🔶 News Alchemists #30: "A newsroom that listens"

Hello and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter.

IT'S SURVEY TIME ! 📝🎁🥳

Forgive my seemingly unjustified excitement, but I've been wanting to learn more about your relationship with this newsletter for a while – primarily to learn what I can do better and how I can be more useful to you.

Now, if you regularly hang out in this place called "The Internet", you get surveys all the time... and I know it's annoying.

(In the next few paragraphs, I tell you a little about how I approach the creation of a good survey. Not interested? Jump straight to the survey, and scroll down to the seven links.)

Honestly, when I decide to respond to a survey it's for one of two reasons:

1. I cannot wait to let the sender know how displeased I am with their services, or how bad my experience with them was. (I'm looking at you, UK Visas & Immigration.)
2. I want to support the sender, because I know how useful it is to learn more about your audience, users, or customers.

But even when I start with the best intentions, sometimes I quit halfway through because the survey is too long, the questions are poorly designed, or they feel 100% extractive.

Over the course of my career, I have created dozens of surveys – mostly for participants of programmes I was organising – and I learned that creating a good survey requires to accept that no question gets the right to be included if you cannot explain clearly and convincingly what you will do with the responses.

A question might be included to give you the insights you need to improve something about your product or service; to score an easy marketing win (99% of readers are likely or very likely to recommend the newsletter to a friend!); or to surface needs that you didn't even know you could meet.

Most importantly, a good survey should also include questions that, other than providing insights to you, also give to the people taking the survey an opportunity to learn something about themselves, encouraging some level of self-reflection.

To show you what I mean, each question in the survey is accompanied by one line in which I explain why I am asking that question. (WTQ? = Why this question?)

There are ten questions – some are open and some are multiple-choice. No question is mandatory. You can browse the survey and decide that you only have time to answer one or two. That's fine, and it's still going to be very helpful.

(Obviously, if you answer most or all of the questions, I will have much more information to improve the newsletter and learn how else I can support your work.)

I'll leave the survey open for a couple of weeks, and after some time to analyse your feedback, I promise to share with you what I have learned – and what I plan to do about it.

Ready? Here you go:

I debated whether to include the seven links today or keep it just to the survey, but I already did not include the seven links in the last edition, and I didn't want to skip them twice in a row.

Maybe from the survey I will learn that I'm already overwhelming you with so many links that I should have skipped them again 😉 See? Fill in that survey and the experience of this newsletter will become so much better.

See you next week! 👋

1. A newsroom that listens 👉 LINK

🧩 Documented is an independent, non-profit newsroom dedicated to reporting with and for immigrant communities in New York City. It's also one of the organisations that best embodies the 'Listen to your audience' mantra. In this excellent piece on the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Documented's chief product and education officer 🧞Nicolás Ríos explains their approach to "shaping editorial, content, product, and audience development strategy in direct response to asking communities their needs and what matters to them."

"Reaching underserved communities is not about being on a particular platform. It’s not about a checklist. It’s about your community understanding that you understand them through a continuous process of listening and responding. [...] There are a multitude of ways to listen—SMS and messaging platforms, email, surveys, interviews, public meetings and town halls, focus groups and listening circles, social media, tip lines, comment boxes, and the list goes on."

That's journalism. Not just things you do in preparation for the 'actual' journalism in the shape of articles, videos, etc.

2. The Directory of Liquid Content 👉 LINK

How is journalistic content structured? How is it formatted? How is it delivered? Each of these questions can have dozens of different answers. The Directory of Liquid Content, published last week by 🧞Sannuta Raghu, is a scalable and modular taxonomy designed to map, describe, and standardise how digital journalism is structured, styled and surfaced in the 21st century. It's a beautiful and important product with endless potential applications. Check it out.

3. What are examples of news media that do a great job of serving poor people? 👉 LINK

This is a fundamental question, posed by 🧞Rasmus Kleis Nielsen at the US launch of the Digital News Report a few weeks ago. In this newsletter, we explored it in the 14th edition, referencing El Tímpano. That's one example, but it's hard to find many others – and that's a real problem. A few examples, and some interesting related thoughts, in the comments to Rasmus' post.

4. We talk endlessly about "audience listening" in journalism. Do we actually know what good listening looks like? 👉 LINK

Amazing post by 🧞Mili Semlani, exploring what good listening is actually about and how it's often the exact opposite of what journalists are trained to do.

5. Helping local readers with power-packed journalism and a modern audience+product focus 👉 LINK

In the article about the purpose of journalism that I shared last week (more on that next week), I argued that we must focus more on what people need and on what can improve their lives. As always, when I talk about journalism having to be more useful, and taking responsibility for how we make people feel, someone gets a little defensive and asks what about watchdog, investigative journalism that no individual user asks for but it's still important for society?

This project by the 🧩 Houston Chronicle is a great answer: they published an investigation into soaring home values that threaten to displace Houston’s blue-collar homeowners and renters. But rather than stopping there, they also built a searchable map "to show which neighbourhoods were hit hardest and help readers understand a complicated issue at street level"; a 'Guide to protesting your property taxes' to help people file a protest and prepare their case; and an AI-assisted tool "to help readers compose a script to protest their assessment, potentially saving them thousands of dollars."

6. How the Acquired podcast became a sensation 👉 LINK

A friend recently introduced me to what has quickly become my latest podcast obsession: 🧩 Acquired tells the stories and strategies of great companies, and it does so in deeply researched and long episodes, published often within weeks of each other and with no regular schedule. Each episode reaches over one million listeners. 😳

In this piece, Cal Newport notices that what's interesting "is less what they’ve accomplished than how they did it. The conventional wisdom surrounding new media ventures is that success requires frenetic busyness. [You need to tailor] to your audiences’ attention spans, master The Algorithm, exist on multiple platforms, and churn out content quickly. Acquired did none of this."

So what does explain Acquired's success? "The answer is almost disappointingly simple: it’s really good." I agree.

7. The Economist has made the content of its annual «The World Ahead» issue available in a public notebook from Google's NotebookLM. 👉 LINK

As a frequent NotebookLM user, I found this recent move by 🧩 The Economist very interesting (part of a recent PR push by Google, but still.) In his post, 🧞David Bauer explains why it's so interesting: "It clearly illustrates a trend that is already emerging: the article as a journalistic end product is facing competition. Instead of facts, reporting and analysis being processed into the same end product for all users, they form the basis for a user experience that is more tailored to the needs of the individual user. [...] You may like or dislike this development, but it's happening. The key question for media organisations is, of course: Are we, once again, leaving the interface with users to the big platforms?"