There are works of journalism that resonate many years after publication.
Lane DeGregory’s haunting story for the Tampa Bay Times on a family trying to help a young girl recover from unimaginable child abuse.
A joyful celebration of New York City’s block parties, from Sandra E. Garcia and a team of New York Times photographers.
Alan Diaz’s striking image of federal agents approaching a terrified 6-year-old Cuban boy in his family’s home.
The way the Los Angeles Times’ Día de Muertos altar, created by its De Los team, honored cultural traditions often ignored by English-language media.
Natalie Kitroeff and Alejandro Cegarra’s comprehensive multimedia feature for The New York Times on Mexico’s “train of death.”
Jane magazine’s makeunder series championing natural beauty at a time when many women’s magazines pushed readers to be thin and glamorous.
I don’t know how these stories would perform in this era of make-or-break pageviews or subscription metrics. I do know that they made people more closely examine their world.
But is this the kind of work that can save journalism?
A student recently sent Ask the Recruiter this question: “As a multimedia journalism major, I am wondering what you think about how journalists should balance creating stories that serve their communities while also adapting to what audiences actually engage with online?”
For the most part, I don’t see a balance to strike because I don’t consider these competing forces. Journalism that is useful should also give audiences a reason to engage. What we can do differently as an industry is publish fewer stories that don’t stand out while also taking the time to earn an audience for journalism that is worth everyone’s limited time.
In surveys, focus groups, emails to staff and comments on stories, readers let us know what they want: service stories that help them live more fully, investigations that expose wrongdoing, sports and entertainment stories that inform, uplift and distract, urgent and accurate breaking news and heartwarming accounts of people doing good.
All the stories I shared above — ones I turn back to for inspiration — are the kind of ambitious and creative stories I believe readers will spend time on.
Some newsrooms aim to serve specific audiences: The Wall Street Journal targets corporate players. At one point while I worked at USA Today, the newsroom planned to grow by reaching more families through engrossing education and health coverage. Politico Pro serves policy leaders. Capital B and Remezcla are some of my favorite sites centering stories about and for people of color.
Viral news teams that publish short and timely stories often draw some of the largest audiences in a newsroom. Scoops, or stories you can’t get anywhere else, also tend to drive high engagement.
Successful newsrooms have a strong sense of who their audience is. They are devoted to retaining those loyal viewers or readers while also looking to win over new consumers. They spend time on headlines. They care about publishing times and meeting the moment.
For many newsrooms, the core audience is older, white, educated and affluent. There’s nothing wrong with serving these consumers, of course. But as the nation’s demographics have become more diverse, especially in the large cities many thriving news organizations call home, we must reach a broader audience. A news industry that does not attract younger audiences, people of color and people from diverse economic, ideological and educational backgrounds will only continue to contract and be dismissed by a growing number of Americans.
Newsroom leaders should reach audiences through varied storytelling. Video, audio, live blogs, short and long stories, Q&As, listicles and narratives all have an important role to play in building an audience.
I have worked in several newsrooms dependent on ad revenue where I was tasked with hitting astronomical goals of 40-60 million pageviews each month. It was widely understood that not hitting those goals could mean layoffs.
I have also worked in subscriber-driven newsrooms and led grant-driven teams, where our objective was to write impactful stories on inequality, health care, climate change, education and other topics. These stories, created with a public service mission, were rarely as popular as viral news reports. Still, we spent time on thoughtful audience work to make sure this journalism reached people.
Like many journalists, I did not pursue a career in journalism because I wanted to attend meetings on audience metrics or revenue strategy. I became a journalist because I wanted to help people, loved storytelling and writing and cared deeply about public policy.
As a former government reporter and longtime fan of narrative nonfiction, I learned how to do audience work because I wanted the teams I managed to stay employed and even be able to secure pay raises. That meant ensuring their work was widely consumed.
I learned SEO best practices and spent more time than I wanted to crafting headlines and studying trending keywords on Twitter and Google Trends. I embraced creating community events, newsletters, social media buzz and other innovative approaches to grabbing readers’ attention. When someone pitched a story I didn’t think anyone would read, based on precedent and newsroom audience metrics, I asked staffers to consider who the story was for and how we could get readers to invest their time in that topic.
In many newsrooms, larger audiences mean more money to do the work we care so passionately about. It means giving staffers better wages, sending people on reporting trips, paying for public records requests and hiring more people to do the work.
As more journalists learn audience engagement best practices and as these skills become increasingly common in journalism job postings, we’ve also learned that the business model must keep changing. We have no choice but to stay in dialogue with our audiences, conquer changing technologies and pivot as needed. Experimenting and even getting a bit weird can be fun and oh-so-rewarding.
I do worry that too many newsrooms give up on underperforming coverage areas without first asking whether we actually produced quality journalism. Did we break new ground? Was the headline boring? Did we fail to explain the urgency or why this issue matters to more than one small group of people? Did we choose the wrong format to tell the story? Do we need to do more work to convince a group we have ostracized in the past that these stories are for them, not just about them?
Too often, stories about people of color, lower-income people and younger people feel like they were written by journalists with no meaningful intimacy with those communities. This is not surprising given the lack of diversity in our newsrooms.
We often hear from readers that they unsubscribe because they don’t have time to read everything we publish, and yet we continue to insist that the stories that truly matter are the long ones. I loved when newsrooms such as the Los Angeles Times and Tampa Bay Times experimented with short, delightful stories. I want more of that.
We compete for attention in an endless, exciting world of information and experiences in a way our predecessors could never imagine.
For journalism to survive, there can be no room between the work we do and audiences’ needs and interests.
Editors, reporters and others in our newsrooms must be selective about the journalism we devote our limited resources to, protect and grow our relationship with our audiences and never stop trying to find new ways to tell engaging stories. We have to study stories that get little engagement, tweak our approach as needed and put audiences at the center of our decisions. We need to dazzle with work that is timely, singular, punchy, approachable and, yes, profitable.
Want to chat about your career questions? Email me at cristina.silva@globe.com with the subject “Ask the Recruiter.” Questions can be published with your name or anonymously.
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