Forming Community Through Content
Al Jazeera, the Doha-based broadcaster, is many things: a credible news source for presenting different perspectives, notorious for airing the Bin Laden tapes, respected for its coverage of the Arab Spring. It also expanded to include Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera America, and Al Jazeera Balkans. Despite Al Jazeera English’s success internationally, Al Jazeera America has experienced very limited growth in developing its TV audience.
Enter Circa founder David Cohn who is well known for producing news content targeted towards millenials. As executive producer of AJ+, Al Jazeera’s news app, he is tasked with building AJ+’s audience base that is targeted towards millenials. Cohn wants it to be the news source people end their day with, and the platform that gives them the forum to voice how certain news stories make them feel. For Al Jazeera, AJ+ represents a crucial opportunity to create and strengthen a loyal audience following in the United States, and in particular, loyal young audiences that do not watch news on TV, like Al Jazeera America, or who simply are not engaged with Al Jazeera content. But getting people to engage with the news on any app is a challenge, and AJ+’s user interface and editorial identity still needs some tweaking before it can realize that goal.
By covering issues relevant to specific niches of the American population, AJ+ can create engaged clusters around specific stories. Cohn noted that these types of subgroups have begun to form, which has compelled them to recraft their editorial approach by understanding the types of issues other audiences want to engage with. For example, Ferguson and its coverage of #blacklivesmatter was great for AJ+ because it pulled more of the American audience to the app. Cohn cannot say with absolute certainty that the American audience pulled to the platform was African-American. However, he noted that a specific subgroup of fans appears to cluster around stories covering police brutality. Following that case study, AJ+ needs to continue analyzing the types of stories that draw audience clusters and analyze their behavior across multiple platforms in order to detect new content opportunities and strategies for strengthening the relationship with the audience.
Granted, that presents a “chicken and the egg” dilemma in attracting new audience segments. AJ+ can use data on current audience members to drive editorial decisions. However, it would lack data on potential new audience segments and therefore face the challenge of determining what news stories would draw new users. One solution AJ+ can adopt is to continue to expand its psychographic user profiles through market research and testing to be able to identify the niche communities around the country that would be drawn to an app like AJ+ and the types of content that will keep them engaged. AJ+ can do so through analyzing audience segments and behavioral patterns on the app and potentially, if it is able to form the necessary partnerships, analyzing the behaviors and content preferences of those audience segments across multiple platforms.
Cohn described the three user profiles AJ+ has created as models of their core audience: Kathleen, Kelly and Diego. Kathleen is a mother of two who lives in New Jersey, works as an investment banker, and is not religious. Kelly is a twenty-eight year old bi-racial woman who lives in Manhattan. Diego is a Latino-American Austin resident who works in IT. Another group that Cohn has discovered are “The Skeptics.” These are the gamers who interact with their content on YouTube and are fairly aggressive in their commentary. Now that Cohn has discovered that group, he can develop strategies to serve that niche audience on the platform with which they most frequently engage.
Ultimately, what matters to Cohn are not the profiles themselves, but their characteristics that make up those profiles. Given the diversity of the American population and the issues relevant to them, there are many opportunities to expand the psychographic profiles and increase their understanding of new groups. Future new user profiles could include Hannah, the college student at USC who is an advocate of environmentalism. Someone like Hannah would be drawn to in-depth, interactive coverage on California’s water crisis. AJ+ could even expand the interactive element beyond the “speak your mind” feature to encourage users to share photos and videos related to the drought to foster discussion and debate on the platform.
The app is designed to let users speak their minds and to engage with content in a short amount of time. Aside from content, any app that will achieve those objectives needs to be intuitive. That remains a key stumbling block for AJ+. The app’s visual layout mirrors Instagram’s simplicity with stories in vertical stacks that users scroll through to find a story that interests them. However, as a user I am not sure whether I’m supposed to scroll down or swipe right for new stories. The + share button would lead me to believe I am bookmarking an article as opposed to sharing it. Even after using the platform several times it’s still not clear how to follow a specific story. Additionally, lack of a search function leaves the user scrolling to find a specific topic of interest.
While improving its user interface will impact the audience’s willingness to continue engaging with the platform, AJ+ faces an even greater and more important challenge: pulling an audience to its app and fostering community through its content. AJ+ cannot be the Al Jazeera English that is the go-to for news on the Middle East. It needs to adhere to its motto of covering “the opinion and the other opinion.” And of covering American politics and social issues in that manner.
AJ+ has made noticeable strides in developing its American audience. In order to make it the go-to for millennial news consumers who are looking for community as much as they are looking for quality content, it needs to expand its user profiles and gain a deeper understanding into the issues that matter most to its audience. Those issues could range from racial issues to abortion to Middle Eastern conflicts. However, AJ+ needs to identify those niche subjects that are hot-button issues to niche communities and foster community and debate through that content.
