How can newsrooms step back and truly listen to their readers?

Journalists are often accused of writing for other journalists, for their editors or for readers who are already loyal to their brand. Very rarely do newsrooms try to go out of their way to engage, or write for, those outside their immediate circle or bubble. When they do, however, there are a number of options for making a success of it.

Audience surveys and outreach programmes can be effective ways for newsrooms to broaden their readership, according to Mary Walter-Brown, CEO of the News Revenue Hub (NRH), a US non-profit organisation, which works to help news publishers develop their own loyalty strategies.

Surveys and outreach can inspire trust, engagement and long-term financial commitment amongst readers, she says, speaking on the Journalism.co.uk podcast.

Her market in the US is in an interesting position compared to the UK. Though fewer people trust the news there (26 per cent vs 34 per cent), more people are prepared to pay for it (19 per cent vs 9 per cent), according to the latest Reuters Digital News Report 2022. In other words, the UK has more people who trust the news but it fails to convince them to pay for it.

In the US, news organisations have had to react more urgently to the declining newspaper industry, says Walter-Brown. In its place, NRH has worked with many news organisations like Oaklandside in California or The Lens in New Orleans, to set up community-first news coverage plus donation-based membership models. But this takes a lot of time to develop effectively.

"A lot of newsrooms jump in thinking they will have this brand new revenue stream overnight but it’s not that simple — like most things in life," says Walter-Brown.

The relationship continuum: building loyalty

Before launching a fresh campaign, Walter-Brown recommends gauging your audiences' current willingness to pay. Put out a survey that asks: 'If we were to start a membership programme, what could we do to get you to invest'.

Provide four options: 1) Just ask me 2) help me understand what this means 3) give me a benefit for doing it 4) I would never donate.

They have found that 50 to 60 per cent of people say 'just ask' or 'help me understand''; an indication of what near-immediate success can look like, when the "low hanging fruit" of existing loyal readers can convert to members or donors quickly.

If a higher percentage of people show a resistance to pay then more work is needed to demystify the business and editorial model, says Walter-Brown. From there you can start to build a 'relationship continuum' based on habit and loyalty.

So what does a relationship continuum look like? In many ways it is not dissimilar to the theory behind marketing funnels: When readers land on your site from search, social and word of mouth, you want to quickly get them signed up to a newsletter or some other means to capture their data and build loyalty.

Walter-Brown suggests using a powerful call-to-action on articles and the site like: "Don't let social media feeds decide what's important to you, sign up to our newsletter to understand what is important to [insert location]".

"Email is the number one vehicle for loyalty and turning loyal readers into donors," she says, likening it to being on a first-name basis with readers.

From there, regularly bake surveys, questions, games and other interactive opportunities into your newsletter. Make it a must-read, six-week "welcome series" which slowly imparts key information about the news outlet: who the editor and publisher are, what is the editorial mission, how is the news organisation funded, and who do you serve? You are then primed by the end of the series to move the relationship in a new direction.

"By that point, it isn’t an institution asking them for money, it’s Felicia, the publisher who has already told them how hard it is to keep this running and why we need a particular person to invest in them."

This is an effective strategy used by many US local news organisations. For exmaple, in three years, Bridge Michigan, a Michigan-based nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization, has built a membership program of 9,000 readers worth $900k in annual reader revenue. Around half of those readers have signed up to recurring donations.

Pinning your revenue strategy on reader donations and loyalty is not exclusively for local news. Climate-focused non-profit publication Grist saw an 88 per cent increase in monthly donors and 48 per cent increase in monthly donation revenue in its first year. In 2022, Grist anticipates $140k in reader revenue a month: a 57 per cent increase from the year previous. 

"News consumers might be really fascinated by the fact that revenues aren't coming in from the same typical streams as they were before. It might empower them as consumers to know they could have a deeper role in funding the reporting they care about, rather than being forced to take out a subscription."

The skills and technology gap

Much of the work to coax readers down the loyalty funnel involve sharp technology skills from audience experts. The NRH found from their work, however, that many newsrooms lacked the niche technology skills most audience revenue campaigns need.

It's one of the main reasons behind the organisation's existence: The non-profit provides a technology infrastructure, which integrates essential software, such as donation management systems with email marketing. This way smaller teams are able to automate outreach.

The News Revenue Hub consistently find that newsrooms are also unclear on what audience development actually entails beyond putting out posts on social media. Walter-Brown says that newsrooms need employees trained and dedicated to write and optimise the website effectively with strong SEO, CTAs, lead generation and headlines to attract the widest range of online readers.

It's why the group also trains staff in grassroots community engagement, campaigning, roadmap building, email marketing and budget planning.

Unfortunately, many people with such skills are in short supply or often get sidetracked to work on other tasksm such as writing stories or delivering customer service for memberships, thus neglecting the work of a niche role intergal to the audience revenue strategy.

Boots on the ground

If your newsroom is currently lacking funding for such a dedicated role to fully leverage such infrastrcuture, there are effective non-technical solutions too.

Doing the engagement work in the offline world is just as important; 'listening tours', like these ones seen in the US, can achieve a similar effect when it comes to building trust and long-term loyalty.

Walter-Brown says that the old-school approach of door-knocking and community gatherings is still needed today to better understand readers. Particularly if the intention is to dig into issues of distrust or disservice, as well as what people truly want from their community news organisation.

Making time and space for this type of work is critical. It's why UK non-profit community-news network the Bureau Local created their "Local Week" this year.

The Bureau is unique for a non-profit newsroom in that it has reporters spread out across the UK, in Portsmouth, Brighton, Manchester, Birmingham, Scotland and so on.

Their "Local Week" scheme sees them ask seven reporters from different communities in the UK to step away from their desks and disengage from headlines and deadlines in order to talk and only talk to their local readers.

This year there was just one item on the agenda: the impact of the cost of living crisis. During the week reporters were told to organise their time as they liked and talk to people without the intention of needing to file a story: It was a rare chance to simply listen without expectation.

Two of the reporters and coordinators for this project, Rachel Hamada and Vicky Gayle, spoke on the Journalism.co.uk podcast about their experiences during "Local Week".

They said the goal was to reconnect with the communities they reported on after the pandemic had weakened ties between journalists and readers. Whether forging new contacts or rekindling old ones, "Local Week" aimed to inform potential stories and investigations for the year ahead.

"We knew that a week away from normal duties potentially would be more productive than any other week ever could be, because of the insights we would gather," says Hamada.

For Gayle in Birmingham, her "Local Week" comprised of organised visits to foodbanks and unions to get a sense of the struggles her local readers were facing.

Those conversations were shaped by design thinking and deep listening techniques, so that she and her team did not go in with any preconceived ideas - a rarity for most deadline-driven, day-to-day reporting.

"Normally you go into a conversation with a purpose," says Gayle. "If you email someone because you want to speak to them, you’re letting them know why you want to chat. It isn’t necessarily organic...because you’re on the phone for 20-30 minutes as you’re conscious of time and then you’re off again."

Digital inequality was another big reason for The Bureau's introduction of "Local Week". The latest Ofcom stats state that six per cent of British homes do not have an internet connection. That is a significant portion of the population who, as a result, might not be able to visit news websites.

"The week we had really allowed us to get a taste of the complexity of people’s lives and the extreme decisions they’re having to make in trying circumstances," says Hamada.

"Like decisions between paying for food or heat, or rent and food, or potentially even feeling the need to get back into crime to fund life at the moment."

These themes are lost in the big picture of cost-of-living crisis reporting, she adds. Many testimonies they gained during "Local Week" they had agreed not to share in the spirit of making the interactions more about listening than producing.

Anecdotes to enable the reporters to flesh out an ever-accurate picture of the times, however. Hamada spoke of how a block of flats in Edinburgh used to leave donations in the stairwells so that residents could get support without the stigma of using foodbanks. She heard that these donations were drying up in a sign of the times, mirroring the claims of local foodbanks.

Coming full circle with feedback

A lot of this seems like good, old, plain even basic journalism but it feels like an exception rather than the rule these days, mainly because newsrooms and its reporters rarely have the luxury to do this type of time-consuming and open-ended listening work.

Bureau Local is uniquely set up to do this work, Hamada admits, but says that other newsrooms' editors can consider giving select parts of their newsroom permission to experiment with listening exercises with the proviso that such a decision cannot be a one-off project, as it would make the process extractive and risk those they spoke to feeling used.

Next time, The Bureau wants to increase the planning and preparation time for "Local Week" to around six weeks in order to target specific groups relevant to the topics they want to look into. Gayle adds that she did not have enough time to do any 'shadowing' of organisations this year, which would have given her a much deeper insight into the people connected to the groups and the work they do.

"That would have been so valuable just to see what a day in their working life looks like and the different people they come across," she concludes.

Walter-Brown made a similar point on coming full circle: "It can be equally damaging to go out and ask the community what it needs and not deliver it back to them, when they’ve gone to the effort of telling you. You have to have that completed feedback loop, the editorial team has to be willing to listen and bought in and then you need to be creative."

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