What would happen if every journalist defined their own mission?
This is a guest post from Summer Fields, an engagement strategist at Hearken.
KPCC / LAist launched new individual reporter and producer mission statements. I talked with Director of Community Engagement Ashley Alvarado about this effort — what it looks like, why they took this approach, and what tips she has if you’d like to do something similar in your newsroom.
Alvarado said that staffers have engagement-related goals as a part of their performance evaluation for the first time ever. “Ten percent of each reporter’s work needs to be done with the community.” She cited platforms and strategies like Hearken, the Public Insight Network, Typeform, GroundSource, or in-person engagement. (In order to follow through on their mission statements and involve the audience in their coverage, the newsroom also began having every reporter gather questions via embeds provided by engagement journalism platform Hearken.)
Reporter mission statements
Alvarado said that tying the mission statements to goals for reporters is a clarifying framework as the staff makes decisions about what stories to pursue. The mission statements and resulting questions from the audience provide transparent guardrails about what stories to prioritize. “If the story you’re pitching does not reflect your mission statement — it has to hit it out of the ballpark.” There has to be more of a reason to do a story than, “this report came out.”
Developing the mission statements also gave reporters a chance to share more about their personal connections to the work they do and what led them to their beats. For example, reporter Priska Neely covers “the people, policies and research that shape early childhood.” To supplement her new mission statement, she published a personal essay in which she shared her family’s firsthand experience with these issues — from problems of pay in the daycare industry to the gap in outcomes between white and black babies and mothers.
Alvarado has already seen the impact of this personal transparency from reporters in the types of questions they are receiving from the audience. “These are not vanilla questions. They reflect trust in the reporters.” Many of the questions have a collaborative and solutions-oriented spirit, honing in on the personal issues question askers are facing.
Reporters have flexibility to shift focus from or tweak their mission statements if tangential, newsworthy events emerge. Alvarado gave the example of their Education Correspondent Adolfo Guzman-Lopez’s mission. Typically, his scope is California public education. But when the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal broke, and involved USC, one of the state’s major private universities, Guzman-Lopez needed to shift his focus from his mission statement. (CORRECTION: Guzman-Lopez responded to this breaking news but did not change his actual mission statement. This project description has been updated.)
Outcomes and metrics
What outcomes is Alvarado hoping for from the mission statements, internal to their organization? First and foremost, to improve their engaged journalism. She wants her organization providing “more meaningful journalism and equipping people with the info to be their own best advocates,” and she wants them to find stories they would miss otherwise. In so doing, she wants to make the case that engaged journalism can be a vehicle for financial sustainability.
A key metric Alvarado is tracking is whether their stories are “building a habit of loyal, local audience members,” with a mind to cultivating audience members “most likely to move down the membership funnel.” She monitors audience members as they go from reading to subscribing to newsletters to converting to paying supporters of the organization.
An element that Alvarado tracks closely is audience members opting into newsletters, whether through the website directly or through separate platforms, such as the reporters’ Hearken embeds. Creating a Hearken embed for each reporter meant a big uptick in the potential number of people encountering an invitation to sign up for a newsletter. Alvarado saw an early sign of success on that front: Newsletter sign-ups through the Hearken embeds “matched and/or outperformed the signups through the website itself.” This affirms a trend we have heard from many newsrooms. We have found that audience members who do engage as question askers are more likely to become paying subscribers and members — and we’re working to gather even more data on that now from our partners at Hearken.
Alvarado is eager to see other newsrooms adopt similar approaches to the mission statements / question boxes, “sharing space at the table” with their audiences. She has heard from newsrooms already who voiced excitement to try this out.
If you want to see it happen in your own newsroom, here’s a few pieces of advice from Ashley:
Be patient and persistent
Know that this shift was a broad one that took time investment and organizational buy-in. She estimates it took a year to set the stage for this and to put the pieces together. In terms of the statements themselves: “These are mission statements with teeth. That took time. We spent a year-plus on these,” she said. “It’s not having your higher education reporter saying ‘I care about schools.’ It’s getting into ‘what is the best version of their coverage? Who is it for? Why are they doing it?’”
Collaborate to build allies
She collaborated with her analytics team to prove out the success of public-powered stories over the median story, which helped with reporter buy-in. Someone outside of the engagement team was sending out data about how these stories are performing.
Delegate ongoing tasks
KPCC has hired an engagement clerk whose primary job is the administrative work behind managing engagement platforms, including Hearken, which fuels the embeds that each reporter has. She’s really responsive and available, makes sure the proper tagging happens, and makes those pieces in the process work — which has been a “game changer” for the newsroom according to Alvarado. “The news apprentice role is game changing in that it allows us to have somebody pay attention every day to the platform so that we can keep things moving, do weekly downloads, and make sure embeds are working. She’s also taking a lead on trainings.”
Design a transparent workflow and celebrate wins
They adopted an #impact channel in their Slack platform. “The impact channel is a great way to celebrate wins, and we have loved seeing reporters take the lead in shouting out each other’s work,” Alvarado said.
This approach is personal and involves organization-wide transparency around mission. It’s a promising step that could increase trust in newsrooms. I’m excited to see more newsrooms invest the effort to be accountable to where and why they’re spending time on certain stories, and to prioritize audience curiosity as they do it.
Summer Fields has been an engagement strategist at Hearken since 2016. She has worked with more than 50 news organizations around the world (including KPCC/LAist!) to incorporate engagement efforts into daily workflows and their audiences into decision making. Before that, she wrote a sociology thesis on the experiences of underrepresented and marginalized folks in public media, and the fraught concept of “diversity” in the industry. She has served as a director on the Journalism That Matters board (of which Ashley Alvarado is president) since early 2019.
Trusting News, staffed by Joy Mayer and Lynn Walsh, is designed to demystify the issue of trust in journalism. We research how people decide what news is credible, then turn that knowledge into actionable strategies for journalists. We’re funded by the Reynolds Journalism Institute, the American Press Institute, Democracy Fund and the Knight Foundation.
