INN’s Audience Studio is a peer group where staff from nearly 100 member newsrooms meet monthly to identify critical audiences issues across the Network and form working groups to research, experiment and collaborate on solutions.
In the last session, which met from November to January, participants:
- Identified a structural change to Mailchimp’s internal analytics system, and developed strategies to manage the deeper issues at play.
- Brought hundreds of people off social media to build durable relationships with newsrooms through newsletters, in-person events and local partnerships.
- Built the foundations for measuring reach when audiences are fragmented across a growing number of distribution channels.
Since its inception in early 2025, the Audience Studio – kicking off its third cohort this week — has consistently surfaced innovative strategies for building news audiences, while providing a valuable space for connection and learning. Members have taken the lead in shaping the space and INN provides additional resources for those testing the strategies their newsroom needs to build resilience.
“The Studio’s working groups have consistently hit on innovative audience strategies that are responding to issues happening right now as members experience them,” said Sam Cholke, manager for distribution and audience growth at INN. “We’re looking forward to starting a new cycle and tackling how to scale the great ideas coming out of the working groups so more members can benefit.”
INN’s Audience Studio reopened to new participants with a virtual meeting on Feb. 17 (INN members who missed the kickoff but wish to participate can contact Sam Cholke.)
Read more below on what the working groups tackled last cycle.
Newsletters
The newsletter group identified a critical change in how Mailchimp reported bot activity that was causing newsletter metrics to fall off a cliff.
The change was part of a larger industry reaction to Gmail and other email providers adding algorithmically sorted “promotions” tabs, and came as the group was already collectively experimenting with tactics to grow or solidify relevance of newsletters as competition for attention in the inbox heats up, including better list segmentation, more delivery options beyond unsubscribe, and new promotional tactics.
The community they built helped them to identify that the large declines were due to email system changes, and make decisions about how to move forward with metrics reporting to account for bots.
Total Reach
Another group tackled the challenge of representing the reach of an organization’s work as the distribution channels fragment. The group compared frameworks developed across the membership and determined that while there is no single formula that will work for all organizations, there is enough consistency that a framework is cohering among those who use reach as a key performance metric.
New Audiences
A group focused on building deeper relationships with younger audiences that discover news on social media developed several promising new tactics. Confirming recent Next Gen News research, the group found young audiences were often actively searching for ways to connect outside of social media.
The group tested and had early success with live events, newsletter sign ups and even a call-in number. Among the promising tactics was Manychat, which allows news organizations to automate direct messages on social media — think “Comment NEWS and we’ll DM you a link to the full story.” It was among the most flexible tactics and is currently being tested further.
