduction

The dominant way to pledge support: Financial support

What do members currently receive in exchange for giving?

Different ways to pledge support: Current volunteer efforts

Different ways to pledge support: In the community

Different ways to pledge support: Universities

Different ways to pledge support: Remote contributions

Different ways to pledge support: Code

Different ways to pledge support: Story ideas and sourcing

Finding new potential members: Where to go?

Key takeaways

Acknowledgments

Last summer, public media consultant Mark Fuerst interviewed 40 front-line development professionals at public media stations. Fuerst noted that the people he interviewed expressed concerns about the continued effectiveness of their ability to raise money over time. Two-thirds of the membership directors at radio-only licensees reported that both incoming pledge drive calls and online pledge had declined. Six of the 15 radio-only licensees reported a decline of over 10 percent.1

These trends, coupled with continuing changes in patterns in public radio consumption,2 demand new approaches to thinking about the sustainability of the current membership model. Individuals supplied 34% of funding to member stations in 2013, and the importance of pledge revenue to stations’ bottom lines, as Fuerst notes, is “impossible to overstate.” As modes of listening shift, however, it will become increasingly difficult to cultivate donors using the traditional methods of fundraising.

What, then, is the alternative? How can we encourage people to become invested in the future of public media, both as listeners and as members? In this report, I describe the results of a multi-method effort to detail an alternative membership model for public media stations. This model is based not on the pledge drive (or on cultivating sustaining donors or large donors,3 as many stations seek to do), but on building an infrastructure that allows community members to contribute to their stations in a variety of ways, including non-financial means.4 It takes as its starting point the understanding that building relationships with potential donors leads to their sustained support — in the form of time, money, and advocacy on behalf of the station.

Key findings

Why do we need a new membership model?

• A failure in the coming years to push outside the existing envelope of membership will leave audience growth stalled, potential support diverted, and significant amounts of funding on the table.
• Studies of both baby boomer and millennial volunteers suggest that they are looking for meaningful volunteer experiences in which they can use their professional skills, and that many nonprofits have not developed programs to take full advantage of these talents. The current pledge-based model fails to leverage the unique contributions these groups might make — particularly with respect to the ways in which they could activate their own social networks to increase the impact of their contributions.

What could a new membership model look like?

There are a number of ways in which community members could contribute to their local stations — thereby building connections with both contributors and potential donors.

• Remote membership: Community members could receive one year of station membership by remotely digitizing, tagging, and transcribing a certain amount of audio or video material that would allow stations to resurface their existing archives and generate new revenue streams.
• Partnerships: Stations could partner with existing civic hacking organizations or developer bootcamps in their communities to create maps and interactives for reporting projects, like this Election Night map that was created by the civic tech group Code for DC in conjunction with WAMU. Stations could offer to host these groups and extend year-long memberships to them for contributing their skills and expanding the reach of a station’s reporting.
• Universities: At university-licensed stations, students could be made members for working on semester-long capstone projects to benefit the station. In the process, students would gain real-world experience for their portfolios, and stations could benefit from new talent working on specific projects.
• In the community: Community members could come together — at the station — to user test new websites, share story ideas, edit articles on Wikipedia with citations from station stories, or chat about the news. They could host a listening party, or pledge to share a certain number of station stories on social media, or write hand-written thank you notes or birthday cards to other community members. All of these tasks could be tied to membership.

At the end of the first year of non-financial membership, these contributors could be asked how they would like to renew their membership: By volunteering additional time, recruiting additional volunteers, and/or donating financially.

What are the challenges to implementation?

• Communications silos exist at many stations between departments. Volunteer coordinators and membership departments rarely, if ever, communicate with the newsroom. At a lot of stations, they even sit on different floors. This means that almost no opportunities currently exist for people to contribute their time or a skill for a newsroom or within programming departments. Similarly, online communication is largely segregated between departments and networks. There are at least seven public media Facebook groups, one Slack channel, and several listservs that cater to different types of employees in public radio. Information sharing between these groups is limited and constricted by the platforms themselves, which are often hidden and don’t necessary surface information to everyone in the group.
• Communication silos also exist between stations.5 If Station A creates an open source widget with a civic hacking group, for example, there are few existing ways to share knowledge that the widget exists with other stations, so they can focus their work on other projects.
• Many stations6 do not offer ways for volunteers to contribute professional skills to their local stations. As a result, stations are missing opportunities to engage people who have little interest in traditional volunteer activities (e.g., clerical work, pledge drives) but who are motivated by opportunities to contribute and develop professional skills,7 meet and network with other professionals in their communities, and contribute to projects they deem meaningful or important.8
• New members are currently placed into a database and funneled through a series of automated events. For example, once someone becomes a traditional member of a public radio station, they receive direct mail and emails starting in the ninth month after pledging which ask them to renew their membership. (There is a direct way to turn these off, which would involve giving non-traditional members a user-generated code to exclude them from these mailings or change the mailings they would receive.)

How can these challenges be addressed? What are the next steps?

• Public media must break down current communications silos between departments, between stations, and between online forums. These communication challenges are not specific only to public media, but public media’s funding model can only be strengthened with more collaboration and shared knowledge.
• Public media can look to other organizations that have grappled with the same questions — from libraries to food cooperatives to museums to airlines — to see how they’ve approached membership, and what it means to be a member.
• Public media must continue to challenge and then test current assumptions about engagement and membership. This can be done running experiments, measuring the outcomes of those experiments, iterating on the results — and sharing the results publicly. For example, several stations are currently running year-long pilot tests with me to see whether non-financial forms of membership yield positive outcomes.
• Public media stations can help connect community members with each other, using the public radio station as a platform for doing so. Providing a way for people to meet and more deeply connect with each other helps create connections that can strengthen the community with and through the public radio station.
• Public media must build and use platforms that allow people to collaborate. For the second part of this project, I am working with several developers to adapt a platform that will allow stations to post projects that they need help with, and give community members the ability to both sign up for those projects and become members in return. We are also building several other tools to strengthen communication and allow for better knowledge-sharing and collaboration between stations.

The remainder of the report is organized as follows. First, I detail how public radio stations currently offer membership. Then, I detail the ways in which stations could strengthen their relationship with their communities by asking them for non-financial support — and look at the way several other organizations approach membership, engagement, and sustainability, and what public media can learn from them. Lastly, I detail key takeaways and recommend next steps.



Introduction

Public broadcasting is part of the fabric of our civic democracy. It helps inform and educate the public, and it does so without being beholden to advertising dollars. If we want public media to continue to be able to play this role, then we need to think about new and invigorating ways of defining membership and redefining the public’s relationship with public media.9

The concepts of membership and loyalty have a long history in the fields of social psychology and organizational behavior. In general, this research shows that people who identify with an organization describe themselves to others in terms of that organization. For example, people who identify with public media are likely to describe themselves as NPR listeners on social networks and on dating websites.10 And when people identify with an organization, they exhibit higher and longer-term levels of loyalty and are more likely to formalize their identification by becoming members through donations.

Though membership11 has always been a core part of public media, public radio12 has been grappling with new questions concerning membership and listener loyalty over the past several years. The traditional form of building membership and leveraging organizational loyalty — the pledge drive — has declined in effectiveness, and new conversations are beginning about how to recruit and retain members who access content off-air.

The existing membership model for public radio is largely based on a single assumption: that people who want to listen to the kind of high-quality programming that public radio provides will eventually find and then listen to public radio — on the radio, in the car, or on a mobile device. But the assumption that public radio provides a particular type of listening experience may no longer be accurate. As Kevin Roose noted last October, 50 percent of all cars sold in 2015 are connected to the Internet, and 100 percent of cars will be connected by 2025. Though many stations have developed mobile apps, and NPR has developed mobile apps and continues to create experiences for connected cars, several for-profit podcasts and podcast networks — like Gimlet, 538, Midroll, BuzzFeed, and Slate13 — now sound virtually indistinguishable from the NPR aesthetic,14 and will grow alongside other podcasts15 as they become easier to access in the car, which remains the primary listening place for audio. (Forty-four percent of all audio listening now takes place there.)

The rise of connected cars will also require new techniques to engage current millennials16 and Generation Y-ers, who are not likely to age into the same listening,17 commuting,18 or donation habits as previous generations. Millennials are more likely than baby boomers to give small amounts of money to a lot of organizations,19 and may be more likely to invest in a one-off Kickstarter campaign that makes them feel like part of a larger community or cohort than to become a reoccurring donor or sustaining member.20) Like their parents, however, they’re more likely to support or invest in an organization if they feel some connection to the organization, its mission, or the benefits of becoming a member.

These trends demand new ways of thinking about public media membership and about the kinds of relationships people have with their public radio stations.21 More active donor relationships, which lead to greater donor loyalty, can be cultivated through building trust with people, increasing the number of two-way interactions with potential donors, and by teaching people the importance of the organization itself.22

These interactions don’t always have to start with acquiring financial donations. In this playbook, I articulate how stations can cultivate other kinds of relationships with the public that will lead to stronger and more loyal advocates for public media.23 A failure in the coming years to push outside the existing envelope of membership will leave audience growth stalled, potential support diverted, and significant amounts of funding on the table.

The dominant way to pledge support: Financial support

There are several different ways the public can currently donate to a member station.24 Most of these are financially-based donations. The WNYC website lists nine different donation methods for the public, including donating money, participating in an employee matching program, donating a vehicle, creating legacy gifts, donating stocks, and purchasing tickets to events.

Some public radio station websites make it difficult for people who would like to give a one-time only gift. “They’re less welcoming to the $25/50 donors,” a veteran public radio membership consultant told me. “There’s been a major shift towards sustainable donors.”

Sustainable donors pledge annual donations to a station. They have changed the dynamics of stations’ annual pledge drives. Fewer people are calling into the pledge drives because sustaining donors have already agreed to be automatically renewed indefinitely. (Upgrading sustainers to higher annual levels and/or additional gifts are also key parts of current sustainer best practices.)

Other key innovations related to financial support include the following:

• KQED allows donors to contribute instantly on mobile using SquareCash.
• An app developed by students at the University of Missouri’s Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute allows people to make microdonations to stations.25
• Several shows and networks, notably Planet Money, have used Kickstarter to fund specific campaigns such as Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt. KBBI in Alaska recently created an IndieGoGo campaign to buy new broadcast equipment.



What do members currently receive in exchange for giving?

Nine interviews were conducted with membership leads between May 8, 2015 and May 29, 2015. Other station information was found on station websites.

Most stations in the top 100 markets give members some of the following benefits for contributing financially:

• A one-time only gift, like a mug, tote bag, or tree planted in their honor
• A Membership Card which has local discounts
• An automatic subscription to a digital newsletter that promotes programs, events, and station news

Donors who contribute at higher levels often receive:

• Invitations to exclusive events
• Invitations to live broadcasts
• Invitations to small-group gatherings at the station
• Personal tours of the station

A few stations also offer some unique perks for members:26

• WUTC allows donors at a certain level to become a DJ for an hour and share their favorite music with the listening audience.
• KRCL in Utah is experimenting with creating podcasts with a handful of people. The people have an expertise or interest in the podcast they’re creating. In exchange for access to resources, the station requests a 3-minute-long piece for use on broadcast and the web.

Different ways to pledge support: Current volunteer efforts

Many stations run robust volunteer programs, but the ways in which people can contribute are limited. Most often, these volunteers help the station by:

• Doing light clerical work
• Working the phones during pledge drives
• Volunteering at station events

Two stations of the nine interviewed grant membership perks to volunteers, though this information is not mentioned on their membership pages. One station grants membership for a year to qualified volunteers; the other gives a member card, but not membership, to volunteers who contribute 50 hours.

Case Study: Louisville Public Media

Louisville Public Media (LPM) is an independent, community-supported nonprofit corporation that comprises three public radio stations: 89.3 WFPL News, Classical 90.5 WUOL, and 91.9 WFPK. The stations receive no city or state support. Ninety-three percent of their funding comes from the local community, including 42% from membership.

The stations have more than 200,000 weekly listeners and a robust volunteer program. During their pledge drives, more than 500 volunteers come to the station to help. Another 327 volunteers help out year-round and are emailed once or twice a month with ways to help the station. Thirty-four percent of all of LPM’s current volunteers are also financial donors. Of the active year-round volunteers, 60% are active members, 20% are lapsed donors, and 20% have never donated financially — despite actively volunteering.

Membership manager Kelly Wilkinson is participating in Media Public’s pilot program and plans to make the active volunteers who have not donated financially full-fledged members of LPM for the next year.

“They’ll receive a free monthly magazine subscription to the Louisville Magazine and a free lunch anytime they want to come to one of our free lunchtime concerts, and they’ll get all of the perks that we email our members every week,” says Kelly.

After eight months, the volunteers will receive communication asking them how they would like to renew their membership: with a financial contribution or with another set of volunteer hours.

And what could volunteers do? Kelly imagines a lot. “We have a storage room here full of magnetic reel-to-reel tapes that we’d love to convert,” he says.

Kelly also tells me about a Summer Listening Program that Classical 90.5 WUOL runs for young people.

“It’s like a summer reading club,” he says. “There’s a couple of hundred kids who participate. They receive a list of classical songs that they have to listen to, and our program director puts out information about each song, along with emails and videos.”

This year, Kelly is thinking about making the kids who participate in the listening program members as well. The idea to make young people members is similar to something National Park Service has implemented for next year. They have started a program to give all 4th graders in the United States a year-long park pass to the National Parks.

The White House says the idea is to get kids into safe outdoor spaces, and to make it easier for children to be outside instead of in front of screens. I suspect it also has some substantial additional benefits. Many of those fourth graders — not to mention younger and older siblings, parents, cousins, grandparents, friends, etc. — will eventually:

• Identify as supporters of the National Park Service.
• Feel a sense of satisfaction and loyalty when thinking about their relationship with the National Park Service.
• Value the experience they had in the National Parks and want to share it with their own children.
• Advocate for the future existence of the National Park Service.
• Recognize the National Parks system for the indispensible public resource it is.

Kelly says he is interested in tracking whether the young listeners who receive a similar benefit from his station will grow up to identify as supporters of public radio. This is an experiment well worth testing in other markets as well.

Different ways to pledge support: In the community

Currently, station volunteers contribute most of their time and efforts to the membership and/or events departments at a station.27 Fewer opportunities exist for people to contribute within the newsroom or in programming.28

WYSO in Yellow Springs, OH is one notable exception. The station has ongoing volunteer opportunities for those with experience in journalism, research, editing, oral histories, and photography. The station also runs a program called Community Voices, which trains local people in recording and editing commentaries for use on their airwaves.

Neenah Ellis, WYSO’s general manager, also tells me about an additional program the station runs for young professionals. Called NextUp, the program brings together young people in the Dayton area to volunteer at events in the area.

“They set up a table and act as a presence for us,” says Ellis. “And it’s great because they’re able to meet each other and think ‘WYSO’s cool and brought us together.'”

Many of the stations I analyzed do not currently offer ways for volunteers to contribute professional skills to their local stations. As a result, stations are missing opportunities to engage people who have little interest in traditional volunteer activities (e.g., clerical work, pledge drives) but who are motivated by opportunities to contribute and develop professional skills,29 meet and network with other professionals in their communities, and contribute to projects they deem meaningful or important.30

There are fears across the system that having volunteers complete tasks will take away work from existing or future employees. The tasks I outline throughout this report are not designed to compete against professional roles at a station, but rather to help strengthen the whole system as well as a station’s ability to focus on more specialized tasks and complete and/or strengthen existing work.

There are many different ways stations could benefit from professional volunteers. Here are example activities that could help both a station and a person contributing non-financially. Contributors could:

• Lead discussion groups or workshops at the station to teach station employees and/or the community skills.
• Photograph or videotape events at the station.
• Conduct oral histories for the station for air.
• Donate design or creative talents to the newsroom or programming departments to create teasers or promos for material.
• Test new websites or answer surveys that will help the station.
• Suggest story ideas or sources for stations to cover.
• Help digitize and add metadata to content.
• Host events at the station, like this dating night hosted by WNYC, which brings new people into the physical space of the station.

If these events are held in person, community members could meet one another, develop new professional skills, learn more about the station and ways to get involved, and help out with projects that would help strengthen the station as a vital local resource.31 In return, volunteers can enhance their own skills, meet people in person, and strengthen their local community.

We can also look outside of public media to see how other organizations engage professionals:

• The March of Dimes employs a volunteer named Sari who has recruited over 42 other volunteers who have donated over 11,000 hours of time to the organization. Her husband, also a volunteer, does strategic planning, IT, marketing, training and research for the organization.
• Princeton University, the British Library and the Smithsonian American Art Museum have all held edit-a-thons on Wikipedia. Volunteers sign up to edit specific pages on Wikipedia to make them stronger or make their sources stronger. In addition to helping the hosting organization have better pages on Wikipedia, the edit-a-thons also benefit Wikipedia. Some of the volunteers will decide to contribute to Wikipedia in different ways — either through financial contributions or more time.
• The Kimball Public Library in Randolph, Vermont sometimes asks for contributors to donate gardening skills or volunteer to fix the stairs out front.

What happens when stations bring community members into the process in these ways?

• They feel more invested in the outcome.
• They can contribute expertise the station may not have.
• They can point out errors and share new ideas from new perspectives.32
• They trust the organization more and identify with the organization more.33

Case Study: Park Slope Food Co-op Website

The Park Slope Food Co-op is the largest food co-op in the country. Members at the Park Slope Food Co-op pay a nominal fee to join and then work 2.75 hours a month to maintain their membership.

“In the orientation34 that you take when you become a member, you learn all sorts of wonderful facts, like the fact that they turn over more produce than any other grocery store in the country,” says member Jeremy Zilar.

Jeremy, who has been a member of the co-op since 2003, is a member of the team redesigning the Co-op’s website. Members of the website redesign team are working hand-in-hand with members of the co-op staff, to make sure their website’s needs are met. In doing so, the website redesign team is also introducing the co-op staff — and co-op members — to new online tools and new ways of thinking about technology.

“I wanted to see if it was possible to make this a very open design process,” says Jeremy. “How do we utilize as many members as we can in this process?”

After putting out a call for help, Jeremy found developers, designers, photographers, user research professionals, filmmakers, and product managers who wanted to help with the co-op’s website. Additional members wanted to provide feedback and support, so the team of developers created a website where everyone could register their input.

“Most corporations that make websites, they do it by having 4-5 people go off in a room and make something that everybody has to live with,” he says. “We didn’t want to do that.”

The Co-op’s redesign is designed just like the organization itself: infused with the spirit of cooperation. And as a result of being included in the process, members are really excited to see the final results.

“By including them in the process, they feel involved,” says Jeremy. “Everyone is contributing, and everyone is invested in the outcome. It really raises the level on all fronts.”

This is very smart. Instead of hiring an outside development team, the co-op relied on members, many of whom had skills to redesign and create a website. In order to make an effective project for the web development team members, the co-op decided to:

• Identify a project that they needed help with
• Articulate how members could help with that project
• Assign a project lead
• Determine a project timeline

The people involved in the project also have benefited and associate their benefits with the food coop itself. They’ve made valuable networking contacts with people who work locally but at other organizations, and contributed to the co-op in a meaningful way that takes advantage of their skillset.



Different ways to pledge support: Universities

Stations that are affiliated with a university rarely, if ever, collaborate with the computer science, library, and design schools that are also affiliated with the university. Often, students in these departments have to participate in a capstone seminar or complete a thesis. They are unaware of ways in which they could help their station or volunteer in ways other than stuffing envelopes or answering calls during pledge drives.

Stations can and should form partnerships with local universities, many of which have startup competitions as well as students who would like to strengthen their own design and coding portfolios before graduation.

Creating meaningful partnerships at university-affiliated stations can introduce students to public media stations and help them obtain skills or portfolio items that they can use to obtain jobs after graduation. Other organizations already do this well with events: orchestras offer free tickets, downtown museums offer free or discounted tickets to students, and other arts groups engage students through events and activities.

Public radio stations have the opportunity to introduce students to more than just events. Here are examples of activities, categorized from high levels of effort to low levels of effort, that stations could do to engage students on university-affiliated campuses:

• Work with students to craft stories to get new voices on air. Need some inspiration? Check out WILL’s Youth Media, featuring documentary projects made by young producers.
• Work with students to craft roundtable discussions. Students from Northwestern University started their own podcast, called Wildtalks. Could this be hosted on a station website?
• Elevate the podcasting and audio work that students are doing on campus.
• Partner with classes on campus in the computer science, design, and library departments on semester-long projects.35 Partner with the business school on strategy projects.
• Make it easy for university professors to record their interviews on campus.
• Have a website that lists stories that professors and teachers can use in their curriculum. These could be cataloged by subject. For example, “If you’re teaching WWI history, here are five pieces from our archives that would work for your curriculum.”36
• Host listening groups at the station.
• Barry Nelson of CDP suggests that campuses could create virtual “welcome” kits: i.e. a website with stories from the archives about the campus and surrounding area. This is smart.
• Barry also suggests offering tours of the campus radio station. It would be smart to have an open house, showcasing how a radio story is put together and how people can pitch ideas.37
• Even easier: treat students as life-long ambassadors for the station or network, particularly if they intern there. Give them laptop stickers. (Everyone loves laptop stickers.) Give them the ability to record podcasts in the studio, which could provide possible content for the station and build life-long good will with students.
• If they plan to move after graduation, connect them with the station in their new community.

If students or staff participate in any of these opportunities, stations can sign them up for an e-newsletter, let them know about future events, and reward them with year-long memberships.

Case Study: Carnegie Mellon and NPR

In Spring 2014, graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University taking Ari Lightman’s Measuring Social class worked with two members of NPR’s Social Media Desk to define a ladder of engagement for people who had encountered NPR content online.

The students spent their semester identifying the behavior and demographics of the people who encountered NPR’s content online, then mapped NPR’s goals to each level, and finally identified how NPR could monitor progress and make potential users of their digital community more active.

The students participated in biweekly conference calls with NPR’s Social Desk. (Full disclosure: This was my team and I was one of the two people.) The students did extensive research and created an engagement strategy that helped us think about new ways to create digital experiences for our audience.

NPR benefited from both the research and fresh eyes the students brought to the project. The students benefited too: they got to use the work in their portfolio, I offered to write them letters of recommendation for future jobs, they received course credit, and two of them told me that they were interested in pursuing careers in public media because of their work on the project.

Different ways to pledge support: Remote contributions

Not everyone has the ability to help a station in person. Only relying on community members who can travel to a station for support is limiting: not everyone has the time or capacity to travel to a station. People in lower income brackets are less likely to have the time to “work” in exchange for “membership” and limiting membership to those who can donate money or donate time in person is not inclusive, and limits the type of people who receive membership benefits.38

We can think of ways that people can contribute to a station remotely and accrue the benefits of membership. Examples of remote professional skills that could benefit a station could include:

• Adding metadata to audio content to allow it to be resurfaced in different ways
• Tagging, transcribing, or translating content
• Suggesting story ideas for the station or suggesting guests for broadcast
• Making improvements on the station’s Wikipedia page
• Helping on a software-related project for the station (coding, design)
• User testing a new website (TPT recently asked for help with this online.)
• Pledging to listen to or share station material with an audience
• Creating playlists with station content for others to enjoy
• Pledging to hold an event in the station’s space
• Pledging to listen to and talk about the news or current events with other community members
• Participating in a callout or contributing material to a station for broadcast
• Writing/recording testimonials that could be used to promote the station (h/t Katherine Fink)
• Recording natural sound in interesting places (h/t Katherine Fink)
• Writing thank you notes from one supporter to another to thank that person for supporting the station in a different way (h/t Barry Nelson)
• Hosting neighborhood discussions to get people talking and more invested in local news (h/t Jack Brighton)
• Translate the station’s content into another language.
• Pledge to support the station by posting a certain number of station articles on social media.
• Serving as an evangelist for the larger community by recruiting volunteers for future station needs.

Other institutions have worked with remote volunteers and have set up software platforms to assist with these efforts. Most help to add metadata to content. Metadata is important because it can help resurface archival material in different ways, or help categorize content in new ways.39

The projects save the institutions time and money, and deepen their relationships with those who invest their own time in these efforts. They are also designed so that multiple people have to add the same data, and multiple people who add that data have to agree on the data type. This eliminates concern that the public may add incorrect data to a project. Some examples:

• The New York Times’ open-source Hive platform powers the Madison Project, which asks readers to add tags and transcribe ads from the 1960s. The tagging and transcription add useful metadata to the Times’ archive, so that the material can be resurfaced by the Times’ staff. The platform is open source and adaptable to any material with a URL. A certain number of people have to tag each URL and a certain number of those people have to have the same tag for it to be effective, I was told by the NYTimes R&D staff. (This eliminates people who may tag inappropriately.) The system is currently designed to give points; there’s no reason that it could not be adapted to give subscriptions (for The Times) or memberships (for stations.)
• The New York Public Library asked its audience to help transcribe its menu collection. Over 17,000 menus were transcribed so that they could be easily searched. (The NYPL also runs a community oral history project. Volunteers are trained to collect and record the stories. This would work equally well for stations and may provide another way for remote participants to help stations collect content.)
• Volunteers who work remotely with the Smithsonian Transcription Center have saved the Smithsonian tens of thousands of dollars and have helped transcribe over 124,000 pages.
• Metadata Games allows participants to play games and add metadata to museum artifacts.

Other projects exist that reward contributors with benefits:

• Muckrock, a website that helps people file FOIA requests, offers free filing requests to those who help the website out in certain ways.
• Stack Overflow, a question and answer website for people in technical fields, allows people to do more things on their website if they demonstrate that they’ve answered questions well on the site.40
• Open Whisper Systems, a software company which creates private messaging platforms, collects and then distributes monetary donations to those who contribute in meaningful ways to their code online.41
• Wikipedia contributors often list rewards for people who contribute in meaningful ways on the articles they maintain.42

Case Study: Smithsonian Transcription Center

The Smithsonian Transcription Center started in June 2013, when 1,000 volunteers transcribed 13,000 documents. To avoid errors, multiple volunteers work on each page, and a Smithsonian employee reviews each document for errors.

Two years later, volunteers have fully transcribed and reviewed over 100,000 pages43 and generated greater interest within the Smithsonian to digitize even more of their archive44 — and doubled the in-person volunteer corps.

The effort has been a major success, in part because of the efforts of project coordinator Meghan Ferriter, who has helped create a community amongst the remote volunteers who transcribe material.45

And volunteers really enjoy working with Meghan in return.

“The most common feedback I hear is “thank you for this opportunity” — [and] we are grateful to the volunteers!!” she says. “Yet, they are thrilled to be given this chance — to be TRUSTED to participate meaningfully by an authoritative institution. I think volunteers are slowly (and rapidly for this institution) changing the culture and thinking around engagement, sharing collections more openly, and what the future of the Smithsonian will be,” she says.

As they work, volunteers often realize they have a deeper connection with the Smithsonian. For example, they tell Smithsonian employees about their personal experiences visiting the museum or benefiting from a previous encounter with a Smithsonian collection or staff member.

The average length of time that volunteer contributors spend on the site is 27 minutes and 27 seconds. In return, volunteers are often the first to see newly digitized collections and have immediate access to the work they create in the form of a PDF, says Meghan. When the entire project is completed by volunteers, it too is made available — both to volunteers and the public.

“Volunteers also have been given behind-the-scenes access via Google Hangouts and livetweeting to curators’, catalogers, and even the Secretary!” says Meghan. “These are not regularly scheduled events, but rather have emerged as a result of engagement with and completion of projects. It also allows volunteers to ask staff direct question, learn more about the work of staff, and see the less-frequently seen physical space of the Smithsonian.”

Initially, there were some fears at the Smithsonian about whether the public could transcribe and catalog accurately, and whether volunteers would be taking on tasks that could be completed by staff members. Those fears have been dampened over time, says Meghan, because she constantly sets expectations and shares success stories, and the volunteers’ work allows employees to focus on more specialized tasks. After every digitization, she says, her coworkers respond enthusiastically about doing it again.

Now, she is thinking about other ways to work with remote participants.

“I would love to see volunteers take their “product” or their process and apply it to other Smithsonian projects,” she says. “For example, transcribed an address book? Great, now please map the coordinates of the addresses. We have actually seen small examples of volunteers taking Smithsonian data forward to other spaces: connecting details, completed projects and finding aids to Wikipedia, entering observations from ornithologists and birders as historical observations on eBird (this one is a HUGE deal!), and connect what they’ve learned about scientists and artists to other CitSci/digital humanities projects.”

“I would like to see image parsing, image identification, decision trees, metadata elaboration (via tagging, etc), audio transcription, translation (a tricky one!), personal story “donation” and more,” she continues. ” And I would like volunteers to be able to donate their time/skill in other ways, especially donating time to refine our site and products via development or coding. I think creating a collaborative space for creating better experiences and a “wish list” of delights would be amazing; there are many ways we could share and build a more useful future with the public.”

Different ways to pledge support: Code

Developers and designers who would like to contribute development support or code can help stations create online reporting experiences that stations would otherwise be unable to create. They could also adapt already-existing projects for their own use, which could spur all sorts of new innovation within public media,46 and show the impact of creating such technologies to potential funders.

WNYC is the only station that lists the ability to donate code47 on their website, though they don’t yet extend membership to those who have donated their coding talents. There are also a few stations that occasionally work with outside developers who would like to contribute code to a station. For example, several stations have worked with community organizations to create one-off coding projects, though they haven’t yet extended membership to those who donate in this way:

• WAMU collaborated with the civic hacking organization Code for DC to create an election map that the station used in November 2014.
• WXXI Public Radio in Rochester, NY collaborated with Hack/Hackers Rochester to develop a citizen journalism app called Yellr which is designed to widen audience engagement.
• KQED partnered with Hacks/Hackers to host a weekend-long event with journalists and technologists to create storytelling apps for tablet devices
• OPB partnered with the Agora Journalism Center and Hack Oregon to create a web application that shows what would happen to your home during an Earthquake

There is no platform that exists for stations to articulate how members of the public could help with existing coding projects.48 If such a platform existed, members of the public could help existing public media developers49 with projects, or help suggest new ones. Stations would also be able to articulate what problems they might like to solve — either individually or collectively.50 Stations would also be able to more easily collaborate with each other.

Many stations do not have GitHub accounts and those that do, don’t often make their code repositories public.51 Developer Andrew Hyder, who works at Code for America, recently adapted their issue finder to create a way for stations to show any open source projects they have and how the public could help. For example:

• Brand-new coders could work with a reporter to crunch numbers on a region’s economic development efforts
• University computer science classes could work with a member station to develop a robust way to archive content
• A large software development firm could volunteer a day of time to help station reporters make online visualizations that explains their story in a different way

Partnering with local software companies on small, focused projects on a quarterly basis could increase their donations to the station or their employees’ affinity for the station. The partnership with a public radio station also benefits the company: they can then talk about their pro bono work, learn about new pain points that could possibly be solved through software, and work on meaningful work with immediate benefits in the community they live in.

For this to work, stations would need to clearly articulate their needs and the ways in which developers or designers could help. One good and easy way to do this initially would be to release a batch of archival material, and ask for a firm’s help in sorting, categorizing, surfacing, or displaying the material. This does not require a heavy lift on the station’s side and would have immediate results that could be accomplished in a limited period of time.

Case Study: Code For America

Code for America is a nonprofit organization that pairs technologists with local city governments. The cities pay less than market rate to receive a pair of technologists for the year. The technologists then work with the cities and city officials to build websites and software that make government services easier to access.

The model is one that public media could look at for ideas for how to engage community and make the community more invested in the future of public media. The technologists working with Code for America become more invested in the future of the cities themselves — and often get involved more deeply or in other ways.

Projects that Code for America has launched or incubated include Promptly, which helps inform citizens about city services through text messages, a public art finder, a platform for city residents to quickly apply for business permits, and a way for citizens to claim a fire hydrant to shovel out after heavy snowfall. The fellows have worked in 38 cities so far.

Why are cities so eager to participate?

“They’re receiving a programmer or a designer for much less than they would pay outright,” explains Jack Madans, who has been at Code for America since its earliest days. “Instead of approaching cities with a free model, we offered to bring in highly talented tech work at far under the market rate. This hacks the value for the city, but the city still has to commit money, which means they’re invested in the outcome. The value of the program is less about the rate of development time — and more about building a custom solution to an urban problem from the ground up in their particular city.”

The program has both a year-long fellowship, which pairs technologists with cities to work on specific open source software projects, as well as a nationwide series of meetups, which they call brigades, where people who care about cities work on coding or civic projects that make the city services more accessible. Code for America’s fellows are paid; members of each brigade are not. Both fellows and brigade members interact at a yearly event called the Code for America summit. The Summit is an annual event that ends the fellowship for the technologists, and they present what they’ve made in conjunction with their city partners, in front of representatives from many cities and civic groups from across the country.

“Everyone at the Summit knows that you’ve spent money and time on this,” says Jack. “No one wants to be the person on stage with their hands in their pockets that says, ‘We didn’t accomplish anything.’ When the [technologists and city representatives are] up on stage, they’re not just talking about their own city’s projects — it’s a spotlight for work that can be taken to other cities.”

With Code for America, cities routinely share code and projects with each other so that they’re not trying to solve the same problems. The program specifically looks to connect city employees across the country who are not yet at the managerial level.

“We want to connect with the people who are not necessarily the ones attending conferences,” says Jack. “They’re people who deeply care about working in cities and have a huge potential for innovation and energy.”

Between events, the group uses Twitter to communicate ideas. Jack says they don’t want their work to be hidden behind Facebook groups, which people have difficulty finding.

“We want people to have conversations with each other on Twitter and follow each other on Twitter — and use Twitter to talk publicly about what they’re working on,” says Jack. “We want it to be open. Twitter is an incredibly powerful way to spread ideas and things that have happened. We don’t want it locked away where no one can find it.”

Where to begin

Code for America stresses to cities that they can involve technologists in their work, even if they don’t have fellows. The group advocates that cities can start by simply making their data public so that coders can begin to work on making websites with it at hackathons.

“Though hackathons are not sustainable, and not meant to replace end-to-end service like the fellowship, they showed cities that they could throw something together in a weekend and show what happens when governments start making their data open,” says Jack. “And then cool things were being written up in the newspaper and cool things about the data were being tweeted, and the governments could see immediately that this was a way to get good positive attention, and bring good people who wanted to contribute into the room.”

Initially, says Jack, the projects didn’t have to be complex. “We could have people put data on a map and make it visual. That’s helpful, and it’s a quick win. Quick wins help establish trust and build the framework for longer-term wins.”

Parallels can be drawn between the way Code for America’s work with cities and the work technologists could do if they were better connected to public radio stations. In both instances, technologists can meet other people like themselves, and work on meaningful problems that benefit the community.

“At our meetings, there’s a sense of camaraderie because this kind of problem solving is hugely attractive to technically-minded people,” says Jack. “They want to work on stuff that matters. A lot of people who are really, really smart are spending their days trying to get people to like, click on ad space. They’re doing trivial tasks at their jobs, and they’re cogs in giant tech machines. We give them the opportunity to work on things that matter and public problems that matter. “

And people like coming together in public spaces — like libraries or town halls — to work on these problems.

“It’s a space for geeks who are not extroverted, who may not like conferences or networking events to find each other, and they get to work on things that matter that they might not be able to get to in their day jobs. And they get to show off their tech skills. There’s a “wow” factor of what they can do.”

There are many public radio stations that could benefit from this type of relationship. The stations could present a wish list of technical help for reporting projects or for membership projects, and ask the community to help. In doing so, the station would help connect people with each other — who would attribute their connections with the station. This would strengthen the station’s relationship with a community.

There is already one station working towards this goal. Last year the Code for America brigade in DC worked with WAMU to create their election night map.52 It was a project the station couldn’t create on their own, so they enlisted community members for help. When I talked to brigade members who worked on the website, they mentioned how much they enjoyed meeting people at the station and working with them on the process.

One last thing: Code for America also makes it clear that they welcome help from all people, even if those people have limited time. This is from their website, which details how people can help in different ways.



Different ways to pledge support: Story ideas and sourcing

Public radio stations and the networks routinely ask their audiences to contribute story ideas, respond to crowdsourcing callouts for upcoming guests, and pass along stories on social media. This is smart because it expands the voices that appear on air53 and expands the stories stations tell.

Asking the audience to enter the storytelling process before the story reaches the airwaves is also smart because it makes them more invested in the outcome, builds trust and loyalty, and creates a community around the piece itself. There are many examples of stations doing this well:

• KPCC asks people to share their health care costs to make medical costs more transparent.
• KPCC covered a local municipal primary election by focusing on one citizen who didn’t plan to vote and making all of their coverage designed to make him care about the election.
• Nashville Public Radio hosts a monthly event series that they later turn into a podcast. They bring people into their space, find new story ideas, and create ambassadors for the podcast.
• WNYC has asked people to monitor cicadas in their backyard, their sleep habits and their individual cellphone usage and formed stories around all three.
• Georgia Public Broadcasting-Macon bureau chief Michael Caputo writes a really engaging newsletter that tells his audience about the stories GPB-Macon is working on as they’re working on them.
• WBEZ’s Curious City lets audience members ask questions about the city of Chicago and then asks them to report on the story alongside station reporters.
• Michigan Radio sends out stories via text message that help fill in the gaps on traditional reporting.
• WWNO has listening posts set up throughout neighborhoods that allow people to contribute to the broadcast from community locations.
• WLRN received more than 3,500 submissions for their “Write a Haiku about your Zip Code” project.
• KCUR routinely asks its audience for help in reporting projects.

These small asks make community members feel more invested in the outcome of the piece. But community members who give to the station in this way are not treated in the same way as someone who makes a financial donation to the station. While donors receive thank you notes and updates on the station and events, people who contribute story ideas or respond to a call-out are not thanked or even updated on when the piece will air. This may be their first encounter with a station, and it’s a really good one. Stations can and should incentivize them to continue contributing, tell other people about their contributions, and/or give to the station in other ways.

Stations could:

• Send text messages or emails out to people when a piece they helped with runs on air. (This can be automated.) The thank you note or text message can include a link to a newsletter or suggest different ways to become involved in the station.
• Ask people what their subject-specific strengths are. I particularly like the way this synagogue in Chapel Hill, NC frames this question on their membership page.
• Think about ways to thank people who contribute meaningfully in this way. There are often thank yous in annual station reports for people who contribute financially. Are there ways to publicly thank people who contribute story or sourcing ideas? This may help them contribute more.
• Think about ways in which the contributions of story ideas or stories could lead to further engagement. Are there ways to badge people or acknowledge them so they are more likely to contribute more? Websites do this all of the time. Quora gives people points for asking and answering questions. Reddit gives people “karma” for answering questions. Weight Watchers’ app allows users to earn points that they can spend each day. LinkedIn turns completing their profile into a game.

It is important to value the contributions community members make by sharing story ideas and potential sources. Creating easier pathways for them to do so will benefit the stories stations and the networks tell, and make people more invested in their local news.

Finding new potential members: Where to go?

Several people at member stations told me that they would have trouble engaging the communities in the ways listed above, based on current resources.54 Even larger stations have said they don’t have the capacity to engage potential members in this way. “It’s time-consuming,” said one member station volunteer coordinator. So how could stations begin to find people who might be interested in volunteering a professional skill, time, or code55 — and not create a burdensome process?

There are several software platforms that already exist that could help stations find and then engage potential members56 in this way. I am currently working with several developers to adapt an open-source platform called Midas, which calls itself a “Kickstarter for people’s time.” Midas was originally developed by the federal government and allows any federal agency to post opportunities that federal employees can help with outside of their assigned tasks.

We plan to adapt the platform to allow stations or reporters to post tasks that they would like help with, and would easily allow the public to sign up to help with those tasks. Stations could also articulate whether membership benefits could be given to people who complete certain tasks well. The program will also help stations collect contact information from people who might be able to donate five minutes of time — but not necessarily $100.

Tasks can be completely either remotely or in person, so a reporter could ask for help with an assignment, and a station could ask members to add metadata to stories online.

An alternative arrangement would be to identify and create partnerships with existing local organizations, and extend membership to people who contribute to any collaborative projects developed. Organizations could include local chapters of the civic technology organization Code for America, local journalism coders Hacks/Hackers chapters, and professional MeetUp groups.

This type of professional volunteering may translate into financial donations,57 but it also has additional benefits for both the station and participants:

• When people are involved in the process of creating a story or making decisions, they are more invested in the outcome.58
• 50% of all Americans are currently thinking about changing their jobs and careers.59 Providing meaningful experiences can help people enhance their resumes while contributing to a station in a meaningful way.
• People have expertise in areas that might not be present at the station. When launching a new product or tool, having insight from community members is key for adoption.
• Engaging with the community — and asking for their help explicitly outside of financial dollars — builds trust and loyalty.
• It brings different voices into the newsroom and potentially on-air.60 And it acknowledges that people provide value when they suggest a story or find a source, or translate an article or record sound for air or the web. This is the key to thinking about engaging the community, and making the community feel engaged and invested in the newsroom.61

All of these projects mentioned above also:

• Build loyalty and a closer relationship between the institution and participants
• Build relationships between the participants in the project
• Have the expectation that people can help no matter how much time they have
• Build trust and an understanding of the process between the institutions and the participants
• Build and expand the reach of the institution
• Build better revenue streams for the institutions



What are the key takeaways of this report?

1

We must create opportunities for people to become ambassadors for a station.

Each year, the Vermont State Parks’ Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation runs a state-wide scavenger hunt that rewards people who complete tasks like going for a bike ride, photographing and identifying three types of rocks, and sleeping under the stars.

Jessamyn West, a Vermont-based librarian who told me about the project, says participants are required to submit photos of the activities they complete to the Parks Department, and receive a free state park entry for the following year.

“The state department gets copies of all of your photos so they can see how people are using the parks,” she says. “And what do you get? The ability to play again.”

People love the program, she says, and are likely to put the photos on social media — which lets more people know about the program.

“Parents have a thing to do with their kids that’s interesting, and it incentivizes people to come visit different parks around the state,” she says. “Unless you look at the program as lost revenue — which is negligible — it’s kind of a win-win.”

Imagine a similar scavenger hunt framed around public media. Tasks could include:

• listening to stories
• sharing stories on social media
• sharing a story idea with the station
• listening to a story in public
• actively listening to the world
• photographing a radio
• photographing a tote bag or bumper sticker
• photographing a location mentioned in a story on-air

Photos could be sent to a station and exchanged for a one-year membership or for a discount on an event. The station would be strengthening community while getting feedback from community members on what resonated with them the most. In addition, the program could create opportunities for cross-generational participation. Imagine grandparents working with their grandchildren on a public radio project — and introducing them to a station in the process.

2

We must create ways for people to explore the physical space of a public media station.

Jessamyn West pointed me to a passport program run by the Vermont Library Association. The VLA handed out passports to be stamped at public and academic libraries. The passport program was designed to introduce people to different resources around the state. Participants were encouraged to share their “library adventures” on Facebook which, in turn, introduced more people to the library.

Jessamyn says the initial cost of the program was about $100 — $50 for printing the passports and $50 for printing the stamps.

“It encourages people to visit the library,” she says.

Imagine a similar program in a local community, where one of the passport stops was visiting the public media station. This would get people from the community into the radio station, where they could share story ideas, see how the station operates, and learn about ways to become more deeply involved.

In Jessamyn’s town, she says the library is a center for the entire community.

“The library manages to be multiple things for multiple people,” she says. “People who use it as a community center see it as such, but people who have more money and want to go to a fancy dinner with a visiting author have that available to them as well.”

In her community, people who can’t financially support the library do so in other ways.

“At my library we occasionally need someone to garden or fix the chimney, things like that,” she says. “People have interesting skillsets that the library might otherwise need to pay for, and we reach out to them.”

3

We must create frameworks for communities to be more deeply connected to each other using the station as a hub or platform.

In Nashville, Tenn., reporter Emily Siner routinely interviews people doing interesting things in the community in front of a live audience. The event series is later turned into a podcast and a newsletter — ensuring that a feedback loop is created between the station and Nashville Public Radio’s audience in person, then on digital, and then through email.

“Nashville is booming — people are moving to the area in droves, and many of them are young professionals who love NPR and This American Life and Serial,” Emily told me in an interview later published on Poynter.com. “But after meeting a lot of people like this, I noticed that very few of them seemed to feel a connection specifically to Nashville Public Radio. And it makes sense: There aren’t opportunities to see the station firsthand if you’re not a pledge drive volunteer or a big donor; we have great local news but no local show or podcast; and young people tend to be more transient and therefore less rooted in a community.”

The events Emily runs are free, but require an RSVP online — with an email address — which the station can later use to connect with participants who attend.

“Creating a live event that could double as a podcast seemed like the best of all worlds,” says Emily. “After all, the whole point of digital initiatives is to connect with your audiences better. What better way to connect with your audience than to bring them into the physical world with you?”

The events also help connect community members with each other, using the public radio station as a platform for doing so. Providing a way for people to meet and more deeply connect with each other helps create connections that can strengthen the community with and through the public radio station.

And it drives people into a deeper relationship with the station: they are not only aware of the station, but have an experience within it, which fits neatly into an engagement strategy that could later turn those people into loyal advocates on behalf of the station.

Some stations have robust events programs, but seeing those events programs or the engagement strategies I outline above as key can help strengthen the core functionality of a station while inviting the community to connect with each other at the same time.

4

We must incentivize stations to collaborate and share content and/or code.

Stations would save thousands of dollars a year if they could share code and story ideas or work together on collaborative projects. For example, stations could:

• Create combined e-newsletters that feature news and information from where someone lives now and where they used to live. (Example: I grew up in Philly. I live in DC. I receive a newsletter featuring news from both WHYY’s Newsworks and WAMU News.) This would increase open rates, provide more personalized content, and increase affiliation for both stations.
• Share information with each other when members move. If a station learns someone is moving out of one region into a different one, they could alert the person about the new station in their region as well as the station about the incoming potential member.
• Share content and point to reporters on social media during breaking news. If breaking news happens in Location X, every member’s station in the country should point its web and social media visitors to Station X.
• Work on open source coding projects with one another, saving the need to hire third parties and start from scratch every time upgrades need to be made. This would also save a lot of money.

Collaborations can create better journalism, make it easier for stations to adapt as technologies change, save money, and help serve communities in a more robust way.62

However, there are challenges that prevent content, code, and strategy collaborations from taking place on a mass scale. Stations currently compete for existing financial resources. Words I heard when I suggested these ideas to membership departments include “poaching,” “competition,” and “stealing our potential leads.” Many stations see other stations as competition: they’re competing for pledge dollars, for foundation and grant dollars, and for listeners on-air.

But listeners don’t always affiliate themselves with a single station and this is likely to grow more true as mobile and on-demand platforms increase usage. People I interviewed said they wanted to donate to a specific podcast, or that they still listened to the station from the place where they grew up or where they went to college — or wished they could. They want ways to affiliate with and find material from more than one station. Newsletters and programming could help with this, but there are currently more deterrents than known benefits for doing so, and no one wants to be put at a disadvantage by sharing if no one else decides to share.

This would require different incentivizing strategies, both at stations and at grant-making institutions. Frameworks and processes need to be designed that reward helping and collaborating within the system and not keeping data, information, or software close to the vest. (For example, several people brought up the YMCA in this discussion. YMCA branches allow YMCA members from any branch to use their facilities. Are there some benefits that could be extended to members of any public media station?)

5

We must develop different communications strategies for stations to contact remote contributors or donors.

A number of people told me that they contribute to stations or station podcasts outside of their geographic region and receive mail or phone calls directed at more local listeners. For example:

“I get random bulk direct mail from WNYC because I donated to a podcast — they ought to be able to see that I don’t live in their listening area (they have my address) and that I gave via a podcast and tailor their outreach to me around podcasting.”

Donors or listeners outside of a certain geographic radius should receive customized e-newsletters and messaging. In fact, this could provide stations with an opportunity to target expats or people who no longer live in their geographic area. This could also be a way to introduce people to the public radio station in their new geographic area.

6

We must develop more ways to facilitate both creation and distribution of information.

Much of this report discusses ways that the public can become more involved and invested in public media. There are already a number of projects in existence — both inside and outside public media — that are audience-centered; that is, by including the audience in the reporting process, they make the audience more invested in the story or outcome. Many of these projects were detailed earlier in this report, but there are also initiatives outside of storytelling that facilitate deeper connections within a community. Many of these would require grants and/or additional resources or partnerships. Some ideas:

• Stations could work with libraries, tourist bureaus, or public transportation to disseminate news and collect story ideas from people around town. For example, a journalist in Lapland, Finland, frequently climbs aboard the local bookmobile to collect stories along a route from bookmobile patrons. Could there be a public radio shelf at the library? Could tourists find out information about the local station while perusing information at the local tourist bureau?
• Stations could set up booths around town to allow people to share stories. For example, Caitlin Thompson at WNYC is developing a way to repurpose phone booths in certain neighborhoods that will give people there the ability to communicate directly with WNYC.
• Stations could showcase different voices in the community by creating a show — online or radio — that would pilot short- or long-form podcasts from people within the community. The show could increase distribution for local content creators and develop deeper ties with people working within audio.
• Stations could offer an audio booth, for a fee, to members of the station to record their own podcast — and then potentially use the content on-air or discover new talent.
• Stations could work with public transportation systems to place museum-quality audio cones at bus stops or in parks that would broadcast stories into public places.
• Stations could work with public transportation systems to place informational signs on subway cars. In Boston, many nonprofits receive free or reduced cost subway ad space — what information could a public media station disseminate on a monthly basis?
• Stations could partner with public libraries to project data visualizations and maps on the outside of the building. This would make high-cost projects more accessible and reach the widest audience possible.
• Several projects — including Curious City, Listening Posts, and WNYC’s phone booth project — bring community members into the ideation and storytelling phases of a station. Another project, Question Box, serves as a public information access point in underserved communities. The Question Box allows anyone in a community to ask a question about current events or share information about personal interests or local news. The questions are recorded and then answered through a radio station in the area. Which raises the question: What does the public media equivalent of 311 look like? Could stations open up a phone line for interesting questions which would then be researched and disseminated back out to the audience?

7

We must think about the legal and technical frameworks that could facilitate a more collaborative model.

Stations need tools and platforms that let people collaborate. And public media as a system needs to determine what legal frameworks would be put in place for work done in collaboration with the audience.

For some projects, existing licenses like MIT/GPL for software and Creative Commons for content could be used. For others, public media might have to create standard, easy, and reliable licenses.63

Licensing content with a creative commons license would allow public media content to travel more widely and reach new audiences. And openly publishing computer code would save stations money by producing a more secure, reusable product.

It would also help stations collaborate more easily with each other and with the public. As Eric Newton wrote in his book Searchlights and Sunglasses, “If we unleashed open source software applications and the technology needed to operate them and gave away money for code and machines to news organizations across the country, we would be building a new field of public media innovation — by repurposing existing content and creating new content.”

8

We must think about what it means to be a member.

Throughout this project, I have asked people working within public media to tell me what it meant to be a member of a public radio station. Several people told me that they had trouble coming up with an answer. “It’s code for a donation,” said a few people. Another person asked me if I was talking about tactile things, like tote bags. No, I said — not stuff. Then she said, “As a higher-type relationship, I’m not sure we articulate that very well.”

We must be able to tell the story of what public media is and why it matters, and to explain why people should support it — whether through financial means, time, story ideas, or other types of involvement. And non-financial forms of involvement should be valued as much as financial ones, particularly if they’re viewed as opportunities that could lead to further or deeper engagement with a station.

Between May 8 and June 15, I surveyed 225 people through a Google form, asking them to reflect on their membership (or lack of membership) at their local public station. Eighty-five percent of the respondents were under 60 and 49 percent of respondents were between the ages of 25 and 35. Thirty-eight percent of respondents were members of their local public radio station and half said they listened to public radio quite a bit — at least a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10. Among the people who said they listened a lot but were not members, reasons for non-membership were characterized by the following themes:

I don’t know what I would get out of membership:

I honestly don’t know what it is/what benefits I’d get from being a member. I listen mostly to NPR through podcasts.

If membership had usefulness to me, I might think of it as a service for purchase.

Not sure about the benefits. Also not sure where my money goes. It’s hard to spend money if you don’t know that it’s being effectively used.

Don’t really think of membership as a “thing,” just something that gets talked about when asking for money

I had no idea one could be a public radio member and have no idea what membership means.

I listen online or exclusively to podcasts and not a station on the radio:

I listen to podcasts more than radio these days (and mostly non-public-radio podcasts).

I transitioned a couple years ago to consuming primarily podcasts (and music), and not listening to over-the-air radio at all. I do contribute to podcasts, some of which are associated with public radio, however.

I used to be, but I’ve switched to podcasts and free streaming radio because the calls for donations were irritating and I like the ability to customize my listening. I can’t afford to give much.

Define Local. Define Radio. Define member. I have given a paltry donation to The Memory Palace podcast. I have also participated in New Tech City’s Beyond Boredom (is that what it was called?) project…so I did donate with my time and with my digital information, so that counts as something, eh?

I’m honestly just thinking about the value it provides to me since I hardly ever listen to it. I listen to NPR stories, but online, with no connection to my local station.

I listen to audio strictly via downloaded podcast or streaming. If I choose to donate to a show, I’ll do it directly.

I listen to public radio through podcasts associated with a lot of different stations. I support by doing random one-time donations to particular shows or stations at random times (Radiotopia, etc.). I don’t have the same kind of identification with, say, WAMU, that I may have if I had a long driving commute and really got to know the particular station.

I could never decide what station to commit my membership to — I listen to podcasts, NPR One, and PRI/PRX/APM content directly much more often than I turn on the local FM station that actually asks for my pledge. I’ve lived here 2 years and still don’t know the call letters.

I don’t have the money to give to a station:

Not a ton of disposable income.

I don’t have the expendable income.

Lack of disposable income.

No disposable income.

I am not a member of a public radio station because I don’t quite make enough yet to feel comfortable giving to a station. One day I hope to.

Each of these responses represents a person who is not able or willing to donate financially but who may be willing to become engaged in other ways that are valuable to stations. As more and more listening takes place off-air and on demand, stations will need to clearly articulate why they matter and how they serve their communities. By broadening the ways community members can become members — and become involved in the station itself — stations will create networks of people who can articulate why their local station is a valuable community resource.

9

We must work in public.

What differentiates public media from commercial media? In their 2009 paper Public Media 2.0, Jessica Clark and Pat Aufderheide wrote: “Commercial platforms do not have the same incentives to preserve historically relevant content that public media outlets do. Building dynamic, engaged publics will not be a top agenda item for any business. Neither will tomorrow’s commercial media business models have any incentive to remedy social inequality.”

Public media is not or should not be in competition with for-profit media. As Bill Siemering wrote in NPR’s original mission statement, “National Public Radio will not regard its audience as a ‘market’ or in terms of its disposable income, but as curious, complex individuals who are looking for some understanding, meaning and joy in the human experience.”

Public media strengthens itself by working in public and with the public: by sharing ideas, content, and platforms, public media can bring more people into the fold to support and create material for the public. Working in public strengthens the journalism public media produces and the institution of public media itself. If stations can share how they work and what they’re on working on with a wider audience — through a mailing list or through social media — audiences will become invested not only in the process, but also in the final product.64

Working in public also teaches people who don’t work in public media how to create and distribute content. This will help continue public media’s work “to reach and engage with audiences, when and where they choose, with content important to their lives.”

10

Above all, we must think about and learn from the user, the audience, the listener, the person, and the public.

All of these ideas come back to the listener, the audience, and the public. How do we best serve the public?

Recently I tweeted that I was planning to move to Chapel Hill and asked if the local public radio station had any suggestions for radio pieces to listen to before I arrived. They did — and created this website.

The website is designed for newcomers to Chapel Hill — people who might not have their media habits set in stone. It’s designed for the public and, in this case, with the public’s help. It was not something that existed before I reached out.

When stations get ideas from the public in this way, they strengthen their ability to serve the individual and celebrate the human experience.65 Partnering with the public will help public media feel irreplaceable, regardless of whether it airs on the radio, or on TV, or through an app, or on demand. It will help the public understand the importance of public media — and help public media understand the importance of the public.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Knight Nieman Visiting Fellowship program, especially Ann Marie Lipinski and Joshua Benton, for their guidance and support throughout this project.

Thank you to everyone across the public media landscape who spoke to me, shared ideas, or pointed me in directions I hadn’t anticipated. A particular thanks to Bill Siemering, Barry Nelson, and Mark Fuerst for supplying me with a lot of background material.

To all of those who have championed this in ways big and small since last August: I’m excited for the next steps, which will focus on building out software platforms to make it easier for stations to connect with audiences and each other.

And to A and Sadie — who edited all of this and provided lots of love.

Melody Kramer is a 2015 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow and is currently serving a two-year term appointment with 18F. She was previously a digital strategist and editor at NPR. Based on her research, she is launching Media Public; sign up here for more information.

Photos of public radio swag via the NPR, PBS, and This American Life online stores.

1. I highly recommend reading Mark’s entire report, entitled “Pubmedia stations foresee decline of on-air pledge drives, cite needs for new tactics,” which was published in Current in July 2014.
2. Pew reports that NPR saw its average weekly broadcast listening audience for NPR programs and newscasts fall by about 4% — from 27.3 million in 2013 to 26.2 million in 2014. The amount of time spent listening to public radio has declined and NPR’s audience remains flat, CEO Jarl Mohn recently told AP journalists. And the station as sole provider of content is a model that is rapidly evolving. “The station brand — especially the NPR station brand — is being diluted by digital distribution technologies, and that erosion puts the public radio station revenue model at great risk,” notes John Sutton in an essay entitled “How Stations Can Stay Relevant as Listeners Go Elsewhere for Content.”
3. Sustaining or re-occuring membership is the name of the growth game in public media right now. The push for sustainers has made a big difference over the last decade. I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks sustainers are a bad idea, but there are definitely people, consultants included, who think some stations are implementing it poorly. Signing up sustainers does not mean signing up people and forgetting them — or forgetting people who can give in smaller amounts or in other ways. Mark Fuerst told me — and also noted in his report — that some station sites make it difficult for people to give one-time donations, because sustaining membership is so much more valuable. Sustainers outperform other donors on retention and lifetime revenue, because the payments are taken directly from their credit cards on a monthly basis. “Sustained giving must become the default option for membership contributions, at a suggested level of $10 per month, for example,” suggests this Current article. (This article suggests there are hidden maintenance and customer service costs associated with sustainer programs, such as having procedures and staff in place to update expired or cancelled credit cards, additional segmentation of fundraising messages so sustainers are recognized as such, or being caught in the fallout from a massive security breach elsewhere — the 70 million customers of Target in December 2013, for example.) NPR’s CEO Jarl Mohn has also made clear his focus on big donors. He told the AP that many public media fundraisers “aren’t as bold as they can be” and plans to start asking for significant gifts. It is necessary to focus on these donors, but we don’t want to alienate people who would like to contribute in a meaningful way and cannot afford to be a sustainer or big donor.
4. This Stanford study about nonprofit volunteering is a must-read. “Volunteers are likely to donate at the organization at which they serve,” the article notes. “[But] Volunteers with valuable and specialized skills are often dispatched to do manual labor rather than tasks that use their professional talents.” The report also recommends doing away with the word volunteer — which implies receiving something for free, but not much else — and replacing it with terms like fundraiser, project manager, and legal counsel.
5. They’re also competitive, which also prevents collaboration. As Todd Mundt noted in 2012, “If all the stations are really small, and they all kind of compete against each other in markets, and they counter-program each other, or even sometimes program the same thing at each other, their management structures are duplicated from station to station — that’s a lot of money. You know, in a $1 billion public radio economy, how much goes to the back end and how much goes to the front end?”
6. I talked with people at member stations in Washington D.C, Louisville, KY, Pasadena CA, Salt Lake City, UT, New York City, Jacksonville, FL; Pensacola, FL; Yellow Springs, OH; Tallahassee, FL; Champaign, IL; Seattle, WA, Boston, MA; and Berkeley, CA. Additional conversations took place online with stations from Maine, Missouri, Nevada, Illinois, Alaska, Kansas, Texas, Arkansas, New Hampshire, and Georgia. I also interviewed people from PBS, CPB, CDP, and talked with several people who work with public media stations, but not at a station itself. In addition, I’ve talked and/or interviewed people who work at the Smithsonian Institute, Code for America, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Nieman Foundation, USDS, Google, 18F, the Dodge Foundation, the Assocation for Independents in Radio, the MIT Center for Civic Media, various libraries around the world, and the Park Slope Food Co-op. And a huge thank you to Barry Nelson, Mark Fuerst, and Bill Siemering for sending along dozens of papers on philanthropy, donation habits and trends within public media — I read all of them.
7. The Taproot Foundation talked with corporate baby boomers in Silicon Valley in 2007. Among their findings: professional baby boomers see service as a core part of their lives, but want to contribute in ways that grow and develop their skills and experiences. The report notes that nearly 80% of Boomers plan to stay actively engaged beyond retirement, either through volunteer experiences or part-time work, but want to find opportunities that allow them to leverage their professional skillset. Boomers heavily populate roles that have skills that are transferable to the nonprofit sector, including communications specialists, management analysts, strategy, fundraising, and administrative roles. There is also a strong desire among this group to work on volunteer projects that can involve other generations in their households, such as children or grandchildren. Millennials feel similarly. A study from the Case Foundation showed that millennials get involved when they’re passionate about something (79%) or can lend pro-bono skills (46%) and their biggest pet peeve was having their time wasted with not much to do. (69%.)
8. Jack Madans from Code for America told me that people want to help civic projects in their community specifically because “they want to work on stuff that matters.” He continued, “A lot of the people who work at major startups are really, really smart and they’re working on trivial stuff. We give them the opportunity to work on things that matter and public problems that matter.” This is backed up by research. In a paper entitled “I Don’t Want the Money, I Just Want Your Time: How Moral Identity Overcomes the Aversion to Giving Time to Pro-social Causes,” Wharton marketing process Americus Reed note that “time is a special resource compared to money. People don’t want to give time to just anybody.”
9. Stop reading this paper and pick up this one: “Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics.” It was written by the brilliant Jessica Clark and Pat Aufderheide in 2009 and articulates that public media must “embrace the participatory.” Yes, yes, yes! And there are many different ways to participate, and to participate meaningfully.
10. During an internal NPR Hack Day, a team scraped data from OKCupid, the online dating website. They found that almost 40,000 people in a-completely-random-and-possibly-unscientific sampling list NPR in their profiles as an interest. About 11,000 listed This American Life, while fewer than 5,000 listed Fox News and Howard Stern. An example from a profile: “I spend a lot of time thinking about all of the things Melissa Block, Robert Siegel, and Audie Cornish tell me to consider?” Possibly thinking along these lines, WNYC runs speed dating nights. Super smart.
11. Multiple people told me that “membership” in public media means revenue.
12. My current focus and research has been on public radio stations, but much of what I have researched is equally applicable to public TV. Public radio is a stand-in for “public media.”
13. In Hot Pod, Nick Quah notes that Slate’s network tripled its listeners last year, to 6 million downloads a month. This is not near NPR’s 80 million downloads a month. But there are over 1 billion iTunes podcast subscriptions a year, according to Apple. So people are clearly listening to other podcasts, even if they’re not part of a larger network.
14. They might “sound” indistinguishable, but for me the essential thing is that there is no other news and information service like public media, that offers such wide coverage and aspires to the highest journalistic standards. The mission of virtually all non-public media is to make money, not matter what disguise it’s dressed up in; the mission of public media is, and should be, something quite different. If you’d like to learn more, I suggest starting with my friend Bill Siemering’s original purposes for NPR, crafted in 1970.
15. Over 40 million people listen to some kind of podcast. Podcast listening is up over 25 percent compared to last year. And people who podcast listen to an average of six podcasts a month, according to Edison Research.
16. Though 91 percent of millennials listen to radio for some portion of their week, they also make up the largest cohort of smartphone owners. Listening is growing on that platform and will likely continue to grow.
17. And even younger generations are likely to be even more mobile-dominant, when it comes to listening habits.
18. Millennials are shunning cars. America’s largest generation is not driving as much as their parents. Between 2001 and 2009, the average number of miles driven by 16 to 34 year olds dropped by 23 percent, and the share of younger people using public transportation increased.
19. A survey conducted by the 2012 Millennial Impact Report in 2011 showed that 75 percent of millennials gave, though 58 percent reported that their largest donation was under $100.
20. Sustaining or re-occuring membership is the name of the growth game in public media right now. The push for sustainers has made a big difference over the last decade. I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks sustainers are a bad idea, but there are definitely people, consultants included, who think some stations are implementing it poorly. Signing up sustainers does not mean signing up people and forgetting them — or forgetting people who can give in smaller amounts or in other ways. One consultant told me that some station sites make it difficult for people to give one-time donations, because sustaining membership is so much more valuable. Sustainers outperform other donors on retention and lifetime revenue, because the payments are taken directly from their credit cards on a monthly basis. “Sustained giving must become the default option for membership contributions, at a suggested level of $10 per month, for example,” suggests this Current article. (This article suggests there are hidden maintenance and customer service costs associated with sustainer programs, such as having procedures and staff in place to update expired or cancelled credit cards, additional segmentation of fundraising messages so sustainers are recognized as such, or being caught in the fallout from a massive security breach elsewhere — the 70 million customers of Target in December 2013, for example.
21. The social scientist Kate Krontiris’s research on what she called “Interested Bystanders” is applicable here. She looked at what motivates Americans to do things that are civically motivated. According to her research, half of all adults are what she calls “Interested Bystanders,” meaning they are paying attention to the issues around them, but don’t necessarily taking action on those issues. “When they do take civic action,” Kate notes, “Interested Bystanders do things that meet the public interest most often when it aligns with their self interest.” The implications of this research are applicable to engaging public radio listeners and potential members. What motivates people to participate meaningfully, both in the process of acquiring news and then in the process of supporting it?
22. Active commitments to an organization, which are tied to learning, personal links to the organization, multiple methods of engagement with the organization, and shared beliefs lead to more committed and loyal donors. If you work in membership, I highly recommend reading this entire report, entitled: “Donor Retention: What Do We Know and What Can We Do About It?” by Indiana University professor Adrian Sargeant.
23. I talked with people at member stations in Washington D.C, Louisville, KY, Pasadena CA, Salt Lake City, UT, New York City, Jacksonville, FL; Pensacola, FL; Tallahassee, FL; Champaign, IL; Seattle, WA, Boston, MA; and Berkeley, CA. Additional conversations took place online with stations from Maine, Missouri, Illinois, Alaska, Kansas, Texas, Arkansas, New Hampshire, and Georgia. I also interviewed people from PBS, CPB, CDP, and talked with several consultants who work with public media stations. In addition, I’ve talked with people who work at the Smithsonian Institute, Code for America, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, various libraries around the world, the Park Slope Food Co-op, the MIT Civic Media Lab, American University, the University of Missouri, and the Association for Independents in Radio — and then conducted a survey answered by over 200 people who listen to public radio and have never donated. And a big thank you to Barry Nelson, Mark Fuerst, and Bill Siemering for sending along dozens of papers about the donation and volunteer habits of Millennials, Generation Xers, baby boomers — and about public media fundraising, donation, listening, and content trends over the past 30 years. I read all of them.
24. It’s also important to think about donor communication after donation and different mediums for doing so. I love that Sweden’s blood bank texts people to thank them for donating blood, and then again when the blood is used. One idea: “Your donation was just used to purchase 3 new microphones at Station X. Thank you so much.” Barry Nelson suggests this: “Three thousand children just started kindergarten ready to learn because of what you did to keep Sesame Street on the air.” Kickstarter updates are also worth looking at because they’re smart and not overwhelming. I receive frequent updates with what project creators are doing. This makes people feel more invested in the outcome, and more likely to support them again in the future.
25. This is smart. The likelihood that someone is donating using their mobile phone goes up as their age goes down, says a 2012 report from Blackbaud entitled “Donor Perspectives: An Investigation into What Drives Your Donors to Give.”
26. And boards. OPB’s board recently got custom-made Nike sneakers. This is nice. But I wonder what would happen if the sneakers went to people living in Portland with the biggest following on social media…
27. One program director told me that he thought it was smart to expand beyond traditional volunteer activities, because it helps build relationships. “When you actually work together and make something, you can build a relationship around that that may involve giving financially and may involve all kinds of other things,” he said. “The challenge then becomes the maintenance of those relationships. When it comes to programming or fundraising volunteers, we have clear entry points like the pledge drive. When I think about wanting to broaden a volunteer effort, then we have to think, ‘Are there new groups of people we haven’t been thinking about or new groups of people we want to invite?’
28. One exception is the CPB-mandated Community Advisory Board that all non-State run stations must have. The volunteer board helps review programming. Appointments to the board are made by the station and are based on an application.
29. The Taproot Foundation talked with corporate baby boomers in Silicon Valley in 2007. Among their findings: professional baby boomers see service as a core part of their lives, but want to contribute in ways that grow and develop their skills and experiences. The report notes that nearly 80% of Boomers plan to stay actively engaged beyond retirement, either through volunteer experiences or part-time work, but want to find opportunities that allow them to leverage their professional skillset. Boomers heavily populate roles that have skills that are transferable to the nonprofit sector, including communications specialists, management analysts, strategy, fundraising, and administrative roles. There is also a strong desire among this group to work on volunteer projects that can involve other generations in their households, such as children or grandchildren.
30. Jack Madans from Code for America told me that people want to help civic projects in their community specifically because “they want to work on stuff that matters.” He continued, “A lot of the people who work at major startups are really, really smart and they’re working on trivial stuff. We give them the opportunity to work on things that matter and public problems that matter.” This is backed up by research. In a paper entitled “I Don’t Want the Money, I Just Want Your Time: How Moral Identity Overcomes the Aversion to Giving Time to Pro-social Causes,” Wharton marketing process Americus Reed note that “time is a special resource compared to money. People don’t want to give time to just anybody.”
31. It is important that stations can articulate the importance of local and why people should support local stations. Throughout this project, I’ve been asked by people what the point of a local station even is, when we can get all of our news online and bypass them entirely. I was surprised by this question, but glad it was asked because it really made me think about the value of local and about what local stations could be. As part of the project, I asked hundreds of people to explain why they do or don’t value their local station. Here are some of their very smart responses.
32. I go into more details in this post, entitled “How Talking about Your Work in Public can help your work in public media.” The same holds true for inviting audience members into the process.
33. There’s a paper that just came out in June from the Oxford University Press and Journal of Consumer Research called “Brand Community.” It’s by Albert Muniz and Thomas O’Guinn. In it, they describe how non-geographically bound, specialized communities are formed based on “a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand.” Members of a brand experience what the researchers call “we-ness” — meaning “they feel an important connection to the brand, but more importantly, they feel a stronger connection toward one another. They conclude that brands are “social entities,” and that communities are created as much by consumers as they are by marketers. I highly recommend reading the entire article, because it’s fascinating. Moreover, it holds a lot of cross-over for those of us interested in the public sector. Public radio listeners already think of themselves as a community — think tote bags and mugs — but there are ways to deepen and strengthen this community, both on-air and off.
34. I love the idea of a new member orientation that provides a framework for members to engage with long-term supporters and realize the value of the institution they’re supporting. A smart public media consultant named Barry Nelson told me that he thinks stations affiliated with universities should have open-houses for students. I agree, and would add that stations should make it during orientation week. Do a walk through, explain how reporters come up with stories, and indicate how you take new story ideas.
35. Two examples. Jack Brighton, the brilliant director of new media and innovation of WILL has been working on digital preservation efforts and involving students from the local university. Two, when I worked at NPR, I had a conversation with a professor at Stanford University who works on machine learning. I was interested in extracting keywords from audio stories so they could be resurfaced in different ways. “What would happen if I gave you a year’s worth of audio?” I asked. “Well, we would get three or four dissertations out of it, and give it back to you with whatever we discovered,” he said. Many Fortune 500 companies partner with business schools. Public radio stations could do this, in addition to partnering with classes. This has the added benefit of introducing people to public media in college.
36. I went to a presentation from the Audience Insight and Research group at NPR. The presentation said that if children don’t grow up with public media, they’re exposed in college. We should be making it really, really easy for teachers to insert relevant material into their curriculums.
37. When I worked at WBEZ in Chicago, the station hosted nights for Flickr enthusiasts. (Keep in mind, this was 2007.) The photographers were offered free wine and cheese, and taken on a tour around the station. The station told the photographers to take as many photos as they would like. They did, and were able to reach a wide (and different) audience than the one on the WBEZ website. Their photography was later featured on the website.
38. This is particularly important to think about in light of PBS’s announcement that they plan to beta test Mobile Video on Demand with several pilot stations. If this eventually extends to on-demand educational programming — such as Sesame Street — and parents are required to pay for a Netflix-like model, then the audience for on-demand programming is limited to those who can pay. If we expand the ways by which someone can be a member, then it makes PBS and NPR on-demand programming accessible to all, and not just those who can donate financially. If public media decides to create walled garden for content in order to generate revenue or appeal to new members, then it is equally imperative that it come up with various pathways to enter those gardens, and some of those pathways must not be financially-based.
39. Adding metadata allows people to feel invested, both now and if the content is ever resurfaced in different ways. There are many different ways to categorize pieces. Here’s a list of some that I came up with, and a list of different ways to think about place and location-based content.
40. Thanks to Andrew Losowsky for this one.
41. Thank you to @anton612 for suggesting this.
42. Thank you to Camila Domonske for this one.
43. Project coordinator Meghan Ferriter notes “That number includes 40,209 pages of indexed, searchable text — try searching “joust of windmills” in collections.si.edu, then click on thumbnail. The number also includes data for 59,196 BRAND NEW collection records (bumblebees, botany collections, and currency proof sheets), which are being made searchable for researchers and the public alike.”
44. An example would be the papers of Frederick W. True — uncovered in storage by Fossil Marine Mammals curator Nick Pyenson, the papers were digitized and released to the public in a two month span along with the #FWTrueLove challenge, says Meghan.
45. I asked Meghan to explain what she does to create community and she passed along a bullet-pointed list of the things she does:

    In my role as Project Coordinator, I think I have fostered community by:

    • Being authentic in my engagement (using my voice not hiding behind the Smithsonian, and being enthusiastic because this stuff is pretty cool),
    • Asking questions that furthered the dialogue (how did you hear about us? what did you think of that? what was most surprising? what would you like to do next?)
    • Establishing a rhetorical approach that made it clear that we/I was learning at the same time as the volunteers
    • Establishing a rhetorical approach that suggests there is ALWAYS more to the story and that this is a chance to make discoveries — and then by recognizing or acknowledging those discoveries
    • Creating the hashtag #volunpeers to allow volunteers to leverage the structure of social media spaces to communicate with one another and with me/us — encouraging them to use it as well to ask for help or indicate a project needs review, etc
    • Creating collaborative competitions, rather than leaderboarding: #7DayRevChall (7 Day review challenges) allowed people to contribute collectively to a goal, then metric and try to beat the group goal — and using daily updates to share progress. This also allows for skills acquisition and learning best practice for review AND addresses an issue we see frequently — folks love transcribing and pages languish waiting for review. Every 2 months, we draw attention to this
    • Focusing on the process of transcribing and reviewing often over the volume of the product — and cultivating/encouraging patience from experienced volunteers in regard to “newbies”
    • Letting volunteers speak to each other directly in spaces in which they already live and are comfortable (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.) We have benefitted from volunteers who are welcoming and want to help each other complete projects
    • Also by engaging through those 3 social media networks (also instagram some and hopefully reddit soon), volunteers have the ability to “curate” and own their experience and the product they have created. My perception is that creates more in-depth brand engagement, as well — these volunteers listed “digital volunteer for @TranscribeSI” or “#volunpeer for @TranscribeSI” in their social media bios
    • Listening to the feedback and description of external interests from volunteers and gauging their excitement in subject matter — then actively courting the archives, museums, and libraries that have related material
    • Finally, actually integrating their feedback into site design, when it’s possible to do so.”

46. Thank you to Eric Newton, of the Knight Foundation, who sent me his excellent book Searchlights and Sunglasses. About open source in public media, he writes, “If we unleashed open source software applications and the technology needed to operate them and gave away money for code and machines to news organizations across the country, we would be building a new field of public media innovation — by repurposing existing content and creating new content. Everyone can win. A local newspaper, a commercial or public broadcaster, ethnic and alternative media, citizen media, new Web-based startups, all of them can use open source news technology. The technology does not care whether they are liberal or conservative, old or young, city dwellers or rural Americans, black or white or any color of the rainbow. People will still be free to choose what news they would like to consume; they will, in fact, have greater choice in a media ecosystem richer in local media.”I recommend reading Eric’s entire chapter. His proposal for a technology lab is spot-on.
47. WNYC was the only station I could find that specifically asked the public to help with open source coding projects on GitHub. It isn’t the only station with a GitHub page. I made a list of those stations here.
48. GovCode shows all of the U.S. government’s open source projects. The Civic Issue Finder surfaces all of civic technology’s open source projects that could use assistance. This is an easy way to show developers how their help could be used, based on how much time they have.
49. CPB doesn’t keep track of the number of developers working in public media. There are 120 people with the job title “Web Master”, according to SAS, who are working in public media, but this includes many people who do not code.
50. Collectively being the key term here. If stations collaborated on software needs, and if that software was open source, stations would save tens of thousands of dollars a year. They all need the same software. They rarely collaborate. Instead, they purchase expensive third-party software that requires additional funding to upgrade.
51. Building in public — and creating open source software — lets the public into the process. As Eric Mill, of 18F, writes “You might just help people. And people might just help you! The internet is a big place and a small world, and GitHub has a way of making unexpected connections. If your work is even a little bit useful to someone else, there’s a good chance they’ll find their way to your door, start poking around, and find a way to be useful right back. Even if you’re working on what you think is the most niche project that no one else would ever use: leave the door open for providence.”
52. I spoke with the wonderful Anthony Washington at WAMU who is innovative, open to new ideas, and inspiring. He said he would love to encourage people at WAMU to think outside the box with how they could partner with civic technologists in DC. “It’s a new way of looking at pro bono,” he said. “And when it comes to this program, everyone’s open and willing to try it.”
53. The voices that currently appear on air sound largely the same. Betsy O’Donovan and Adriana Gallardo report that an internal study at NPR found that 58 percent of all NPR’s sources were either politicians, government officials, journalists, or professors. My favorite quote from their article is this one: “If a significant number of your sources are going to be journalists, you have already made a racial decision without making one,” Woods says. “If a significant number of your sources are going to be professors, PhDs in America, you’ve made a gendered and racial decision by that choice, before you ever choose the actual source. If you’re in Washington and you’re talking to a politician, you have made a racial and gendered choice and maybe even a geographic choice, by choosing the category of source.”
54. This Stanford study about nonprofit volunteering is a must-read. It recommends finding professional skill-based opportunities for volunteers, who can conduct strategic planning, train staff, develop programming, and provide technology services. “Volunteers are likely to donate at the organization at which they serve,” the article notes. “[But] Volunteers with valuable and specialized skills are often dispatched to do manual labor rather than tasks that use their professional talents.” The report also recommends doing away with the word volunteer — which implies receiving something for free, but not much else — and replacing it with terms like fundraiser, project manager, and legal counsel. Not to harp on this one article, but it’s great. My favorite example from the piece is about Deloitte employees, who were planning to volunteer in the traditional way at a thrift store, but then saw that they could instead increase monthly revenue at the shop by recommending different merchandising strategies. This was a much better use of the Deloitte employees’ time. (And, the study says, volunteers who perform professional or management activities are more likely to return and donate themselves.) This aligns nicely with a conversation I had with Betsy Gerdeman, the PBS Senior Vice President of Development Services. “It makes natural sense to engage first before asking for support,” she told me. “And investing in engaging millennials is critical especially because research shows that they give to places where their interests align with a mission.”
55. LinkedIn for Good says it has 4 million people who say that they want to volunteer for good. 72% of them are Millennials. They want to help with project management, strategy, management, PR, IT, event planning, and communications.
56. I say members because I believe that people who contribute in meaningful non-financial ways should be made members of the station, and accrue all of the benefits that membership entails. More in this Nieman Lab essay.
57. A 1981 study by Frisch and Gerrald found that donors select charities to support on the basis of whether they have benefitted in the past or will benefit in the future. An additional study found that individuals also give to organizations that will do them political good and/or enhance their careers through things like networking opportunities. Again, this is from “Donor Retention: What Do We Know and What Can We Do About It?” by Indiana University professor Adrian Sargeant.
58. Sargeant recommends that nonprofits think about how they might contribute to a donor’s sense of self-identity.
59. From a WNYC interview with writer Anna Kraemer.
60. Read “Public Radio and the Sound of America” in Nieman Reports. Notably, it reports that NPR found that 58 percent of NPR’s go-to sources were either politicians, government officials, journalists, or professors — pools of people whose racial demographics don’t reflect the rest of the country. Sounding like America means bringing different kinds of people into your newsroom. I also recommend looking at the project the DC Public Library created to train new audio talent and find new audio stories. Peter Timko, who launched the project, came in for a lunch chat at NPR. He told me that the program has given people job skills and allowed them to tell stories that haven’t been told on the radio. An alternative: partner with libraries who are creating these programs and put them on the air!
61. Many people have written about engagement and community in the newsroom. I recommend reading The Local News Lab, written by John Stearns and Molly de Aguiar, and starting with this post, on “Building Community with Journalism and Not For It.”
62. Should you want a deeper dive on this subject, I recommend reading “Greater than the Sum: Creating Collaborative and Connected Public Media in America.”
63. Thank you to Irakli Nadareishvili for suggesting I dig more into licensing and tech frameworks.
64. I talk about this in much greater detail in this conversation with Jay Rosen and this essay for AIR.
65. Two phrases taken directly from Bill Siemering’s original mission statement.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/putting-the-public-into-public-media-membership/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/better-timing-more-social-media-likes/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/better-timing-more-social-media-likes/#respond Thu, 02 Jul 2015 18:56:02 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=110526 Why some social media posts fall into a pit of oblivion while others shine brightly is in great part a question of timing. A new study from Klout finds that, unsurprisingly, posts that land sometime during the workday tend to receive the most reactions — and that beyond that, it’s a matter of geography.

The study, by Nemanja Spasojevic, Zhisheng Li, Adithya Rao, and Prantik Bhattacharyya, sampled 144 million Twitter and Facebook posts and around 1.1 billion reactions to those posts — retweets, comments, likes, and so forth. In the U.S., people on social media in New York and San Francisco tend to react more in the first half of the work day. In Paris, reactions peak in the later half of the work day; in London, near the end of the work day. The most notable exception: Tokyo, where reactions on social media peak twice in the day, both outside of working hours.



As Klout’s blog post on the data put it:

User schedules need to be personalized for maximum engagement, and using a generalized schedule based on regional averages is limited in effectiveness. Why? Because any user’s audience is typically spread across various locations. So, when you tweet from Dallas, Texas it reaches your audience that is in the same city/time zone as you, but it doesn’t arrive at the prime time for reactions for any of your followers who are in different locations around the country or globe. Thus, the likelihood of them reacting is much lower.

On weekends, Twitter activity drops significantly across the board, though Facebook is still used fairly regularly (and most consistently on Sundays), the study found. Timing, though, is everything:

We find that a majority of reactions occur within the first two hours of the original posting time on most networks. Audience behavior differs significantly on different networks though, with Twitter having larger reaction volumes in shorter time windows immediately after the post (50% of reactions within the first 30 minutes), and as compared to Facebook which reaches 50% of reactions after two hours.

The researchers have made their dataset available publicly if you want to check their work — or just want an anonymized set of a billion or so social media posts to play with over the weekend.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/better-timing-more-social-media-likes/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/newsonomics-10-numbers-that-define-the-news-business-today/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/newsonomics-10-numbers-that-define-the-news-business-today/#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2015 14:00:54 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=110180 We’re bombarded by endless numbers every day — some claiming the exalted status of metrics or, even higher, benchmarks. It’s tough for any of us to figure out which — ARPU? TOS? post-click activity? — are meaningful and which will go down in news transformation history as footnotes. For me, making sense of the numbers helps bring a little order to the chaos.

On Wednesday, I spoke to a Media Impact Funders group in Menlo Park, right there on Sand Hill Road, where so much venture money flows into would-be high-flying companies. This funders group, though, represents the journalism grantmakers — the foundations that have searched for and paid for much of the experimentation of the past decade.

In 15 minutes, I shared with them 10 numbers that I think tell us where we’re at today, in yet another uncertain time for the “future of news.” So, here, for your summer beach thinking, are a few numbers that deserve our attention. It’s not an eternal top 10 list; it’s a list of the moment, guaranteed to change. I welcome your additions.

$14 million That’s the monthly digital ad revenue of The New York Times in the first quarter of this year. And, intriguingly, it’s the same number as the monthly digital ad revenue of The Huffington Post, newly part of Verizon. That number is open to a kaleidoscope of interpretations. Is it incredibly low, given the massive reach of both news organizations? Isn’t it interesting that the Times, with its core of 1,300 top-of-the-trade journalists, takes in the same amount of digital ad money that HuffPo does, relying on its army of 100,000 contributors from around the world — a number Arianna says she wants to grow to 1 million, in addition to its own full-time hundreds. What does that tell us about the advertising value of content? Compare that $14 million to Google’s monthly revenue of $5.7 billion and Facebook’s of $1.2 billion, and you can see the world as it now exists. A bonus number: Combined, Google and Facebook take in about 52 percent of all the nation’s digital advertising.

50% Today, most news companies tell me more than half of their digital access comes from mobile devices. That breaks down more than two-to-one smartphones-to-tablets. A recent Gartner series forecasts that by 2018, 50 percent of all web access worldwide would come via mobile. So news is a leading edge for mobile. That’s no surprise: It’s always changing and perfect for on-the-go reading. National and global publishers see this profound shift as the prime issue and opportunity before them; most regional news companies still struggle with mobile. In everything from revenue generation to product design to reader engagement, publishers must reckon with this non-tethered, personalized world.

54,581 The number of “social marketing” jobs currently listed at LinkedIn, from strategist to instructor to intern. That’s about 20,000 more jobs than exist today in U.S. newsrooms. It’s a new world of “earned media.” Forget OPM, Other People’s Money. Think OPT — Other People’s Time. Our billions of shares promote (or relegate) content to its place on the web, and almost all come for free. The big new news brands — BuzzFeed, Vox, Business Insider, Vice, Mic — all rely heavily on this form of earned media. Ask one of their CEOs what they spend on paid media, and most likely the answer will be a big, fat zero.

1:2 Video ad rates still manage to beat text ones, but many legacy publishers still can’t produce enough news video that attracts big-enough audiences at small-enough costs. That puts in perspective Arianna Huffington’s plan to produce one news video for each two written stories. That announcement follows a steady drumbeat of video announcements out of HuffPo: 11 new video series formats; 2.3 billion video views in less than three years on HuffPost Live; more than 30 million views in the first six episodes of The HuffPost Show. HuffPost has also launched what it calls “the first next-generation online video journalism network, Outspeak.” That latest sound of convergence you are hearing: Verizon, with HuffPost as its new face, remaking itself as our friendly video provider. Major subtext here: The pipes companies are now leaping into the world of media in a big way, and that megatrend informs a lot about “news” going forward.

63% Of the $58 billion U.S. digital ad total for this year, almost two-thirds of it will be touched by “programmatic.” Publishers once used it as a term of derision; now they’re trying to get up to speed on programmatic optimization. Star Tribune publisher Mike Klingensmith cites better harnessing of programmatic for his company’s above-average digital ad gains As Sebastian Tomich, The New York Times’ senior vice president for advertising and innovation, told me this week, most newspaper can count their major ad priorities with three finders. Those would be branded content or content marketing, mobile content — and programmatic. It’s tough to imagine any scenario in which ad buyers won’t want the added targeting effectiveness of programmatic — the data-driven matching of audience and product.

75% That’s the share of its traffic that BuzzFeed gets from social. That number informs Jonah Peretti’s decision, joined by others, to jump under the covers with Facebook Instant Articles (“Newsonomics: BuzzFeed and The New York Times play Facebook’s ubiquity game”). Let’s match that number to those of other news media. Digital-first champions, like Salt Lake City’s Deseret Digital Media, drive 30 percent of their traffic from social. Public media leader WBUR can count 33 percent. Quartz, ever innovative points to 60 percent of its traffic coming from social. Most dailies tell me their take runs from 6 to 12 percent. Certainly, legacy brands were able to build large non-social audiences in the early days of the web — but today social is the major route to new, younger audiences.

1.5 million That’s the combined total of The New York Times’ daily paying readers. Remarkably, it’s the same number the Times had 20 years ago, when all of them were paying for newsprint. Now close to 1 million pay for digital-only and about half a million for print daily. (On Sundays, the Times can count close to 2 million paying readers — long live the Sunday paper!). So what do we make of that 1.5 million number? Depends on where you rank on the ottimista/pessimista scale. The Times can cheer that it’s held on to paying daily circ when few other dailies have. Or we could acknowledge that the paying intelligentsia audience for a top national general news source is…roughly one half of one percent of the U.S. population, then and now. It’s funny that back in 1995, with the same number of paying daily readers, everyone deemed the Times a highly successful company. Today, some still lay bets on its survival as an independent entity.

36,000 That’s roughly how many jobs remain in U.S. newsrooms, as we await the new ASNE census in August. We seldom see much reporting of buyouts and layoffs these days, as some publishers concluded that the industry’s problems were only being exacerbated by its reporting on its own staff changes. Now with Jim Romenesko retiring, that uneven news will get even more uneven. Occasionally, bigger newsroom cuts get reported, as with The Denver Post’s cut of 20 a few weeks ago. The dropping of a couple or a half-dozen here or there mostly goes unreported. Post editor Greg Moore summed up the rationale: “It’s basically…getting expenses in line with revenue.” And with no revenue gains year-over-year since 2007, and the only way to maintain profits is cutting jobs, with newsrooms being hard hit. We can only guess at the math: How many fewer stories — online as well as in print — are 20,000 fewer journalists producing? What don’t communities know about themselves that they might have known a decade ago?

0.5% That’s the percentage of its monthly unique visitors that The Boston Globe has been able to sign up for digital-only subscriptions. Among the regional papers, the Globe looks to be the leader, last reporting more than 65,000 digital-only subscribers and about 11 million monthly uniques. Compare that to The New York Times. The Times can count more than 960,000 digital-only subscribers in its U.S. audience, according to comScore’s latest multi-platform survey. Those May numbers show the Times reaching 60 million uniques, for only the second time. At that number, the Times converts 1.5 percent of its unique audience. What this points out: The Times’ highly successful model — shifting its business to rely more on reader revenue — works far less well for the regionals. The Globe’s number is good, but still only a third of the conversion. And most papers’ conversion rates are significantly lower than the Globe’s. We’re still waiting for the Newspaper Association of America’s 2014 full-year numbers. (Last year’s numbers published in April. Now it’s mid-June, and we still don’t have them. NAA says they’re in process, but can’t give a date for publication.) The trajectory of digital circulation revenue reinforces the belief that paywall strategies need a rethink.

44 That’s the number of minutes that Quebec’s La Presse says its readers spend daily with its La Presse+ tablet product (“Newsonomics: La Presse’s bet on tablets and its crossover calculus”). It’s an absolutely stunning number, and seems to suggest that everything we think we know about digital news reading might be wrong. Thankfully, The Star in Toronto will soon test out the strategy in mid-September. Peut-être it’s a Québécois thing — but if it’s not, success will confront news producers again to reimagine themselves.

Photo by Denis Giles used under a Creative Commons license.

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