A Journalist’s Guide to Customized, Site-specific Engagement Strategies
One of the major tenets of journalism is to serve the public. And to serve the public, you have to interact with the public—this is where news outlets have historically fallen short.
Public radio is the exception and has always done a great job engaging their audiences. Their entire business model and existence depends on it. As an avid radio junkie, I have always wondered why public radio does such a great job, but why other outlets (print and online both) fail comparatively. The failure of online news outlets to engage meaningfully is most confusing because we have the most tools, and yet we don’t take advantage of them.
Engagement has been improving in recent years. But a lot of work still needs to be done, and the subject is vast. Engagement can mean many things, but I define engagement as something more than sharing, focusing specifically on calls-to-action or things that would get people to do something.
So I chose to focus on engagement for my Studio 3 project. I started by surveying the media world for the types of engagement that are being done and what seems to be working. There is a lot out there, but I quickly realized that the most successful projects have a unifying factor: They all fit the style of the publication and the platform. And so, I decided to focus on the following problem.
How can a news site create an engagement strategy that complements its personality?
Engaging with your audience shouldn’t be generic; it should be customized to carry your brand and voice as it spreads across platforms. To answer this large question, I started out with a set of smaller guiding questions:
- What organizations are doing engagement well?
- How do these news outlets connect their engagement to their publication’s voice?
- How does the platform affect the type of engagement?
- WNYC has a good local engagement strategy and success. How can we emulate something like that on a global scale?
- How do media partnerships encourage engagement?
I worked to develop a set of rules and guiding philosophies for tailoring engagement to a specific publication through research. To test my theories, I worked with the publication Matter to create an engagement strategy tailored to their voice and character. To do so, I divided my project into two sections:
- Creating a set of best practices for site-specific, customized engagement based on research and interview
- Working with Matter to create an engagement strategy tailored to their platform and type of publication
My project, named The Engagement Party, develops a set of rules and guiding philosophies for tailoring engagement to a specific news outlet through research and interviews and works with a publication, my media partner, Matter — a digital magazine — to create a site-specific engagement strategy tailored to their voice and character.
What do the experts say?
I reached out to people that I felt were doing good work and collectively represented a variety of publication styles and platforms. There is a lot of radio, breaking news and everything news, investigative journalism, and a crowd-funded publication.
I conducted most of the interviews as background research. With permission of the interviewees, some of the interviews are available. The links are below.
How do I customize engagement?
Figure out one guiding characteristic.
For the New York Times, it’s quality—maintaining their legacy. For Studio 360, it’s the ability to replay it on the radio—bringing their audience into their shows. For ProPublica, it’s geared at creating communities around each of their investigations—involving the populations that are most affected. But for each publication, this is the one characteristic they keep in mind for everything. Decide yours and stick to it.
Make your engagement work match the style of your publication.
This point is closely tied to the last point, but focuses on the end-product rather than the overarching strategical philosophy.
The inspiration for this point came directly from Amanda Michel at The Guardian:
The overall most important thing to keep in mind is that each large engagement effort should produce material that makes a feature. If you would want to read it, your readers might too.
For large engagement projects, there should be a definite end product in mind. That means a feature for most publications. But for places like ProPublica and Chalkbeat, the journalistic goal often revolves around holding people accountable and making change. Engagement projects should contribute to the publication’s mission.
Develop a schedule.
Develop a schedule that matches the natural rhythms found within the way the news site operates. There is a natural workflow and understanding of time that exists within each newsroom. Rather than fighting against this natural rhythm, try to work within it.
The schedule can be flexible and can be updated—that’s agile. But you need to have a schedule and timeline in place for different size projects and how they integrate into your workflow. You can’t reinvent the wheel for every Twitter call-out, or every crowd-sourced investigative project. Setting a flexible but outlined schedule will created a set of guidelines people can return to for each new project.
At Studio 360, for example, they use a six week cycle as a guideline for every single challenge. The producer leading the project will change, the topic will change, the medium of the product will change. But the six-week cycle remains their go-to time frame.
Define the culture.
Set the expectation that your staff care about engaging with your readers/users/audience—however you define them. There are two good ways to help define the culture: have dedicated staff or make your staff dedicate their time. Both of these approaches require dedicated leaders.
Most of the organizations I spoke to have dedicated engagement editors, like ProPublica and The Guardian. But a few just have expectations built in to the staff’s workflow, such as Studio 360 and De Correspondent.
De Correspondent is a crowd-funded publication in the Netherlands and published in Dutch. They started a year ago, and do great work, but are most notable for their membership and contribution structure. They have a large number of subscribers, especially for the first year and especially given that there are not that many Dutch speakers out there. I interviewed the co-founder and publisher, Ernst-Jan Pfauth. When I asked him how journalists and contributors (audience members) interact, he said:
Involvement starts with the attitude of the journalists. All our journalists feel the obligation and need to engage with our members, and they spend a lot of their time on this. It turns out that if you actually say what you’re going to write, then people are willing help.
Then when I asked him how they got journalists to think about engagement as a part of their job and work towards it constantly.
The journalists who wanted to work with us knew they would be working for a digital audience, and that they would have to interact.
Other people said the same thing, but I think Ernst says it most clearly: Engagement with the audience was a priority for our journalists because we were clear that it had to be.
Working with Matter
Matter is a new digital magazine that lives inside Medium. Since Matter relaunched in June, they have been evolving rapidly, continuously working on “defining their brand,” and working to build/engage an audience that wants to be involved. Matter, like any other publication, can utilize all available engagement tools and needs to think about what works best for their audience.
Iteration of Ideas
My basic method is: Start with many ideas, narrow it down, run tests. Start over. Think up new ideas and so on and so forth.
To do this, I surveyed the Internet as well as I could and came up with approximately 30 ideas for engagement projects that could function on and off of Matter (or Medium, to be specific, since Medium is the platform). I then started to think about how these different potential engagement projects fit into the unique platform of Medium and how they could match Matter’s personality.
The Chosen Three
To test these theories, we decided on three projects at Matter, with a magazine feature product as the end goal, to test what the guiding characteristic would be.
- Transparency + building reader’s trust
Like the Social Media Sandbox at NPR, run by Melody Kramer, I thought it would be good for Matter to share more about the process and what happens inside Matter. So we developed a plan for an Inside Matter collection. - Challenges + user-generated content
We want to get the users involved. There are not a lot of magazines that engage on the Internet—so Matter wants to start. - Crowd-sourced reporting/storytelling
Each call-to-action should have an end-product that resembles a magazine feature, since Matter is a magazine that produces magazine stories.
To develop a schedule, we created an engagement workflow that matches a traditional magazine workflow for so that it integrates seamlessly into the publication and doesn’t disrupt existing work.
To define the culture, an editor was assigned to each project so that there was always someone on the staff working on the project.
Tips
Here are some tips to keep in mind when planning your engagement strategy:
- In the same way that the news cycle is constantly changing, innovation is too. It’s an ongoing process of updates.
- Traditional workflows are really hard to infiltrate — so don’t try and fight them. Learn to work within them.
- Not every call-out will receive a response, but that’s okay. Keep trying, keep testing to discover what works for you and your audience.
Read the Interviews
Thanks to:
I would like to thank Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, and Zoe Fraade-Blanar for their guidance, my parents for their eternal support, my classmates in Studio 20 for their ideas and feedback, and of course everyone I worked on The Engagement Party with: the Matter staff—Mark Lotto, Maddie Kahn, Leah Beckmann, Bobbie Johnson, Mike Benoist, Erich Nagler, Devin Washburn— and all of the people who let me take their time for an interview—Jenny Lawton, Ernst Jan-Pfauth, Lexi Mainland, Amanda Michel, John Keefe, Julie Whitaker, Amanda Zamora, Melody Kramer, Sarah Glen.
