What local news organizations can learn from bagged lettuce
Audio experiments in the Salad Bowl of the World
Check out the produce aisle in your local grocery store. You are sure to have your choice between a head of romaine lettuce or you can pay a bit more to get your romaine triple washed and bagged. Would you rather make it a caesar salad? That’s available too. It’s the same product, but altered to serve a different type of customer. In the agriculture industry, this is called value-added agriculture. The same opportunity exists in local news.
What does value-added local news look like? Chances are you are already doing it with an email newsletter that recaps the news of the day or week published by your organization. You can and should do more of that. Audio is the way.
Ask any publisher or managing editor and they’ll tell you creating content is one of the most expensive parts of their operation. It’s the reporter’s salary and benefits — the editor’s too — and all the infrastructure to make a story shine for its moment in the spotlight. By repacking it using audio, you can let it shine longer to reach new audiences.
I uncovered why you should, and how you can, do this during my year as a 2021 John S. Knight Senior Journalism Fellow at Stanford.
The Project
For my fellowship project, I set out to discover the ways small, local news organizations can use audio to extend the reach of their content and connect with new audiences. I did this work in a region of California known as the Salad Bowl of the World, nicknamed for the large amount of fresh produce grown on the Central Coast. There I worked separately with two publications: The Californian in Salinas and The Monterey County Weekly in Seaside.
Over the past year, I developed and ran experiments with audio products I created using the content of those two newspapers. The first step was identifying each paper’s target growth audience. For The Californian, it was first-generation English speakers and early career young adults, 35 and under. For The Weekly, I spoke with women 30 to 40 who were already somewhat engaged with the paper.
The foundation of the experiments is based on conversations with people in those target groups.
Those conversations led to the ideas for five different audio products. I prototyped and tested each product with a small group of users from the target growth audiences. Overall I conducted roughly 50 user interviews.
This process reflects a design thinking approach. It’s about learning, testing and iterating. What I’ve learned is qualitative. The results don’t come in the shapes of bar graphs and statistics. They come in the form of these three big takeaways.
1. Local news is an on-demand product.
2. Our content has a longer shelf life than we believe.
3. Simple audio products work.
1. Local news is an on demand product.
In journalism, we deliver news on two types of schedules. The first is based on the timeliness of content. The event, vote or catastrophe is happening now and is news now. Then there are the more enterprise, investigative or long term stories we work on. Those publish on more arbitrary deadlines, like when the story is done or when there is a news hole to fill. This is news on our schedules.
In my early audience interviews, it became clear that people in these target growth audiences were turning to local news on their own schedules. Some used it to do personal research on local issues, others to learn about information relevant to their jobs or they went looking for local news when a story entered their personal orbit. They go looking for it and expect it to be there on their own timeline.
Kellsy, a 32-year-old advertising saleswoman, reflects this trend that emerged throughout my interviews. She has a daily routine around national news. “For local news, it’s not like a first thing in the morning, look at the local news kind of thing,” she said. “When I have a very specific question on my mind, like, ‘oh I wonder, are they still doing that project over in Marina Dunes (a local residential and commercial development)?’ I Google it, that’s when I encounter The Weekly or The Herald.”
For local news to work for people like Kellsy, content needs to remain accessible, easily discoverable or as Joanna, 37, a working mother of two put it, “the news has to come to us.” She is someone who has embraced smart speaker technology as a radio replacement, using it daily for her national and world news.
Thinking of local news in a more on-demand way means the publish date is not the expiration date.
2. Our content has a much longer shelf life than we believe.
As journalists, we tend to look at news as dated practically the moment after it’s published. We put less value on day-old news and think of our competitors as being late if they get the story after us. This is a very journalist-centered way of thinking. The reality for the audience is news has a much longer shelf life. It remains new to people until they hear it, read it or see it; until they seek it out. That may be days, weeks or years later.
Audio is one way to give print content a longer shelf life and you don’t have to launch an audio department to do that.
3. Simple audio products work.
When most newspapers think about adding audio to their storytelling, they think about launching a podcast. I tested five audio products that weren’t initially designed to be podcasts. Two of those five products proved to be too labor intensive for my goal of helping small newsrooms. They were more fitting for news organizations with audio departments. The three other products showed promise for news organizations that want to extend the reach of their content using audio without a lot of additional resources.
Three things made these audio products simple.
- They use existing content.
- They only need one voice.
- Each can be made with single-track audio editing.
Here are the three products I tested that can get more value out of existing content.
The Experiments
Testing of each product was done over Zoom with the tester, myself and 2020 JSK Journalism Fellow Jim Colgan, who assisted with interviewing. Testers would interact with, react to and give feedback on the experience with the products. Each was tested with at least five people, which was enough for me to learn if the product had traction and what changes I’d make to carry it forward.
Experiment 1: The Newscast
The newscast is a short audio recap of top stories, upcoming events and things to look out for. You’ve heard newscasts on the radio, usually at the top of the hour; some local newspapers, like the Cedar Rapids Gazette, have also been releasing newscasts for smart speakers and as podcasts. I did a couple of rounds of testing for this product using content from The Monterey County Weekly. The first round of testing was with a two-minute newscast I created. After that went over favorably with our target audience of women 30 to 40, we moved on to a second phase of testing.
In phase two, we tested the newscast over the course of a week, and instead of creating it myself, I trained associate editor Tajha Chappellet-Lanier how to do it. She currently edits The Weekly’s newsletter, Monterey County NOW. Chappellet-Lanier wrote, recorded and edited the newscast for five days. The process took about three hours out of her workday. That amount of time could probably be reduced with experience, but it’s never going to be a 20 minute job. The thing about audio is when done right, it sounds easy, so people are often surprised by the amount of work that goes into the final product. In this case, rewriting 500+ word stories into a few useful and informative sentences took the bulk of the time.
The Weekly publishes a print paper every Thursday. The newscast was published that day and for the four following weekdays using content from the Thursday paper, for the most part. It also created the opportunity to publish some daily news, like the Governor’s surprise visit to a COVID vaccine clinic. By traditional journalism standards, much of the content was old by the time it reached the ears of our testers.
During the experiment, we shared the newscast each day with the audience in The Weekly’s existing newsletter, which led to minimal engagement after a burst of interest on the first day.
I also shared it by text message with a small group of women in the target growth audience. They received an mp3 of the newscast every morning for five days. This is where I saw the most promise.
Here’s a reaction that sums up what we heard from everyone in that small group who received the mp3 by text. “I like that I don’t have to go out and find that information or research it or look for it. That it’s coming to me. That it’s current, it’s relevant,” said Steisha, 40, who moved to Monterey for graduate school.
No one in this small testing group had a sense of the information being old even though they could have read it in The Weekly’s print edition in any of the days leading up to newscast delivery. By journalists’ standards, some of this news was six days old by the time they heard it. That did not register with these testers. Everyone in the small group wanted to know if they could keep receiving the newscast by text message.
Experiment 2: Inspired
I created Inspired using content from The Californian’s archives. It’s a collection of stories about inspiring people in the community recorded audiobook style. For the test, I presented the stories as pictured below, as if Inspired was a feature on the web site.
Testers could choose to listen to one or more narrated articles. Each story had been published by the paper within the past two years. These were stories that were more evergreen than those in the newscast.
What I personally love about this idea is it’s a way to repackage and resurface this type of human interest content that most local news organizations already do, but often don’t get the credit for. These types of pieces can take longer for reporters to create, so I see high value in finding a way to get more mileage out of them. Collections of narrated articles could be created around different themes based on the interests of an organization’s target growth audience.
The theme of inspirational locals resonated with The Californian’s target growth audiences of first generation English speakers and early career young adults. Salinas is a community of dreamers. It’s a place where people have come to this country in pursuit of a better life. For testers, that dream felt more attainable while hearing the stories of others who have made it. Manuel, 33, put it best. He moved to the US from Mexico at the age of 21. He now works as a tutor. “You feel like there is a light at the end of the tunnel,” he said after listening to four narrated stories.
We did not do a second round of testing, which would have involved making this live on The Californian’s website. If we had, I would have made some changes based on what I learned in this first round of testing. For example, I would have had the stories narrated by a native Spanish speaker (still in English) to create a sound and feeling that better reflects the target growth audience.
Experiment 3: Sounds Local
Sounds Local was made with content from The Weekly. The original idea for the product was to create audio vignettes of local sounds that would lead people to audio recordings of old, but still relevant news stories. In the test, it took shape in the form of one story. I did an audio book style reading of a 2017 cover article about Big Sur, California’s Highway 1 and the clash between tourists and locals. I added an opening introduction with local sounds from Highway 1 and followed the reading with a brief news update of the story.
The test group was all women 30–40 who subscribe to The Weekly’s Monterey County NOW newsletter. During the testing, we told them to imagine they have subscribed to a podcast that takes a deep dive into local issues through old news articles. We had them listen to the entire piece with two brief breaks where we checked in, mainly to see if they would’ve stopped listening if we weren’t there. None of them would have.
Narrating this article really challenged a lot of what I believe about what makes good audio. It broke a lot of rules of what you would normally put in an audio piece. It was full of numbers and written in a way that when you listen to it, you could lose track of who is talking. But the content was really good and while some listeners noted that they lost track of the numbers, they were overall forgiving.
They were also not concerned with the story’s publish date. Even though the content was four years old, it was new and felt relevant to the listeners. “I mean, it’s currently relevant. I know a lot of this stuff happened a couple years ago, but it’s not like it was back in the ’80s or something. It’s more recent. It’s still relevant and it’s still a problem,” said Christine, a 39-year-old administrative assistant.
Because I did just this one test of Sounds Local, I’m left with a lot of questions. Was this story a one off? Did it work because it was such an interesting piece? Does The Weekly have other stories from the archive that would also work? As a long time reader, I think they do.
Finding Listeners
Questions remain for all these products. If The Weekly or The Californian were to move forward, they would still be somewhat experimental, especially around distribution.
These tests were focused on content in an audio format and whether or not I could find traction with the target growth audiences. There were some distribution methods baked into the testing, like texting the newscast to listeners, but testing distribution didn’t end up being part of this project.
I think if a small, local news organization is going to invest in one of these products, then they should get the most out of them. That means exploring any form of distribution that’s available and affordable. That could include distributing the audio by text message or voicemail, as a podcast, posting it directly on the organization’s web site and creating partnerships with local radio stations. If they are going to put in the effort, it’s worth experimenting to see where they can find a new audience of listeners.
Let people hear your great work
It’s worth it because audio plays a big role in people’s lives. In all my audience interviews, I didn’t meet a single person who doesn’t engage with audio on a near daily basis, but I did meet people who don’t engage with local news. They’re filling their time listening to videos on YouTube, guided fitness classes, audiobooks, short and long form podcasts, and of course, music and the radio. So while we focus on other local news outlets as competition, I think we are missing the fact that the real competition is any other content.
Local news journalists produce a lot of great content. Much of it is sitting in the archives while still having relevance in our communities. Valuable stories are lost behind ineffective search engines on our websites, sometimes only days after being published. Others are locked behind paywalls. I’ve outlined three ways to add value to that content with a low level of effort. These ideas not only can help local news organizations connect with new audiences, doing so extends our public service mission. People want to be engaged. They want to know about their community. They want to feel connected. People want all of what local news does best. Help them hear it by using audio to get more out of your content.
If you have questions or want to chat more about this project, audio and local news, I’ve made room in my calendar. Book a time. Or you can reach me at kalmanza@stanford.edu.
