The Dallas Morning News has created a Facebook Group for its subscribers. It’s a way to grow loyalty among those who pay for its journalism and give them more direct access to the paper’s journalists and editors. Members of the group also get exclusive benefits such as tickets to events and other perks … In this issue, we’re looking at how the Morning News built its subscriber group and how the newsroom and marketing departments collaborate to run it.
Language matters. How we think about and frame the communities we serve inside the newsroom influences the issues we tackle, the assignments we pursue, how we define success, and how we edit, package and circulate our stories. That’s why we want to share some strategies, based on our own hard-learned lessons, for how to build genuine and productive relationships with your communities.
The Hearken team is proud to have developed a transparent, collaborative, and well-defined system for hiring that attracted a diverse pool of strong applicants. We learned a lot from others out here on the Internet about best practices when recruiting and hiring, so we wanted to give back and share what we learned. Related resources Dodge Foundation, Poynter, and Open News.
It’s time to rethink the newsroom social media team: its structure, mission, responsibilities and skillsets. In this strategy study, the American Press Institute, in conjunction with a fellowship awarded by the Knight Visiting Nieman Fellowship program, examines a reimagined social media team that refocuses its efforts on urgent issues impacting today’s media.
Across the journalism industry, more and more newsrooms are turning to events as part of their engagement and revenue strategy. And advertisers and residents are responding. In Texas last year, The Texas Tribune made roughly $1.5 million from its journalism events, most of which were offered free to the public. In Philadelphia, Billy Penn made 84 percent of its revenue on events. In this guide, we will draw on lessons and case studies from news events run by newsrooms of all sizes and share some key lessons for publishers who are just getting started.
This guide was created based on a workshop I gave to graduate students at the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York. It is the culmination of a lot of research and my own experience with email outreach, online advocacy, and fundraising, as well as my work on the Local Fix, a weekly newsletter on tips and tools for local journalists.
rom 2014 to 2016, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation supported two crowdfunding campaigns with local newsrooms and studied a number of others. This guide looks at each of these campaigns and pulls in lessons from other newsrooms that have been successful. The guide also looks at how to convert the community that supports your crowdfunding campaign into ongoing contributors, allies, and friends of the organization. See Local News Lab series of Guides.
Gather is a hands-on guidebook for all convening designers and social change leaders who want to create convenings that tap into a group’s collective intelligence and make substantial progress on a shared challenge. It provides simple frameworks for the questions that are often ignored: whether convening is the right tool to use to advance a strategic agenda, and how a convening can be used to achieve a specific purpose. It then helps readers understand how to customize the design to fit that purpose, laying out a clear series of steps for what is a naturally chaotic workflow.
For so long journalists held a monopoly on attention and information. That time is over; we all know this. What’s just beginning is an era when journalism can redefine itself as something of people, not about them. … How can we serve our neighbors and our world? By involving them in the process from start to finish; by focusing on them. We have to know who they are, what they value, and how they consume information. And we have to demonstrate that we know these things by bringing the stories to them where they are.
This 10-step guide offers practical tips and exercises to create the optimal conditions in your newsroom for meaningful engagement efforts to take root and thrive. This guide will help cultivate lasting culture change in your newsroom that results in producing more relevant content in a more authentic manner.
The Listening Post Collective provides journalists, newsroom leaders, and non-profits tools and advice to create meaningful conversations with their communities. Whether you are a journalist, media outlet or civil society group, these steps will get you into a flow of listening to your community, creating stories that resonate, and fostering an ongoing conversation with people. Learn more about the Listening Post Collective from Poynter, MediaShift, and journalism.co.uk.
This guide is designed to give newsrooms a simple, step-by-step process to host focus groups with local residents. It is based on the work of Phil Napoli, Jessica Crowell, and Kathleen McCollough at the Rutgers University News Measures Research Project at the Media + The Public Interest Initiative.
