• Podcast
  • Blog
  • FAQ
  • How to Podcast
  • Newsletter
  • Take a Survey

It's All Journalism

The broccoli of media-focused podcasts.

  • Podcast
  • Blog
  • FAQ
  • How to Podcast
  • Newsletter
  • Take a Survey

#244 – Newsrooms need to build trust with their audiences

March 16, 2017 by ItsAllJournalism

 

It’s no longer enough to simply provide information to readers. Reporters who do that and take a “Wizard of Oz” approach, assuming readers should be happy with the information they’re given and not ask anything more of their local newsrooms, will find themselves at a loss.

Joy Mayer has been studying audience engagement for the better part of this decade. Now an engagement strategist with the Reynolds Journalism Institute, Mayer got her start as an editor and page designer.

Joy Mayer

Joy Mayer

“Designers are always the people in a print newsroom focused on the consumption of news, not just the craft of storytelling,” she says. She viewed that role as “an advocate for the reader.” After all, what good is a great story if readers can’t find it?

In the digital age, however, readers might be better served if they feel they can interact with the people who give them their news, not just read it on the physical or virtual page.

“I still see so many occasions where community members are talking back to journalists on social platforms or in the comments and the journalists aren’t even there. They don’t know” people are trying to communicate with them, Mayer says. “If you work in a large organization you might get thousands of comments, and there’s a problem of scale there. Sometimes the journalists aren’t investing the time or catching the comments coming back,” to say nothing about the lack of response to those who have taken the time to comment and try to interact.

To Mayer, that’s the heart of the engagement questions. “Do you want a relationship with the people you aim to serve or do you just want to broadcast? If you want to broadcast, are you confident the people you’re speaking to will stick around if you’re not having a conversation?”

She points to the Ogden Standard Examiner. The reporters there “show up every day in Facebook comments. They thank people for commenting, they ask follow-up questions, they really invest in being in conversation with their community.” Yes, she admits, sometimes the questions are of a more light-hearted nature, like asking readers their favorite restaurants in town. But if the reporters ask a more substantial question, on whether they’d support higher taxes to pay for salary increases for local law enforcement officials, “they’ll get 150 comments in not that big of a town because they’ve earned the right to ask those tougher questions. The newsrooms that invest in conversation see that pay off around topics that other newsrooms struggle with.”

Taken another way, Mayer suggests newsrooms can learn from engagement, determining which topics resonate most with readers and where to allocate increasingly tight resources.

“A big part of using all this data to inform our journalism is not just which stories work but looking at the stories that don’t, which are the topics or beats that continually underperform,” she says. “One benefit of using data to inform newsrooms that people don’t talk about enough is it can help you make hard decisions. … Use data to determine what you’re not going to cover.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to reader engagement specialist Joy Mayer of the Reynolds Journalism Institute. They discuss how important it is for journalists to build a relationship with their readers, by responding to comments and creating a dialogue on social media. She also talks about a recent project she conducted to help newsrooms build trust with their audiences.

#197 – Solutions journalism: Recipe for engaging local communities

Share Button
If you like this post, please share it along:

Previous Post

Video journalist Matt Pearl
#243 – Solo video journalist emerges as model for most newsrooms

Next Post

Investigation Continues: The Lyon Sisters is a new podcast by Neal Augenstein.
#245 – Decades-old cold case comes to life in new podcast

Leave a Reply Cancel reply




Related Posts

  • Josh Kramer, editor of The Cartoon Picayune (Photo by Michael O'Connell)#43 – Josh Kramer takes journalistic approach to creating comics
  • From left, Ben Myers, Jon Davenport and Sara Lipka of the Chronicle for Higher Learning.#210 – Tracking sexual assaults on college campuses
  • Jesse Holcomb is the associate director of research at the Pew Research Center. (Photo by Michael O'Connell)#159 – Local news in the rear view mirror
  • David Mindich Ph.d. Professor of Media Studies, Journalism & Digital Arts, St. Michael's College#213 – Trump tests journalistic traditions of objectivity, balance

Learn How To Podcast

Turn Up the Volume equips journalism students, professionals, and others interested in producing audio content with the know-how necessary to launch a podcast for the first time. It addresses the unique challenges beginner podcasters face in producing professional level audio for online distribution. Beginners can learn how to handle the technical and conceptual challenges of launching, editing, and posting a podcast.

Order this new book by It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell.

Take a Survey, Earn Some Swag

If you haven’t heard, we created a five-question online survey to help us assemble a toolbox for journalists that we’ll share on our podcast and website. Please take a few minutes to share the tools that help make your job easier.

We’ve also just launched a new survey on how to improve our podcast. Let us know how we could do better.

To those people who complete one of our the surveys, we’ll be sending out a limited number of It’s All Journalism coffee mugs while supplies last. Show your support for good journalism by taking the survey and get a reward in return.

Help Support Our Podcast

Promoting good journalism is essential in a democracy. By donating to the It’s All Journalism Patreon page, you will help ensure that we continue producing the weekly podcast that focuses on good journalism. You’ll also help to boost us to the next level with live events and exclusive content. Donate here.

Sign Up for Our Weekly Newsletter

Latest Posts

  • 444. How Documented uses WhatsApp to reach its audience
  • Better News: Use Slack to host cultural conversations in your newsroom
  • 443. Tucson newspaper proves to be a vital source for the Latinx community
  • Top 10 podcast episodes of 2020
  • 442. 2020 Lookback: America from Canada’s perspective

Copyright © 2021 · Pintercast Child Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in