Digital subscription has replaced advertising as a main revenue stream for most news organizations. To secure broad and deep impact for your journalism, you need to engage your audiences – but how do you actually do it? Glowline is a news production mode designed to strengthen the connection between audience and newsroom, enabling co-creative glow in all phases of the news production process – also aiming to strengthen journalists’ enthusiasm for interacting with their audience.
Clean up the chaos
Map out all points of contact your organization has with its audience today (e.g. mail adresses, face-to-face, by phone, social media etc).
Mapping dialogue
– Work in groups based on newsroom role/function (journalist, editor, market, etc)
– Use pen or post-its to fill in the ways in which you reach out to your audiences (blue arrow) and the ways in which audiences approach the newsroom (green arrow).
– Present the filled in form to the other groups in a plenary session.
– After all groups have presented, discuss what you have come up, if there is anything missing, and group the different kinds of input into separate categories.
Mapping audience contact
– Work in groups based on newsroom role/function (journalist, editor, market, etc)
– Fill in all the ways you can think of that you are currently in contact with various types of audiences.
– This will give a detailed overlook of the current situation in your organization, which provides you with insight into what changes can/need to be made.
Systematize and implement
Use the tools below and/or Six Step process to make productive changes in the ways you interact with the public.
Improving dialogue – from line to loop
– Work in groups based on newsroom role/function (journalist, editor, market, etc)
– Use pen or post-its to fill in what you think can be done to improve the dialogue between newsroom (blue arrows) and audiences (green arrows) so that the interaction takes place more as an interactive loop than lines in and out.
– Share your ideas with the other groups, compare and discuss which ideas that might be implemented and how.
Get creative
Collaborate with colleagues to explore ideas for how to engage your audiences in new ways. Test it!
How do we get people to glow?
– Divide the newsroom into groups mixing newsroom roles/functions.
– Use the simplified idea propeller (download here) on a different relevant theme/story in each group.
– Answer the questions and explore ideas for how audiences might be engaged.
– Remember to stay in the green zone!
– Present your filled in propellers to each other (5 min max).