Friday 2nd December: Straight from the LION's mouth: local news lessons

December 02, 2022

Welcome to Friday! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Chris.

We mentioned LION in our recent Media Moments '22 launch event (if only because I believe it's a backronym) - but I wish we'd seen this before we went live. There are some fascinating insights in here about the shared challenges across a wide range of news businesses. While it focuses on the local news organisations in particular, I'd bet that many of them feel at least somewhat familiar to all news businesses:

For example! “I heard a lot of ‘I think’ or ‘I believe,’ and some of the founders had invested an incredible amount of money and time without checking any of their assumptions or evaluating them at critical junctures in their business,” said analyst Ariel Zirulnick, senior editor of community engagement for Southern California Public Radio. 

LION suggests, as a potential solution, that audience research is a nice antidote to those gut instincts. While the article itself doesn't say it so explicitly, I'd bet that the team meant that audience research is a constant process, rather than a one-off project. Audiences shift; newsroom priorities must shift also.

Stealing an idea from Spotify, WaPo has launched a "look-back" experience but pivoted "when we learned that our readers are more interested in insights that center on their reading 'personality' and content discovery rather than revisiting news from the past." Interesting idea!

In yesterday's newsletter Esther shared this story about how women of colour are effectively invisible in UK and US news organisations. Now, a group of prominent black and Asian Britons have expressed concern at potential impact on shows aimed at BAME audiences. Basically, as ever - minority groups get the short end of the stick.

Now this is a mystery. It seems like the original headline for this story read that the news media bargaining code was a success - but that isn't necessarily reflected in the story. Instead that conclusion gradually get sanded down over the course of the story reaching a nadir when it becomes clear that a lot of those payments aren't actually going to support journalism at all.

This week's podcast:

For our final episode of this deep-dive season, we're joined by Internews CEO Meera Selva to look at how climate coverage is coming to the forefront of publisher strategies, and how journalists are evolving the way they communicate climate issues with audiences.

It's alive! Check out this year's Media Moments 2022 report. It's free! And you can hear the audio of our live launch event this coming Monday.