Audience development and growth jobs blossomed in 2016. The need for smarter, deeper stats has been more important than ever, as our newsrooms have come to realize that unique viewer counts just aren’t going to cut it anymore in providing the time of information we need to create content that reaches and informs the masses. But in this rabid thirst for metrics, we’ve replaced the idea of a conversation with the old magazine and print adage of telling our readers what to think — rather than making the news a conversation and learning from the people we provide service to.
Look no further than 2016 election coverage to see the damage speaking at people, instead of with them, can cause. The results of the election, the lack of trust, and ultimately, the response in November, while a shock to many journalists, was not that crazy of an outcome to community managers and others who have spent a large part of this year listening to cultures unlike our own and outside of the newsroom bubble. When we make listening the job of one or two people in a newsroom instead of remembering that this is the cornerstone of journalism, we lose track of what readers are actually taking from our work, as well as the narrative we are sharing with them.
As journalists, we are exposed to a wealth of knowledge every day, but should never forget that there are millions of people outside of our newsrooms who are more of an expert in whatever we’re writing about — any topic, on any given day — than we will ever be. User-generated content has been one of the most blatant ways of keeping the dialogue between reader and writer open, but it’s also become an evergreen circus of curated quotes. We cannot assume that low-hanging fruit Q&As are the best form of user-generated content anymore, and maybe they never were. We need to work on ways to track a wider range of sources from our audiences, and new ways to roll their experiences into our coverage. Twitter quizzes and Facebook polls don’t tell us anything about the story of a reader, and comments, though more authentic than other forms of UGC, are policed and feared to the point that they don’t provide a service to reader or journalist. Let’s really consider how we communicate.
Before engaging in any UGC, let’s ask what these answers will provide. What question are we asking and how does it fit into the larger strategy around coverage? Who will learn from this? What’s the story we’re telling? By rolling these reader experiences into our work, we open up our newsrooms to new ways of thinking, more authentic conversations with our audience which builds more trust and loyalty, and more accurate reporting for the longterm.
Annemarie Dooling is director of programming at Racked.
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
AX Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
David Weigel A test for online speech