Matt Carlson, Associate Professor at St. Louis University

Matt Carlson, an associate professor of communication at Saint Louis University, was set to announce a collaborative research project that would “connect a lot of dots surrounding news metrics and digital distribution platforms.” He wanted to examine journalism’s embrace of real-time audience data by shining a spotlight on “all the different actors involved, from reporters and editors and news management to engineers and salespersons at data analytic firms to the audience on the other end.”

But first, he needed to find a term that tied everything together. “Measurable journalism” was the solution.

In a special issue of the academic journal Digital Journalism, “Measurable Journalism: Digital Platforms, News Metrics, and the Quantified Audience,” nine researchers explore the implications of these technological and cultural shifts. Carlson, who edited the special issue and wrote an introductory essay, “Confronting Measurable Journalism,” explained his interest in this topic in an e-mail to MediaShift: 

“When we think about measurable journalism, we need to keep in mind all the parts that go into it without privileging one over another. Often discussions of news metrics focus on technology, but it is equally about human actions that direct technology to do x and not y.

A concern I have with measurable journalism is when what can be measured takes precedent over what should be measured. These are sophisticated technologies, but they can only ever get to what people do. What we can’t know is what news audiences think or why they do what they do. I am always worried that user data becomes so fetishized that we forget it can only ever be a partial representation. We talk about such complex terms as impact or engagement but then we look for simple measurements.

The idea of measurable journalism can be both promising with the hope of creating journalism that is more accountable to the audience and frightening with the threat of journalists losing control over what is newsworthy. It may bring journalists and their audiences closer together or it might push economic imperatives ahead of journalism’s public service mission. Given these outcomes, what we need is vigilance and a solid understanding of all the forces in play.”

MediaShift discussed these forces in short interviews with the researchers who contributed to the special issue.

Quantified Audiences in News Production: A Synthesis and Research Agenda

Interview with Rodrigo Zamith, assistant professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

There are two main reasons. The first has to do with a professional observation: Journalism is becoming more sensitive to and powered by measurement. We see this in the rise of “data journalism” as well as the proliferation of audience analytics — the latter being the focus of much of my recent work. Those shifts have important implications for how journalism is constructed, performed and rewarded, yet the phenomenon is not yet well understood by scholars (or practitioners). The second reason is personal: I’m a nerd and think in terms of numbers. I find the tensions playing out as quantification and quantitatively oriented actors gain foothold in newsrooms to be fascinating.

What did your research show?

My contribution focused on synthesizing the current literature on audience analytics and metrics, offering new lenses for studying the phenomenon and identifying future research directions for the scholarship. Three arguments stand out in the piece: First, we are witnessing a new wave of audience measurement in journalism (following two waves in the 1930s and 1970s) that is driven by audience analytics (systems that automatically capture information about individuals’ media use). Second, while contemporary journalism is not being driven by quantifications of audiences (i.e., audience metrics), both audiences and quantification are playing far more prominent roles in news production than in the past. Third, scholars and practitioners have become less pessimistic about the impact of audience metrics and now recognize more nuanced impacts on news production as well as opportunities for using them to advance journalistic goals.

I have a new piece out (in Digital Journalism) arguing that we are witnessing a third wave of audience measurement in journalism and synthesizing the knowledge across 5 areas related to news production: https://t.co/G1Fzu3rGwo. Feedback welcome! #ddj #journalism #metrics

— Rodrigo Zamith (@rodzam) March 7, 2018

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

Journalists and educators need to take analytics and metrics seriously. The measurement of audiences will only become more sophisticated and news organizations will face further pressures to make use of those data. Journalists should seek out training on how to use their newsrooms’ analytics suites (e.g., Chartbeat) and/or ask for permission to access the system. Educators need to ensure they incorporate analytics and metrics into their curricula and also provide students the opportunity to engage with those suites (e.g., integrating them into student media offerings, at minimum). In both cases, serious conversations need to be had about how to use those data sensibly — from influencing organizational coverage decisions to developing reward structures for individual journalists. I find the argument that metrics should neither be restricted to the business side nor the primary driver of journalism to be especially persuasive. Analytics are tools that can be put to good use, and that means trying to align journalistic aims like satisfying community information needs with the many data points that analytics can offer. At the same time, those tools can be misused and practitioners should therefore maintain a healthy skepticism and promote robust dialogue.

The Audience-Oriented Editor: Making Sense of the Audience in the Newsroom

Interview with Raul Ferrer-Conill, Ph.D. candidate, Karlstad University, Sweden, and Edson C. Tandoc, Jr., assistant professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

In the last decades we’ve seen an increasing quantification of journalism, spurred by the use of metrics and analytics. These metrics are effectively the new way by which news organizations make sense of the audience. Combined with the commercial urgency, the need to entice and engage audiences makes the quantification of audience news consumption a key factor to understand the current news production process. Researchers and practitioners should pay more attention to how journalism production is quantified, measured and understood.

What did your research show?

First, the definition of engagement is almost entirely centered on different types of metrics. Second, while audience-oriented editors take part in the editorial process, their role is to help journalists negotiate between the information obtained by their metrics and their journalistic intuition to make editorial decisions. Third, there is a lack of cohesiveness regarding what these newsroom positions are and how they operate. We provide insight on the pervasiveness of metrics and quantification of journalistic processes by offering a more nuanced understanding of a new set of editorial roles.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

The more that metrics are part of news production and the increasing number of audience-oriented editors legitimize and institutionalize metrics. Therefore, understanding the impact of audience measurement on news work requires an analysis of these emerging roles, who act as intermediaries between audiences and the newsroom through their interpretation and valuation of audience data. The reliance on metrics and social media insights questions their capacity to capture the audience. The analytic tools are constrained by what they can measure and rely on likes, shares, number of comments and other audience metrics to define engagement. In this sense, it is user activity and behavior that becomes a proxy for the voice of the audience. This is a limited understanding of the audience, let alone having a dialog with the audience. Editors can assess the performance of their editorial choices as they scrutinize metrics in real time, but they are limited by and reliant on the technological affordances of the tools they use. We argue that this dialog is predominantly informed by metrics and therefore it needs to be understood as such. Metrics are not necessarily a valid way to measure audience engagement and should be used cautiously.

Selecting Metrics, Reflecting Norms: How Journalists in Local Newsrooms Define, Measure, and Discuss Impact

Interview with Elia Powers, assistant professor, Towson University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

My interest is in examining the ways in which journalists think about and ultimately measure their work’s impact. Impact is a buzzword in newsrooms, but there are so many ways to define the term that little can be done to move the conversation forward until there’s more clarity about what journalists mean when they talk about impact. It’s also critical for journalists to feel comfortable publicly discussing their work’s impact, because newsrooms now more than ever need to make the case to audiences and funders that civic-oriented journalism makes a difference in local communities.

What did your research show?

Interviews with journalists from a range of local news organizations in one U.S. city found that they welcome the opportunity to inform audiences and effect change, and they had no issues discussing impact with newsroom colleagues and in promotional materials. However, journalists were generally more hesitant to discuss their work’s impact outside the newsroom — in follow-up news stories, social media posts, interviews, etc. Some journalists were concerned about being perceived as too self-congratulatory or being labeled advocates. There was a perception among some participants that publicizing impact violated journalistic standards of objectivity and detachment. Additionally, journalists had many ways of defining and measuring impact, one of which was audience analytics — although many felt these were more about engagement than enduring signs of impact. Effect-oriented metrics (audience awareness, public discourse, public policy, etc) were widely considered the best to assess impact but among the most difficult to systematically measure.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

First, I propose that measurable journalism should not be limited to quantitative metrics, often the standard by which news coverage is judged. Much of what journalists want to measure has little to do with audience analytics. Second, as I argue in the article, “publicizing the impact of journalism, when facts support such a claim, is central to the journalistic process and necessary for newsrooms to justify their funding…Newsroom policies and professional codes of conduct should clarify that engaging in public discourse on impact is central to the journalistic process, a necessary part of communicating with the public, and a way for newsrooms to justify their funding rather than a sign of self-promotion or
advocacy.”

Dimensional Field Theory: The Adoption of Audience Metrics in the Journalistic Field and Cross-field Influences

Interview with Qun Wang, Ph.D. Candidate, Rutgers University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

Fifteen years ago, I was a TV news anchor and reporter in Beijing, China. I was able to access both quantitative and qualitative audience information due to the nature of the show that I covered: on the one hand, we kept a close eye on the ratings because the show was a signature show in Beijing’s competitive TV news market; on the other hand, we had our ears open to the three hotline phones on which the show relied for audience members to share news tips, feedback and comments like “I don’t like the anchor’s hair!” We sometimes learned a lot from the audience information and sometimes got lost in it. The show ceased years ago, but I have never stopped wondering how the team would deal with today’s audience information in the digital age if the show was still around. This work experience and this particular question have contributed to my interest in measurable journalism.

What did your research show?

In the years that I worked in the newsroom, I already felt that newsroom practices and norms were often a result of the negotiation of different forces. In my study, drawing on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, I took a historical and relational approach to embed the journalistic field into a wider media ecosystem. Particularly, the study examines how the adoption of audience metrics in news media has been shaped by influences inside and outside the journalistic field in order to understand the origin, driving forces and implications of this trend. I looked at neighboring fields adjacent to the journalistic field, such as the online advertising and online audience research fields, as well as web analytics services working with news media that I identified as the intermediate field to trace the evolution and influence of these fields. I also looked into the journalistic field itself and identified three dimensions — the techno-economic means, the subject of journalism and the object of journalism — that construct the field and serve as sources of internal influence.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

The main takeaway of this study is that the journalistic field is not a static or monolithic arena. Rather, it is a social universe that is subject to and constantly interacts with cross-field influences. Therefore, to understand the root, development and effects of measurable journalism, we may need to inspect our own field and look elsewhere.

Boundary Work, Interloper Media, and Analytics in Newsrooms: An Analysis of Web Analytics Companies’ Role in News Production

Interview with Valerie Belair-Gagnon, assistant professor, University of Minnesota, and Avery Holton, assistant professor, University of Utah

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

Journalism has been undergoing a series of fascinating changes for several decades. In particular, social media has challenged the ways in which we measure the success of journalism. Much of that success still rests in financial growth, or at least stability, which itself is increasingly dependent on audience interactions with journalists and the content they produce. We’ve begun moving past a reliance on journalistic or editorial intuition and instead see tangible value in understanding complex web metrics and analytics. So if the latter are beginning to drive journalistic decision making, particularly in news production and professional identity, then they are critical to examine.

https://twitter.com/journoscholar/status/969222955677908992

What did your research show?

Our most recent research shows that web analytics companies seek to understand and address news production values and norms without assuming responsibility as journalists. We think of these companies, or their employees more specifically, as implicit media interlopers. These are journalistic outsiders, more or less, who are bit more welcome in the journalistic process than previous interlopers (e.g., citizen journalists, bloggers) because of the value they add to news products. These companies also foster profit-oriented norms and values in newsrooms by introducing web analytics as disruptive, connective and routinized in news production. By offering a product that needs to be modified on a continuous basis because of changes in the structure of the web and audience behaviors, web analytics companies foster a milieu of constant experimentation with old and new products. This helps place them squarely in the middle of evolving news organizations that are turning more to disruptors and innovators as they grapple for financial footing.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

Today, like many other technological innovations in newsroom, disruption increasingly comes from innovations from outside companies and individuals. As journalism evolves, scholars and practitioners need to understand more deeply what the values and practices are that these disruptive innovators bring to journalism. We’re not just talking about web analytics here, but rather programmers, app developers, drone hobbyists, and others who are interacting with journalists and news organizations in ways that are giving new meaning to what exactly journalism is and who exactly is doing it.

Engineering Consent: How the Design and Marketing of Newsroom Analytics Tools Rationalize Journalists’ Labor

Interview with Caitlin Petre, assistant professor, Rutgers University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

Way back in 2010, Nick Denton, founder of the now-defunct Gawker Media, said, “probably the biggest thing in internet media isn’t the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability.” Superlatives are tricky, but Denton was surely right that the unprecedented ability to measure audience behaviors and demographics is a defining characteristic of digital media — one that has major implications for the working conditions in this industry and the kind of journalism that is produced. Media scholars have an urgent role to play in helping to interpret and explain the causes, manifestations and consequences of measurable media.

What did your research show?

In the early stages of my research on the role of analytics in journalism, I kept encountering the same puzzle. Journalists at a wide range of news outlets would profess a profound wariness or even hostility toward analytics tools, often seeing them as a threat to their professional autonomy and integrity. This by itself wasn’t all that surprising: Sociological research has found that workers (especially those, like journalists, who consider themselves to possess some kind of special knowledge or expertise) often resist the implementation of technologies that quantify their performance and rank them against each other.

But even as they regarded analytics tools with suspicion and resentment, journalists didn’t seem to be resisting them very much. On the contrary, many journalists would describe feeling “addicted” to real-time analytics tools, consulting them more frequently than was required or even encouraged by their managers, and scheming about how to boost their stats.

My article aims to figure out why that is. I find that a big part of the answer has to do with something that often gets overlooked in these discussions: the design and marketing of real-time newsroom analytics tools. Newsroom analytics companies engineer their dashboards to provide a user experience that is strongly habit-forming, flattering and emotionally compelling. The resulting products are so “sticky” that explicit managerial coercion to boost traffic (which many journalists would not take kindly to) becomes unnecessary. Once journalists get hooked on looking at real-time analytics tools, they begin to monitor themselves. They also push themselves to work harder and harder in hopes of gaining ever-higher traffic.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

When we have conversations about analytics in journalism, we tend to focus on which metrics are provided: time spent or page views? Scroll depth or uniques? In other words, we assess the merit of each metric and speculate about the kind of journalism it might incentivize. But my findings indicate that anyone seeking to make sense of the role of analytics in contemporary journalism should be just as attentive to the way the data are presented, and the daily experience of using these tools, as we are to the metrics themselves.

The Elusive Engagement Metric

Interview with Jacob Nelson, Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism? 

Over the past few years, a growing number of journalism stakeholders and researchers have argued that newsrooms should make “audience engagement” one of their chief pursuits. This term has many interpretations that stem from one underlying belief: Journalists better serve their audiences when they explicitly focus on how their audiences interact with and respond to the news in the first place. However, those who hope to make audience engagement a larger part of journalistic practice need to first settle an internal debate surrounding how audience engagement should be defined and evaluated. Because the term currently lacks an agreed upon meaning — let alone metric — it has become an object of contestation. The efforts to make audience engagement central to news production therefore present an opportunity to learn how journalism is changing, as well as who within the field have the power to change it.

My latest article looks at how @wearehearken persuades newsrooms to adopt audience engagement as a goal, and the institutional obstacles they navigate in the process. https://t.co/cAXzUP5vFf

— Jacob Nelson (@jnelz) March 6, 2018

What did your research show?

My study draws on an ethnographic case study of Hearken, a company that offers audience engagement tools and consulting to about 100 news organizations worldwide. Findings show that news industry confusion surrounding how audience engagement should be defined and measured has left Hearken unable to quantify the benefit of its offerings. The news industry currently privileges measures of audience size, so newsrooms face economic incentives to pursue audience growth (which they can measure) rather than audience engagement (which they can’t). Instead, Hearken’s pitch to newsrooms relies primarily on appeals to intuition. Its employees argue that their interpretation of audience engagement will lead to a better quality of journalism, which will inevitably result in increased audience revenue as well. Though some newsrooms refuse to invest in Hearken’s offerings without proof they will yield some measurable return, others seem eager to take the chance. The success of Hearken’s faith-based approach indicates that many in journalism innately believe the profession should improve its relationship with the audience.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics? 

Hearken’s effort to spread its interpretation of audience engagement is just one piece of an ongoing public contest to determine journalistic practice. There are countless conversations about audience engagement that occur annually at a variety of journalism practice and research conferences. These conversations tend to include editors, reporters, and publishers, but rarely include employees of companies like comScore and Nielsen who are in the business of understanding how audiences behave. What makes this omission confounding is the fact that these firms are having their own conversations about audience engagement. The fact that these conversations are taking place shows that the major players within the news media environment believe that how audiences engage with media is worthy of consideration. On the other hand, the fact that these stakeholders with disparate interpretations of audience engagement have yet to come together reflects just how convoluted the term has become. How the term is ultimately defined and measured will have consequences not just for how journalists produce the news, but also what they expect of public – as well as what the public expects of them.

Elia Powers, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Towson University. He writes regularly about news literacy, audience engagement and nonprofit journalism.

The post What Research on ‘Measurable Journalism’ Tells Us About Tech, Cultural Shifts in Digital Media appeared first on MediaShift.

For local news organizations, tracking impact is a way to tie journalism’s value to revenue. Impact trackers can help show readers how news works and source powerful messaging for membership or subscription campaigns. Thirty-one percent of recent subscribers to local newspapers subscribed because they wanted to support local journalism, according to the Media Insight Project. Gannett, where Smith worked before joining WhereBy.Us, recently launched an internal impact tracker, and LION Publishers is now offering investigative reporting grants to local newsrooms and helping grantees use the impact of that reporting in fundraising.

WhereBy.Us has been at the forefront of using analytics to create news products for the local media market. This philosophy has led to a newsletter-first strategy, an emphasis on connecting people with the cities they live in, and a membership program with benefits that include merchandise, giveaways from local businesses and discounts for events. The company is currently using an institutional fellowship from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute to build a toolkit for using metrics in small, independent newsrooms.

I talked with Smith over email about her new role at WhereBy.Us, the metrics she tracks and why the company started tracking impact. Here is our lightly edited conversation.

Q&A

What’s a typical day look like for you as growth editor?

I’m not sure I’ve had a typical day since joining the WhereBy.Us team in December! Much of my work so far has been around building workflows and processes for our growing team. My role is set up so I’m like a consultant for our local brands — The New Tropic in Miami and The Evergrey in Seattle (and more coming soon!) I check in with the local teams daily to brainstorm how we can engage our current audiences and capture the attention of new people. I also lead project work related to growth — things like our content distribution plans and tracking, CRM-like people tracker for editorial use and organic and paid social media strategies.

What metrics do you track?

Since we’re a daily newsletter, subscribers and open rates are important. We use a net promoter score system to get regular feedback on how our newsletter subscribers feel about our daily product. For social media, we look at engagement metrics, so comments, shares and reactions. We also look at things like number of responses to our callouts and how many people attend our events. I care most about metrics that indicate people have found value in what we’ve created and want to participate in our community. And, of course, we keep tabs on revenue.

It’s a new position, so in the bigger picture what does the company hope to learn through your work?

How to grow effectively. I’m tracking our experiments, big and small, so that we can learn over time what works and what doesn’t. Test, measure, learn, test again.

What can impact look like for WhereBy.Us?

We organize how we think about impact in four buckets: informed awareness, informed conversations, informed action, external recognition. We look for and track when someone tells us we taught them something or changed their mind, shared or talked about our work, took an action, changed a behavior, things like that.

Is there a great example you can share?

Our first experiment with Facebook Groups. Our Seattle brand The Evergrey launched “Embrace the Grey,” a Facebook group designed to help their community (and themselves!) make the most of winter there. Members participate in daily challenges, share ideas, start conversations, and we ask if they’ve changed their minds about winter after trying new things or considering different perspectives. The group is coming together IRL in March to celebrate a holiday that we made up and members chose the name for — Greybreak. This is a great example of how we can bring a community of people together around a shared experience and help improve lives in one way.

The group is open to the public — check it out here.

What pros and cons did you talk about before deciding to start using an impact tracker?

A lot of these conversations happened before I joined the team. There are lots of pros — making sure we’re fulfilling our mission to engage the curious locals in our cities, learning what qualitative value our projects and events provide, showing clients more than quantitative metrics. I think one of the pain points on this for many organizations is the effort and time needed to keep the thing updated and useful. My smart colleague Anika Anand kept the input process for our impact tracker as simple as possible.

Anything else on your mind right now related to metrics and impact?

WhereBy.Us’ ecosystem. Is it healthy? Are people who subscribe, or have conversations on our social posts, or attend our events, or pay us for marketing work, delighted with what we’re offering? Are they participating in our work on different platforms? I’m thinking about ways to measure and check in with each mini-community we’ve created so we never rely too heavily on any one space.

Learn more

You can subscribe to WhereBy.Us’s newsletters at The Evergrey and The New Tropic.

Jason Alcorn (@jasonalcorn) is the Metrics Editor for MediaShift. In addition to his work with MediaShift, he works as a consultant with non-profits and newsrooms.

The post How WhereBy.Us Will Track Impact of Local Media appeared first on MediaShift.

The New York Times’ Lindsey Goddard, Greentech Media’s Brady Pierce and Parse.ly’s Clare Carr generously shared their expertise. Watch the video here or scroll down for seven of their best tips for how to get better newsletter metrics.

1. Segment your audience.

Newsletters feel personal, like a one-to-one communication. Or at least they should. By segmenting your audience and developing email products that deliver on a unique, targeted value proposition, you are likely to have the greatest success.

2. Track what happens after the click.

You might not get your audience segments exactly right the first time. After all, that’s what metrics are for. By tracking your newsletter audience after they click through to your site, you’ll be able to see what stories and topics keep their attention. You’ll know if they are on mobile devices or at their desk when they are reading. Use that information to refine your email and improve your results. Bonus tip: Follow Google Analytics guidelines and use email as your UTM medium.

3. Measure promotional activities alongside growth rates.

Growth rate isn’t an independent variable. If you publish multiple newsletters, there are going to be times when some, and not others, are more timely and will see increased demand. You’re marketing and promotion calendar should reflect those changes in demand. An Olympics newsletter, for example, will grow more quickly this month than last month. Set target growth rates and compare across email lists, but make sure you know which ones got an extra boost.

4. Run re-activation campaigns.

Is a newsletter getting a little tired? Engagement and open rates dropping? It might be a good time to do a re-activation campaign. In fact, good list hygiene is always important. A re-activation campaign will ask readers if they want to stay on your list or not. If they don’t open it — and they haven’t opened any of your emails in the last six months — go ahead and unsubscribe them. Then explain to your boss that even though the list is smaller, it’s higher quality, more valuable to advertisers, and all your performance metrics will improve.

5. Do regular A/B testing.

A/B testing isn’t a one-time effort. First of all, you can’t — and shouldn’t — test everything at once. You’ll get the best results by regularly testing.

6. Heat maps.

Both Goddard and Pierce shared heat maps of their email newsletters. Heat maps provide a quick, visual snapshot of where your readers click on your site. Whether you are making the business care for email, reporting on results to your team or considering a product redesign, heat maps are an essential better-metrics tool in the email producer’s toolkit.

7. Evaluate on a regular basis.

Newsletters have been around for a long time, but they don’t stand still. Your reader’s inbox is a competitive place and you need to earn their attention. Our panelists all said that regular evaluation, whether that’s once a week or once a month, is important to making sure that your newsletters are performing up to standard and that your metrics align with your team’s KPIs, or key performance indicators.

Jason Alcorn (@jasonalcorn) is the Metrics Editor for MediaShift. In addition to his work with MediaShift, he works as a consultant with non-profits and newsrooms.

The post 7 Tips to Get Better Newsletter Metrics appeared first on MediaShift.

Monica Todd and Moshe Raphaely of the Financial Times

Last year, the Financial Times reached a milestone — 900,000 paying subscriptions. The company has used a paywall on its website FT.com since 2002, long before it became a must-have for news outlets outside financial media.

As a media business reliant on reader revenue, it’s been important that we track usage behavior. Those metrics help our product and news teams to understand what readers are doing and the different outcomes of those journeys.

Over the past few years, we’ve relied on user feedback as part of our toolkit to provide context and further understanding on readers habits and what they value. Users can provide feedback to our team in multiple ways — an annual customer survey, qualitative interviews, customer services, on-site feedback form.

Using user feedback to enhance the overall FT.com user experience has led us to create new products and shut down efforts that weren’t working — and in the end to build a better news experience that earns the loyalty of our users.

Shutting down a feature when qualitative and qualitative metrics say to

In October 2016, during the relaunch of FT.com, we released over 50 updates and new features. During this roll out, we wanted to understand the impact those developments had on how users used the site. We monitored engagement metrics for grouped users based on their reading habits and analyzed thousands of customers’ feedback via various channels including an on site feedback form, qualitative interviews and our annual customer survey to understand the impact those developments had on how they used the site. Those learnings helped us prepare support for different kinds of customer reactions in the post-launch period.

One feature in particular, Compact View, was created to meet the needs of a newly identified reader group. This new persona of engaged readers, the majority in the finance industry, shared the preference for consuming news in a list or “feed-reading format.” Thus, Compact View was created to provide the same FT homepage news without any images for an easy and cleancut way to scan the news daily. The feature allowed users to easily transition to the new website design, with a service customized for their specific reading habits.

Following its launch, we monitored the impact Compact View had on our users, both in terms of customer satisfaction and user behavior, and found that while there was initial praise and engagement with 15 percent of users on the old site opting in, only a small number of users were happily using it regularly. The resulting drop off rate caused our customer research team to evaluate how useful the tool was for readers.

In October 2017, after research and observations of feedback from numerous users, our product team decided that Compact View would no longer be available. It had become clear that the first iteration of this new feature needed improvement and was not valuable in its then-current format.

Photo: Danny E. Martindale / Stringer / Getty Images

Test and measure to customize user experiences

At FT, we have a vision to move away from a “one size fits all” news experience, which is why we are keen to test out products that users request, such as the new FT.com. Even when products fail, we learn from the data we collect and are able to make the next product better as a result.

In fact, we are able to see when our products are not serving our readership and can easily pivot to something more helpful.

One piece of the 2016 redesign of FT.com that has turned out to be extraordinarily successful was a tool called myFT, a personalized news feed catered to each reader’s specific preferences. Users can find the myFT icon in the top right section of the homepage banner on FT.com, clicking this will take users to a dashboard which provides an overview of the topics they have selected to ‘follow’ and receive stories about.

User growth for the myFT feature exploded from 20,000 users in June 2016 to 241,000 in June 2017. The myFT feature allows users to receive the FT perspective on what is relevant on a global scale whilst simultaneously receiving updates about their own industry and preferred news topics. These tools have resulted in great feedback and high user rates, proving that user input is a fundamental component that we will continue using in the future to grow and adapt to meet our readers needs.

In 2018, the FT’s product team will continue to focus on the personalization of news and ways to enrich journalism. We will be using metadata to increase tagging and give more prominence to relevant articles. The team are trialing data based approaches to show the correct recommendations based on individual user preferences indicated using myFT.

Monica Todd is head of customer research at the Financial Times and Moshe Raphaely is a Financial Times group product manager.

The post How The Financial Times Uses Reader Feedback To Launch And Test New Features appeared first on MediaShift.

One of these crucial quality measures for individual pieces of content and content formats is readability, often called scroll depth. Readability measures how thoroughly your audience digests your content by tracking where most people finish reading each individual article. You can’t track it in Google Analytics without a plugin, but some commercial analytics providers offer it as a feature.

For digital publishers, two aspects of readability make it worth your attention. First, it accurately gauges the quality of your content by measuring one aspect of user engagement. Second, it can easily be improved, allowing you to quickly alter your content and increase performance using analytics. Let’s look at how this metric can be used to diagnose low-performing content and how you can start tracking it on your own sites.

Good content needs great structure

The key to good readability is structure. An article layout that supports the content also encourages readership. It’s not enough for the content to be interesting. If key information is readable immediately, if there’s no incentive to scroll, or if page elements like ads or links get in the way, your audience won’t bother.

For example, DMG Ireland is one of Ireland’s leading media groups. Its brands include national newspapers like the Irish Daily Mail and digital lifestyle magazines like Evoke.ie. A focus on readability allowed the group’s analytics to soar in 2017.

“Viewability of ad content was becoming an increasingly important metric so I decided to focus on readability as as this would help our sales team serve out more ads,” said Desmond Farrelly, DMG Ireland’s digital audience manager.

Farrelly realized that Evoke.ie had lower readability than the company’s other publications. In particular, style posts — articles covering one featured image, usually related to fashion or celebrity news — had particularly low readability and were dragging the site’s average rate down, even though they had high page views.

As a consequence, ad view metrics site-wide were down.

The solution turned out to be a simple one. Farrelly’s team added a teaser image at the top of the article that led readers to scroll down to see the featured image, enticing the reader to complete the article and spend more time on the page.

This resulted in a 14 percent increase in readability for featured image articles and a site-wide 6 percent increase in readability across Evoke.ie. The change also caused corresponding rises in every major metric, especially in recirculation and depth.

“We found the more readers scrolled down the page, the likelihood would be that they consumed additional content,” Farrelly said. “This meant that our depth and recirculation metrics benefited as a result of improving one metric: readability.”

How to measure readability

The benefits of healthy readability are considerable. High quality content increases the loyalty of your current audience and attracts more readers in the process, making your readership larger.

One popular plug-in for tracking readability is this Scroll Depth plugin that works with Google Analytics and other event-based analytics tools. Using this tool, readability can be measured in percentages of the overall page height, in pixels from the top of the page or by specifying specific elements on the page to measure against.

Once you are able to start measuring readability, you can start to diagnose and fix issues.

Experimentation with your content will allow you to track and improve readability. If you notice an article has poor readability, or you want to generally experiment, change its structure and measure the effects in real time on your analytics tool.

If you have an advertising business model, for example, look at readability to place your ads in places most likely to catch readers attention without causing them to end their visit. You can do the same with recommendation blocks to boost recirculation and depth on your site.

If readability improves with the changes you make, retain the structure you used and apply it to your other articles. If it stays the same, or drops, avoid using this layout.

Complete quality needs symbiotic thinking

Remember, like many metrics, readability works best in combination with other metrics you use on a daily basis. A solid readability rate correlates with many other metrics you work with, so it’s important to master it.

Make sure that any analytics tool you use includes readability, and also allows you to track its impact on and interaction with other metrics. After all, you may be able to track the quantity of your content, but without quality, you won’t have room to grow.

Don’t be afraid to experiment and always keep track of your successful results as great readability really can get your audience clamoring for more content.

All graphics courtesy of the author.

Andrew Sweeney works at IO technologies, a digital analytics company that provides tools and services for publishers and e-commerce.

The post Why Scroll Depth Is A Key Metric for Individual Pages and Article Formats appeared first on MediaShift.

What do people do before they go see a movie?

The movie industry tries to answer this question through proxies employed by marketers: surveys, data on past successes, search data, and more recently social media listening or interaction tools.

Given Parse.ly’s dataset of billions of internet visitors per month to the largest media properties in the world, we thought we’d try to visualize actual reader attention, as measured by page views, for movies. We removed the need for online audiences to take an action in order to measure their behavior and instead focused on information they’re taking in.

What happens when you remove the need for proxies and focus on actual attention?

To start, we examined the amount of attention a movie receives in the media and the correlation to box office success. In the scatterplot below, each dot represents a single film. Dots located further to the right received more internet attention in the three days prior to their release, and those located towards the top received more total U.S. box office revenue.

The high correlation between page views and box office revenue is likely simple: people tend to read articles about a movie before buying a ticket. So, the more readers a movie’s articles receive, the more money made. It’s interesting to note the exception, PG movies (which are represented by the hollow blue dots in the scatterplot were less correlated), also makes perfect sense: kids are less likely to read an article about a movie before attending it.

What else can we we see by analyzing reader interest and attention in movies? One thing that became clear when digging through the data: geography affects audience attention for movies and entertainment online.

Captain America vs. Deepwater Horizon in the USA

Movies, at least as measured by their box office earnings, still require an understanding of localized viewing habits. For movies released in 2016 through August 2017, our team analyzed how many total views each movie’s articles received in each of the U.S.’s media market areas. For each movie, we found every article from our database where the movie was mentioned in the text or headline. Then, using IP address, we matched each visit to these articles with the extracted the geographic location of the visitor.

Here’s two examples of the results. (You can explore all movies in the visualization on our website.)

We can see that the regions around the Gulf of Mexico, which were most heavily affected by the real-life Deepwater Horizon disaster, paid the most attention to the film, which makes sense and is a good sanity check for our data. The film also received high levels of attention in Western North Dakota and Eastern Montana. The two deep-green media markets in this area are at the epicenter of the shale oil boom, and are presumably home-away-from-home to many oil workers.

Compare that map to the people reading about Captain America: Civil War in the US. Captain America: Civil War grossed the third-highest total box office revenue in 2016, which presumably means it had very broad appeal. With the map of audience attention for this movie, we see a broad spread across the United States, though with slightly higher concentration in the Midwest.

What movies were you most likely to read about?

Using data science we can quickly identify patterns that we wouldn’t be able to see just by looking at the individual movie patterns. We used a technique called Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to find these hidden geographic trends in how online readers pay attention to movies in the United States.

We uncovered five distinct groups. Each group has three distinct components:

1. Patterns based on geography, or visually, where the most views for the group took place. The maps below show the geographic clusters. We compared these to census data for area density, race and other factors to help describe each group.
2. Most read about films in the cluster: this simply shows what percentage of page views each audience gives to each movie. Because this ranking is based on absolute volume of page views, large-budget, popular films show up in this list.
3. Each audience’s most characteristic films compares that audience’s most popular list above to the average across all audiences. Because this ranking is relative (based on comparing interest to the average), both small and large budget movies both have a chance of appearing here, so this list highlights what makes each cluster unique.

Using this information, we’ve described each group below. Read on to see the groups for yourself, and see if we matched the movies you watched to the area where you live.

Group 1: Tentpole movies and comic book heroes: Middle America loves you

The largest grouping (or cluster) of views included 38 percent of all the page views analyzed. For each cluster, certain movies that this segment was uniquely interested in were characterized by action films that appeal to different age groups, especially comic-book action films. This audience has a large presence in most media markets, but is especially prevalent in rural areas.

We described this grouping as “Mainstream,” based on the size and the spread of the interest across the country. The films most characteristic of this cluster are extremely expensive to produce: the average production budget for this group’s ten most characteristic films was $150.3 million, indicating that movies with widespread appeal have their price.

Group 2: Urbanites like their indie flicks

The second grouping the algorithm showed us generates 22 percent of all movie focused page views. In an almost inverse pattern of the previous group, the reader interest comes mostly from urban, coastal regions. The movies, like The Zookeeper’s Wife and The Big Sick, focus more on adult themes and less on special effects.

The average production budget for this group’s ten most characteristic films was $22.9 million, or 85 percent less than the budget of the films most characteristic of the mainstream group.

Group 3: Southern Corridor of the US, the most profitable and very, very interested

In the third grouping, we discovered interest in movies with largely black casts, including When the Bough Breaks and Girls Trip. We also observed that the geographic trends very closely resembles that of the African-American population according to the U.S. census.

Using the relative interest levels as an indicator, it appears these films aren’t generally popular across the U.S., but in this group, they’re very popular. Additionally, when we looked at the budget vs. the box office gross for these movies, the movies that this group was interested in were especially profitable, often beating industry predictions.

Group 4: Southwest interest in Hispanic casts, but very little inventory

Somewhat similar to the previous group, this pattern of readership closely resembles a distinct ethnic group, specifically the Hispanic population (we compared it to census data compiled by Pew Research). While 7 percent of total page views visited about movies went to these films, it appears that this market is underserved—very few Hollywood films feature predominantly hispanic casts.

The movies that did do well include Lowriders and How to be a Latin Lover, along with Phoenix Forgotten, which centers around events in Phoenix, Arizona.

Group 5: Brrr, it’s cold in here

The final audience, which accounts for 24 percent of page views, is the most difficult to interpret. It is more prevalent in the northern half of the US, and many of its most characteristic films were winter releases, so we tentatively call this the Winter audience. The movies unique to this cluster included A Dog’s Purpose and Fist Fight.

Now that we’ve taken a shot at defining these groups, take yours! Explore the data on the movies and grouping on Parse.ly.

Clare Carr is the VP of marketing at Parse.ly.

The post What Movie Will You See This Weekend? That Depends On Where You Live appeared first on MediaShift.

For those of you, like myself, who woke up November 9, 2016, and wondered how the country landed in what seemed to be an alternative universe, these websites provide a rich trove of clues.

My daily visits have led me to wonder about the size of their audiences as well as whether those audiences were getting bigger or smaller. And so, working with data from SimilarWeb, I began to track the number of monthly visits for the top 20 conservative sites, including juggernauts like FoxNews.com, Breitbart and Infowars; publications like The National Review and The Washington Times; and smaller publishers like Spero News and NewsBusters. (See my ranking for the top 20 conservative websites in December.)

Based on this research into site traffic and my own regular visits, I have nine observations to make about audience traffic to right-wing websites over the past several months.

1. Right makes might: FoxNews.com is even bigger than you think

Traffic to FoxNews.com far exceeds every other conservative website. Let’s just call it what it is — the 8,000-pound gorilla of right-wing websites. In December, FoxNews.com recorded more than 313 million site visits. That’s almost four times the number of visits to Breitbart, the second most popular right-wing website. Furthermore, FoxNews.com had more visits in December than the next 19 sites on the list combined. And there’s more bad news on the horizon for the competitors of FoxNews.com. Politico reported last month that FoxNews.com is “a sleeping giant that is about to wake up” by increasing staff and refining its pro-Trump voice.

2. But Breitbart is still a formidable digital power even without you-know-who

With monthly visits in excess of 80 million, Breitbart recorded more audience visits in December than mainstream media sites like Politico (69 million), Time.com (68 million), Newsweek (51 million) and Slate (43 million). And its December audience was more than double the size of the next closest conservative website, The Daily Caller.

3. No one’s rushing to RushLimbaugh.com in huge numbers

Rush Limbaugh’s website, where his staff posts transcripts of his shows, consistently ranks in the bottom of the top 20 right-wing websites as monitored by TheRighting. He’s a radio powerhouse but he’s a mere mortal on the web. What’s surprising about his relatively low digital numbers — just under four million visits in December — is that his site is well organized by the day’s topics and easy to navigate. You’d think that more audiences would abandon his radio show and just read him online.

4. Celebrity conservative websites: All admirals. Not enough sailors?

Pat Buchanan. Ann Coulter. Sean Hannity. Bernard Goldberg. Todd Starnes. They’ve got their own name-branded websites that lean heavily to the right. Yet none of them except for Limbaugh have cracked the top 20 ranked websites in the three months that TheRighting has monitored them. Most don’t post on a daily basis and that’s keeping traffic relatively low. More writers for those sites might solve that issue.

5. Stop the presses! Right-wing newspaper sites draw hefty digital audiences

Two stand out: The Washington Examiner and The Washington Times. Both were top-ten conservative websites in December based on audience visits. The Washington Examiner in particular looks like an up-and-coming brand. In November, when 85% of the top 20 conservative websites posted declines in visits from a year ago when Trump was elected, The Washington Examiner recorded a 16% spike in audience visits.

6. An old print dog has learned some digital tricks

Can a print magazine founded during the height of the Eisenhower administration make it in a digital world? Apparently so. The National Review, founded in the 1950s by conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., attracts more than ten million visits a month to its site. It’s close to being a top ten conservative website. Credit the magazine…uh website…with new content posted every day that’s provocative and thoughtful.

7. And the site where right-wing audiences spend an incredible amount of time is…

PJ Media. The average visit duration to PJ Media in December was a whopping 32 minutes, according to SimilarWeb. FoxNews.com was a distant second with the average visit clocking in at a very respectable 6:17 minutes. (If you’re wondering, the average visit duration to CNN.com in December was 4:01). We’re not quite sure about the secret sauce that keeps PJ Media so sticky but the site uses video whenever possible, updates its home page frequently, and adds widgets to encourage users to more time on the site.

8. Over there: Top conservative website with the largest percentage of visits outside the U.S.

Infowars. Twenty-two percent of its audience visits came from outside the U.S. Its ultra-right-wing slant seems to attract visitors from around the world but especially Canada, the U.K., Australia and the Netherlands, setting it apart from the other top conservative media sites.

9. Born in the USA: Top conservative websites with the largest percentage of U.S. visits

RushLimbaugh.com and the One America News Network are talking to almost entirely domestic readers online. Ninety-five percent of traffic for both sites comes from the U.S.

Howard Polskin is the president, founder and chief curator of TheRighting, which launched in September 2017. He spent the first half of his career as a journalist. Polskin has also worked in public relations and corporate communications for a variety of companies including CNN.

The post Who Gets The Most Traffic Among Conservative Websites? appeared first on MediaShift.

It’s not just brands and publishers that are competing for our ever-diminishing attention spans on social media. Charities and non-profits are also vying for the same audience eyes, despite their different way of working.

At NewsWhip, we decided to look at what these charities and non-profits, including some of the big United Nations programs, are doing to maintain their social presence and win on social.

To do this, we looked at various aspects of social performance, including earned media, owned media and social content, across several of the world’s largest and most ubiquitous social-good organizations.

Engagement on articles about the groups

For our purposes here, we define earned media as articles written about the non-profit. In terms of content written about these groups, the most covered in the press were TED, Unesco, and Unicef.

TED, the non-profit whose mission is to spread ideas through series of short talks, had the most engagements on articles written about it in the three-month period from September 1 to November 3, 2017, with more than five million engagements.

Unesco and Unicef, two UN programs devoted to cultural preservation and helping children respectively, were the next two group to receive the most engagement on earned media, and the only organizations other than TED to garner over one million engagements on such content.

Stories tended to be about serious issues, with themes including from the crisis in Yemen, the potential economic problems caused by Brexit and the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is perhaps to be expected for content written about charities, who after all exist to work on these kinds of serious, hard-to-solve issues.

The most-engaged article about a charitable group is also perhaps the most controversial. The Open Society Foundations had the highest average engagement score due to one false but hugely viral article about its founder, George Soros. The story was rated by PolitiFact as untrue, but it garnered more than 200,000 engagements put it firmly in the top five for total engagements.

More generally, the publishers that garnered the most engagements writing about non-profits and charities were the Independent, The Hill and CNN. The Independent drove the most engagements on its non-profit-related content with nearly 300,000 for the period. The Independent also had the most engaged story after the untrue OSF article with its coverage of the crisis in Yemen, which cited Save The Children research.

Engagement on their own content

It is a slightly different picture when it comes to engagement on charities’ own content. The World Economic Forum received the most engagements with 1.6 million engagements, and TED was close behind with 1.4 million, almost exclusively on links to videos of its talks.

Content from these two websites dominated to such an extent that they were the only two domains that featured in the top ten articles, with TED and its specific TED Ideas site appearing seven times, and the World Economic forum appearing three times.

There was a lot of thematic unity with what content was successful, with big, sweeping ideas and innovations dominating engagements across the board. TED speaks for itself in this regard, but the World Economic Forum posts that were most highly engaged with could easily be the subjects of TED talks themselves.

Beyond these big two, the Council of Foreign Relations was the next biggest in terms of engagement on its own content and was the only other organization to break six figures for the period by this metric, garnering 100,235 engagements over three months.

Engagement on organization Facebook Pages

For Facebook Pages, we see two dynamics at play. TED, again unsurprisingly, had the highest number of followers, with 10 million, and as a result drove the highest number of average engagements, at 5,787 per post with their well-defined brand of informational video.

TED did not however have the highest number of total engagements, as that honor belonged to the World Economic Forum. This was driven mostly by the sheer amount of content they posted, with 4,521 posts over the three months — or 50 per day.

This was over six times higher than TED, and helped them to their total of 11.7 million engagements for the period, compared to TED’s 3.9 million.

Both TED and the World Economic Forum had immense success with video, with it comprising roughly 10 percent of each of their Facebook posts, but being responsible for 65 percent and 85 percent of their respective engagements on the platform.

Conclusion

There are multiple ways to get attention on social as a charity or non-profit organization. Here are just a few of them:

• Be an authority. If you or the studies you do can be a cited authority in earned media, this will help make people aware of the work you do as a charity.
• Define your voice and stick to it. TED has a very defined voice for its videos, which keeps people coming back to its content.
• Post frequently. The World Economic Forum posted fifty times a day on Facebook, which resulted in over 11 million engagements. If you have the content to post frequently, do so.
• Use video to your advantage. Video vastly over-performed for the two biggest non-profit pages we looked at on Facebook. If you can take advantage of this trend with well-produced, informative video, it’s worthwhile.

Benedict Nicholson is a writer at NewsWhip.

The post How Charities And Non-Profits Succeed On Social Media appeared first on MediaShift.

Click the image to read our entire series.

Investigative non-profit journalism is flourishing this year, likely because it is top of mind for so many people. Media credibility is in the spotlight, and those of us who dig deep into uncomfortable places and ask for our reader’s trust by being unbiased and fact-driven feel it shining especially brightly.

New York-based ProPublica, one of the country’s most high-profile non-profit newsrooms, opened a regional bureau in Chicago with a team of 12 reporters, editors and technologists. In Vermont, the non-profit VTDigger has become the country’s largest investigative reporting non-profit focused on local or state news.

And at inewsource in San Diego, we’re projected to reach $1.1 million in revenue this fiscal year — our most successful year yet.

inewsource’s small but versatile team of reporters covers a variety of topics but focuses on four: education, health, the environment and local government. Through our partnerships with the local PBS and NPR affiliate station, KPBS, and San Diego’s leading commercial news station, CBS8, our work reaches more than a million people a week through web, radio and TV. Our investigations have had more impact this year than ever before.

Here are a few examples of what that impact looks like:

• Our series on a long-ignored transparency law prompted the city of San Diego to enact a new law mandating disclosure of business interests behind billions of dollars in city purchases and contracts.
• Our data analysis on diabetes-related amputations in San Diego County and California uncovered a “shocking” increase that has mystified diabetes experts.
• An investigation into a local non-profit Christian college found administrators couldn’t account for more than $20 million in expenses. The college’s CFO was replaced shortly after publication.
• Our dogged pursuit of problems at a local school district, which serves one of the county’s poorest areas, forced the resignation of an interim superintendent and uncovered millions of dollars that were misspent or unaccounted for. It also prompted the state to begin what it calls an “extraordinary audit.”
• Our analysis of test score data posted by the California Department of Education found huge errors in the data. The state removed the faulty data and initiated a system to notify the public when bad data has been replaced.

Reporter Brandon Quester of inewsource on a reporting assignment. Used with permission.

Collaboration is the future

During a year of successful, high-profile collaborations across journalism, we’ve used partnerships with other local and national non-profits to have an even bigger impact. For example:

• We worked with KPBS reporters to investigate how one local refugee resettlement agency violated housing practices. The story prompted the agency’s executive director to step down and launched a federal inquiry.
• We collaborated again with KPBS in the first-ever mile-by-mile look at the U.S./Mexico border wall, as well as its effect on migration patterns and border patrol staffing levels over time.
• We partnered with the Investigative Reporting Workshop to highlight how San Diego schools are dealing with educating refugees.
• And we worked in tandem with the New York education journalism non-profit The Hechinger Report for a first-of-its-kind analysis of how race plays into community college completion rates.

What comes next?

In looking ahead to 2018, local investigative reporting non-profits are likely to have an even more important role in the media landscape, through more partnerships, increasing readership and an ever-more urgent need for trustworthy journalism. We will continue to produce stories that have immediate impact. As a non-profit investigative newsroom, we can only do this work with the support and generosity of people who care about credible, fact-driven journalism.

Through the end of the year News Match, the largest-ever grassroots campaign for non-profit news, is helping us and newsrooms like ours in communities across the country by matching donations by individuals to non-profit newsrooms. That’s how we will raise the funds necessary to pay for what’s to come in 2018, more local investigative reporting – journalism’s gold standard.

Brad Racino is senior reporter and assistant director at inewsource, an investigative journalism non-profit in San Diego, California.

The post The Growing Impact of Local Non-Profit Investigative Journalism in 2017 appeared first on MediaShift.

How does a documentary series inspire real social change?

A case study by the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center’s Media Impact Project illustrates how a 2016 series first broadcast before the 2016 election was used to reinvigorate progressive groups in the election’s aftermath. For media makers intent on social impact, it’s a story with important lessons for how to plan engagement that makes a difference.

America Divided is an Epix documentary series that aired in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and is now streaming on Amazon and Hulu. Its producers conducted an innovative engagement campaign to spur action against social injustice, and invited MIP to determine if their documentary series inspired real social change.

What we found was that documentarians can use innovative engagement campaigns to rally the public to action long after a program’s TV broadcast (if they were lucky enough to be broadcast!).​

America Divided producers took 10 steps to engage citizens following the series’ broadcast. Somewere tried-and-true, such as using celebrity prestige to attract attention, but others were more innovative, such as editing several shorter, single-issue versions of the series that could be screened before niche groups. This varied approach helped America Divided to meet its producers’ goals for impact by building coalitions around the project as well as re-energizing a demoralized liberal base post-election.

The MIP impact evaluation revealed that a key benefit was this re-invigoration of groups around the root causes of social injustice: the screenings and panel discussions gave activists a reason to assemble, to air their views and, more importantly, to talk about paths to solutions. Specific actions that grew from these assemblages include canvassing, starting social media pages, creating petitions, and signing up for planned marches and rallies, as well as organizing additional meetings and screenings.

What can media makers take away from this case study? We identified 15 key insights that producers of all kinds can use to create engagement around their own work.

15 Tips for Media Makers to Keep Social Issues in the Public Eye

1. Think of broadcast as just the first step in your engagement campaign.
2. Forge partnerships with groups who can screen and promote your work.
3. Seek connections between your issue and any arts, civic, philanthropy or cultural groups and their own activist work.
4. Focus screening campaigns around one rallying issue.
5. Partner with regional PR firms that know the local players and issues and can unite disparate groups.
6. Be open to re-purposing edits that allow for issue or region specific coalitions.
7. Exploit celebrity power to cross-promote online, draw live audiences and create a relevant “face” for the issue.
8. Use screenings as forums for people to assemble, discuss and create community.
9. Engage audiences in panel discussions following screenings to promote deeper dialogue and create plans for social action.
10. Support learning with fact-based resources for deeper study.
11. Keep the momentum going by continuing to supply content to your partner groups.
12. Reach out to different-minded audiences to promote civil discourse.
13. Make the information in your documentary searchable online
14. Make certain screening partners can easily access your materials.
15. Keep your website current so that it becomes a source for news on your issues, and maintain ongoing dialogue with your digital audience.

Download the full report

Laurie Trotta Valenti is a writer and media educator currently managing the Media Impact Project at USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center.

The post How Media Makers Can Plan Engagement That Inspires Real Change appeared first on MediaShift.