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Emerging Engagement StrategiesStaffing on Multiple PlatformsAudience Conversion ChallengeWays to EngageChicago's Ethic MediaA Master Narrative for Chicago

Chicago Media’s Emerging Engagement Strategies

Thirty-one news organizations based in Chicago responded to the engagement survey. Their input suggests that local news organizations, despite cultivating communities via in-person events and on social networks, still tend towards a “broadcast” mentality when it comes to engagement.

Engaging Audiences, Chicago: How big is your audiences (unique visitors per month)?This means that many respondents conflate audience reach or size with audience engagement. It’s an important distinction between quantitative and qualitative: The difference between measuring an audience’s overall size, but not the quality of users’ interactions with the publication. Cultivating audience participation is still a nut that needs to be cracked.

Chicago respondents ranged from broad-reaching legacy media to neighborhood-based newspapers, from political blogs to outlets dedicated to preserving the city’s cultural heritage.

Because the Chicago market is so distinct, the recruitment pool was broadened to include some legacy print and radio media outlets that had a strong online presence. Approximately 115 regional media outlets were asked to take the survey. Including these organizations also gives the McCormick Foundation some targeted information about Chicago news media’s needs pertaining to engagement and outreach strategies.

Overall, the city’s respondents mirrored national survey responses on topics such as engagement tracking tools, asset mapping and conversion. Likewise, many Chicago respondents cited “good journalism” and quality content as the primary tool for engagement in self-submitted comments.

Engaging Audiences, Chicago: What indicators does your organization monitor to track online engagement?

As in the national survey, Chicago respondents were broadly distributed in age. Almost 36% of survey takers were between the ages of 25-34, with an even distribution across age brackets 35-44 and 45-54. Nearly 11% were 65 or older.

Chicago respondents also looked to website metrics more than social media metrics as evidence of engagement. Almost 97% of Chicago respondents said that page views were a primary indicator of engagement, while only 61% said that tweets and retweets were important indicators, and 68% cited interactions on Facebook.

However, Chicago respondents also overwhelmingly noted that information gleaned from monitoring community engagement helped prioritize or inform editorial content and/or identify sources and stories for future coverage.

Engaging Audiences: What indicators does your organization monitor to track online engagement?

One respondent, whose organization was “just getting started” using information from monitoring community engagement, said it was “using data mainly to see how social media is driving involvement.” Another organization used this information to “adapt and position the organization and its products and services in a dynamic communications landscape.”

Engagement Staffing

Like respondents from around the country, Chicago media members also struggle with staffing, bandwidth and crafting measurable engagement strategies that can refine their organizational goals. Nearly 97% of respondents said that the publisher/editor was the primary point person for engagement strategy. “We are small — just two people so we do everything,” said one. “This is one of the many hats I wear,” said another. Over 38% spend between one and five hours a week on engaging community.

Yet, some outlets have created roles that were specifically focused on fostering engagement, with such titles as “Director of Strategic Partnerships,” “New Media Manager” and “Community Editor.” These positions were typical for respondents who were more legacy and multi-platform in nature or had larger overall operations.

Engaging on Multiple Platforms

Chicago respondents differed from national participants in their use of many different platforms to distribute their content. Several outlets described broad distribution strategies that mix print, web-only text stories, podcasting, video reports or mixed media projects in order to reach more people in a meaningful way.

One organization even cultivates engagement by offering guided tours of the city. “On any given tour, audience members function as ‘study guides,’” the respondent wrote. Those study guides often inform others “about topics that they might not have known about otherwise.”

Chicago’s media organizations also tended to be more mission-driven than national respondents, and they focus on cultivating real impact in the community. Many responding outlets do vital work that supports nonprofit and advocacy organizations. “We write about non-profit missions and raise awareness for their causes,” said one. “For example, [we] wrote one story about … a non-profit that supports middle-school music programs in a low-income neighboring town. [The organization] got a $10,000 check the next day.”

“Informing our audience of pressing issues faced by this region continues to be our goal; inspiring them to action is also significant to us and figuring out better ways to track and measure the impact of our work is an important next step,” said another.

However, it’s key to note that inspiring community members to act is only a goal for some respondents. In an interview, one individual said her organization’s mission was not to inspire communities to act, but to “equip them” so that they could make an informed choice about how to act on an issue that impacts them.

The Audience Conversion Challenge

As with the national respondents, about 81% of Chicago respondents do not track or measure audience conversion. They blame this defi cit on a lack of bandwidth, lack of resources and lack of tools that could support this kind of work. “Though we might not be collecting data on this, we do note these conversions,” said one organization.

Regarding audience conversion – that’s the process by which an audience member becomes increasingly engaged with a media organization – responses from Chicago media were quite mixed. When converting visitors to be content contributors, nearly 39% said it was “important” and nearly 23% said it was “very important.” But converting audiences into financial contributors, either as paying subscribers or donors, generated mixed responses: nearly 43% of respondents said that paid subscribers were “non-applicable,” while about 23% said donors were “non-applicable.” Almost 27% said that converting users to donors was only “somewhat important.”

Engaging Audiences, Chicago: How important is it to the success of your site to convert visitors any of the following?

In an interesting twist, Chicago media’s responses to conversion-related survey questions denoted more awareness of revenue-related conversion issues than national numbers. For example, nearly 11% of national respondents said that converting audiences to become paid subscribers was “very important,” as compared to Chicago respondents’ nearly 18%. National outlets also leaned more heavily towards “non-applicable” when it comes to converting audiences to be advertisers or donors. Based on these responses at the local and national level, there is a clear need for support when it comes to conversion strategies that facilitate revenue.

Off the Asset Map

Asked whether they engage in any kind of “asset mapping” of chief resources or attributes to help their audiences understand the community they live in, 70% of Chicago respondents said they do not. Also, over 83% of respondents do not engage in asset mapping to help staff better understand and report on the Chicago community. These responses were often linked to lack of staff and budget to create formal structures supporting this kind of work. “Staff? I should be so fortunate,” wrote one respondent.

“We’ve been developing these maps internally but implementing them effectively has been a challenge,” said one organization. Another said the organization’s asset maps consisted of “a ton of interviews, photo trips/essays, developing deep friendships with people in any given community.” These assets are what “makes worthwhile, memorable content,” the respondent said.

Stories of Engagement

Chicago news sites also offered powerful stories of civic impact, successful audience engagement and recruiting community members as contributors. As one respondent wrote, “Citizens often feel disconnected from their governments. By us suggesting … how they might participate in government, they become more engaged in both their governance and our content.”

Strategies to curate engagement varied. See the three accompanying Chicago case studies for more information. In addition, here are a few shorter stories of engagement.

Themed audiences: One organization sought out specific audiences for thematic content: “We shared archived stories about the Robert Taylor Homes development with a Facebook group for former residents of Robert Taylor,” the respondent wrote.

Ad-hoc crusade: One site went on an all-out crusade to free information vital to the community, even risking the possibility of police arrests for staging a sit-in at a local school. The site was engaged in publicizing candidates for a Chicago school election called the Local School Council. In Chicago, there is an LSC for each school. “We identified policies that allowed us to examine the files of candidates, knowing that the schools did not want to release those files to the public and had frustrated our attempts two years ago to shed light on the process,” the respondent said. The site did research with the National Lawyers Guild, the Chicago Kent Center for Open Government, the Headline Club (SPJ) and its attorneys to craft a strategy that would put the schools in a position where they had to open the records. “We anticipated being arrested for our work. The possibility of arrest was brought up when one school decided not to give the files out. We decided to sit down in the school and wait them out. This could have provoked a charge of trespass and a felony arrest. While in the school we made phone calls to our support group, who made further calls. We called political leaders, who monitored the situation and called the school. We began using Facebook and Twitter to alert the public, in real time, of what was happening. At the end of the day, after nearly six hours, we were given the records.”

Documenting city services: Another organization believes its coverage led to an electoral upset: “We did a very simple story following a heavy snow, comparing how the streets and sidewalks were being cleared in different special tax districts called SSAs,” the respondent wrote. “We feel our coverage of the failure of one SSA led to a victory for an opponent of the Chicago machine in the 2011 municipal elections.”

Cultivating contributors: One organization specifically uses social media as a means of cultivating contributors. “We publish stories daily and then take the conversation to Twitter, where we ask readers for their take,” the organization wrote. “The most engaged Twitter users get invited to submit a ‘citizen contributor’ column for the next print edition.”

Engagement Needs of Chicago’s Ethnic Media

While Chicago’s digital and legacy media are developing engagement strategies to move their organizations forward, the needs of regional ethnic media are distinctly different. While news organizations that serve black and Latino communities did respond to the survey, no members of Chicago’s immigrant press responded.

Chicago’s ethnic media consist primarily of small print newspapers with few staff that serve a variety of immigrant and cultural communities. Furthermore, their news coverage tends to skew members towards stories about developments in that community’s native land rather than news in Chicago.

“The only way ethnic news media exists is because they represent [a specific community]. The minute [an ethnic news outlet] loses its link to that community, it dies,” said the Community Media Workshop’s Steve Franklin, who works with more than 300 members of Chicago’s ethnic press.

“I really see a need for community and connection. I see success, but there’s so much more to be done. [Ethnic media] needs support from the larger community. It’s too isolated and too singular,” Franklin said. “The risk is that all of these little organizations will go out of business.”

A Master Narrative for the Windy City

Asked whether they anchor their coverage in an ongoing master narrative, nearly 52% of Chicago respondents said they did. Their responses offer a unique opportunity to chart out how media outlets that serve divergent communities in the area perceive and narrate the story of their city. Open-ended survey responses were multifaceted and touched on narratives of Chicago culture, ethnicity, politics, social responsibility and civic pride. As one respondent put it, “Identifying Chicago as a site of ongoing social justice work (historically and contemporaneously) gives our readers a deeper connection to the work that we do. It’s not just reporting. It’s storytelling.”

Another wrote, “I liken what we do to letting the world know what the community … is doing, letting our light shine. A great deal of what we write is in support of economic development and cultural literacy, to provide news and information of interest that can help and a celebration of individual and local successes.”

“Many of our readers come to us for a real assessment of the city, its politicians, its institutions, and its sports teams. [They come] for a narrative called ‘Reality.’” Another respondent wrote, “Citizens often feel disconnected from their governments; by us suggesting … how they might participate in government, they become more engaged in both their governance and our content.”

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