As an INN fellow, I saw nonprofit newsrooms’ engagement innovations firsthand
Editor’s note:
In 2023, the Institute for Nonprofit News welcomed Allison Altshule as its first audience research fellow, and I mistakenly thought her work here would be relatively straightforward.
The challenge was obvious: There were a growing number of news organizations facing strategic challenges around increasing their audience and a lack of people who saw audience roles as more than maintaining social media accounts.
As Allison dove into her work, we both discovered the deeper needs that existed. Allison was tasked early on with asking INN members to help her understand the gap between their target audience and who they were actually reaching. The conversation too often stopped there, and we never got to questions about how news outlets were balancing the audiences that could financially support the work and those who couldn’t. Some could not easily define their target audience, and many more struggled to measure their actual audience.
Allison was quick to pivot to this new challenge. We found ourselves asking, “What is the foundational information an organization needs to make strategic audience decisions?” And then we went about not only collecting it, but creating new tools to create it.
What I found at the end of Allison’s fellowship was not what I had expected. We were not just preparing her for audience roles; we were putting her on a leadership path. We were focused on how the audience relates to an organization’s mission, affects sustainability and fits into people’s lives — questions that newsroom leaders think about every day.
I am proud of the work that Allison accomplished and know she has helped hundreds of news organizations during the nine-month fellowship. She heads into a journalism industry struggling with its survival, and she is equipped with skills and new ideas that live at the heart of what we do.
Below, Allison reflects on what she learned about news audiences and the impact of her work at INN.
— Sam Cholke, INN manager of distribution and audience growth
Before my audience research fellowship at the Institute for Nonprofit News, I thought of journalism’s audience work as a problem of supply and demand: People want to know what’s going on, so news outlets will exist to cover it.
Days into the fellowship, I was thrown into the deep end and forced to grapple with all the things standing between the news and its audiences, particularly the challenge that many people don’t know they want news reporting, much less what news they want.
I found myself confronting deeper questions about what worked for building audiences and why. I quickly realized I was not the only one grappling with these questions. I met audience engagement experts thinking about how to establish stronger and longer-lasting audience relationships. I leave the fellowship focused on helping newsrooms see their audiences in more holistic ways — as evolving, reactive and nuanced people who news can impact in many ways.
I was introduced to INN through an internship at Solitary Watch, a tiny but mighty watchdog newsroom with only a couple of full-time employees. Solitary Watch focused on dogged reporting, explainers and investigations exposing the damages of solitary confinement and other harsh conditions of the U.S. prison system. There was plenty to do, and as some of the most committed voices to the issues of weaponized isolation, we knew which stories were worth telling.
Solitary Watch was stretched thin. Beyond distributing our investigations on social media, we often didn’t have the bandwidth to ponder the details about our readers, let alone the many things they may do with our reporting. Considering our audiences in more depth felt like a luxury we too rarely had time for.
After that experience, I knew I wanted to spend my time at INN developing resources to help those most limited members.
When I started my fellowship at INN a year later, I was thrown into the fray. At INN Days, the organization’s annual conference, I learned that my experience in a resource-limited newsroom was common — but it didn’t stop people from trying new things. I learned about Spanish-speaking communities gathering around WhatsApp channels from Conecta Arizona and the cult following surrounding Cephalopod Week at Science Friday. I saw nonprofit newsrooms building strong, long-lasting relationships with their most engaged readers in new and creative ways.
Some newsrooms prioritized thinking harder about audiences, starting with a simple question: “Who is this for?” When you can confidently answer that question, editorial and business decisions positioned to have the biggest possible impact can come into focus.
Diving deeper into news consumers’ needs and motivations
I’ve spent the last nine months talking to dozens of leaders of nonprofit news outlets to understand their wide array of audience obstacles and solutions they have found to keep their audiences engaged, donating, or sharing their journalism. I began to see what newsrooms did that was successful, building up a stockpile of case studies from across the INN Network that fueled my ability to problem solve with newsrooms.
I began to see audiences are layered, complicated, and flexible. But figuring out how best to target those groups is challenging even for seasoned publishers.
Some newsrooms, like the Forward, split their audiences between new readers and longtime subscribers. Some longtime subscribers had been reading the Forward since its time as a Yiddish-language newspaper serving Jewish immigrants. The new readers are interested in learning about Israeli geopolitics, arts and culture, and the different ways that identity can manifest in daily life. They are much more diverse and less easily reduced to one homogenous group.
This split among news readers and longtime subscribers is relevant context, but it didn’t go far in explaining why they made the Forward part of their lives. It just scratches the surface. Not until I started talking to organizations with different types of readers, and engagement teams that understood their reader’s relationships with their publication, did I see how deep it could go.
When splitting its readers by industry, The Hechinger Report could understand the ways different readers used its reporting. Educators might engage with the reporting out of professional necessity, whereas parents of school-age children may use it to consider the best education options for their families.
Much of these types of audience discoveries came from applying fairly simple audience research tools like surveys.
When I first met Ken Paulman from Energy News Network, he was confronting some big unanswered questions after surveying his audience. He noticed most of ENN’s survey respondents identified as Democrats — a potential challenge for an organization that strove to be nonpartisan. After he dug deeper into the data, he saw a much more detailed audience picture that wasn’t defined by political leanings. He split the audience by industry and saw two major constituencies: environmental advocates who were predominantly Democrats and those who work in the energy sector, who were representative of the range of political leanings in that industry. That segmentation helped me see Ken’s audience in much greater detail and understand how ENN’s reporting manifested reader relationships in the first place.
Understanding the multiple groups he was serving, Paulman could visualize his journalism’s on-the-ground impact, in what circles articles are being shared, and how ENN might expand its audience.
Equipping newsrooms to analyze their audiences
To answer the question “Who is this for?” newsrooms needed a broad-reaching audience tool that was cheap to administer and required little labor. For many, this was a major audience touchpoint, so we wanted to be able to answer multiple questions at once.
With the help of a team of academics and audience experts across the newsrooms INN serves, we collaborated to build an audience survey template and user guide. We gave newsrooms the knowledge they needed to pull greater audience insights and the tools they needed.
Once they can answer “Who is it for?” newsrooms can begin to ask, “What do these relationships allow us to do?” For example, readers can interact with journalism from Science Friday in many ways — using it as teaching materials, to inform decisions about whether to donate their brain to science, or by giving money to the newsroom.
With INN’s help in devising a clear path to answering audience questions, news outlets were excited to get to work analyzing their audiences. Over 170 nonprofit new organizations downloaded INN’s survey template materials, and 50 registered for a boot camp to administer surveys with our guidance and support. Many are now confidently administering their first audience surveys, while others are redesigning a tool they have overlooked in the past.
At the end of my INN fellowship, I not only have newfound knowledge and abilities but also a deepened understanding of the significance of actively pursuing involvement at a more foundational level and making a meaningful impact — much like the many dedicated nonprofit news outlets that consistently contribute in this way each day.
I feel reinvigorated and grounded in the work of organizations that are reaching previously overlooked news audiences and journalists who are stepping up to tell the previously unreported stories of their communities. The INN Network has taught me that to know what stories your audience wants, you must be willing to listen.
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