‘Media is having this reckoning.’ Our engagement editor on the importance of building relationships with readers
The Idea, an Atlantic Media newsletter on media trends, caught up with Chalkbeat engagement editor Caty Green to chat about membership, the uniqueness of education reporting, and the rise of the term “audience” (she’s not its biggest fan).
This Q&A was originally published by the Idea.
Q&A: Caty Green, Engagement Editor @ Chalkbeat
By Lizzy Raben, an Atlantic Media fellow
Can you give a brief description of Chalkbeat and your role there?
Chalkbeat is an education reporting nonprofit. We started out as the merging of two bureaus — one in New York, which used to be called GothamSchools, and an organization in Colorado called EdNews Colorado. Since then, we’ve expanded to seven bureaus in Denver, Detroit, Memphis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Newark, and New York. We have plans to expand to more cities soon, and we also have a national coverage team.
My role in that so far has been engagement, mostly in the traditional sense, which has involved a lot of SEO and social media. I’m also going to be working with our digital marketing manager Kary Perez going forward, and we’re going to be building out our email strategy.
I’m going to be focusing a lot on the umbrella tier of community building. Part of that is going to be working with our reader advisory board, which is one of our main ways to talk to very loyal and passionate readers who have been part of the Chalkbeat community for varying lengths of time, and moderating conversations with them — finding out how we’re doing and what we could be doing better or more of.
The other part of that is figuring out what kind of online communities we can better develop for Chalkbeat. For me, that’s still kind of unclear whether that’s going to be a Facebook group, or what we used to do at The Atlantic, which was work with a group of Atlantic super readers and moving that conversation away from the comments section to a full forum. I haven’t yet figured out what the appetite for something like that would be.
When we make decisions like that, I’m a big believer in starting from the place of asking readers what they are up for and what would be a real service to them and not just, “Oh everyone else is doing this, so we should also do it.”
What is unique about working in the education space?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the balances we have to strike, and part of that is the local versus national balance. Another big part of it is the specificity of education policy versus the broad, general appeal of making sure kids have access to an education — and not just an education, but one that is quality and worthwhile.
On a larger scale, I really respect how when Chalkbeat sets out to open new bureaus, they look at where the need is and where the news deserts are, or where the school story is in such a space that there needs to be some coverage and could use deep analysis with some real expert insight into why schools are struggling here.
They really are looking at where can we do the most good. And that sounds very cheesy and corny (obviously we still have to operate within a budget), but I appreciate that they make those decisions based on that. And then they go and start building relationships and finding out who is covering this stuff there and what have they done differently or what could we bring to the table that this community wouldn’t already have.
What’s the balance between weighing what readers might want and what is feasible or attractive for the newsroom?
We’re thinking a lot about this right now with our newsletter strategy and taking a look at how big of a burden or slice of the workload producing a daily newsletter is for our team. A lot of our bureaus are so small, so for many of them it means rotating throughout the week, and after starting work at 8 or 9 a.m., they are still working at 9 or 10 p.m. to put this newsletter together and get it sent out the next day.
So we’re thinking about redesigning our daily newsletters and maybe making our monthly or weekly newsletters a little bit more of a narrative product, or a little bit more conversational.
I just come from a place where I want to ask readers what they want first before doing that. Which is not to say that depending on what the majority says, we’ll definitely do that, because within newsrooms you have to maintain editorial decision making, but I do want to know what people expect when they open those newsletters and what kind of experience they want at seven in the morning or on a Wednesday afternoon.
Being able to put that into a quantitative and qualitative experiment so that we get some real data to make decisions that’s more than just one guy’s email reply that says, “Hey, I really hate this section of the newsletter” — that to me is a more worthwhile and thoughtful approach to redesigning what is actually a major distribution channel for us.
Why does engagement work matter? Why should publications care about doing engagement or be invested in it?
From a business standpoint, media is sort of having this reckoning where we’re no longer just thinking about advertising as our main revenue generator. We aren’t just thinking about what can we offer advertisers, or what access to readers can we offer them so that our product is at a premium — instead, we’re thinking more about how can we serve consumers.
Engagement matters because we are relying on readers to support us financially, and we can’t really make the case for that if we keep the walls up between newsrooms and the audience. Even using the word audience can be sort of alienating. They’re just people. They’re just people like your mom and your music teacher from third grade who are trying to be actively informed citizens in the world. Not everyone is an actively informed citizen of the world, but we’re trying to serve people who are.
I came from this traditional newspaper newsroom that was in a pretty tumultuous period while I was there and then went into a membership newsroom where we really developed relationships with the people who supported our work. We had monthly coffees with them where we just had coffee from Starbucks and some pastries and we sat in a circle and just talked about the big trends — the big threads in politics, education, climate and things like that around San Diego where people probably didn’t have time to read every single story that we wrote on them.
That was our chance to make it more approachable and talk to them as people about what we were noticing that was happening in San Diego. I really believe in membership programs and I have since my first real year in journalism with the Voice of San Diego.
Another reason we’re invested in engagement is because it helps inform and better our reporting. For example, during the Denver teachers strikes that just happened last week, we were able to send out a few forms and a few surveys to get teachers and students’ stories of their experience during the strike. We also asked what main questions parents and teachers still had that weren’t really being answered. So engagement can shine a light on what is not being fulfilled and what the voids are in coverage that we can help people understand.
Coming from a membership background, is there anything that’s surprised you about the rise of subscriptions and membership?
What’s funny to me about that is it sort of reminds me of the old divide between journalists and the people who are responsible for the business of journalism. Because I think journalists all (or mostly all) get into this business because they are thinking about serving readers — they’re thinking about the role that their work is going to play in society and how are they going to help the greater good by writing their story.
Now the folks on the business side are thinking more about serving readers and serving people so that they invest in these media outlets, which is just a funny full circle. That’s why you’re seeing all of these subscription models pop up, along with all of these tiers of access that media outlets are offering readers, subscribers, and donors.
It’s been interesting to see the big boom in membership models since being at Voice of San Diego. Now I think there are these go-to options that you can offer people who become members. I personally enjoy being a Slate Plus member, but I think that is sort of what people think of for membership models now — people get an ad-free experience or bonus content on podcasts or maybe they get early ticket sales to Slate events and Slate panels.
And I like all of those things, but I always have to remind myself: I am not an average user. I am not an average reader. It’s a trap that a lot of people fall into. I think in all of my jobs I’ve played this every-man kind of role — as a journalist I’ve always been a generalist — and in a lot of cases that’s been good for me because I feel like I can help translate work for a wider audience without dumbing it down or without screwing it up.
What is a challenge you’ve faced while doing engagement work?
I think a big challenge, and it feels cliche to even talk about, is honestly burnout. I work on the internet and live on the internet and that never goes to sleep. There is a spiral you can get into where you’re just working constantly and hoarding a lot of information and trying to do so much that you don’t really give yourself time to be thoughtful about what you want to do next. I’m trying to avoid that as much as possible and I think I’m getting better about that as I get older.
I also think cynicism is a trap of this job. If you spend too much time on Twitter, you end up following the people who work in media who are suspicious of everything — not that you shouldn’t be skeptical and take things with a grain of salt, but I think that in itself can be a grind. So while spending a lot of time on social, I try to let it not affect my brain (although I can’t really avoid that with memes.)
What is a project that you’re excited to work on?
I am really excited about working on our newsletter strategy because that is such a big need among our reporters and it is one of our core ways of reaching readers on a daily basis. So I’m excited to work with our digital marketing manager and our editor to make that the best product it can possibly be.
What’s something interesting you’ve seen recently from a media outlet other than your own?
I really liked Vox’s Future Perfect rollout. From what I can tell, it’s very similar to some of the ongoing series or species projects we would do at The Atlantic, where we’re sponsored by a major foundation or major company but we have editorial freedom (obviously). I liked the approach on the site itself, where it’s not fluffy feel-good stuff, but it’s like, these are the major crises facing our country and our society, here’s how people are trying to solve it, or here’s the super context-heavy (because it’s Vox) and super nuanced thing to consider when you see what’s claiming to be a cure-all. And I also really like the newsletter. That is one that I spend time reading through.
Lizzy Raben is an Atlantic Media fellow. This Q&A was originally published by Lizzy via The Idea.
