Focusing on news gathering and reporting is not enough to ensure news outlets become and remain viable. Publishers also have to address demand for news—or the lack thereof.
That’s why audience engagement is crucial.
“The world in which you just produce quality journalism and expect your audience to find it is not the world we live in anymore,” Benjamin Toff, who leads the Minnesota Journalism Center at the University of Minnesota, said during the opening plenary of the Institute for Nonprofit News’ annual conference, INN Days. “If you aren’t investing in how … your news can find those audiences, especially young people who are very unlikely to go to a website — and will tell you that — you’re going to be left behind. They won’t even know that you exist.”
Journalists and other experts stressed the importance of identifying, connecting with and engaging audiences during numerous sessions of INN Days, held June 16-18 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The event also featured in-depth discussions about practices related to audience engagement and growth. Panelists shared insights into how nonprofit news organizations broaden and deepen their reach despite prolific challenges stemming from social media, disinvestment, and changing attitudes, experiences and habits of news consumers.
Connecting with audiences also requires overcoming Americans’ complicated relationship with news. The Pew Research Center released a survey analysis in February that highlighted seeming contradictions in Americans’ attitudes toward news. Most survey respondents — 80% — said voters have a responsibility to be informed. Yet about half of the respondents (52%) said they feel overwhelmed by the news, while similar percentages said the news is not relevant to their lives (48%) and that they can stay informed even though they don’t regularly follow the news (47%).
Another challenge is that decisions about what people need to know may not rest with a human editor, but with an algorithm.
“The algorithms act as editors in chief for a lot of people experiencing news today,” Karen Rundlet, executive director of the Institute for Nonprofit News, said during opening remarks at INN Days. “Social platforms decide what gets seen, what gets shared, and what gets ignored.
“If we cede that relationship to an algorithm, we lose the direct connection to the communities we serve. And without audience, what is our impact?”
Across INN days sessions, advice coalesced into four main themes: focus on what the audience needs and endeavor to meet those needs; make efforts to draw in younger people who value information but not traditional media; look for ways to meet people where they are, not just your vehicles; guide community members to your content as a service.
Focus on audience needs
“The most natural audience for your stories are the people who are at the center of that reporting,” Nicole Lewis, deputy editor of INN Network member ProPublica’s engagement team, said during the opening plenary.
Lewis, a former engagement editor for The Marshall Project (another member), framed engagement around identifying problems and solutions. In an investigative reporting context, she said, “we’re thinking really concretely about making change, about systems, about policy, about what’s not working. So, to really understand that in great detail, we need to go directly to the people who are having an experience and understand that experience in really clear terms.”
Once the problem is identified, the team begins to think about solutions: “What information is missing? What information gaps could we fill? What resources? What services? What value could we create here?”
The subsequent strategizing acknowledges that an audience and sources, or people informing content, are intertwined.
Other speakers described gaining audience feedback through surveys, polls and other intentional outreach. The responses informed editorial approaches and news products such as niche newsletters. Data gleaned from niche newsletters, for example, could be a source of audience insights, such as what content and editorial approaches are effective.
Newsletters can be a vehicle for experimentation that’s essential for growth, speakers said. Newsletters provide a tool to ask readers what they want, respond to that input and test specific audience engagement goals and key performance indicators.
While moderating a panel on niche newsletters, Ashley Webster of News Revenue Hub noted a theme that had emerged about how the publications can generate useful audience feedback and engagement.
Niche newsletters succeed, Webster said, “because readers feel seen and they feel heard. Those interactions create a feedback loop that helps the product evolve.”
Great niche newsletters solicit reader feedback, Webster said. “But the best ones have conversations. They start conversations.”
In other sessions, speakers discussed experimentation as a way to explore new editorial approaches, act on emerging trends and remain relevant.
“We as a news industry need to build a culture of experimentation in our news organizations to not repeat the sins of … the previous generation of news leaders,” said Kara Meyberg Guzman, CEO and cofounder of Santa Cruz Local, an INN Network member. Instead, she said, stay ahead of the rapidly changing playing field to ensure news products are relevant to communities.
Pay attention to Gen Z and younger generations
There’s a popular meme of Don Draper, the central character of TV show “Mad Men,” telling a younger employee, “I don’t think about you at all.”
Most young people have a similar attitude toward news media, Benjamin Toff said during the opening plenary of INN Days.
“It’s not that they don’t care, it’s not that they’re pushing you away,” he said. Instead, they tend to care more about other things happening in their lives, “and they don’t see the value or the importance of news fitting into those priorities.”
Pew researchers found that 73% of Americans younger than 30 said they come across news instead of seeking it out. Only about a third of Americans under 30 said they think it’s important to follow the news, according to the survey data.
Several INN Days speakers also noted that younger audiences care about local news, but they don’t have the traditional news habits such as reading daily news sites and subscribing to traditional print publications.
In 2023, Santa Cruz Local leaders spoke to more than 100 community college students between 18 and 29 years old about what they need from the news.
“I was surprised to learn that students actually really do want local news,” Guzman said.
Look for new frontiers
What the students clearly expressed, Guzman said, is that they do not want news from the typical go-to mediums such as websites and newsletters.
“Meet us on social media,” college students shared with Santa Cruz Local. “And, like, don’t dumb it down, but make it quick.”
Based on the students’ feedback, Guzman said, her team is continuing to iterate its use of Instagram. “We’re also doing a lot of in-person events at the community college because students are really hungry to connect,” she said.
Some news outlets organized in-person events — such as storytelling sessions, a block party, trivia nights and a fun run — to engage their audiences and address people’s need to connect.
For Jewish Currents, hosting an in-person, all-day event in 2024 was a way to boost awareness among their specific audience of Jewish residents. Deputy Publisher Naomi Gordon-Loebl and Program Coordinator Noa Azulai encouraged other newsroom leaders to think about what makes their outlet unique when planning live events.
“What is the thing that only you do? … What is the thing that only you can offer to your audience? That’s the thing to build your event around.”
Be a guide
News outlets can also leverage their strong ties to a community.
On New Year’s Eve, Ohio-based Block Communications Inc. shut down Pittsburgh City Paper. A week later, the company announced plans to close the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a commercial newspaper company.
At Pittsburgh’s Public Source, another local news outlet in the city and part of the INN Network, leaders quickly responded with an advertising campaign that featured messages like “Pittsburgh news is not dead. Public Source is here for you” and “Pittsburgh deserves quality journalism. Public Source has your back.”
That message paid off, said Jennie Ewing Liska, the outlet’s co-executive director. Newsletter subscribers for Pittsburgh’s Public Source grew by 3,000 to 4,000 people in one month, Liska said. The outlet also gained another 300 or 400 donors.
“It really showed us that people are hungry for quality local news, and sometimes they just don’t know where to turn for it,” Liska said. “In those moments where people are looking for it, you really have to step up and guide them to it.”
