On Oct. 10, INN gathered some of the brightest audience experts and news organization leaders from across the network to tackle some of the hardest — and most common — audience challenges nonprofit news organizations face today.
INN’s 500-plus members think of themselves as more than sharing a tax status, but part of an intertwined network. Through the day’s activities, we came to understand more deeply how responding to the decline of newspaper chains and broadcast networks by rebuilding local news with lone nonprofits had opened new opportunities to reimagine audience and product — but also created a broad set of new problems rooted in isolation and the loss of a larger network support structure.
Over the course of the day at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, leaders and audience experts from ProPublica to the Peekskill Herald grappled with the endemic audience problems independent nonprofits face, pushing current best practices to their limits and then tackling the isolation and disconnection at the root of many of the issues.
It was a day dense with new ideas, but there were clear takeaways, too.
Isolation is a recurring factor in the most common audience problems. From audience staff working alone (where for-profit peers relied on network teams); to deeper uncertainty about forces destabilizing audience reach because of the lack of network intelligence (common in even public media), disconnection is driving many problems and standing in the way of solving many more.
There are severe limitations to what a single news organization can do on its own to manage instability. Many of the freedoms and efficiencies gained by operating as small, lean organizations are overwhelmed by the lack of collectively owned resources and capacity for collective action that nearly all other news organizations from corporate chains to public media rely on.
Network infrastructure, though unglamorous, was frequently the solution participants proposed and where they found consensus. Joint contract agreements, network intelligence and benchmarks, resource distribution systems and commonly owned technology were the types of solutions imagined and selected as what should actually be built.
These insights were hard won over the course of the day as participants were challenged to solve problems shared by their peers.
INN interviewed more than 40 news organizations leaders, audience experts, editorial staff and others. We used those interviews to build a workshop around five fictional INN audience staffers facing the most common, most significant audience challenges in front of nonprofit newsrooms.
Among the hypothetical audience staffers was Eric Rivera, a part-time audience staffer hired to bolster vertical video production for the made-up investigative news organization Wyoming Watch. Like many audience staffers, he’s among the youngest in his organization, the only person on the audience team and struggling to apply broad best practices in a unique community where he has few professional peers. He’s struggling to get colleagues to collaborate, making due with cheap software until he can demonstrate the value of his work to the organization.
Though hypothetical, the teams that strategized how to improve Rivera and Wyoming Watch’s position said it felt “too real.”
Participants noted it was the right move by Wyoming Watch to hire Rivera to build out video offerings, but his isolation, as much as the deficit of skills or resources, was at the root of his challenges.
Solutions started at the strategy level. Participants immediately moved Rivera to full time, brought in managers to lend their authority to his relationships with other staff, reworked organizational KPIs to include Rivera’s contributions and plugged him into a broader peer community.
Several groups working independently on the same persona arrived at a very similar set of solutions. The organization was doing the right things, but it was not integrated into a cohesive strategy, leaving critical work to be done by people who felt isolated in the organization, unclear what they contributed to the deeper mission.
Across teams and personas, one theme became clear:
When groups addressed challenges at a network level, deeper insights and potential solutions became increasingly evident. This was particularly clear in the group working on the thorny problem of republication, where partners frequently refuse to share metrics about the reach of republished stories.
While the vast majority of INN news organizations offer their stories free for partners to republish, the potential benefits remain largely unrealized because of structural power imbalances.
The group tackling the problem quickly decided to band together to regain leverage against large newspaper chains like Gannett, who come to the table with their own massive network of news brands. The group drafted a collective agreement so republishers were required to abide by terms beneficial to all INN members if they wanted to republish any INN members’ content. It was a solution that was only possible by acting as a network with shared interests on an ongoing basis.
The group arrived at a solution strikingly similar to On the Ground, a republication marketplace INN developed with members. Visions of distribution channels owned by members was not far off from Text Rural, a product INN’s Rural News Network uses to share audience and reach. The support and insights lost by working on a team were being regained by peer groups like INN’s Audience Studio. While we are still far from the robust network infrastructure of public media, we left understanding that members do see themselves as connected and there is both a vision and drive within the INN membership for network infrastructure that helps solve the problems brought on by isolation and allows for collective action in response to the growing instability of the news industry.
“Better Together” is part of INN’s ongoing efforts to think beyond mentorship and training cohorts to build a more resilient news ecosystem shaped by our members.Over the coming weeks and months, we will use what we learned at Better Together to guide our audience work and product development.
Key priorities include helping members cultivate owned audiences and first-party data, deploying AI and other tech to make public-service journalism more accessible in more places, and developing key performance metrics that can be shared across the industry.
In all of these cases, a key takeaway from Better Together is that the solution will need to be truly networked to create collective impact.
