Newsrooms are finding new ways to build community, online and off

At the Institute for Nonprofit News’ first full-day topical conference at CUNY’s Craig Newmark School of Journalism last week, INN members came together for a shared exploration of the challenges facing newsrooms in an era of dramatic changes in audience behavior and social media platforms’ relationship with news.

As participants wrestled with the many ways to think about adapting to the environment, discovery was top of mind. A common theme across the day, from reporters to publishers to funders, was the role of tapping into people’s real-world relationships to drive discovery in the future.

Let’s give ’em something to talk about

For most people, news is consumed in the context of their real-world lives: it gives people something to talk about with others. In the day’s kickoff, Sam Cholke, INN’s manager for distribution and audience growth, highlighted the importance of this aspect of news consumption for newsrooms thinking about sustainability, referencing recent research into audience habits. “The thing that had the strongest connection to someone’s propensity to develop a habit and their propensity to give,” he said, “is sociability — that it gives people things to talk about.”

Social media has been an important source of web traffic and digital audiences for newsrooms, but for many people the benefit of consuming news on social platforms was consuming it as part of a community. As we’ve learned more about news avoidance, Benjamin Toff, a professor at University of Minnesota and author of Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism, pointed out that many news avoiders aren’t part of communities where other people are consuming a lot of news.

“When there isn’t a community around you to help you make sense of the news together, when you don’t have people you can talk to, a social currency to keeping up with the news — it feels disconnected,” he said. “It’s a chore that is going to make you feel bad and it isn’t really about you. Why would you spend your time with it?”

Some newsrooms are finding ways to help create those shared communities on digital platforms, as part of their news product. Mia Sato, platforms and communities reporter for The Verge, talked about how her newsroom has put conversation — including comments and smaller, bite-sized formats that curate the best content and conversations happening elsewhere — into its homepage design.

Sewell Chan, the outgoing editor of the Texas Tribune, reminded everyone that efforts like these are worth investing in: “We had digital audiences before social media!” he said. “We didn’t have social media prominence until 2008….It might be interesting for us to study as we think about a digital future that is post-platform.”

Building bridges between communities

Focusing on shared interests and values to serve niche communities is a tried and true media tactic. But many participants talked about the need to ensure that the shift towards building communities on private social networks and an increasingly siloed media environment doesn’t further isolate people from one another, or reinforce historic patterns of exclusion.

“Maybe we have a chance to do it better. Maybe we make better plans for the future,” said Alicia Bell, Borealis Philanthropy’s director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. “We can’t be exclusionary in how to be sustainable. We know we can’t only prioritize folks who have the most access and power.”

Ralph Thomassaint Joseph, the Caribbean communities correspondent for Documented, highlighted his organization’s role in supporting off-line conversations between members of New York’s immigrant communities — especially among parts of the community that might not already be in conversation. “Sometimes migrants have common issues, but communities deal with those challenges in different ways,” he said. “We translate and inform people in other communities — what other people are doing and what lessons they can learn from them.”

Time to get to work (and school and the community center)

Polarization was a common concern of many of the day’s attendees.

Surveys consistently find that people talk about the news at work, which is also one of the few places where they will talk openly with people with differing political views. “Workplaces are the most politically diverse environments we inhabit,” pointed out Diana Mutz, director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics at the University of Pennsylvania. Getting people to talk to their family and friends is “useless for exposing people to new ideas and views.” The place where most people encounter diverse perspectives is at work. “What happens at work is that people don’t scream and yell at each other. They are incredibly civil…it’s an ideal venue for people that you’re trying to reach.”

News organizations that primarily serve people at work have better weathered the downturn in social traffic, and there are broad opportunities for publishers pursuing impact. Documented showed how a smart engagement strategy and mutually reinforcing products can make it work, such as newsletters for immigration policy professionals and in-person events and WhatsApp groups for immigrants. Jo Ellen Kaiser, CEO at J: The Jewish News of Northern California, described her organization’s partnership with another organization that served Jewish parents of young children to create a newsletter. As a business side partnership, it generates revenue for the organization — but it also helps put their news directly into the community they’re trying to reach.

Collaboration, capital, and long-term thinking

Many speakers and attendees noted that the approaches needed today — being on multiple digital platforms, from Reddit and Nextdoor to Instagram and TikTok, being at events offline and in the community, providing direct service and support to readers — require more work and offer less scale. As Terry Parris Jr., public square editor for The New York Times’ Headway, asked: “How does an organization start to shift away from what it does to what may be more intensive and important work?”

Collaborations, many people noted, are critical to making sure that a focus on relationships doesn’t limit the reach of our work. In a final panel, Jeff Jarvis, author of The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet, Mutz, and Chan highlighted the importance of creating collaborations between organizations that serve specific communities or specialize in particular areas of expertise, echoing comments from other speakers throughout the day. “We’re an expert on a single subject, and so other outlets find value in that,” said Arik Ligeti, director of audience at The Narwhal.

UM’s Toff stressed a need to focus on doing this work now — particularly because young audiences are the most at risk when it comes to developing news habits in this changed environment. “When you talk to the most trusted news organizations, why people trust them, it’s the relationship that’s built over a long period of time,” he said. “If you don’t build that relationship, they aren’t going to be there in 10 years.”

And Borealis’s Bell underscored the need for funders and partners to have faith in the long-term impact of slow relationship-building work. “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast,” she said. Building core foundational relationships and trust is smooth: “Those relationships end up having echoes, and people vouch for you. Your organization doesn’t have to have a relationship with everyone. If the foundation is there. If it has integrity. If it has honor. People will vouch for you, and all of those things are easier.”