Q&A: Nicole Stockdale, Director of Digital Strategy @ Dallas Morning News
This week, The Idea caught up with Nicole Stockdale, who leads digital strategy at Dallas Morning News. Nicole explained how journalists can use data while still maintaining their editorial judgement, and how her whole newsroom works together
Can you tell me a bit about yourself, your career path, and how you got to where you are now?
I serve as the director of digital strategy in the newsroom, and I’ve been in that job for about a year, which is how long this position has been around. Much of it has been, “let’s figure it out as we go.” I oversee the audience, data, and interactive teams. I also serve as the chief liaison to the digital marketing side of the organization.
Part of what I do is hold a weekly meeting of digital leaders in the newsroom, who help me examine metrics and set strategy, with the idea that having 10 minds put together on what we should be thinking about is better than one. That fosters a lot of conversation about what direction we should be going in.
I also work in tandem with managing editor on the kinds of journalism we produce that are most likely to turn casual readers into loyal subscribers. Before that, I spent 12 years on the newspaper’s editorial board, most recently as the deputy editorial page editor. I started my career in journalism as a news copy editor.
How did you decide to move into the digital space?
It’s something that I’ve always been interested in. I’ve been in newspapers for almost twenty years now, and so there has always been a digital aspect in some form to news as I’ve known it. Particularly in the last half of my career on the editorial board, digital strategy in that department was part of my job. It was something that I was interested in — understanding how we can know the difference between different sets of audiences — and as more data became available to us, as some of those walls between the traditional business side and editorial sides came down.
Back when we had much more traditional walls around that, we didn’t have a lot of that audience data. As those walls have come down, we got to know a lot more about what people wanted from us, and for me, that was really empowering, because it meant that we could understand how news organizations can be more useful to the people who need us.
That has become even more accentuated as we have moved to a subscription model. Not only do we have to worry about what people want from us because it’s a good idea to know, but also because it’s part and parcel of our survival as a for-profit business. We pay a lot of attention to being analytics-informed, but then still using our expertise and our good judgment to make journalism decisions. That was true for me on the editorial board, and it was a really smooth transition for me to expand that part of my role and turn it into something that was newsroom-wide.
You mentioned learning about what your audience needs from your publication. Can you tell me about some of those findings, and how you discovered them?
Forever we just put out a print newspaper everyday and we thought, well that’s what people want and that’s what they subscribe for. We could do some reader surveys that ask what sections do you read first or more often, and that gave us some information, but that was time-intensive and you couldn’t do it daily. As we shifted to digital, part of that revolution was that we understood so much more clearly what people were interested in reading. And so being able to figure out what kind of data we should be collecting on that was major for us. I think it’s also important that we don’t just base our decisions on what data we have. We could find out that everybody loves to read stories about traffic fatalities, but that doesn’t mean that’s going to become the only thing we cover. There are still a lot of conversations that we need to have about how we found the needs and desires of the community, and make sure we’re living up to our mission to inform and serve the democracy of Dallas as we know it.
Beyond that, we have a lot of room to grow in terms of understanding where our assumptions about what the audience wanted, and the reality, and where those things diverged. That became particularly true, when the metrics we focused on moved from a page views driven culture to a subscriber and reader loyalty culture. Often, people will click on a story because they’re mildly interested in it, but they don’t care deeply enough to pay for that. That takes a different kind of content and a different kind of reader, somebody who will build loyalty to your news organization. To build loyalty, they need a habit of reading. They need to find the kind of content and products that appeal to them over time, and that they’re willing to come back for. That’s not something that’s going to be helped by one viral story that spreads across the nation.
One of the things we’ve really focused on is how do you get a newsroom to pay attention to analytics, without focusing too much on analytics. How do you get that balance right? We’ve started sending a daily email to the entire newsroom and some other folks across the company, that is a quick summary of what our traffic was like yesterday, and it shows what pieces of journalism we published that brought in the conversions, so we know that everybody has access to that information and that it’s easy for them to find. But the meat of that email is to talk about what we’re trying, what works, and why. Ideally there will be direct tangible takeaways that folks in the newsroom can figure out how they could take a slice of that and improve the journalism that they’re producing. I think that’s our way of trying to marry a strict adherence to numbers, and the idea that data just needs to be one part of the decision making process on how to produce good journalism. We’ve gotten some really good feedback from people that they are paying attention and that they are learning from the examples that we’ve shared, so that’s been a success.
As someone who comes from an editorial background, how did you go about starting to break down the wall between editorial and business, and getting the editorial team on board?
It helps that we have had a couple of people in the newsroom who have moved over to the marketing and consumer revenue side of our organization. We have a lot of well-formed relationships that make those conversations really easy. We understand where the other is coming from. Beyond that, it’s a commitment to making it work and understanding the importance of it. I am a firm believer in developing those relationships across departments throughout the entire organization, because the more that you understand what is motivating them, and why they’re making the decisions they are, we can all work together and not waste a lot of time being at cross-purposes. There is a weekly cross-departmental meeting about membership, that I attend as well as people from development, product, marketing, print subscriptions, digital subscriptions, it runs the gamut. We’re talking about, what are the things that affect our ability to provide our journalism to our readers and make sure that we are reducing the friction for them to become subscribers. At that meeting, a lot of things circuit. We know what we need to talk about, what we need to follow up on, who’s the point person, who needs to get what done by when, and we’re much more likely to have the right hand know what the left hand is doing.
So much of what folks in subscription acquisition are doing is closely connected to the journalism that is produced in the newsroom. Those good relationships are critical to both of our success. If we don’t have people who understand journalism and what the mission is in the newsroom, they are not going to be good advocates for selling subscriptions or for marketing that journalism, or for throwing events that matter to readers. If we don’t understand what they’re trying to do to help the organization, they won’t be successful.They need us to produce good journalism that we can highlight in newsletters that might sell subscriptions or to help them put on events about current events and topics that matter to our subscribers. Or being able to lead a tour of subscribers around the newsroom in a way that’s meaningful to both our journalists and our subscribers. All of those things are examples of things that we work on very closely together everyday. It just wouldn’t work if we didn’t have that collaboration.
Can you talk a bit about the Dallas Morning News project from the Facebook Accelerate?
Two people from the newsroom and two people from our marketing and digital subscriptions department went to the two Facebook Accelerator meetings this year. The Facebook Accelerator this year was focused on how to retain subscribers, and so all of the workshops and projects we’ve done around that have all been related to retention. It was important to have both marketing and digital subscription acquisition folks and newsroom folks involved in that project, because those are so interrelated.
What has specifically come out of it for us was between the first and the second class, we wanted to do a quick project that we thought could help retention with something that we could pull off immediately. My colleague who works on subscriber retention, Leslie Lauhon, organized a program where we wanted to thank subscribers, and they wanted everyone in the news org to do it: people from marketing, people from the newsroom, people who work in customer service, and we all were handed a list of 60 subscribers, and we were asked to contact them individually, either by email or phone. The goal was just to let people know how much we appreciate them. We are in this business because it is a pleasure to be able to provide this service to them, and the fact that they appreciate it enough that they’re willing to pay for it and make it possible, is really important to us. We don’t often have the chance to be able to reach out to them and tell them that. This was just an organized way for us to, instead of having those conversations internally, to make sure that that message is getting out to subscribers, and that they know that they are appreciated and that we couldn’t do this without them. We are emailing we are calling, we are writing handwritten letters, and so far we have reached out to thousands and we will keep it up throughout the year. I think so far it’s been really nice and reinforcing for those of us who work here to take a little break and spend some time and say thank you to folks.
What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen in media from an organization other than your own?
One thing I’m really interested in is from Advanced Media. They are experimenting with a texting platform, where readers can text directly to the writers who are participating. Writers send them a personal text throughout the week. You can subscribe, some of the programs are pay models, and some of the programs are just perks of a subscription, the point is that it’s more personal communication, one-to-one kind of communication is not one that’s traditionally associated with news organizations. I think that there is a lot that could really help us foster a different kind of conversation with our audiences that helps us meet them where they are, rather than just expecting them to read the journalism that we produce every day. I thought that was a really cool experiment that I’d like to know more about.
