🔶 #83: Show how audience input has influenced your coverage
Hello and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter!
And a first welcome to new subscribers from Fathm, The Lancaster Tab, Felixe Nova, and to all of you brave souls working independently.
Last week we talked about value propositions, and I enjoyed the reactions:
- Giulia launched herself into drafting a value proposition for FACTA Lab: Environment Uncovered, a training programme we've been developing together.
- Dima added an interesting dimension, highlighting how an organisation's value proposition needs to be "directly linked to its user needs model: if the latter is not understandable from the former, the former must be reworked."
- And my coachees lovingly hated me for forcing them to iterate on their value proposition again and again, until we arrived at unearthing the real pain points experienced by their audience – and what their products/services can do to address those needs.
I've also been working on the value proposition of this newsletter: "The News Alchemists newsletter helps time-poor media innovators who want to...", but then I thought:
Wait. I write a newsletter about people-centricity. Shouldn't I include my readers' input in my value proposition?
So I'm asking you to click here and fill in the blank:
Onto today's links.
It's Election Day in the U.S. (good luck y'all!) so I'm making an exception to my personal rule of not making this newsletter too US-centred – as most of our industry is – by sharing seven stories about media organisations in the US we can learn something from.
See you next week 👋
P.S. The prompt above was inspired by this post by Amanda Shendruk.
P.P.S. Very, very sad to read about the closure of Rest of World, just three weeks after I described it as one of the most beautiful websites in news. 😢
#1 | Lessons from the crash of the Houston Landing
"The Landing failed because it didn’t have ‘product-market fit’. That's business speak; in plain English it means that the Landing failed because its newsroom wasn't producing a service or product that people actually needed."
🧞Cecilia Dobbs on why not even $20 million in seed funding is enough if you don't have a clear value proposition – and the questions everyone in your team should be able to answer to prove that you have one.
#2 | Show how audience input has influenced your coverage
"If you ask your audience for input or feedback, you can bet they’re wondering what you’re doing with that information."
In this piece, 🧞Joy Mayer of Trusting News shares how 🧩 Tangle News dealt with that exact scenario – and what we should learn from how they handled it.
#3 | The viral Boston Globe story brought in thousands of $1 subscribers. It has six months to make them want to pay full price
Now, that's an interesting challenge. Thousands of readers want to read a single paywalled story, and they accept to create a subscription in order to do so because the introductory price is ridiculously cheap. How do you convince them to stay and pay the big bucks once the introductory offer expires?
It reads like one of those business school case studies, but it's not. 😅
#4 | The Verge switches up its audience team to prepare for Google Zero
...moving away "from generalist audience development roles in favor of specialists focused on areas like newsletters, platform engagement and audience analytics", each with their own growth targets related to a specific step of the subscription funnel.
#5 | How Radio Ambulante has made community building routine
After sharing its value proposition section last week, I found myself browsing that beautiful evergreen resource that is the Membership Guide of the Membership Puzzle Project. Not only is the design excellent – giving you constant access to the tables of content – it also includes over 40 practical case studies. This one written by 🧞Ariel Zirulnick about 🧩 Radio Ambulante is one of them.
"One of the main reasons people become a member of a news organization is to be a part of something bigger than themselves. If your members don’t feel each other’s presence, you’re not offering them one of the most common motivations for membership: community. But a community can only flourish when it is consistently there for its members. By cultivating community in a few targeted ways, Radio Ambulante has been able to routinize that work and consistently deliver."
#6 | Defining engagement at LAist
It's not the first time we've tried to define 'engagement' in this newsletter, which only proves it's a concept we shouldn't take for granted. I like this take by 🧞Ashley Alvarado:
"When I say 'engagement' here's what I'm thinking about: closing the gap between communities and the journalists aiming to serve them; serving those who may not already consume your journalism; story selection, framing, language, and distribution; and shaping stories with community members."
#7 | What if local news were something you could walk into?
A pitch for helping communities build the local information practices they need inside public libraries. By 🧞Terry Parris Jr., founder of the Library Newsroom Project.
(Not a story about a single US organisation but still from the US, so I hope you'll give me a pass. 😉)
And the most clicked link from the previous edition is... 🥁
The guide to discovering your value proposition from the Membership Guide:
Written by Elizabeth Hansen and Ariel Zirulnick
🌱 Do you need help identifying your value proposition? Let's talk.
⚙️ Looking for help with your newsletter strategy? Let's work together.
🤗 Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone you think might like it too.
Member discussion