🔶 News Alchemists #72: A free society requires journalists to work like scientists, not artists
Hello, and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter!
Back to the standard 7-links format this week – and they are especially good links, so no more words standing in the way of you enjoying them, except for one reminder:
Jazmín Acuña (co-founder of El Surti and author of Change-centric Journalism), Alessia Cerantola (strategic projects editor at OCCRP), Miriam Wells (impact and strategy editor at The Examination) and Grace Murray (senior impact producer at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism) will answer all your questions about measuring impact beyond traditional metrics, meaningful engagement, serving underrepresented audiences, and much more.
The conversation will be moderated by Eliz Mizon, communications manager at Arena for Journalism in Europe.
And without further ado... Enjoy the links, and forward them to a colleague if you want to spread the hope.
See you next week 👋
1. A free society requires journalists to work like scientists, not artists 👉 LINK
This is a fascinating piece by strategy and audience consultant 🧞Cecilia Dobbs, who asks if journalism is an art or a science. From the headline, you can guess her answer – but what's yours? Have a read and let me know.
2. FACTA’s blueprint for collaborative science journalism products 👉 LINK
🧩 FACTA is an independent Italian non-profit media that applies the scientific method to investigative and data journalism. (I wrote about them also in #62.) I worked with FACTA for six months, helping them to develop Paludi, a weekly newsletter that – as co-founder 🧞Giulia Bonelli explains in this article – is not just a newsletter, but "a product built around community needs and long-term engagement: [...] part investigative journalism, part environmental storytelling, part community-building experiment. Each issue connects local stories to broader environmental and political dynamics, while experimenting with a more participatory editorial process."
3. The line between subscription and membership is blurring... 👉 LINK
...but that doesn’t mean membership is just subscription with a different name. Good post with successful membership examples by 🧞Madeleine White of Audiencers: "Subscription is a transaction. Membership is a relationship. It’s the difference between “Pay to access content” and “Support something you care about, and be part of it”."
4. Why we’re asking readers to register 👉 LINK
Because "it’s a step toward a more direct, sustainable relationship with our audience", says 🧩 Rest of World. I've always been a fan of how the RoW team explains their product decisions to the their readers in a clear and honest way. This post is no exception: "Building a direct relationship with our readers is no longer a nice-to-have — it’s how we stay independent and keep doing the work. Reader registration is one of the most important steps we can take towards that."
5. It’s about connecting people to local groups and activities to empower them to be more active in their community 👉 LINK
Fantastic list of examples of how a community-led news organisation measures its success – by 🧞John Baron, editor and co-founder of 🧩 West Leeds Dispatch:
- One of our volunteer community reporters wrote an article about a new ADHD self-help group for late-diagnosed women; their numbers trebled to 28 at the meeting following our article.
- A men's mental health group reported three new members after our article in January. A community centre received three new volunteers following our article.
- An elderly reader sent us a cheque for £250 to support a local charity we'd featured on numerous occasions over the years.
Small numbers maybe. But I'd trade tens of thousands of page views for them any day.
6. What’s the opportunity for news publishers on Reddit? 👉 LINK
An interesting Ask Me Anything session with Reddit's senior growth partnerships lead on how to grow and engage with your community on Reddit.
7. A journalist’s guide to the federated web 👉 LINK
"Given unstable ownership on traditional social media platforms, algorithm changes, and threats of de-platforming, this guide examines how journalists and news organizations can use the federated web as an additional or alternative social network channel." A useful resource put together by students of Northwestern University's Knight Lab.
Shout-out to 🧞Kelley Lu, with whom I had a great chat about using Ghost for independent publishing and audience engagement.
And the most clicked link from the previous edition is... 🥁
Dmitry Shishkin
⇲ The LinkedIn Corner
A section of this email in which I highlight LinkedIn posts written by newsletter readers that, for different reasons, may not make it to the main section, but are still interesting to share. This week...
- "Don’t let anyone tell you this isn’t journalism." Shirish's message to a post by Catarina about Mensagem de Lisboa's success with live journalism.
- If you're not yet tired of Digital News Report analyses, this one by Ezra is worth a read. (Thanks, Fede!)
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