Last year, our teams at WhereBy.Us went fully remote. Our team was already distributed across the U.S., and we chose to formalize this as an operational way to ensure that “solo” employees working alone in various cities had the same habits and access as those who gathered IRL. It also saved us cash, the lifeblood of any startup.

Building a truly remote culture takes time. We haven’t mastered it yet, and we probably never will. Every change in personnel and every change in operations is also a culture change. Company culture is constantly evolving, with or without us managers, and staying engaged with those changes is one of our biggest leadership responsibilities.

It’s true that working IRL has advantages. Colocated teams have more “creative collisions” through hallway chatter or quick coffee breaks. You can tolerate less discipline about documentation because there’s someone nearby who can help folks through an unfamiliar tool or process and face-to-face interruption feels less disruptive to us non-robots. Urgent problems are solved more quickly. Non-urgent issues stay non-urgent for longer.

But, for managers, working together in physical space also means what’s really happening at your company may be less obvious. Gaps are more easily swept out of sight. Work on both operations and culture is less effortful. Remote work, for all of its challenges, can force you and your company to become more intentional, more thoughtful, and more resilient to the challenges of change.

Adopting remote work under duress and during a global health crisis is an especially difficult task. For the past week or so, my DMs and email have been filled with requests for help from those who must rapidly upend their team’s entire way of working together to protect the safety and health of their people. Here are some practical habits that we’ve learned that your company could adapt quickly to ease the disruption.

1. Start with your calendars.

Getting used to the heavy calendaring of a remote team is a big adjustment, but it’s vital. Remote teams must deliberately schedule communication that is easily organized ad-hoc in real life. And, you need much more visibility on when your teammates are available and when you’re interrupting the most important work of all — actually working. All of our meetings are video conferences, and every calendar hold includes one, even if teams happen to be working in-person. (More on video in a minute.) Our team works on weekly sprints and our meetings look like this:

• All-hands kickoff: We devote 15 minutes for the company to get oriented to the sprint. We review the roadmap and identify urgent blockers, update the company on anything the executives resolved over the weekend, and answer any questions submitted to our anonymous AMA form.
• Standups: We need our teams to check in daily on their work. It’s probably best to default to a videoconference to start, but some teams rely entirely on Slack, others do a combination of both. Your teams know what they need, so get them started and trust them to adapt. The point is consistent, daily communication on what we did, what we’re doing, and what is blocking us from completing our sprint tasks.
• Sprint kickoffs and retros: Again, it’s best to trust your teams to decide what they need. Often a kickoff is simply a Monday standup to ensure we know what we’re doing. team retros are mandatory in our company, though, and they take longer. We want to know what went well, what we’re unsure of, and what we need to work on at the end of each sprint, and we force a specific conversation about our team health. This gets shared across teams in our All-Hands Retro along with a wrap-up of our metrics, what we accomplished, and demos of finished work.
• 1-on-1s: These are your most important meetings as a manager, and they need to be your top priority each week. 1-on-1s are your best opportunity to dig into what is happening in your team, and your best opportunity to ensure that your people are healthy, growing, and keeping their work on-target for the rest of the team. Set and review individual goals. Ask consistent questions. Try to listen three or four times as much as you talk. Review your notes beforehand to understand each person’s growth and development week-to-week. Ask for feedback on the team, and on how you can improve as their manager.

Try specific time blocks for cross-team work. Your people need to work together, and they need some dedicated time to make it happen. When we started off, we set two two-hour company-wide internal calendar holds to ensure teams had dedicated time to collaborate on tasks like research, workshopping, brainstorming, and critique. We asked team leads to set these meetings on Fridays for the next sprint and whatever time was unused by Friday close of business was free to be scheduled over.

2. Default to video on and write everything down in meetings.

When we started working remotely, I consulted some friends at Vox and Zapier for advice on how to do it right. Two of the most important things I learned were to default to video on and to get great at written communication.

As a manager, it’s your job to ensure these things happen and set the tone for each meeting. Turn on your camera. Ask everyone to do the same. You need to read people’s faces and body language, so you need those visual cues. Set up your agendas. Take notes in shared docs yourself first to demonstrate how it’s done and then you can pass the responsibility around. (Managers should always stay in the scribe rotation. Ours is a service job. Don’t do it alone, but don’t get lazy either.)

Over time, we’ve grown a little lax on the video rules from team-to-team and meeting-to-meeting, but the notes habits have only deepened. Remote teams have to write. They have to communicate very well to overcome distance. They need written records of decisions to help people get onboarded and stay on top of the work. Documentation is imperative to making all this work, and that includes meeting documentation.

If you’re managing remotely for the first time, some of the first things you’ll identify are your documentation deficiencies in your systems and processes. To get started on fixing them, keep a shared list of documentation needs and start knocking them out as sprint tasks for yourself and your teammates.

3. Leverage asynchronous communication.

Remote work requires deep trust in your teammates. To get the best performance out of your team, you need to care less about when or how they work, outside of your internal agreements on work times, reporting responsibilities, etc. If you manage mostly by hovering, you’re going to have a hard time with this transition.

Asynchronous communication is an asset. People are different. Some work better first thing in the morning (🙋‍♀️), others are night owls. People have different family responsibilities and different personal responsibilities too. Remote work allows for flexibility to accommodate these differences, and that is an advantage for your whole team.

We have set “work hours” for the company when we expect people to be mostly online, but we are extremely flexible about this from team to team and employee to employee. Some people need more structure to stay on track. You can adjust for that too. It’s a good idea to check-in on productivity during your 1-on-1s.

I built a Slackbot for standups¹ that we have adapted over time to understand the basic daily check-in items: What did you do today? What are your next steps? Are you blocked on any work?

We now send it out at the end of the day and we added some new questions: What were your wins today? What did you learn today? The timing encourages folks to end their day at a reasonable time and the questions encourage us to end our day thinking about what we accomplished and what energizes us.

And some days are really hard. I think we’ve gotten more honest about this in our notes too, which is a good thing for our culture. I also think we learn a lot more about each other. My colleagues are learning about cooking, languages, history, they’re going to cool events, training for stuff, coaching, and mentoring, and doing all sorts of things that may or may not be entirely work-related that help them grow. They inspire me daily.

Mostly, encourage more communication than anyone thinks is necessary. If you use a chat tool like Slack, post notes about when you’re offline and encourage people to keep their statuses up-to-date and to respect the statuses of others. If someone’s working weird hours, have them set up an email responder about when they’ll return. Trust and adjust.

4. Normalize AFK and “heads-down” time.

Asynchronous communication can also lead some people toward burnout. No one can be “always-on.” As a manager, you set the tone for how your team understands the culture around this. Your habits will become the habits of your team.

Send a message and set your status when you’re stepping away from keyboard to take a walk or pick up your kid or to eat your lunch. Let people know when signing on early so you can leave early. Turn off notifications and update your status when you need to ignore Slack for a few hours and focus on your tasks. If something is truly urgent, we all have phone numbers in our profiles. Calling or texting is an escape valve, but in my experience, most issues can wait until you’re back.

5. Engineer some collisions.

No one’s running into each other in the hallway when you work remote. As counterintuitive as it seems, you need to schedule some interactions for your team that aren’t about work. That can start as simply as reaching out to plan digital “coffee breaks” or quick catch-ups with your teammates.

Last year, we started a new routine called What’s Been Up Wednesday. (I’m currently revamping this a bit, but we’ll pick it back up in the next week or two.) Everyone who wants to join can come into a Zoom for a half-hour at the end of a Wednesday and share what’s been going on in our lives outside of work. We also do staff recs — what shows, books, podcasts, etc. you’ve gotten into lately.

Through this little moment, we’ve learned so much more about each other’s passions, personalities, and families. We’ve built a little more camaraderie in our team and I think it’s helped us all see each other as whole people rather than just coworkers.

We’ve also started a lunch and learn series in which every month or so we invite experts, advisers or people we admire to share about their work. These conversations allow us to collectively turn our gaze outward, broaden our thinking, and learn together. And, they give us great ideas to get excited about and plot to steal.

One of the best social things that happened to me personally this year has been getting into a weekly online Dungeons and Dragons game that my colleague, Michael, started organizing within our company. A few of us play weekly, other colleagues pop in and out, and of course we’ve made new friends outside the company through the game too. Turns out a few hours of grown-up pretend every week is very good for my heartbrain. If you’re not quite as nerdy as we are, consider hosting some Pictionary or Jackbox over a video call. Or play together online. Or maybe set a book club or cooking club for your crew.

I have a hard rule about “no forced family fun,” so all these activities are entirely optional. Optionality protects people who are currently really busy, have other commitments, or who simply don’t want to socialize. That’s OK. Not everyone is a joiner, and there are other ways to engage.

We have “squad” slack channels for (work and recreational) reading, games, music, and more. We have “steal-this” channels to highlight other work we admire. We share a lot of memes and gifs. We ask each other a lot of “dumb” questions. People plan meetups when they’re in each other’s cities. Encourage chatter. Be the first to reach out. Risk looking dumb. Risk being vulnerable.

I truly hope your teams are not affected by COVID-19, but emergencies aside, most companies, especially media and tech companies, require at least some remote work these days. If you’re forced to adapt now, perhaps some of these tips will help you improve your habits or at least think differently about how your team works remotely. I’d appreciate your tips and suggestions on how to improve too. Running a company — remote or otherwise—is an intense learning experience. I would love to learn from you.

Rebekah Monson is co-founder and COO of WhereBy.Us, a media tech startup that is currently crowdfunding. Learn more about the company and how to invest at republic.co/whereby-us.

1. Slack has some great docs to get you started on bots, and you can host these for free on Glitch!

5 practical tips for managing newly remote teams during coronavirus was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Launching a new product, even when you do the research, use design thinking principles, and work in an agile way, can kind of feel like throwing a party and wondering if anyone will attend. Thankfully readers showed up when we launched a new membership product this year. When we did a fresh round of user research in early summer, we learned new members were satisfied with the good feeling that comes with supporting their fave local newsletter and used some of the perks and participation opportunities we offer especially for them.

With a strong foundation for the minimum viable product, it was time to turn our attention to new member growth and start iterating. We had questions like:

• How can we grow our baseline conversion rate?
• How much recurring reader revenue can we expect from membership?
• What incentivizes readers to become members? What doesn’t?

To begin answering these questions, we ran different new member campaigns in two months for three of our city brands, The Evergrey, Bridgeliner, and The Incline. Here’s how we did it and what we’ve learned so far.

Building three campaigns in two months

The Evergrey in Seattle tested a birthday celebration campaign around their third birthday in October. In November, Bridgeliner in Portland tested an idea that users may be more likely to pay for membership if they knew their dollars were directly supporting an editorial project. The Incline in Pittsburgh used Facebook Membership Accelerator grant funds to test a New Member November campaign with weekly incentives for joining.

For all three campaigns, we outlined the campaign theme, goals, budget, timeline, and stakeholders. We then secured additional incentives to use during the campaign. For example, The Incline gave new members the chance to win one of these four experiences:

Bridgeliner tied incentives directly to content by pitching to readers a contributor network concept that would get funded if we gained enough new members:

Once our core message was solidified for each campaign, we created a messaging plan, tagged in our illustrator to design visuals, and made a lot of marketing content — enough to distribute on all of the platforms we publish on for a month. This step took the most time. But once our messages were crafted, we were ready to launch.

Each week we reviewed our distribution strategy and content to track what generated the most conversion of new members, then we’d tweak the next week’s plan based on what we were learning. For example, when The Evergrey sent a direct email appeal to users asking them to become members during their birthday campaign, they saw a significant spike in new member growth. We repeated the direct email appeal approach with a direct ask later in the campaign to produce similar results.

At the end of each campaign, we announced results to users and thanked them for participating, fulfilled incentives for new members, compiled data on new member growth and qualitative feedback we received throughout the campaign, then hosted a retro meeting where stakeholders review what worked, what didn’t, and discussed next steps.

What we learned

We are still learning how to grow direct reader revenue with our MVP membership product, and it was exciting to see these campaigns make a big impact. The Evergrey saw a 21% increase in members during their three-week campaign. The Incline and Bridgeliner ran four-week campaigns, and increased new members by 32% and 31%, respectively. Here are some of our key lessons learned:

Ask often and directly, and you shall receive. Even though we’re a for-profit business, we can communicate to our users the costs of producing journalism that they value. One direct email appeal read, “Your membership makes our work possible. It’s no secret that local media is a tough biz these days, but a small investment now can go a long way to making Bridgeliner sustainable for the years to come.” Sending direct email appeals targeted to our most engaged readers and community partners led to the most new member growth.

Mission-aligned incentives work. Many of our users support our mission to help curious locals live like you live here, so our conversion-driving incentives included a staycation package and a tote bag featuring a meme that was popular on our Instagram feed. And as for incentives that didn’t work so well? A chance to be our newsletter editor for the day wasn’t a big hit in driving new members. But we did get positive feedback from some existing members who thought it could be a delightful perk that we could offer to members once a month.

Members don’t mind the additional messaging. We used audience segmentation while sending campaign messaging, yet inevitably our active members saw some asks to become a member. We were upfront with them about our campaign goals, excluded them when possible, and didn’t hear more than a few complaints.

The mid-campaign slump is real. The campaign launch is shiny and new. The final countdown urges readers to join on a deadline. But the middle is, well, the middle. We tested saving our best incentives for the middle of the campaign and increasing the messaging frequency on some channels, like social media, and it helped minimize the slump. But the first and final weeks of the campaign remained the strongest in new member growth.

To party or not to party? Members have shown varying levels of interest in attending free meetup-style events. (More focused events like our Setting the Table series and Who’s Next celebrations are much more popular with members.) But we wanted to test a celebration of sorts alongside our campaigns. The Evergrey hosted a low-key birthday bash during the first week of their campaign, a fun opportunity to make an ask and a handful of readers joined on the spot.

The Incline hosted a brewery get-together after their campaign — a dozen members attended to meet one another (and write haikus!). Half of the attendees had just joined during the campaign and were already looking for more ways to participate in the membership program.

Bridgeliner plans to meet with members in January to host a conversation about the contributor network content they helped to fund. We don’t have great answers on members-only events strategy yet, but we got some good new data to understand the ROI on these activities.

What’s next

Using lessons learned from these three campaigns, our central team created templates so that any of our local city brands can more easily run similar member campaigns in the future. Our brands The New Tropic in Miami and Pulptown in Orlando are stress-testing our templates now while running their first campaigns. (The New Tropic turns 5 in January!)

Alexandra Smith is the director of growth at WhereBy.Us. This post is part of a series on how WhereBy.Us works in an effort to share what we’re learning, and to learn from others across the industry. Thanks to Evergrey Director Caitlin Moran, Incline Director Rossilynne Culgan, and Bridgeliner Director Ben DeJarnette for experimenting and to WhereBy.Us COO Rebekah Monson for editing. What are you learning about reader revenue in local media? Let’s chat!

Sign up for our WhereBy.Us city newsletters!
The New Tropic
The Evergrey
Bridgeliner
Pulptown
The Incline

How we launched three member growth campaigns in two months was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• What triggers a reader to open one of our newsletters? How much do different things like subject line, time of newsletter send and day of the week contribute to this?
• What motivates readers to become a member of one of our local brands?
• What can the needs of content creators in different cities tell us about possible expansion opportunities?

Our product team is small, so we don’t have the resources to run all of these projects on our own. Our solution? We built documentation and ran user research training to empower teams to design and conduct their own projects with assistance on organization, methods, and sensemaking.

Having infrastructure to support our teams to do their own user research is a logistical solution but has other benefits, too. We run local media brands, and no one is more familiar with our different users than the people on the ground. Our engaged readers often come to in-person events, so having our local directors, for example, run user interviews helps us build and strengthen relationships. When our other teams such as sales have specific research questions, they’re more equipped to dig into specifics on customer jobs to be done because they work with customers all the time. User research doesn’t have to be something only handled within a single team — we think it’s better for this work and the insights from it to be shared across the company.

Our five-step workflow for designing and running user research projects

In our documentation, we break up a user research project into five parts outlined in a workflow document. I’ll be linking to public copies of our documentation, which lives here — feel free to adapt for your own needs!

1. Initial research planning consists of initial planning and two half-hour research scoping and logistics planning meetings that usually can be accomplished in a one-week sprint. Throughout this planning sprint, team members fill out a research plan document, with different questions to consider throughout.

First, a team member should jot down initial research thoughts:

Then, relevant team members and a point person from the product team meet to determine what we want to research and the correct method for it. Next, a smaller meeting is held to answer logistical questions, like how we’re going to find interview participants or survey respondents, how we will compensate them, and what our research timeline looks like.

2. The next step consists of writing survey or interview questions and scheduling and conducting research. This is the bulk of the project and will probably take two or more sprints of work, depending on the number of interviews being run — we estimate that tasks for each interview takes around an hour.

3. Compiling your results consists of noting initial survey and interview takeaways and cataloging interview audio recordings and survey data.

4. For each project, we run a one-hour sensemaking meeting where we review who we interviewed or surveyed against our research question, discuss observations and insights from research, and ensure we’ll be acting on the right insights.

5. We end each project with a one-hour cataloguing and retro workshop with team members who participated in user research and at least one point person from product. We catalogue results in our user research database, then run a traditional retro, where team members share and discuss what went well, what needs a little more work, and what went poorly.

At each step of the workflow document, we link to relevant documentation, like in this overview for scheduling and conducting research:

All of this is organized in a folder of our team Google Drive.

Survey and interview documentation

Most of our team members have never run surveys or interviews, so we put together documents and training to explain interview and survey logistics and basic principles that run through things like benefits and drawbacks for each research method, how to write effective survey questions, how to know you’re getting meaningful results and logistics around recruitment, research scheduling, participant compensation and more.

We also created a document called “Should I use a survey or interview?” that provides quick guidance for choosing between two of our most common research methods, keeping in mind factors like project timeline, whether or not the questions are ongoing, and desired number of participants.

How I onboarded team members

I ran a videoconference to train and onboard our team members and to give them time to think of possible research projects during our fourth quarter planning process. I addressed everyone’s questions and updated our docs accordingly. Here’s our onboarding presentation, which we’ll share with new teammates too.

Onboarding also happens on a case-by-case basis; some projects are simple enough to run on these docs, while others may need training on specifics like a specialized type of interview or survey. For example, our engagement producers are trying to learn more about our members and had little experience with user interviews, so I put together some slides and ran a small onboarding session to help them get started.

So, how’s this all working?

This quarter, we’re in the middle of three research projects around membership, newsletter opens and expansion opportunities, and here’s some of what we’re learning:

• Planning varies a lot project to project. We went into our membership and expansion projects with a clear idea of what we wanted to research, which made kickoff work, the research scoping meeting and the logistics planning meeting very simple and quick — it took 30 minutes to get through all of the planning work for expansion, while our local team needed several meetings with different stakeholders to decide on a research plan.
• It’s overwhelming to have many sets of user interviews going on at once, even if they’re being run by different teams. If we must have lots of concurrent projects, it’s best to set recurring time blocks 2–3 days per week for user interviews across teams to ensure the project team can still accomplish their production and other sprint tasks.
• Best practices for recruitment vary by project, but generally, if we’re targeting a wide swath of readers, we found that the best way to encourage participation was to offer a free advertisement in one of our newsletters. We wanted to offer smaller incentives like a free month of membership or referral credit, and originally were targeting individual subscribers who met different requirements through MailChimp, but found that this level of specificity and variance was generally not worth the time and effort required to manage it.
• Participant compensation should be static throughout the project. We changed compensation halfway through our local user research project to encourage more participation and ran into logistical complications. Moving forward, we plan to set compensation guidelines once in our scoping phase to make fulfillment much easier.
• We needed a static processing checklist for each interview that includes recordkeeping tasks like note-taking, audio recording, audio transcribing, logging in our UX database and more. For now, one person is assigned to do all of these things, but as we learn, we think this should be included as a part of each interview’s done condition. I made this checklist for future projects.

As our projects progress, we’re constantly updating our documentation. For now, you can view it all in this public Google folder, and we’d love it if you adapted it for your own projects.

Have you put together similar documentation or empowered multiple teams in your workplace to conduct user research? What have you learned? Do you plan to do this in the future? Reach out at carolyn@whereby.us — I’d love to hear about it and learn with you.

How we built a system to let our teams run their own user research projects was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

That’s all pretty heady stuff. And while there’s value in tracking this type of journalistic impact, at WhereBy.Us we think there’s also value in broadening that definition of impact and capturing other (seemingly “smaller”) ways we’re adding value and usefulness to our readers’ lives. In other words, we think there’s value in consistently tracking whether we know what we’re doing matters to our users.

Our WhereBy.Us tagline is “live like you live here,” and so we define impact as all the ways we’re helping our readers do that. In each of our five cities, two-person editorial teams are focused on helping people feel more connected to where they live. We don’t focus our journalism on attending every City Hall meeting or requesting public records for deep investigations. We provide a different type of essential public service –– helping our readers make sense of what’s going on in their local communities and showing them how they can get involved.

That means we needed to build an impact taxonomy that worked for what we were making, for the impact we want to have.

So here’s a step-by-step process for how we created our impact taxonomy and a simple impact tracker tool, and how we’re planning to use it to collect data that we hypothesize will help us drive revenue and build a sustainable business.

Step 1: We came up with a very rough definition of what impact means for us.

Many news organizations aim to serve different audiences, so it makes sense that our definitions of the kind of impact we want to have will vary. But there are a few guiding questions I think every newsroom can use to figure out how they want to define impact:

• If you’re talking to a source who’s never heard of your publication before, what stories do you tell them you’ve written to earn their trust and to build credibility with them?
• If you’re catching up with a friend you haven’t talked to in a while and you want to tell them what you’ve been up to at work, what do you share with them first?
• When you’re applying for a job and are asked for clips, which ones do you include?

Once you think about your best work, you should be able to see a common thread, and that should inform the basis of the kind of impact you want to have.

Step 2: We identified all the places in which we receive feedback from our stakeholders.

We made a big list of all the places we currently hear from our readers, sponsors or anyone else who has read or experienced what we make. That list included things like reader emails, our social platforms, in-person feedback moments, user research and reader feedback from our Net Promoter Score surveys. Making this list helped us understand the scope of the data we were trying to collect. Later, we’d think about the best ways to collect data from each of these places so we aren’t just relying on our memories when it comes time to rounding up all these impacts. (If you didn’t already know, we’re big fans of user research and making giant lists to better understand our work.)

Step 3: We looked at that list of sources and, for each one, pulled what we thought were relevant “impacts” for the past three months.

A group of us spent about an hour and a half looking through these impacts. We each took one source and added to a spreadsheet what we thought the relevant impacts were. This is boring, manual work, but I think it’s a step that’s often missed and can lead to an impact taxonomy that doesn’t account for the kind of impact you’re having right now. Of course it’s important to be ambitious (and maybe one day WhereBy.Us will add something like “policy change” to its taxonomy) but if you make a taxonomy that’s overly ambitious and you aren’t able to input impacts you’re having right now, no one will ever use the thing.

Step 4: We created an impact taxonomy based on similar themes we saw in the impacts we collected.

After we added some impacts to the spreadsheet, we read through the data everyone collected. Then we took a stab at creating categories for the common themes we saw. That led us to create this impact taxonomy:

–– Informed awareness: We helped build awareness.

• Influencer feedback: We provided local leaders and influential organizations useful content they wanted to share with other people.
• Media mention: Other media shared or republished something we made.

— Informed action: We helped our users take action.

• Reader action: Our users took action based on something we made or shared.
• Reader contribution: Our users helped inform or contributed to our editorial process.

— Belonging/connection: We helped our users feel more connected to the city and to each other.

• Reader belonging: We helped fuel our users’ belonging in their city.
• Reader connection: We helped our users get connected to people they wouldn’t have met otherwise.

–– User Love: Based on our users’ feedback, we’re achieving our company mission.

• Sponsor/partner feedback
• Events feedback
• Storytelling feedback
• Member feedback

— External recognition: We were recognized by our industry or our community with these awards and honors.

• Award: When we’ve been recognized with an industry award or some other type of award.
• Media recognition: When our team has been interviewed by other media, made any public appearances on behalf of the company, or our company has been mentioned by other media.

Step 5: We used Airtable to collect and organize existing and future impacts.

As previously mentioned, there are other tools out there that are much more sophisticated — like CIR’s open-source Impact Tracker tool and Chalkbeat’s open-source MORI tool. But we decided to build an MVP and then decide later whether it’s worth making a deeper investment.

We added a tab to our existing editorial calendar in Airtable so that we could link the impacts to stories or newsletter items we published.

It looks like this:

Besides adding an impact directly to the table, we also created an Airtable form and an /impact Slackbot to make it as easy as possible for anyone in the company to add impacts.

We also thought about how to divide up the impact tracking based on who’s closest to the feedback source. For example, we have a customer support specialist who reads all the responses that come through our Net Promoter Score surveys. So it’s now his responsibility to choose which responses feel like they meet our criteria for impact and add those to our impact tracker.

Step 6: We trained the team.

As part of creating training materials and documentation, we also added a handful of impacts each city has had so far so there were some examples to help inspire the team.

And to help everyone understand what all this was for, we emphasized our hypothesis: “Tracking our impact can help us make more money and become sustainable. We can use impacts to show existing and potential sponsors, members, crowdfunders, and investors how their dollars would be used to directly make an impact in communities they care about.”

Which leads us to why…

Step 7: We created an impact report.

A few weeks after introducing the impact tracker and giving everyone time to add their impacts from the last two quarters, I sifted through the impacts in the tracker and pulled the ones that felt most relevant. I grouped them based on themes and wrote up a short summary of the impact each city has had recently. For future iterations, I’ve suggested to the team to create a template based on our taxonomy. I shared that impact report draft with our teams who are editing/reviewing it now.

My hope is our team’s day to day work will inform future iterations of the taxonomy and impact collection. But for now, it feels pretty awesome to have all this stuff in one place and in a format that you could give your mom to read!

How do you define the impact of your work, and how do you track it? We’d love to hear from you.

Anika Anand is the director of product at WhereBy.Us and cofounder of The Evergrey. This post is part of a series on how WhereBy.Us works in an effort to share what we’re learning, and to learn from others across the industry. Thanks to WhereBy.Us COO Rebekah Monson and growth editor Alexandra Smith for editing.

Interested in WhereBy.Us coming to your city?
Tell us where we should head next.

Sign up for our WhereBy.Us city newsletters!
The New Tropic
The Evergrey
Bridgeliner
Pulptown
The Incline

How we think about the impact we want to have at WhereBy.Us was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One tool we use to help us with those decisions is “Jobs To Be Done,” a framework used to better understand what motivates people to subscribe, continue subscribing, and pay us for our work. Our UX Lead, Michael Schofield, introduced it to us a few months ago.

“Tools like user personas are good exercises, but in all honesty, when it comes to practical decisionmaking, they tend to be useless or left on the sidelines,” he said. “If you identify the end to which a service you provide is the means, you can make really sound, strategic decisions about how to facilitate that journey regardless of your user’s demographic or what persona they fit into.”

In other words, everyone who walks into the hardware store to buy a drill has a very similar end goal, and it doesn’t always matter who they are, where they came from, or what their persona is. Most drill purchasers want to buy a tool so they can easily drill holes in things and screw things into those holes. (Buyers may want the drill to do other jobs too, but this basic one is a pretty safe bet.)

So our goal to iterate on the product based on the user’s end-goals, and Jobs To Be Done is a good way to discover those goals and to test our assumptions about them. It’s basically broken down to this sentence structure, which you can read more about it here.

So we started talking to our users. We started with user interviews and asked our users to read a recent newsletter with us and talk us through what they found interesting and/or didn’t enjoy so much. We also used insights from our Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, which we send out regularly to our readers in which they rate how likely they are to invite a friend to subscribe and give feedback on what they like or what could be better about the newsletter.

Based on that feedback, we designed these JTBD for our newsletter readers:

• When I open the newsletter, I want to understand what’s going on in my city in five minutes or less so I can win at the watercooler.
• When I open the newsletter, I want to explore new places, meet new people and try new things in my city so that I can find my place in it and build a meaningful connection with it.
• When I open the newsletter, I want to learn how I can be civically active in my day-to-day life so that I can contribute to solutions in my community with my time, money or effort.

This framework played a large role in informing our content design strategy– the types of newsletter content we make and how we organize it for our readers.

After defining our jobs to be done, we revisited each of our newsletter sections to determine whether they satisfied our users’ jobs.

For example, because users want to read the newsletter quickly and to win at the watercooler, instead of the five paragraph-long summaries of stories in the city, we now choose one story we think our users need to know for the day and write a longer summary about it. Also, because our users love knowing what they can do with the stories we share with them, we always try to include resources on how to get involved as part of every piece of original content we make.

As great as this user-centered framework is though, we also have to make decisions based on our capacity and resources, which can sometimes feel at odds with what users will love.

In our latest newsletter design iteration, we created a “card” as our design component. Schofield said that it allowed the tech team to create a standard, consistent look and feel for our websites and newsletters without having to be the best designers on the block. The tradeoff? Some users have told us the newsletter looks more boring and feels more corporate.

We want to revisit ways to bring back design elements that reflect each of our city brands’ homegrown and delightful feel. Because we were very focused on “utility” in this set of iterations, delight wasn’t surfaced as a specific job, and now we know it should be!

The card design has a lot of benefits for us internally. It helped reduce our technical debt (i.e. it’s faster for our tech team to make), paved the way for specific content to be displayed to specific segments of users, and will also inform future iterations of our newsletter promotion ads. So we’ll keep it, but also work in our next set of iterations on making the format feel more delightful and testing it with users.

There’s certainly not one single framework to use when considering how to iterate on a product. What other frameworks or tools have been useful for you? What other factors do you take into account when iterating on a product? And how do you measure the success of product iterations? Reach out! I’m at anika@whereby.us. I’d love to chat more, and hopefully, we can learn together.

Anika Anand is the director of product at WhereBy.Us and cofounder of The Evergrey. This post is part of a series on how WhereBy.Us works in an effort to share what we’re learning, and to learn from others across the industry. Thanks to Michael Schofield for chatting about his UX work and to WhereBy.Us COO Rebekah Monson for editing.

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The New Tropic
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The Incline

How we used a Jobs To Be Done framework to iterate on our newsletters was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re thrilled to announce that The Incline, a local media publication based in Pittsburgh, is joining WhereBy.Us. We’ll be working with the team that’s built The Incline into a beloved force for local news and engagement in a growing, innovative city. The Incline will be the fifth local media brand in our network, alongside The New Tropic in Miami, The Evergrey in Seattle, Pulptown in Orlando, and Bridgeliner in Portland.

WhereBy.Us has acquired The Incline from Spirited Media, which launched it in 2016 along with two other local news sites in Philadelphia and Denver. Spirited recently decided to find new homes for its properties.

Rossilynne Culgan, who’s been food and culture editor since June 2017, will take over as The Incline’s new director. Reporter and producer Colin Deppen and head of sales Lindsey Van der Veer are also staying on the team.

“Think of this as The Incline 2.0. WhereBy.Us helps curious locals make the most of their cities, and that mission aligns perfectly with our vision for The Incline,” Culgan said. “You can continue to expect incisive, meaningful, fun and engaging coverage — all with the extra signal boost from WhereBy’s team.”

We’re committed to continuing The Incline’s award-winning journalism, and to supporting its mission to help Pittsburghers explore and celebrate their city — like when they tried to find the best pizza or figured out why everyone adds an “s” to the ends of words or helped us learn how the city kept its “h”.

You can sign up to get The Incline delivered to your inbox every morning, and follow @theinclinepgh on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. See yinz on the Internet.

About WhereBy.Us

WhereBy.Us is a local media company that helps curious locals make the most of their cities. Our mission is to help people explore, connect, celebrate, and get engaged where they live — or as we say, “live like you live here.” Each brand on our platform publishes a daily email newsletter curating news and events, creates original journalism projects on everything from food to homelessness, and produces events to help people explore the city.

Today, we’re in five cities: Miami , Seattle, Portland, Orlando, and now Pittsburgh. We have more than 75,000 daily subscribers across our network and reach more than 3 million people each month across platforms. Since launching in 2015, we’ve raised more than $2.5M to support our growth, and we generate more than $1 million in annual revenue.

The Incline is joining WhereBy.Us was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every time I work on a @newtropicmiami voter guide and get to the explainers on amendments and referenda, I am reminded of how little concern there is in the political process for, you know, actual people. (1/5)

Ariel Zirulnick on Twitter

I am a college-educated adult who speaks English as my first language. I'm more civically engaged than most people in my city. And it's taken ME hours to decode these things and understand their implications. (2/5)

Ariel Zirulnick on Twitter

Some of these ballot initiatives have major implications for the way we will live our lives for the next couple decades, and yet they're incomprehensible to almost everyone who reads them. (3/5)

Ariel Zirulnick on Twitter

What the Constitutional Review Commission did, bundling unrelated amendments together, is irresponsible and dismissive. (4/5)

Ariel Zirulnick on Twitter

Voters shouldn't need a third party to understand how to vote. Props to @MiamiBeachNews, which put together a super comprehensive, clear voter guide to its own ballot that I will use when I vote. Other governments: do better. (5/5)

When I sent that string of tweets, I had just spent my Sunday struggling to understand most of the 12 state amendments on Florida’s Nov. 6 ballot, and I was still stumped on a few of them. I had phoned a friend (many of them). I had read the guides. I had read the original text. And I was still confused AF.

Miami is a minority-majority city, with one of the nation’s greatest measures of inequality. So to have a ballot that complicated isn’t an oversight. It’s disenfranchisement. And it encourages greater distrust in the political process at a time when we definitely can’t afford that.

But don’t take my word for it. Take this reader’s:

When I led my first voter guide project at The New Tropic in 2016 (we did one in 2015, before I joined, as well), I was motivated by the realization that even I, a well-educated, well-informed citizen, didn’t fully understand my ballot — and that if I didn’t, then it was a safe guess that most local voters didn’t either.

The New Tropic’s voter guides are driven, above all, by utility. We’re not going to win Pulitzers for them, and they’re not fancy. There are no interactives or video explainers. But they’re one of the most straight-up useful things that we do, and utility is seriously underrated when it comes to media’s role in the political process.

One reader felt so empowered after reading the August primary guide that she hosted a “breaking down the ballot” gathering for her politically disengaged friends. Another, the U.S.-born daughter of immigrants who became citizens a few years ago, wrote in, “You are ensuring that my family votes because they actually feel they understand this and I’m so grateful for it.”

Alana Greer on Twitter

The @newtropicmiami voter guide & reminders of where candidates stand on the issues is the best thing that's happened to democracy in a minute

Here are a couple things we’ve learned about playing utility player the last couple years:

There is no such thing as a “too simple” question.

Mainstream election coverage assumes a lot of knowledge, like that you understand what the agricultural commissioner does or that you know what an amendment is.

We set out with the goal of making the political process feel accessible to everyone and assumed no prior knowledge.

It’s a little like the four sons of Passover. We weren’t worried about the wise child, who would be able to make sense of the horse-race coverage and the 1,500-word profiles and draw an opinion from that. (Although even the “wise children” wrote in with questions about things that had them stumped.)

We wanted to build a guide for the wicked child, the cynics who thought the whole process was screwed from the start and opted out; the simple child, the citizens who went to the polls feeling flustered and confused (or just skipped the polls entirely); and the child who was too young to ask, the locals who were completely disengaged, but had an inkling that maybe they should change that. (I guess something from Hebrew school stuck.)

In August, we searched for a relatable framing that would bring the whole thing down to earth. Our storytelling producer, Lance Dixon, pitched “Voting shouldn’t be as hard as building IKEA furniture.” Because millennials.

And then we provided examples of the kinds of questions people could ask. We said, very clearly, that this wasn’t a time to prove how much you know by submitting wonky comments disguised as questions. We wanted to make sure that those people who don’t vote didn’t feel intimidated about coming with much simpler questions.

You can see the 50+ questions that came in response to that August primary callout here.

When two people wrote in asking if they could vote as a permanent resident/green card holder, we knew we had succeeded. It is the most basic, essential question, one that we might have assumed everyone knew already. But those two people didn’t, and they probably represent many more in this city of immigrants and expats.

Perhaps the most valuable thing you can do is focus on the boring and esoteric races.

The most popular pages of our guides, every time, are judicial races and ballot initiatives. And the primary and local election guides have outperformed our general election guides.

Why? Because these things are boring and complex, and don’t get much coverage because they’re generally non-partisan and decidedly unsexy. When they do get coverage, it’s often “smart takes” diving deep into the back story.

Most voters don’t want to know the details of the eight-month process to write an amendment or about the politics of a subcommittee. They just want to understand who’s behind it and what it’s all about when the time comes to vote on it. Take a look at the questions that rolled in for our August guide.

Find the right entry points for your readers.

“Single-issue voters” often has a sneering connotation to it. But many voters are motivated to head to the polls over an issue that’s particularly urgent for them.

You can turn this into an opportunity to activate more on-the-fence voters. Last election and this one, we’ve shared quick takes on where candidates stand on particularly hot button issues on social media platforms and in our newsletter to keep a steady drumbeat of attention on the election.

Where to go from here

We understand that we have more flexibility to experiment than many outlets do when it comes to this kind of community-centered journalism work. We aren’t trying to be the local paper of record.

But here are a couple things that don’t require an excellent meme game or freedom from page view goals.

Reevaluate your assumptions about what people want to know

Ask people what they’re most concerned about. Ask people what they don’t get. Ask people if they know how to find their polling station. Ask people if they know that their state is a closed primary state. Ask. Ask. Ask.

We’re lucky to now have Hearken at The New Tropic, which makes the process of collecting questions from the community easy, but before we had Hearken we did this manually — in our newsletter, on Facebook, on Instagram, and in neighborhood Facebook groups across the city. It’s time-consuming, but worthwhile. Think of it as reverse vox pop. You will be surprised by what information people find most valuable.

Exclude election coverage from the paywall.

Great election coverage is as much a public service as coverage of a natural disaster. Newspapers often drop their paywalls during crises like hurricanes and mass shootings, which is admirable. Why not during elections? That coverage will have more of an impact on the future of their coverage area than any of the items above, but most have metered paywalls, and a voter is going to hit their monthly free article limit long before they can read up on everything that’s on their ballot.

This is critical, impartial information they can’t get anywhere else that shouldn’t only be accessible to those with a subscription. Paywalling local election coverage is unhealthy for the community.

That’s all for now.

Our voter guides will keep evolving, as will how we approach empowering locals the other 360-something days of the year there aren’t elections. How are we doing? What could we do better? We’d love to hear from you. Hit us up at ariel@thenewtropic.com and lance@thenewtropic.com.

Got your own suggestions for how we as journalists can empower the community with our election coverage? Want to hear what some others are doing? This rundown from Hearken about their newsrooms’ people-powered election coverage inspires us and we’re always down to talk to others in the space about how we can do better.

We’ve been helping Miami vote for three years. Here’s what we’ve learned. was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As Florence continues its slow grind over the Carolinas, we’ve been thinking a lot about that. Here are 10 things we learned from Irma:

Feel your emotions about the storm. Journalists like to say things like, “You’ve just got to squash your emotions and get the job done” when people ask how they cover crises. But stripping the human out of your storm experience makes it a lot harder to keep humans at the center of your reporting. Pay attention to where your mind is going when you have a second to breathe. Are you worrying about flooding coming into your home? Are you wondering how to make the call on whether to evacuate? Notice that. You are going through this storm with your readers, and if you have those questions, they probably do too. On a related note: embrace the “we.” We’ve got this. We’re all in this together. Yes, we ate all our hurricane snacks last night too.

Let readers, not meteorologists, drive your reporting. The level of detail and frequency at which meteorologists share information is overwhelming for the average person just trying to keep their homes and loved ones safe. As reporters, you should be keeping tabs on the storm updates, yes, but you should be spending as much time, maybe more, on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and NextDoor, where locals will be spending their spare moments waiting in line for gas or taking a break from putting up shutters. What questions are they posting again and again? What are people expressing anxiety about? What misinformation can you debunk? At WhereBy.Us, the time peg of when we act is when a reader needs the information, not when the information is released or when the event happens. Listening carefully can help you focus your effort on utility rather than trying to keep apace with other information sources.

The coverage TNT is providing is a much-needed balance to the fear-mongering happening on television. The usefulness of what you are reporting is welcomed and refreshing. When I feel the panic and fear rising, your emails and posts are like lifelines to greater balance. Please keep up the good work! Stay safe.

— A New Tropic reader in reply to one of our newsletters

Decode the jargon. The cone of uncertainty. Storm surge. Hurricane watch. Hurricane warning. Flood zone. Sheltering in place. If you can’t confidently explain what terms like these mean for your actual safety, neither can most readers. Keep using the expert terminology, but define it, too. (Why not abandon it entirely? Because other news outlets will still be using it, and you’ll want readers to be able to follow them, too.)

Municipal websites are generally terrible. As journalists, we spend years learning how to navigate local government websites. While it’s effortless for us, it’s not to most people — especially when they’re on their phone in line at the grocery store and they’re trying to find out whether the storm surge will reach their home but they can only do so with a color-coded interactive map that only works if you use a weird slider tool to input the expected hurricane wind speed, and it keeps freezing because it’s not mobile-friendly. (Yes, true story, and yes, the screaming in our head at that moment sounded like a run-on sentence.)

And yet, that’s where people must go for essential life-saving information like evacuation zones, shelter locations, and sandbag or water distribution points. Bigger players often dedicate resources to redesigning these tools to be more user friendly, but sometimes the best thing you can do is explain to people how to use the tools their government has built for them, or where to easily find the information they need.

Don’t make your readers come to you. A crisis moment is not the time for a form that can only be hosted on your website. Be where your readers are — Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, NextDoor — and jump into the comments with advice. As Irma was approaching, we made social cards for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter that asked people what questions they had.

One member of our team set about answering them right there on whatever social platform they were asked, while another scraped the most commonly recurring questions and answers into a static post that could live on our site and be shared (and updated and resurfaced for the next time a hurricane comes our way). Readers jumped in and answered for us sometimes, and the comment threads became short-term community forums.

Reassure your community that you have their back, and they can stop obsessively checking the news. The breathless reporting in the buildup to a storm is unnecessarily anxiety-inducing. Hurricanes are slow, even when they’re “fast-moving.” But media outlets default to pumping out a constant stream of information in a crisis moment like this, often shifting to conjecture and worst-case scenarios because there is little new or substantive information to add. You can serve as a filter for your readers, and let them know when something happens that they need to pay attention to. Discrete things like newsletters are clutch in this moment. If you can give them a reprieve from obsessively refreshing the Weather Channel homepage or keeping the local TV station on at top volume, you become a helpful friend rather than another source of anxiety.

Be open about your own situation. In the lead-up to Irma, The New Tropic’s work was produced from the following places, among others: our coworking space, the backseat of a car driving down I-95 to get back to Miami before the storm, abuela’s house (because she refused to leave), and Washington (both D.C. and the state). Be honest about that. You might all lose power. You might all lose Internet. You might have to write the entire newsletter on your iPhone. Thank readers for bearing with you as you go through the storm just like them. (In our case, others in the company evacuated outside the state took on production load as those who stayed got knocked offline. We also got an assist from our sister publication, The Evergrey.)

Your business team can get in on this too. At WhereBy.Us, the editorial team isn’t the only part of the company expected to be responsive to the community. As Irma bore down, our business and creative teams pressed pause on all advertisements and client work that was scheduled to be published, and instead offered up newsletter ad spots free of charge to any hurricane preparation/recovery initiatives. A month after Irma, we sketched out a company-wide emergency plan that laid out thresholds for making decisions like this.

Give everyone something to laugh at. People are nervous, and hurricanes can be an agonizing waiting game. Sometimes, people just need a hurricane meme or 10 to break the tension for a few minutes.

Stay focused on recovery after the storm. It took weeks to recover from Irma. Gathering up downed trees, sweating through nights without power, and worrying about their elderly loved ones left everyone exhausted and emotionally drained. And, recovery doesn’t drive ratings or traffic as well as build-up, so there are a lot of stories in the community that lack the attention they deserve. After Irma, we reached out to many community groups and nonprofits to help users understand how to help the city get back on its feet. Let your reporting remain simple and actionable for awhile. Now is not the time for the deep dives. Now is the time to help people pick up the pieces and give them ways to help others.

We’re sitting here in Miami sending all the good vibes to journalists in the Carolinas and across the east coast, especially in small newsrooms with dwindling resources. But what we learned from Irma is that you can do great work and be a valuable resource to your community (and even to your own colleagues), no matter your size.

Stay safe, stay hydrated, and remember that readers will appreciate you being in the fight with them. You can find the guide we produced during Hurricane Irma here.

Chase readers, not storms: What we learned from Irma about reporting in a crisis was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We thought about and asked you how we could help cut through the noise for all of our readers, many of whom were desperate to see this time be different — for it to not be yet another mass shooting immediately followed by rallying cries, but, ultimately, no change.

There was one thing different this time: Unlike the Pulse shooting, the Florida legislature was in session when Parkland happened, which provided an opening for action and real conversation on gun laws.

In the past few weeks, hundreds of you have written to us to share your thoughts and give us feedback on our coverage and our gun legislation tracker — and we’re enormously grateful for that.

Some think our standard for defining “progress” on gun reform is too low. Some think we shouldn’t have an opinion on what is considered “progress” — that we should be objective and just stick with the facts. Some shared that you’d prefer The New Tropic stick to local events, and avoid political topics altogether, because the world has enough politics already (and man, are there days we feel you on that). Let’s talk about all that a bit.

As we debated how we could help people feel less overwhelmed and more empowered in the days after Parkland, we zeroed in on helping readers stay on top of what was happening in Tallahassee.

The legislative process, especially at the state level, is opaque and often hard to follow. It makes voters feel powerless because, despite the fact that this is our government, often it seems like there’s no place for us in it.

So we set out, at least for the remaining two weeks of the session, to help change that. That’s where our daily legislative tracker came from, led by our storytelling producer Lance Dixon.

As you probably noticed, we didn’t attempt neutrality on gun control. We heard an overwhelming call for changes to state gun laws, so we tried to help you track that as best we could. Every day for the last couple weeks, we asked, “Did we make any meaningful progress on gun control in the last 24 hours?”

We rarely play it down the middle. While we don’t align ourselves with political parties because that’s an inherently exclusive act, we do have certain values that we think are important to the city — and we won’t shy away from reflecting those values in our coverage.

We care first and foremost about the future of Miami, and helping it move toward being a safe, inclusive, welcoming place for all of us. That means being unapologetic about things like furthering diversity, talking about climate change as a fact, supporting equality for LGBT members of the community, and responding to evidence about what keeps our communities safe. We think it’s more important to be upfront about our values — and how conversations with you have shaped them — than to try and maintain a false sense of neutrality.

We know that everyone here wants a safer, better city. So whether you identify as liberal or conservative or something in between, we want to hear your ideas on how to build that, together.

The criticism of how we framed “progress” on gun control didn’t just come from gun rights advocates. It also came from strong gun control advocates, for declaring what happened in the legislature as progress. The final bill didn’t include a ban on assault weapons, but it did include a plan for placing guns in schools — two major strikes for that group.

We get that frustration. But you can’t deny that this legislature surprised us with the changes it did make happen, such as raising the age to buy a gun, imposing a waiting period, and banning the sale and possession of bump stocks. Want the short and sweet rundown of what they accomplished? Find it here.

It’s most important to us that despite our different political stances, we can agree on facts. So if you feel that we’ve misunderstood or misrepresented the facts, we want to know.

Where we go from here

We’re going to keep covering politics, as well as events, freakshakes, transit, and Dwyane Wade memes. And we’re going to keep listening to you about what we should be covering and what questions you have about it. And we’re probably going to take a stance, because that’s one of the ways that we #livelikeyoulivehere — being open and transparent about our values and inviting everyone into respectful, thoughtful discussion and debate.

Got questions? Want to talk more about it? Shoot me an email at ariel@thenewtropic.com.

You’re right. We’re not neutral. was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We spend a lot of effort on building trust, authentic local engagement, and ultimately a strong community through stories and experiences at WhereBy.Us. After a rough election season in which media were battered and “fake news” became a buzzword, I think what we’re working on matters now more than ever. So I wrote a little thing for Nieman Lab’s annual predictions on it. Here’s a meaty bit:

These decisions have resulted in a proliferation of content from journalism brands that many people could easily confuse with or purposefully substitute with “fake news.” Sure, Facebook’s standardized display and positioning of content doesn’t help users make informed choices, but journalism can’t shirk responsibility for cheapening the product offering.

Journalism businesses must shift away from thinking that our solution is to build more, cheaper content to create more, cheaper ad inventory. Media’s own measures of business value reflect how wrong this idea is. One-off anonymous views are far cheaper than the sustained attention of those whom we understand and who trust us. And as CPMs shrink in the age of “peak content,” media businesses are cultivating revenue streams beyond display ads — including premium subscriptions, membership models, newsletters, and events — all of which rely on the value proposition of access to and meaningful information for specific, engaged communities.

Media have advantages in this effort. Journalists are pretty damn good at making authentic, impactful, and important stories. They’ve always built products that help people create, share, and unite around ideas. Some companies even have significant scale. It’s time to leverage these tools and recenter around the highest value proposition we have: engaged communities.

Read the whole thing here.

Journalism is community-as-a-service was originally published in WhereByUs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.