Six skills you need to run a modern, sustainable newsroom
Keeping newsrooms sustainable requires blending traditional editorial expertise with an understanding of how to create viable products that fit your audience.
In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, Code for Africa (CfA) took a high-level newsroom innovation training programme online. This posed plenty of challenges — many were planned for and avoided, but some were harder to anticipate. This article is the second in a two-part series. Part one: Four lessons for preparing a successful online training.
It’s a truism that newsrooms and good journalism are under threat. Decades of declining revenue have stripped away newsroom capacity, and an ever-growing wave of disinformation on social media, driven by anti-democratic actors, is eroding the public’s trust in news media.
To lead a newsroom in this space requires a complicated mix of skills, blending traditional editorial expertise with an understanding of how to pitch, launch and manage viable products in line with audience consumption habits.
In a recent project, produced in partnership with Deutsche Welle Akademie, Code for Africa spent weeks with senior Kenyan journalists and media practitioners, training them to be media viability consultants. Below are the principles from this training, aimed at helping these consultants thrive in this challenging ecosystem.
- Understand your digital landscape
The key to being successful in any business, especially news, is understanding the space you’re playing in. In news media this means your digital landscape, and it includes information about everything from what platforms your audience uses to consume news, to how much the audience trusts news, to what areas donors are funding.
Knowing the answers to these questions is key to building a sustainable news business. For example, the latest data indicates that in many countries around the world, trust in news is at an all time low. This is a complex problem, but understanding this can help create opportunities. Lack of trust could mean that there is space in the market for a news product built around trust. This could mean considering creating a news team with high journalistic standards, or even a dedicated fact-checking desk within your newsroom.
To get a sense of the media landscape in your country you can consult the wealth of research available online. One of our key references for this program was the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020. It has insights into the markets in Kenya and South Africa, and has contributions from CfA and our Deputy CEO, Chris Roper.
2. Understand how to manage for delivery
Historically in the media industry, there has been a clear division between business and journalism within newsrooms. This means that editors tend to focus on content and editorial decisions, and little time is spent discussing how editors manage tasks.
Within newsrooms, the bulk of project management is done by content management systems (CMS), with editorial leads managing traffic through it, but increasingly newsrooms see more special projects, which can’t necessarily be managed through a linear CMS.
We advocate that newsroom leaders become familiar with the principles of agile project management and managing via Kanban boards. CfA uses Trello, but there are a number of tools available and finding the right one for your organisation is key.
3. Understand your business model and build products for audiences
When looking at a newsroom as a business, it helps to think about every column, newspaper, radio show or television programme as a product, designed to generate revenue from a particular audience. Increasingly, the manner in which revenue is generated by these products is changing.
Traditionally revenue came from advertising, but with the catastrophic decline in this over the last few decades, newsroom leaders have needed to understand other means of generating revenue. Substantial revenue can be generated through donation-based models, where revenue comes through individual reader contributions or larger tranches of institutional donor funding. It can also come via reader revenue, where readers pay membership and subscription fees for access to content.
We are seeing more newsrooms becoming service providers — packaging content creation services with advertising, managing events and promotional campaigns for partners and producing and monetising products as offshoots of their standard business model.
Whatever the funding source, it is critical for newsroom leaders to understand the constraints and tradeoffs that come with each category of revenue, so as to understand how to successfully build products around them without compromising editorial ethics.
4. Understand your analytics and be data-driven
Modern newsrooms have the potential to generate immense amounts of data about their audiences, to the extent that knowing what data is most important, and what it means for the newsroom, becomes challenging.
The key data points to look at are the ones relating to acquisition, how readers are reaching your content, and behaviour, or how, when and for how long readers are engaging with your content.
This data can be mined from social media, from Google Analytics or other web analytics platforms, and it can be mined from any proprietary apps and platforms the newsroom may own and operate.
It can be overwhelming to grapple with, particularly for journalists who aren’t trained in data analysis, so we recommend anyone start out by taking Google’s free Analytics Academy.
5. Get tough on security
Newsroom information security isn’t just about protecting data, it’s about business. For starters, if platforms get hacked or infiltrated by bad actors it can cause catastrophic reputational damage for your newsroom, which is why we recommend enabling two-factor authentication on every newsroom platform, as well as on team members’ personal accounts.
More serious security risks can directly result in loss of revenue and even loss of life. Online newsrooms are extremely exposed to DDoS attacks which can disable websites, asphyxiate traffic and advertising revenue and incur further losses. To prevent this, newsroom leaders must understand how to choose reliable service providers and even use 3rd party protection like Cloudflare.
Finally, newsroom leaders need to know how to protect the individual safety of journalists and sources. To ensure this, modern newsrooms must employ a variety of protections from using VPNs, like Jigsaw developed Outline, to using encrypted communications platforms like Signal or Telegram.
6. Know how to (and whether to) pitch a product
International sources of funding, as well as potential revenue cases, mean there’s opportunity to launch new journalism projects — you just need to understand how to make them viable within your newsroom.
To understand whether an idea is viable within a particular environment we developed a five-part checklist for analysing an idea. It consists of five simple questions:
- Does it build on existing skills, tech or other capacity?
- Does it require minimal additional investment?
- Does it service a growing or underserved market?
- Can it be reliably quality controlled?
- Does it strengthen our core offering?
By asking the above questions you can accurately assess whether a new, revenue generating, product is viable for your newsroom, and you can know how to effectively pitch it to newsroom executives. Illustrating how this worked for his particular context, one of the participants, Kimani Chege, wrote: “In our experimental break-out team revenue model, my team and I created a business model where existing media houses with functional recording studios can create an extra revenue stream through leasing out space and equipment to podcast producers. This was seen as a revenue mix of both subscribers/membership as well as an option of tapping into donor funding by making this setup a media innovation centre.”
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If you want to learn more about how we train the business of news, data journalism or any other skills area, send us an email at hello@codeforafrica.org.
For access to our MOOCs, which provide digital skills for journalists and civil society, visit academy.AFRICA
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DW Akademie is Deutsche Welle’s center for international media development. As a strategic partner of the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, DW Akademie carries out media development projects that strengthen the human right to freedom of opinion and promote free access to information.
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of civic technology and data journalism labs, with teams in 12 countries. CfA builds digital democracy solutions that give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions, and that strengthens civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability. This includes building infrastructure like the continent’s largest open data portals at openAFRICA and sourceAFRICA, as well as incubating initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative and the sensors.AFRICA air quality sensor network.
CfA also manages that African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), which gives the continent’s best muckraking newsrooms the best possible forensic forensic data tools, digital security and whistleblower encryption to help improve their ability to tackle crooked politicians, organised crime and predatory big business. CfA also runs one of Africa’s largest skills development initiatives for digital journalists, and seed funds cross-border collaboration.
