Insights, tools and research to advance journalism
Rounding up some of the best ideas lately about how to get readers to pay for news, Local News Lab says that engagement is essential to turn casual readers into paying subscribers: “Engagement can’t be marginalized, it has to be central to the work we are doing and has to be designed strategically and supported […]
While digital media is changing fast, creative development director Andy Cowles says there’s some universal ways for publishers to increase emotional engagement with their stories. Cowles says: “Facebook is BuzzFeed’s number one referrer. But in all of these article titles the three-word phrases that crop up more than anything else are the words ‘you,’ ‘your’ […]
In the Local News Lab’s latest report, a series of six essays document the project’s own learnings in areas such as revenue, community engagement and philanthropy. Some questions tackled include “How might communities be more active participants in local news?” and “How might newsrooms, working with communities, better represent and respond to the diverse needs […]
Crain’s is focusing on email newsletters as a way to increase the reach of its business news. The newsletters are personalized for each city and each reader using a combination of technology and human editors in each location. While editors curate relevant business news stories, a content aggregation platform serves as a CMS to tag […]
Los Angeles Times engagement editor Daniela Gerson says the key to covering a bomb threat to L.A. schools was “prioritizing digital engagement at the beginning of the process.” The L.A. Times asked readers how the decision to close schools affected their day, which Gerson says extended their reach beyond what their reporting team could have […]
At a recent Wharton conference, experts from firms including Fidelity and Accenture gathered to discuss how they’re using gamification to motivate employees and clients, and the results they’re seeing. The consensus from the conference is that gamification is still a gamble, but many companies are seeing big payoffs: With a gamification system to increase sales […]
As part of its coverage of the San Bernardino shootings on Thursday, The New York Times prominently highlighted comments from readers by placing them on the top of its homepage. To bring readers into its coverage, NYT asked readers to answer the question: “How often, if ever, do you think about the possibility of a […]
Publishers often consider their “audience” to simply be their active readers, Maria Terrell writes. However, Terrell says publishers should define their audience as those readers who are showing support, interest and enthusiasm for the publisher’s product. By communicating with that part of the audience and acting upon their feedback, Terrell writes that publishers can build […]
While the industry has invested resources in exploring new business models and using analytics to grow audiences, Andrew DeVigal writes that there’s something else we need to be focusing on: Using engagement to increase trust. “If journalism didn’t exist today, it wouldn’t be created in the top-down distributed model it has used in the past,” […]
Speaking at Mindshare’s Huddle event in London, Jonah Peretti shared takeaways for other publishers from what they’ve learned at BuzzFeed. Among those lessons, Peretti says publishers need to give readers more control over what’s “news,” a concept BuzzFeed is applying as it focuses its coverage on topics not widely covered elsewhere. Peretti says: “In the […]