Connecting With Readers During a Crisis
By Carrie Reynolds and Ebony Reed
For many news readers, the coronavirus pandemic has sparked an urgent desire for useful information from a trustworthy source, presented in accessible and easy-to-use ways. It has also created new needs, such as wanting a sense of connection, or a space for reflection.
At The Wall Street Journal, the Audience Voices and New Audiences teams have been working on projects to serve readers and further their interactions with us. While working during the coronavirus crisis has been a challenge, it also has been an opportunity for innovation. It has required us to think in new directions as we strive to engage and serve the many new readers who have turned to The Wall Street Journal in recent weeks as well as our longtime readers.
Our audience projects have included reader questionnaires, experimentation with poetry and audio and even asking a group of lawyers to share their Covid-19 questions.
Here’s a look at some of the WSJ audiences teams’ projects in recent weeks, how we did it and what we learned.
You Ask, We Answer: Reader Q&A
In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, people hungry for information turned to conversation threads on WSJ.com with questions on all manner of topics. We introduced “You Ask, We Answer” to address these questions. We invited readers to submit questions through a feedback form that gave them the opportunity to pose a question privately. We have had thousands of reader questions.
The Audience Voices team selected the most popular questions and answered them by pulling together WSJ reporting and other research. We then published both the questions and answers in a single “You Ask, We Answer” article, which is one of our most popular free-to-read stories.
The feedback form that powered this format has become an integral part of our broader reporting, allowing journalists to connect with readers and readers to surface their concerns. The Audience Voices team manages its use on a number of other articles, including a “Making It Work” series and a collection of articles on small-business loans. The team also helps to integrate responses from the forms into new articles, and uses reader questions to suggest a new direction for reporting. For example, questions that came though “You Ask, We Answer” helped build Q&As on other topics such as travel during coronavirus and health concerns.
The overwhelming reader response to “You Ask, We Answer” also galvanized our Innovation team colleagues to launch a new, easy-to-read interactive format that included shareable, drop-down answers.
Coronavirus Information in Spanish
The Wall Street Journal opened some of its reporting on Covid-19 for all to read, highlighting those items in a navigation bar at the top of our homepage and in articles relating to the coronavirus. Among those items is information in Spanish about the virus and how to protect yourself. We developed this page after the Associated Press reported that information in Spanish on the virus wasn’t consistently available across the country. We are periodically updating it as information changes, such as the emphasis on wearing masks in public.
Legal-Community Questions
We also reached out to the National Bar Association, the largest group of black legal professionals in the United States, and offered them an opportunity to ask any questions they had on the virus. The project is the beginning of a powerful relationship as the majority of the lawyers who shared their questions about the virus also said they’d speak with a WSJ journalist if needed. Some of the group members’ questions were answered in published WSJ stories. When they raised new questions, those were shared with our WSJ reporting colleagues.
“Poetry During a Pandemic”
Crisis calls for comfort, and the Audience Voices team looked to bring our readers uplifting, human-interest stories.
Our team was seeing reader anecdotes about times of goodness and positivity amid the pain and uncertainty of the pandemic, and we wanted to celebrate these moments. We noticed that readers had responded well to a Life & Arts piece on “10 Haikus by Stressed-Out Remote Workers,” and were sharing their own three-line poems in the reader conversation box. We created a profile of eight WSJ readers, including their poems, photos and a short reflection about their life during this crisis. We also wanted to move beyond a text article, and worked with our engineering colleagues to upload audio clips to these profiles, in hopes that they create a more intimate connection with our featured readers.
Collaborating with the Podcast Team
The Audience Voices team has been working with colleagues on the podcasting team to build connections with our readers in different ways. We have teamed up with three WSJ podcasts — Tech News Briefing, What’s News and Secrets of Wealthy Women — to help engage a broad group of listeners. Listeners call into a voicemail account to leave messages, and the AV team helps the audio team select the clips to include on the show by reaching out to the callers. During the pandemic, the team has received many calls from listeners with tips and questions primarily on the topic of working from home. Our podcasts tend to reach younger listeners than our other content, and these collaborations help us meet a diverse audience and answer their questions.
Celebrating our Crossword Puzzle Community
We’re also meeting the needs of readers as they look for entertainment and diversion during this period of sheltering-in-place. We’re helping the WSJ Crossword Puzzle team as they develop new kinds of puzzles and we’re highlighting the close community of readers that complete the daily crosswords. This community of core puzzle players, called Muggles, was featured in a charming article for WSJ+ that included a special bonus. We asked one of the weekly contest creators, crossword maestro Matt Gaffney, to make a puzzle filled with words from the world of Muggles, including many sprinkled in the reader profiles.
Audience Questions on Live Q&A
Members of our Audience Voices team are working with the Live Q&A team on virtual discussions of timely topics. During Live Q&A sessions, members submit questions, which are then sorted by moderators on our team and funneled to The Wall Street Journal hosts who are leading the discussion. In recent weeks, we have hosted discussions with WSJ reporters and editors on what life is like in post-lockdown Wuhan, how to manage personal finances during the crisis, and a Q&A session with New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy.
Audience Voices is one of many groups across the organization that are critical behind the scenes in making this format work. Audience Voices team members help to build the scripts, which serve as a framework for the discussion. They help collect ahead of time the published stories that will be mentioned during the Live Q&A session, and then post them to the chat during the show. We’ve also worked to adapt this format to at-home settings.
“Making It Work” Carousels
Colleagues on our business-coverage team and programming-strategy team initiated a new series called “Making It Work”, which are daily profiles of people whose work has changed during this pandemic.
The Audience Voices team has not only written for this project, we have also used our feedback form to elicit reader responses, and from those responses we have created carousels of short but revealing interviews of readers from across the country. These carousels are illustrated with reader photos, which are a vivid reminder of the broad range of people affected by this crisis. Each of these touching profiles gives voice to a different experience facing the challenges of coronavirus.
Over the past weeks, serving WSJ readers has meant testing some ideas and retooling as we learned from these experiences. For example, the photos on our first reader carousel in “Making It Work” didn’t load properly in mobile view, and identifying the best stories for the use of the feedback form has been a learning process. In the end, these internal collaborations benefit our readers because they strengthen our ability to listen to as many voices as possible and to engage with readers in many formats.
Carrie Reynolds is Deputy Community Editor and Ebony Reed is New Audiences Chief at the Wall Street Journal
