People don’t just consume news today. They participate in it.
People have access to vast and varied information. They pursue news on their own time, and on their own terms, connecting with others who share and help satisfy their curiosity about their world.
This presents an opportunity for news publishers strained by shrinking resources and growing competition: Now more than ever, journalists can engage their audiences as contributors, advisors, advocates, collaborators and partners.
This study describes in detail how newsrooms and independent journalists can grow their readership, boost their relevance and find new sources of revenue by listening to and learning from their audiences.
Reporters and editors can apply this knowledge to all phases of news production — including story selection, reporting, and distribution. These strategies also can help with the longer-term development of beats, sources, formats, and innovative news products. Over time, publishers embracing these strategies can strengthen their business and increase the impact of their work.
This report is part of the American Press Institute’s series of Strategy Studies, which offer detailed, practical strategic guidance about a critical issue that journalists and news organizations need to address.
For this study I talked with 25 news leaders and innovators to distill best practices in audience and community engagement. I consulted reporters and editors, managers and strategists, pioneers and leading thinkers in this field. These innovators work in many places: in legacy newspapers, digitally native outlets, radio and television stations, hyperlocal news outlets and technology startups. They serve national, local and hyperlocal audiences and have for-profit and nonprofit business models.
[pulldata align=center context=”Collaboration is not about what your audience can do for you, but what you can do with your audience.”]To be clear: This report is not a social media guide, a technical manual or a primer on marketing yourself or your stories. This is about how journalists can genuinely collaborate with audiences to improve their work, not simply to promote it. To the extent that certain technologies and promotional strategies help strengthen your work, we will address them. But this report was written with a point of view: Collaboration is not about what your audience can do for you, but what you can do with your audience.
To examine best practices, we’ll work through the basics of how to effectively interact with and tune in to the communities that can most strengthen your journalism. Then, we’ll look at a few ways newsrooms can build their capacity to engage their audiences.
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- How to become a newsroom that consistently engages audiences
- How to listen to your audience and learn from them
- How to engage your audiences in 5 key steps
- What exactly is engagement and what difference does it make?
- The best ways to build audience and relevance by listening to and engaging your community
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The press will be much more effective in serving people and strengthening democracy if it learns from what researchers are learning. Among the examples and takeaways, you will find that news leaders and non-news experts alike value the opportunity to think differently about the challenges in front of them, about how local news can change and how research can ask different questions.
When community members are no longer voters, their needs become diffuse once again and there is no clear, focusing mandate. So many newsrooms slip back into the usual: politics coverage driven by politicians and press releases. How do we avoid that backslide?
How can we avoid that backslide this time?
We see in research how trusted messengers matter for news that’s shared. We know Millennials and Gen Z pay for or donate to support email newsletters or video or audio from independent creators at higher rates than newspapers.
