Welcome to our November Need to Know series on influencer partnerships and how one local newsroom approached it from an experimental framework as a way to test whether it could become a permanent segment of their freelance work. Each week, different people from the Houston Chronicle team will walk you through their approach.
News creators are so hot right now. And rightfully so: it’s been a constant theme on LinkedIn since that Pew study came out last year, was a popular topic on the journalism conference circuit this season, and it feels like every month, another high-profile staffer announces they’re going solo as a journalist-creator. What’s a local newsroom to do?
At the Houston Chronicle, we’re implementing a two-prong strategy of working within the creator economy. The first one is to internally train and support staffers in making creator-style videos (which many newsrooms are also moving toward as an off-platform strategy). The second one — and the topic of this month’s series — is to meaningfully partner with local creators.
In October 2024, we noticed a local food influencer had been sharing our Top 100 Restaurants guide, which resulted in a noticeable number of new subscribers. We knew those new subscribers could be credited to this influencer because we hadn’t yet launched the latest Top 100 list, and she had been pointing her followers to the old list while mistakenly broadcasting that it was the newest list.
We ultimately invited her, and several other food creators, to our annual food event where we unveiled the correct Top 100 Restaurants list. But despite the influencer’s error, it was a glimmer of possibility when it came to engaging new audiences. What if we could strategically work with a creator so we all have a seat at the table? Could we purposefully collaborate and grow together?
We participated in this year’s API Influencer Learning Cohort as a way to create small-scale experiments that tested how to do exactly that, while navigating potentially thorny issues around ethics, control and impact.
There’s no one right way to get started, but in this series, we’ll walk you through what we did. Upcoming editions will be written by the various stakeholders on our team, including the local food influencer we worked with.
– Jennifer Chang, senior director of innovation & experimentation
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- Experimenting with Creators
- How a local newsroom got started in working with influencers
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