A desire for community – to “be a part of something bigger” than oneself – was one of six key motivations previously identified by the Membership Puzzle Project for readers to join membership programs.
At HuffPost, where we led our membership program from 2018 to 2020, we were initially surprised when members told us they were as interested in joining the HuffPost community as they were in supporting our mission. This came through in surveys and member feedback, and also played out when we A/B tested various messages and ads for membership. So we built our membership strategy based on cultivating community through events, polls, reader callouts, forums, newsletters, and our comments section. Like many other newsrooms, we described our members as a community.
But what exactly qualifies as a community of members? And how can newsrooms cultivate a healthy, successful membership community?
These questions seem straightforward, but they assume a common understanding of community, which hasn’t been well defined. In this report we studied four newsrooms from around the world – the Honolulu Civil Beat in Hawaii, Krautreporter in Germany, The News Minute (TNM) in South India, and Tortoise in the United Kingdom – who have cultivated strong communities among their members. Through interviews with both staff and members of these very different newsrooms, we found similarities and differences – and dug into what worked and didn’t – in order to construct a more nuanced understanding of what healthy membership communities can look like. In this report, we’ve identified takeaways and lessons that we hope will help other newsrooms interested in a community-building approach to membership to navigate their own journeys.
This report is not a step-by-step manual for building community. There isn’t a magic formula for success, no secret KPI to optimize for. Indeed, each of the four newsrooms we spoke to had its own conceptualization of what community is and looks like. Ultimately building an authentic community will be a unique journey for every newsroom based on its team, values and goals, founding members, business strategy, and so on.
However, by drawing from the experiences of four newsrooms that serve different audiences with different strategies, we hope to give other newsrooms greater insight into what to expect and consider if you are taking this path. If you’re a news editor, executive or technologist working to make journalism more sustainable, our goal is to help equip you with more information to steer your newsrooms toward building healthy, robust, engaged communities that support and enhance your journalism.
Methods
This study is based on interviews with staff and members from four newsrooms: the Honolulu Civil Beat in Hawaii, Krautreporter in Germany, The News Minute in South India, and Tortoise in the United Kingdom. We conducted three sets of interviews, all on Zoom, between May and June 2021, including:
Ten 30–60-minute unstructured interviews with editors who oversaw membership communities. From this group, we selected four newsrooms to study in greater depth for this report. We selected newsrooms in different geographies, with different value propositions, that had each tried a variety of community activities so that we could compare and contrast their results.
Four 60–75-minute semi-structured panel interviews, one with each selected newsroom. Each panel included up to three staff members who were selected by the editors from our initial conversations.
Six 30-minute semi-structured interviews with members of the Civil Beat, The News Minute, and Tortoise, who were nominated by the editors. (Note: We were unable to interview any Krautreporter members before our deadline.)
We recorded and transcribed each interview, coded the transcripts to identify themes, compared perspectives both between the different newsrooms and between staff and members, and then synthesized our conclusions. Throughout the project, we drew from our own experience leading membership strategy at HuffPost from 2018 to 2020, where Jennifer Kho served as managing editor and then senior director of strategic innovation, and Rohan Grover was a senior product manager.
Disclosure: The Membership Puzzle Project has supported Krautreporter in the past and currently supports The News Minute through its Membership in News Fund. MPP helped identify potential newsrooms and introduced us to several, including those two. However, we independently identified our own criteria and selected the newsrooms we ultimately included in this project. For further discussion of our selection process and interview questions, please see the Appendix.
The Concept of Community: What Does a Community Strategy Entail?
Katie Vanneck-Smith, co-founder and publisher of London-based Tortoise, remembers being at a member breakfast when co-founder and editor James Harding got emotional. One of the members said “Well, what I think we need to do is…,” she recounted. Harding told her: “They just said ‘we.’ Oh my god, this might actually work.”
When Ragamalika Karthikeyan, editor of special projects and experiments at The News Minute in Bangalore, India, reflects on the concept of community, she thinks about members coming together to help victims of the floods in the South Indian state of Kerala in 2018. Many of the news organization’s members wanted to help, so the publication – together with its readers and other volunteers – set up what was effectively a call center to help coordinate efforts. They answered questions and even collected clothes and other donations for victims – and hired a truck to bring them to recipients.
“We were sort of the point of contact between people on the ground and victims of the disaster, authorities who were able to rescue them or provide relief, and volunteers who wanted to give food or had a place for shelter,” she said. “And all of this was paid for by our readers.”
For Leon Fryszer, publisher at Krautreporter in Berlin, what sticks out is an angry email from a founding member, Ben Hadamowsky, to editor-in-chief Rico Grimm about the publication’s coverage of the government-mandated coronavirus lockdown. In a long and civil email thread, they discussed their difference of opinion about the newsroom’s approach – and in the end, Grimm decided to publish the whole conversation with Hadamowsky’s permission. “I think that’s been very powerful,” Fryszer said.
People who send angry emails don’t expect you to write back in a friendly way and take their concerns seriously, he said, and publishing this email chain showed Krautreporter is having these conversations with everybody and really engaging with different viewpoints. “We don’t try to mute people or say they are stupid or something; we try to talk to them on a sort of level playing field and be fair to them,” he added.
The idea of “community” – along with the need to grow closer to readers – is gaining importance in newsrooms around the world, especially those with membership and philanthropic revenue models that aim to grow revenue beyond advertising. But a definition of community in journalism remains elusive and inconsistent, and readers might define it differently from journalists. These examples of community, though, might provide some evidence for how this construct might be defined, even as they also hint at the term’s broad range.
Defining Community
Oxford Languages defines “community” as, among other things, “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common” or “a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.” According to a presentation from Coral by Vox Media, a group of members is not necessarily a community unless those members are tied to one another, even if they share some of the same interests or goals. In “The Art of Community,” cited in the Coral presentation, Charles H. Vogel defines a community as “a group of individuals who share a mutual concern for each other’s welfare.”
What elements contribute to that “feeling of fellowship” or “mutual concern for each other’s welfare”? We asked both newsrooms and members for their definitions, and only one – The News Minute – had one ready to go: “We envision a community as people who are going to come together when something happens,” Karthikeyan said, after telling us about its members’ response to the floods in Kerala. But everyone had something to contribute to a definition.
Based on themes that came up repeatedly in our interviews, we believe elements of a healthy community include the following:
People in a community share some common ground, whether it’s a collective belief in an ideal or a shared identity, experience, interest or goal. That also means there must necessarily be some limit to who is included in the community, which can be tricky to navigate for newsrooms that also want to be as inclusive as possible. For Civil Beat and The News Minute, this community is tied to a sense of place (Hawaii and South India) – and in TNM’s case, it’s also tied to an interest in social justice and change. For Tortoise, it’s a mindset: people who consider themselves to be global citizens, who are civically minded optimists – “part of the glass half full brigade,” as Vanneck-Smith said. If everyone were part of a community, it would become society as a whole instead of a community. As Fryszer put it: “It’s sad, but I think community has to do with some sort of exclusiveness in terms of access. If there’s no sense of where the boundaries of your community are, then it’s very unclear who you identify with and what the community actually is.” To be clear, exclusivity doesn’t necessarily mean “limited to registered members only.” Boundaries can be drawn around membership – as in the case of Tortoise, where events are open to members only – or can be set based on belief in a shared value, for example, or a shared interest, attitude or an identity.
A community is made up of a set of individual relationships with what sociologists call “weak” and “strong” ties (essentially friendships and acquaintances). Ben Nishimoto, vice president of operations and philanthropy at Civil Beat, referenced the analogy of a social fabric with many different threads tying people together: “To build resilient communities … you have to have a lot of common threads that are strengthened and established over time, so that if a few of the threads fray, you’re still connected in some way.”
A healthy community involves trust and a willingness to be vulnerable or ask for help. Civil Beat, Krautreporter, The News Minute and Tortoise all mentioned trust as a key factor. And Cora Yamamoto, a Civil Beat member who regularly attends the newsroom’s events, said one particular event struck her with a strong sense of community: a discussion about mental health in which one of the speakers, a staffer, was “very open and vulnerable,” setting the stage for other diverse speakers with lived experiences to share openly as well.
A healthy community provides space for disagreement and to engage in civil discourse about different points of view. Every person we interviewed cited this as an important factor for a healthy community.
A community is something that has evolved beyond an audience. The relationship involves much more of an emotional connection than a functional or transactional one, Vanneck-Smith suggested, and is between people – and not between a brand and its readers. “People want relationships with people,” she said. In other words, just because someone contributes money or views your site regularly doesn’t mean they will necessarily feel they are part of your community. The members we interviewed said they felt the journalists were part of the community with them, so they would feel comfortable emailing or calling them.
A healthy community involves interactions beyond a single person or organization. This idea isn’t new to journalism: We spoke with a behavioral scientist, Jon Levy, who first told us about this concept. Each of the newsrooms we interviewed had examples of community persisting beyond them, including members independently interacting with each other and running initiatives without the newsroom. At both Civil Beat and Tortoise, members frequently stayed after in-person events (before the pandemic) to continue to talk in the newsroom – and sometimes, in the case of Tortoise, went to the pub together afterward. The majority of the text chat that happens during Tortoise’s virtual events is also private among their members, who frequently say they have made friends as a result, Vanneck-Smith said.
When Civil Beat launched a new podcast on Hawaiian ancestry, the team also paired each episode with an event for listeners. The group of listeners who attended the events spun off and continued to meet without Civil Beat for some time after the podcast ended, said Mariko Chang, Civil Beat’s major gifts manager. At Krautreporter, members have started and run satellite groups on new social media platforms, such as Discord, with permission – but without leadership from – the newsroom, Fryszer told us.
The concept of community, in other words, is broad enough to include many different activities across a wide range of functions in a newsroom. Among other things, it can include audience activities, marketing, news gathering and sourcing, customer support, membership and events. It can be part of membership, in that growing direct financial support from an audience usually requires some engagement with that audience, but membership – and revenue from readers – is not required to build community.
The newsroom staffers we interviewed said that revenue seems to be correlated with their community-building activities, but each of those activities didn’t necessarily result in direct revenue. At Tortoise, for instance, 60% of members have attended an event. At Civil Beat, Nishimoto said, high engagement with community activities is correlated with the likelihood to donate.
The usual funnel is that casual readers, who might first interact with Civil Beat by viewing its site or attending an event, will take a step toward more engagement by subscribing to a newsletter. If they grow more engaged and loyal as a result, they will eventually get a call to action asking them to donate. But while 30% of Civil Beat event attendees donate, events and membership manager Alana Eagle said, there are some readers she has seen at every event who have never contributed financially – so those people could be considered part of their community even though they aren’t members. And others have donated but have not yet subscribed to a newsletter.
Similarly, Chang said she would consider someone who attends an event in person to be highly engaged with the Civil Beat community and pretty far down the engagement funnel. But about a third of event attendees actually subscribe to the Morning Beat newsletter after attending, Eagle said. “When we found out about these numbers, I was actually shocked because I thought they would be Morning Beat subscribers already. But it’s nice to know that a third of this audience is new.” And they have seen a very low unsubscribe rate for those who sign up for Morning Beat after attending an event, she said.
This matches what other industries have documented as well: the customer loyalty funnel that many newsrooms use – essentially moving audiences from casual to more engaged and loyal audiences and then to members – isn’t really as simple or straightforward as the funnel analogy suggests. As visualized in this customer value journey, people make the decision to join or contribute at different stages, which they zigzag through instead of falling through in one direction.
A Note About Language
One thing that came up a few times is whether “community” is even the right word to be using.
Do readers consider themselves to be part of a community? Vanneck-Smith doesn’t think they would use that word. “A reader or listener or member of your community would never use the word ‘community’,” she said. “I think they would say, ‘Oh, I love The New York Times or ‘I can’t get through the day without doing The New York Times crossword – I’m really passionate about that,’ but they wouldn’t say they were a member of the The New York Times community; they would say ‘I’m a New York Times reader.’
She urges newsrooms to put themselves in the shoes of their readers, listeners or viewers. Something news brands are bad at is “actually thinking about the language of consumers, rather than the language of journalism,” she said. (Tortoise calls its members “tortoises.”)
There’s some evidence Vanneck-Smith may be right: One member we interviewed – John McComas, a Civil Beat donor – objected to using the word “community” in this context: “Community isn’t how I’d describe this relationship at all; I don’t consider I’m part of a community.” Instead, he considers himself a contributor, an advocate and a fan of Civil Beat.
The answer will vary for different publications depending on the culture of the people who join and your value proposition, which might be based on a sense of place, a common interest, goal or mindset. But even different members of the same publication will have different reactions to the word “community.”
In contrast to McComas, Cora Yamamoto, also a Civil Beat member, said she absolutely feels she is part of a community. She feels free to contact the editorial staff, has had virtual conversations with two of the journalists in the comments and has attended events, where she has seen some of the same people a few times. But she doesn’t identify or describe herself as a member, subscriber or part of the Civil Beat community when she refers frequently to Civil Beat articles in conversations with others. Instead, she feels Civil Beat is part of her community.
That has also been part of the pitch. As Nishimoto said: “We want to show our readers, first and foremost, that we’re rooted in Hawaii, that we report on issues for them but we’re also members of the community ourselves.”
A Civil Beat Hawaii Storytellers event on mental health
Meanwhile, Tortoise member Ceil Tilney proactively cited “being part of a real community” as one of the most attractive parts of being a Tortoise member. She enthused about the robust, civil conversations at Tortoise’s virtual events and the robust, literate conversation that streams in the events’ text chats. At the beginning of the pandemic, in fact, when she joined, “I felt like Tortoise was my tribe more than anyone else I was associated with,” she said. She calls herself a member when she tells others she joined Tortoise. Fellow Tortoise member Andrew Girdwood, who also referred to himself as “part of the community,” says he most often identifies himself to others as a reader, “which is wrong – I spend more time online participating [in Tortoise’s events] than reading, though I do listen to the podcast.”
We don’t have answers about whether news organizations should be using the word “community” publicly or reframing it in a different way. But news organizations should be aware there may be a gap between how they view members and how members view themselves, and should ask about, assess and consider this difference in their approach.
Metrics: How Can News Communities Be Measured?
One conclusion from our research is that community does not necessarily equal revenue, or even membership in some cases. You can have a financially successful membership program without a strong community, and you can have a successful community without large revenue. That said, the newsrooms we interviewed all felt strongly that community-building is a worthwhile strategy that, for them, was essential to building sustainable membership and revenue.
With such a broad definition of community, is it measurable? Given the multiple nuanced characteristics of a healthy community described above, the newsrooms we interviewed did not have defined sets of metrics for success. Instead newsrooms and members alike responded with stories, not numbers: an editor individually engaging with a founding member's pandemic coverage concerns, reporters feeling overwhelmed by an outpouring of members' gratitude before signing off of a Zoom event, members creating Slack groups or heading to the pub across the street to continue the conversation after an event, and relationships between members – and between staff and members – blossoming into friendships.
A mix of measurements, instead of one overarching metric, will likely be needed for newsrooms hoping to track the health of their communities. Overall, we encourage newsrooms to measure their community as a collection of experiences and stories rather than simply tracking things like open rates and attendance. Such numbers can certainly be useful signals, but they don't accurately measure the qualitative "feeling of fellowship" that is core to the idea of community.
That feeling could potentially be observed and ranked in polls, surveys, interviews and focus groups; and quantified in admittedly harder-to-track metrics such as the number of stories originating from member ideas or the number of thank yous from members. The Membership Puzzle Project’s Membership Guide includes a useful process for setting appropriate metrics of success for your newsroom. Some specific and potential metrics that arose from our interviews include:
Size of the community
Number of members
Members who have attended a community event
Attendance at community events
Number of referrals (new members referred by existing members)
Number of members who have recommended membership to others or brought new members into the community
Depth of engagement
Raised hands at events
Participation – speaking at an event or contributing a comment or story idea – beyond attendance
Members co-publishing stories with reporters
Number of interactions among the community
Number of members who have given feedback, solicited or unsolicited
Number of members who have shared or recommended a community activity with others publicly
Email open rates
Online member-to-member conversations (on private chat, comments or discussion forums)
Contributions or donations
Renewals
Length of memberships
Number of meaningful (non-toxic) comments (on site, in emails or at events)
Number of story ideas contributed by members
Number of stories published that originate from members
Number of stories with input from members (which can include new angles, additional sources or perspectives, etc.)
Members taking their own initiative to organize discussions or events (number of initiatives or number of members)
Number of interactions with journalists and other staffers
Reputation metrics
Testimonials about the value of the community (solicited or unsolicited)
Number of thank yous
People saying they contributed or joined because of shared values or other community reasons
Volunteers (whenever a newsroom asks for something)
Introductions to sources, potential donors, partners, speakers, etc.
2. Engagement Tactics
What channels do newsrooms use to cultivate a community with their members? In this section we will describe the tactics employed by newsrooms to engage members by cultivating community. Together these tactics, which are summarized in the table below, suggest that a broad range of engagement channels can effectively cultivate community among members, but that the right strategy truly depends on each individual newsroom’s audience, team and goals.
* While The News Minute and Tortoise invite members to their existing editorial meetings, Civil Beat holds separate occasional “Conversation and Coffee” events where members can meet journalists in a casual setting.
Comments
The comments section is a common entrypoint for newsrooms to engage directly with their readers and for readers to engage with each other. However comments were a contentious topic among the newsrooms we interviewed.
The four newsrooms varied in their adoption of comments on their websites. Civil Beat allows comments on its articles and all users – including non-members – are allowed to comment. Commenting has been one of the most challenging community activities, said Ben Nishimoto, vice president of operations and philanthropy at Civil Beat. “It’s highly moderated – we want to make sure a few people don’t bully and dominate the discussion to prevent others from joining in – and we frequently ban people,” he said. “We’re heavy-handed with it. … There’s a high degree of moderation we feel is necessary.”
At Krautreporter, only members are able to comment on its articles, and Krautreporter plans to further invest in this feature by building member profiles in the future. In fact, when Krautreporter originally launched, its journalism was freely accessible to everyone and its community was restricted to members only – but publisher Leon Fryszer said that offering didn’t convert readers into members until they moved everything behind a paywall. The News Minute (TNM) and Tortoise do not have comments on their articles.
Tortoise publisher Katie Vanneck-Smith distinguished the decision to disallow comments from her aspiration to allow readers to express themselves. She said that comments were unsatisfactory because they “never felt quite real time or human, because you have to put in that moderation.” She contrasts this with Tortoise’s events, which are held on Zoom with the chat enabled for all users so they can bring their live voices to the discussion. She acknowledges that allowing live commenting without moderation can be risky, but that they set clear expectations in both the host’s introduction and the terms of service. Thus Tortoise has had minimal issues with moderation, and has never had to ban a member for violating the rules of civility. Vanneck-Smith reports that about 90% of the chat logs are private messages, indicating that the events facilitate significant member-to-member engagement.
A lack of formal moderation was a common theme shared by Krautreporter. Members can flag comments, which then triggers a notification in a Slack channel so that the Krautreporter team can discuss the comment and come to an agreement about what to do. However, Krautreporter’s commenting tool does not have a feature to hide individual comments, so objectionable comments must be deleted manually. This hasn’t been a challenge because moderation is so rarely required: Krautreporter has only had to delete a comment twice and ban a user once in recent memory. Fryszer comments that “it’s pretty bad product-wise, but if you don't have to, why build it?”
Fryszer attributes Krautreporter’s success to two factors. First, reporters are expected to be heavily involved in the comments in the days after an article is published, including commenting with a question to spark conversation. (Reporters are expected to produce fewer articles – about two per month – as a result). Second, frequent commenters set a friendly tone for other members to follow, although reporters have had to be more involved in the comments since the pandemic triggered new tensions and disagreements with their members. Even in those cases, reporters turn to civility and rely on their individual relationships with members to resolve any issues, such as the exchange between the editor-in-chief and a member mentioned earlier.
Editorial Collaboration
Collaborative reporting was a common tactic by newsrooms to include members in their reporting and also reconfigure relationships between reporters and members. Both The News Minute and Civil Beat invite members to meet with their newsrooms on a regular basis, while Tortoise holds daily editorial meetings with their members.
The News Minute opens its editorial meetings to a limited number of members once a month, and approximately10–12 different members usually attend. The members share feedback on the stories being discussed and can pitch their own ideas, too. Member Gurusaravanan described how much he appreciated seeing TNM’s team genuinely connecting with their members and incorporating new perspectives in their reporting. In one meeting he pitched an idea, which editor of special projects and experiments Ragamalika Karthikeyan supported in ultimately getting published as an opinion piece; Gurusaravanan identified this as an especially memorable moment in his membership experience. TNM has also published articles that were written collaboratively between reporters and members, especially when members bring their expertise on specific subjects. These articles are appended with an invitation for other readers to join the membership program to help produce journalism themselves, such as the following:
The idea for this article was discussed during an editorial meeting with TNM Members. If you’d like to discuss story ideas with our editorial team, and generally observe how an editorial meeting is held, become a Member today.
Civil Beat hosts occasional events called Conversation & Coffee, which are casual, unrecorded discussions with newsroom staff about their coverage. They were regularly held in-person before the pandemic, where about 40 core readers would attend a meeting in the morning at the Civil Beat’s office to share their concerns. Some Conversation & Coffee discussions focused on a specific beat, topic, or reporter, which Chang says means that “you see a lot of the people that come together, say around a criminal justice reporter, they know each other through various different networks out in the community. So it's kind of like a gathering of friends, oftentimes, and then they stay and then they chat. And we have a hard time getting them out of the newsroom.”
Tortoise hosts one-hour open editorial meetings every day, which between 100 and 2,000 members attend. The primary purpose is to discuss potential topics for member-only events called ThinkIns, which are described in the following section. The meetings were held in-person before the pandemic, and occasionally on the road across the UK, but have since moved to Zoom.
Krautreporter incorporates members into its reporting by drawing from its member database. When members sign up, they identify their profession and areas of expertise, and also sign up for beat-specific newsletters run by individual reporters. Reporters can reach out to members through these newsletters to gauge interest in stories in progress or to help connect with sources; breaking with the norm of holding stories secret until publication builds enormous trust between reporters and members while enhancing Krautreporter’s journalism. In one example, a lawyer answered a call to help file a case against the government and offered a discount.
These forms of editorial collaboration and transparency reconfigure relationships between members and newsrooms by casting members as experts and sources. These relationships build enormous trust between newsrooms, who practice more inclusive and community-oriented reporting, and members, who learn about and contribute to editorial processes. These practices strengthen a sense of community among individual reporters, editors, and members, while also enhancing the quality and relevance of journalism.
Events
Most of the newsrooms we interviewed hold members-only events for different reasons, all of which moved to Zoom during the pandemic. Cultivating interaction between members and the journalists is a priority for Civil Beat, Nishimoto says, whereas for Tortoise, it’s about meeting their members’ needs. As Vanneck-Smith puts it, “people pay for the things they value; always have, always will.”
Civil Beat organizes multiple types of events targeted at members with different levels of engagement. In addition to Coffee & Conversation meetings with the newsroom, the publication holds panel discussions with reporters called Civil Cafés about issues such as health care, education, or the legislative session; casual Hawaii Storytellers events featuring stories by five to seven community members; Civil Beat IDEAS discussions featuring guests who have authored an essay or opinion piece; and a book club that currently features only local authors. All events are open to the public, but many attendees become readers by subscribing to a daily newsletter.
Kameha’ililani Waiau presents at a Civil Beat Hawaii Storytellers event on incarceration
Tortoise hosts ThinkIns, which are live, unscripted conversations between members, editors, and invited guests — including occasional high-profile guests such as Tony Blair, Madeleine Albright, and Thomas Friedman. Although the guests bring expertise and unique perspectives, Tortoise eschews what it calls the “sage on the stage” model in favor of one in which everyone shares their own thoughts and experiences on equal footing. Vanneck-Smith says, “We have one rule at a ThinkIn, and that's: no questions. So they're not panel conversations … everybody in the room is equal. And before you speak, you have to introduce yourself. You have to say, ‘Oh, hi, I'm Katie, I’ve been a member since, this is my point of view, this is my perspective, this is my experience…’ So it's built on quite a different premise, because we talk about it being an organized system of listening.”
The events end up feeling like “part lecture, part dinner party and part Alcoholics Anonymous meeting,” Vanneck-Smith said. “At the heart of Tortoise, it's not what we do, really, that's different; it's how we do it. And so I think of Tortoise as almost reimagining the structural processes of journalism. … The idea is that, as a member of Tortoise, the news is what we all make it so the whole idea is that we listen. Before we report, we host our ThinkIns to go deeper into subjects that we're interested in investigating and reporting out.”
A Tortoise ThinkIn with the National Citizen Service, pre-pandemic
From 2018 until the onset of the pandemic, Tortoise hosted 334 ThinkIns in-person. Since moving to Zoom, Tortoise has held 510 ThinkIns between March 2020 and May 2021 — about two per weekday. Currently the schedule includes a main daily ThinkIn and lunchtime news topic discussions — in addition to the open editorial meetings where members help Tortoise’s editorial team plan the topics and guests.
Since the pandemic began, Tortoise has organized more casual events, too, including BakeIns and DrinkIns that feel more like a party and less like a traditional event. Similar to editorial meetings, these events reposition members as peers rather than mere audiences, facilitating new relationships and building trust between attendees and the newsroom.
Surveys
Newsrooms use surveys to collect feedback and questions on both community experiences and their reporting.
Krautreporter invests significantly in surveys to collect frequent feedback and input from members. It runs a continuous survey that asks readers two questions: “what questions do you have?” and “why do you have those questions?” These surveys keep member feedback front and center for the newsroom, helping ensure that editorial priorities are aligned with the community’s interests. The newsroom votes on members’ questions and chooses one to answer each month. In addition, reporters regularly use surveys to gauge members’ interest in potential topics before writing articles.
Surveys have significantly influenced the topics Krautreporter has covered over the years, Fryszer said, leading to far more lifestyle content, for example. “It’s made a big difference in terms of what the [angle] of the story will be or whether someone will write the story or not,” he said. “If you do a survey and you get 1,000 responses, that’s a big indicator that it’s something people are interested in.”
One reporter also acts as a survey editor, who Fryszer describes as a “firewall for survey ideas” and “a sparring partner to improve them,” with a goal of upholding quality and integrity in interacting with members. This position helps ensure that surveys follow a process similar to other editorial content, that they do not request excessive personal information, and that they avoid being “askholes”. In addition to strengthening the membership program, this investment in staff time and process sustains respect for members’ time and input.
Forums
Both The News Minute’s and Krautreporter’s membership programs feature forums for members to engage in discussions with each other.
TNM has experimented with multiple platforms to learn more about how to foster discussion among its members. First it launched a discussion board using the Discourse platform on its website for members only, and tried to spark discussion by hosting AMAs with executives such as the editor-in-chief and the CEO. TNM member Gurusaravanan described the discussion board as an “educational hub… to connect with like-minded people, to learn and get to know their perspectives”. He checks the board once or twice a week, and cites specific threads that he returns to to re-engage with the same people. When he decided to invite a few friends to join TNM’s membership program, it was because he wanted their views and perspectives to be represented on the board. However, the TNM team learned that adopting a new platform was simply not a realistic expectation for many members as participation has waned. Although the discussion board is still open, TNM is now testing other, more accessible platforms, including closed Facebook Groups. The first Facebook Group, which requires approval to join but is not exclusive to paying members, provides a space safe from trolls and abusers on TNM’s public Facebook page. This investment in the broader community of readers was important to TNM’s founding promise to engage directly with its audience. At the time of writing the reader-wide Facebook Group was just a few weeks old, but they already saw very high engagement compared to the Discourse discussion board, including from many members who had access to both.
While Krautreporter primarily invests in discussion through on-site comments, its members have created off-platform or private spaces to host smaller groups of members. These include closed Facebook Groups, which Fryszer recognizes as an exception to his view that “any community that happens on social media [is a] failure”. Some members, especially those who don’t use Facebook or Twitter, have created those spaces on Discord or Mastodon. These spaces are built by individual members who take initiative, and then act as liaisons with a member of the Krautreporter team. Sometimes these communities are built around specific topics: one climate-focused group of members self-organized and published an article about solutions to climate change, although the group ultimately dissipated. Fryszer highlights that an individual member-leader is crucial for setting up these community spaces to succeed.
Newsletters
All four newsrooms used newsletters to cultivate their communities beyond distributing content to their members, primarily for growth, retention and engagement. In particular, they use newsletters to convert casual readers to core readers and to recruit readers to attend events and join their membership programs, if relevant. They also create a regular cadence of communication to members.
In particular, The News MInute stands out for its “newsletter-first” membership strategy to appeal to two segments of members. TNM launched separate members-only newsletters for two groups of readers: one for Indians living in India and one for Indians in the diaspora (“NRIs” or non-resident Indians). Accordingly, each newsletter’s content is customized for its audience: the Indian newsletter is more “perspective-based”, according to Karthikeyan, to provide domestic readers with a unique editorial position, whereas NRIs are sent a relatively straightforward daily roundup of TNM’s articles to help them keep up with the most important headlines, from a South Indian perspective. The newsletters were the first benefits offered when TNM launched its membership program to both Indians and NRIs, signaling to members that they were investing in building relationships by catering to each group’s unique needs.
3. Evolving Strategies
While the newsrooms we interviewed took very different approaches, one thing was consistent for all of them: change. As we also experienced at HuffPost, the hypotheses and assumptions most membership programs start with tend to evolve once you start learning about your community – and as your membership grows and new people join.
“We are learning and sometimes it’s extreme,” said Navin Sigamany, outreach manager for memberships at The News Minute (TNM). “Our instinct is to structure things and to organize things in a way in which we think it makes sense. But when it starts flowing organically, it can be completely out of touch with what we had predicted.”
We observed different phases of an evolving community, based on our interviews and our own experience. These phases don’t necessarily happen sequentially, to be clear; some can happen simultaneously or in a different order.
Launch: A Rallying Cry
For readers, joining a new membership community takes a leap of faith, especially if the news organization isn’t publishing yet. It’s difficult to get people to sign up to join a community before it exists and before they can see who else might be part of it.
The message you choose will ultimately determine the people you attract and, therefore, the type of community you create. So newsrooms often launch with a rallying cry, identifying a problem and proposing some form of change, to get readers to participate in the first place — and then build a community around their earliest members.
Examples of rallying cries include:
saving journalism from the influence of advertising
slowing down the pace of news production and consumption
growing journalism by, for and about under-represented communities
Tortoise and Krautreporter used variations on a theme that Krautreporter put perhaps most succinctly: “Online journalism is broken. We will fix it.”
For Krautreporter, the call to support a new journalism publication through crowdfunding stemmed from public dissatisfaction with the online advertising model for news. Krautreporter was founded in 2014, at the height of online advertising – and journalism optimized for clicks – in Germany. So Krautreporter was founded on the principle of complete independence from ad revenue, and this powerful shared purpose brought its community – people from all over Germany who think mainstream news is headed in the wrong direction – together. Its crowdfunding was based on this messaging alone, with little clarity about what news or benefits it would actually provide. “The real truth is what Krautreporter was supposed to look like, after the crowdfunding was done and the platform was built, was a little bit fuzzy,” Fryszer said. Nevertheless, by leaning into a strong ethos about advertising, Krautreporter attracted a community of supporters that rallied around this common mission.
For two-year-old Tortoise, the message “Slow Down – Wise Up” was about the value of slower, more thoughtful news as an antidote to the reactive and often overwhelming 24-hour news cycle.
At The News Minute and Civil Beat, the message was that there wasn’t enough news about South India and Hawaii, respectively. Members responded to the assertion that their communities were undercovered.
In fact, TNM launched with only a newsletter and a payment system – and a promise to its members that more would be coming, including ways to interact with the TNM team and join a community. For member Hari Sasikumar, that was enough. “When you have the North Indian daily media that reports in English, news tends to be very North India-specific. So the idea of having an accessible, English-medium, South Indian news organization was quite appealing.” Although he wasn’t eligible at first because he lived outside India, he joined as soon as TNM expanded to the diaspora by accepting foreign payments. “I thought it made sense to support what they were doing,” he said.
At HuffPost, we initially hypothesized that HuffPost readers would either want to support journalism for the non-elite or want access to exclusive benefits. But – in reader surveys and A/B testing – we discovered what actually attracted the most members was the prospect of joining the HuffPost community. HuffPost had already been around for 14 years by the time we launched membership in 2019 and had a robust commenting community, so most readers already had a sense of whether they wanted to be part of it. We tested a variety of different messages before arriving at the one currently on the site: “Don't sit on the sidelines of history. Join the HuffPost community and support real news that puts people first.” But the winning messaging tends to change over time, as different events change what resonates most with readers, so it’s important to continuously test and iterate to find what will work best with your readers at different times — especially as your community evolves by growing beyond your founding members.
In summary, newsrooms don’t necessarily need to launch membership programs with particular features or benefits in order to foster a strong community. All four newsrooms launched with a strong sense of purpose, which attracted a group of founding members collectively motivated by a shared purpose, and then built community infrastructure around those founding members.
Experimentation and Iteration
As you attempt to engage and serve your evolving community, don’t expect everything you try to be successful. All of the news organizations said retaining a changing and growing community has required constant experimentation, evolution and openness to change if they aren’t getting positive feedback or engagement from members.
Examples of experimentation and iteration include:
niche newsletters
podcasts
virtual and hybrid event formats
new events such as book clubs
evolving coverage or formats in response to reader interests
TNM launched a newsletter on arts and culture that attracted few subscribers and low open rates, for instance, and cut it after finding – via a survey – that members weren’t interested. Tortoise originally prioritized long reads, in line with its “slow news” approach, but found that members preferred long listens and a shorter, curated newsletter. “We’re much more of an audio-first newsroom now,” said Katie Vanneck-Smith, Tortoise’s co-founder and publisher. Krautreporter’s coverage areas have also changed as the desires of its community have evolved. (You can read more about how Krautreporter has handled this in this Nieman Lab case study.) In a nod to this expectation of change, Fryszer’s motto on his Twitter handle says, translated: “What are we going to do next?”
The pandemic, of course, has been another point of forced evolution for all four newsrooms, as they took steps to figure out how to engage their communities without in-person events. Aside from Krautreporter, which Fryszer said had been planning to start in-person events but delayed this launch due to the pandemic, the others turned to virtual events, which may have delivered some unexpected advantages. Ceil Tilney, a Tortoise member based in San Francisco, for instance, and Andrew Girdwood, a member in Edinburgh, Scotland, both said they wouldn’t have participated in live events but joined many virtual events during the pandemic. They worry about whether they will still be able to participate as actively when in-person events start up again. Tortoise is now considering hybrid events in an attempt to blend an in-person experience with the accessibility of virtual events.
Growing Your Community
Growth vs. retention
As newsrooms grow membership programs out of their infancy, they may face a tension between trying to retain and deeply engage early members and growing their membership to reach new audiences.
Examples of decisions that had to consider both existing member retention and new growth include:
reaching diaspora readers who may have different needs or interests
addressing rapid attrition of founding members who provided the first funds to launch a news organization
creating a membership that is inclusive of and accessible to socioeconomically and ethnically diverse communities
Retaining members can require a different approach than attracting them in the first place. As Vanneck-Smith put it: “It’s different for different members, but generally what you pay for and what you stay for are two different things.” They might join because they believe in journalism as a pillar of democracy, for example, and stay because they love participating in the events. (In the case of Tortoise, access to ThinkIns, which are member-only, are a key reason people become paid members.)
Interviews with members seem to bear this out. TNM member Sasikumar specifically recalls joining “to support subscription-based media in India.” “I wasn't looking forward to some specific benefits of being a member, really, I was just happy to support them and what they were doing.” Since then, though, he has enjoyed some of the membership benefits that weren’t part of his motivation for registering in the first place, particularly the editorial meetings that members can join. “The idea of being in a meeting with the desk, when they're trying to think of ideas and they're asking the members for suggestions on what they would like to see reported, is quite nice. I think that's a really, really healthy and good practice."
Tilney also wasn’t certain about why she joined Tortoise initially but thinks she may have read about the publication’s “slow news” approach and signed up for a free trial. She remembers being immediately enthralled by the idea of crowd-sourcing journalism and being able to contribute in meetings with the newsroom.
“I feel if there were more civil discourse, the world would be a happier place,” she said. “At the beginning of the pandemic, I was a gazillion time zones away but I felt like Tortoise was my tribe more than anyone else I was associated with.” A self-described introvert, Tilney said she has discovered that being part of the Tortoise community can reduce her anxiety. She loves the ah-ha moments she gets in exchanging different points of view with reasonable people virtually. “It’s important to me as a person to figure stuff out and to be aware there’s a lot I don’t understand. People are social animals and to know there is a universe of people who share my fascination with figuring stuff out, who are really engaged with the issues of the day, gives me an incredibly comforting and uplifting kind of feeling.
As a community expands beyond founding members, however, growth can present another set of opportunities — and challenges. Engaging a broader audience may require changes that can then alienate founding members, and striking the right balance between catering to founding members vs. new members can be tricky.
For Civil Beat and TNM, this growth phase included reaching outside of their geographic areas to include expats from Hawaii and non-resident Indians (NRIs) living in other countries. TNM created a new newsletter specifically for NRIs, a short format list of the most important news NRIs need to stay informed about South India – and that they might not see in the national news – for people who don’t live there. Ultimately, TNM even created a help desk that provides personalized information about South India upon request for NRIs (see more about this in Operations).
At Tortoise, one issue that came up was a perceived elitism – pointed out originally by Emily Bell, founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University – because the content was originally restricted to people who could pay for it. After three months, when Vanneck-Smith looked at the data, she thought, “We’re going to be another liberal elite talking shop unless we sort some shit out.”
To tackle this problem, Vanneck-Smith identified demographics where Tortoise was underrepresented, found community organizations already engaging with and connected to those communities and set up partnerships to bring in new members. She also set up a social impact business model – it’s essentially a “buy one, donate one” model – in which paying members and a percentage of all grants sponsor free memberships, so that the free memberships are still bringing financial value to Tortoise. “I wanted them to be as valued a voice in the room and valued in the overall valuation of the business. So I built it into the DNA of our business – the value is both editorial but also commercially valuable – there is money against them on our [profit and loss statement].”
Though a compelling idea, it remains to be seen how effectively this strategy will create a more equitable, inclusive membership community: paying members are 69% more likely to have attended a ThinkIn and 35% more engaged on email than members who received free memberships through partners.
Meanwhile, founding members continue to play a big role at Krautreporter, which tracks members that have been with them from the beginning. The original crowdfunding campaign to launch Krautreporter had 18,000 one-time donors, and then when the newsroom launched its membership program to sustain itself on a recurring basis, 4,000 of those became members beyond the initial campaign. Now 1,300 of those original 4,000 members remain members today.
Krautreporter’s newsroom feels a real sense of loyalty to those founding members because they converted from funders to recurring members without really knowing what they would get, Fryszer said. Now he considers it a “big alarm bell” and a sign that “something isn’t going in the right direction” if one of them leaves. The Krautreporter staffers know the founding members by first and last name, frequently see them in the comments and in emails, and – after more than six years – feel they have a relationship with each of them, he said.
Prioritizing founding member retention, as in the case of Krautreporter, and growth through expanded inclusion, as Tortoise is doing, represent contrasting responses to the tension faced by newsrooms looking to mature beyond their founding members. While no strategy is necessarily better than the other, they shape communities in different ways, either reinforcing core values by catering to existing members or challenging them to evolve in service of a larger mission.
Benefits and Incentives
Several newsrooms have offered different benefits and incentives to attract members, and here’s where the line between “membership,” or being part of a community, and “subscriptions,” or paying for access to content or other products, can get blurry. If you’re trying to attract members who want to be active members of your community, luring them with transactional benefits can be counterproductive if it doesn’t attract people interested in engaging in that way.
Examples of benefits and incentives that might grow membership but not community include:
an ad-free experience
a members-only app
restricting content behind a paywall
offering gift cards, tickets or other merchandise unrelated to your publication
Mariko Chang, Civil Beat’s major gifts manager, said she previously suggested access privileges for certain levels of membership. She was frequently reminded that Civil Beat’s mission is to provide access to information and level the playing field to ensure more people have the information they need. At first, that took her a step down, she said, but she has learned to really respect that. “It has forced us to focus on the mission and why people support us rather than these kind of transactional relationships,” she said. Civil Beat still offers incentives – film festival tickets, for example, or Civil Beat swag – to give members some urgency to renew at a particular time. But, Chang added, “we hope they would support us no matter what.”
The appeal of fast growth from subscription-oriented benefits can complicate or undermine a community-driven membership strategy. Chang says that she is “learning now that some of those readers and members didn't have really strong ties with the work and our core mission. We're seeing that attrition.” Accepting attrition is a difficult but sometimes necessary decision in order to retain the strength of a community.
Chang’s comments reflect the difficulty of making a strategic decision to invest in community, potentially at the expense of membership growth. While Civil Beat made its decision according to its vision and values for membership, it’s possible that similar growth-oriented tactics can be steered toward cultivating a community for other newsrooms. More research is needed to determine whether and to what extent these features can help attract a loyal, engaged community of members who want to support and participate in the news.
Developing a Culture of Listening
For the four newsrooms we interviewed, launching membership – and raising financial support from members – led naturally to listening and engaging with members. This required new editorial processes – not only deeper engagement with the audience team, for instance, but also cultivating relationships between journalists and members, and turning member ideas and feedback into action. As Fryszer put it: “If people are paying for your journalism, you have to basically make them feel like you’re doing it for them – and you have to really listen closely or [you won’t be able to retain them] and then you don’t have a business.”
Getting to know your members – including what they think of your journalism, what they want more or less of, what’s missing and what they value – is critical to developing a healthy community, and the concept of openness is a major part of all four newsrooms’ propositions (see more about this in the Engagement Tactics section). This extends beyond standard audience activities to one-on-one interaction between members and newsroom staff. The members we interviewed all cited the ability to engage directly with the newsrooms as a key to their participation.
Examples of listening include:
asking readers for story ideas, coverage gaps, crowdsourced anecdotes or reporting
gathering feedback in surveys, emails or interviews with community members – and taking action based on that feedback
soliciting readers’ views in comments, forums or events and incorporating those views in coverage
In its events, Civil Beat puts its reporters and editors front and center to show how accessible they are and give them a chance to connect personally with members of the community, Chang said. In addition, the business side of Civil Beat reflects this idea with a strong sense of customer service in responding to all emails and feedback. “Whether it’s comments or questions with their membership or updating their credit card, there’s a real person behind that email,” she said. “We’re going to get back to them quickly and let them know how to resolve their question.”
Just listening to your readers alone isn’t enough to develop a deep and meaningful relationship, however: members also want to see that their participation is having an impact and leading to change, whether it’s new stories, events or other activities arising from their input, or new perspectives being included into the mix.
The News Minute invites members to share their questions for panelists ahead of the event to help shape the conversation
John McComas, a Civil Beat member, said it felt good to get calls from the newspaper asking for his advice or opinions – including once when he was asked what they should cover in his field of public health. Some of those topics ended up getting covered, he said, leaving him “feeling like I was able to contribute something of value to an entity that I felt was valuable to the community and to me.” He even suggested potential donors to support a new health care reporting position, he said, one of which ended up funding the role.
Building Trust
As with most relationships, engaging with readers requires a level of trust in both directions – and that can take work to establish. Actively listening to readers can take serious time and commitment, but can also build trust and a highly engaged community.
Examples of strategies to build community trust we saw included:
being transparent about how you’re using your members’ feedback and what it is changing or affecting.
letting members know about stories being considered in advance and getting early feedback.
including members in editorial meetings.
co-producing stories with members.
Nishimoto was inspired to focus on building trust after seeing a Pew Research study about trust in the media that found that 78 percent of the U.S. population had never directly spoken to a reporter – and even fewer in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. He wanted Civil Beat to help change the statistic in Hawaii. As a local media outlet, the goal of breaking down as many barriers as possible between journalists and the local population guides a lot of Civil Beat’s engagement work, he said, and connecting readers to Civil Beat journalists is a key part of the strategy to build trust.
TNM special projects and experiments editor Ragamalika Karthikeyan added that this transparency, which enables people to see how TNM really works, helps to counteract the credibility crisis in media. “People really do enjoy sitting in on [our editorial meetings]... We trust that you will not divulge any sensitive information that we discuss here outside, and we have never had a breach so far.”
For example, when reflecting on his experiences attending editorial meetings, TNM member Sasikumar says that “with the newsroom itself, I definitely think there is a sense of community.” He credits this in part to having published on the website and even co-authoring an article with a reporter. But “if [any] member has joined any of the editorial meetings, they will notice that the atmosphere is informal, it’s very much like you're talking to friends, or friends of friends... It does feel very much like a community, both with the staff and with the other subscribers.”
Sometimes members even get more involved: Recently, a member filed a Right To Information Act request – the Indian equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act request in the U.S. – related to something they had discussed in an editorial meeting, Karthikeyan said.
Figuring out how to openly and honestly discuss story ideas with readers – including why many aren’t a good fit – can be tricky, but the reward can be better journalism and more engaged members. “My editor-in-chief loves to say that our best ideas come from our readers,” Karthikeyan said, adding that these have included sources in government and companies they cover. (“There is no pandering or [special treatment] for members,” she added; all story ideas are selected on their merits.)
The staff also regularly wades through many toxic comments on social media in order to consider and respond to any valid feedback, she said. “That’s the culture of The News Minute. We are on social, we are visible and we are engaging with our readers. We never say: Because you don’t have 5,000 followers, I’m not going to reply to you. Even if you have one follower but you’re making a pertinent point, we want to listen to you. That’s always been the DNA of The News Minute.”
Stories co-produced with their members are another example of collaboration cited by Krautreporter, Tortoise and TNM. Tortoise cited three investigations that all started at ThinkIns: Family Separation, a 12-month investigation, started at a ThinkIn in the Bronx, Campus Justice, an ongoing investigation into sexual abuse at colleges and universities, and Power in the Shadows, an investigation into the power of private social networks that emerged from a ThinkIn about the changing rules of democracy.
Achieving Self-Sustainability
Where does this community-building path end? One potential answer could be the idea of a self-sustaining community, aligned with the point – cited by behavioral scientist Jon Levy – that a healthy community should extend beyond your brand.
Examples of self-sustaining community could include:
members taking the initiative to start discussions about new topics in comments or a closed Facebook group, without needing prompting from the newsroom
members making friends with each other in private chats or meeting up even if the newsroom hasn’t planned an event
members launching and running subcommunities on new platforms
members collaborating with other members to help others or improve their communities, such as volunteering to collect donations or run help lines
Introductions can be another sign of a healthy, self-sustaining community. If members are bringing friends and family into the community as new members, for instance, or are recommending potential partners, speakers or donors, this can indicate that they are proud to be associated with the community. All the members we spoke with mentioned recommending their publications to others, unasked.
Because he cares about the Tortoise community and respects it, Girdwood said he is careful about who he recruits to join. “Because I care about the community, if [someone I bring in] does something, I want to be proud of that thing,” he said. “Community begets community – that snowball is rolling and going to attract more like-minded people.” Girdwood feels like he gets “a psychological badge for introducing good cleverness” to the community and feels it would reflect negatively on him if he brought in “a disruptive, unhelpful element.” He looks for politically “leftish” people who are smart, purpose-led and – after signing up people who didn’t end up having time to attend any events – able to make time to participate. “To get value from Tortoise, you need to make time for it,” he said.
From our interviews with members and newsroom staffers who work on membership, it seems that the growth of a news community is more akin to building friendships and other social networks than to traditional audience work. If that’s the case, cultivating community could mean creating new spaces to facilitate more one-to-one interactions between members and the newsroom.
Another sign might be that the news organizations are seen as part of a larger community, rather than “owning” their own community of members, as members Yamamoto and McComas said about Civil Beat. And that might also require newsrooms to take a step beyond their comfort zones to be seen as a force for the good of their community, not just a source of information. For Civil Beat, for instance, that includes regular messaging about the role of journalism in making Hawaii better. The newspaper also launched a project to translate important COVID-19 information into lesser-spoken Micronesian and Filipino languages, despite the small audience, in an attempt to provide critical health information to under-served communities during the pandemic. For TNM, facilitating mutual aid exchanges during disasters such as floods comes to mind.
4. Operations
How do newsrooms allocate resources to cultivate community? In this section we will describe how newsrooms operationalize their approaches to cultivating a community of members through staffing, member support, and technology.
Staffing
Each newsroom uses a different staffing model to support their community initiatives, although two themes emerged. First, staffing doesn’t need to be large; what’s important is for responses and interaction to be personal. Most newsrooms had a small but mighty team of 1–3 people committed to cultivating a community of members. Second, participation is key to building a sense of community based on mutual trust by building relationships, even if it requires stepping beyond the normal responsibilities of journalism. Below we summarize how each newsroom staffed their community efforts.
Civil Beat
Three members of the community team: Ben Nishimoto, vice president of operations and philanthropy; Mariko Chang, major gifts manager; and Alana Eagle, events and membership manager.
Reporters and editors are also deeply involved in membership, especially by hosting and speaking at events where they engage directly with members.
Tortoise
Dedicated membership team including editorial, acquisition, engagement and events leads.
Editors also host events and engage with members as peers, conveying that journalists are in community with their members.
Krautreporter
No dedicated membership staff.
Membership responsibilities (e.g., engaging in comments, curating custom newsletters) distributed across the newsroom, including to reporters.
Member engagement is built into the structure of the reporter’s job, and they are expected to publish fewer stories per month as a result.
Member Support
Supporting members provides a key touchpoint to build and reinforce individual relationships between newsrooms and members. Chang describes how the Civil Beat has a “strong sense of customer service”; even if a member is just updating their credit card information or asking a question, they want members to remember that they are contacting real people at the Civil Beat.
The News Minute has invested considerably in cultivating relationships with members by supporting them outside the scope of journalism, offering its premium NRI members a help line service called TNM Roots HelpDesk. Since NRIs may not be connected to local specialists, the service helps connect NRIs with providers such as legal consultants, accountants, delivery services, and medical providers. The help line is “staffed” by the same people who run the membership program, representing a creative way to leverage the organization’s staff and build trustful relationships outside the formal scope of news. Through these connections, the help desk has helped members who wanted to buy property, set up a non-governmental organization and find a healthcare professional for their mother.
Data & Technology
Although each newsroom cultivates an online community — especially since the pandemic — their success shows that innovative practices don’t necessarily require new platforms. Civil Beat and TNM, for example, don’t have member log-in on their websites. Instead, they communicate with members using newsletters and individual outreach. After first launching a dedicated discussion board on their website, TNM also found more success engaging their members with a closed Facebook group.
Chang said she hopes the member login Civil Beat is building might offer a better sense of how deeply engaged people actually are: “Something that would be really cool that we haven't really cracked yet is a really full understanding of individuals – we might know a person is a member at a certain level, but [we don’t know if they’re] also a newsletter subscriber, a commenter and attend events. The systems aren't necessarily speaking to each other in a way that's very actionable right now.”
Several other newsroom staffers also described their frustration in not being able to track member interactions and engagements across events, newsletters, surveys, support, and forums. In some cases the lack of granular, cross-platform analytics limited the newsroom’s ability to measure success with quantitative metrics, as described earlier. We had this same challenge ourselves at HuffPost; even though we had a member login on our website and mobile apps, it wasn’t integrated into all our platforms (forums, virtual events, in-app purchases), we used to develop our community — especially platforms that we adopted quickly as experiments.
conclusion
The potential impact of building a strong, healthy community can be huge: It can bring you closer to readers, developing loyalty and sustainable revenue. But to accomplish that, newsrooms need to be able to build trust with their readers, and that means that the work of developing these relationships will need to be fully integrated into a newsroom – and not something that happens on the side, in a siloed way, or as part of a plan to simply promote stories after they have been finished. That means newsrooms will need to be comfortable giving readers more input into the editorial process, as well as spending more time soliciting and responding to feedback. Not all newsrooms will be willing and able to do this, but those that can may find themselves rewarded with loyal members who see them as essential to their communities, their democracy and their lives.
Appendix: Methods Discussion
Selection Process
We identified more than 30 potential newsrooms from a combination of snowball sampling, other research reports, and the Membership Puzzle Project team. We applied two baseline criteria in order to select 3–5 newsrooms who could contribute to a deep, textured understanding of community in news membership programs: newsrooms needed to show evidence of both an engaged online community and multiple engagement channels (such as events, forums, comments, and newsletters).
Next, since we were interested in drawing conclusions that could be broadly applicable to a wide audience, we considered diversity across several characteristics: thick vs. thin membership models, different engagement tactics, country and target audience, membership program age, and newsroom size and focus.
We reached out to 13 newsrooms for initial phone calls to discuss interest and availability, and ultimately finalized four newsrooms that were included in the study. In addition, we conducted one interview with the publisher of the Record-Journal in Connecticut, which launched its Latino Community Reporting Lab in March, but did not have sufficient time to interview additional staff or members.
Disclosure: The Membership Puzzle Project has supported Krautreporter in the past and currently supports The News Minute through its Membership in News Fund. MPP helped identify potential newsrooms and introduced us to several, including those two. However, we independently identified our own criteria and selected the newsrooms we ultimately included in this project.
Interview Questions
We interviewed newsroom staff together in semi-structured panel interviews that lasted 60–75 minutes. The interview guide evolved throughout the research period, but some of the key questions were:
Why is community important to you and your newsroom?
What’s the story of your membership program? How has it evolved over time?
Who is in your community? What do they have in common?
Why do your members join your community? What do you think they would say?
How do you define community?
How have you tried to cultivate community? What has gone well, what hasn’t gone well, and what have you learned?
We interviewed members individually (one researcher with one member) in semi-structured interviews that lasted approximately 30 minutes each. Member interviews were conducted after all newsroom interviews were complete, in part so that we could compare newsroom and member perspectives. Some of the key questions were:
What’s the story of your relationship with [newsroom]?
When did you first become a member? Why did you join?
What do you have in common with other members?
What has your experience been with various engagement channels [such as events or forums]? Can you describe an especially memorable moment?
Have you invited anybody else to become a member? How did you choose them, and what did you say?
