Public Media Innovation
PMI Program Updates
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Testing a New Model of Hyperlocal News and Citizen Journalism
KAXE embarked on one of the most ambitious—and, to our eye, visionary— efforts in the PMI series. Stimulated by discussions taking place within the "new journalism" group, Media Giraffe, they began to imagine the future of community media as "a web operation that owned a radio station."
To test that vision, they began the development of Northern Community Internet, which would provide hyper-local news content to more than a dozen community in northern Minnesota. The Internet service was supported by administration and production at KAXE, but in many ways it was branded as an independent media operation, providing basic local services including news, blogs, classifieds and display ads.
The sales staff at KAXE was asked to support the project by multi-media packages that would include radio and web; the organizers also aimed at develop a type of user gift/membership program that was specifically tied to the development of local story ideas.
After a year of work, they have made modest progress, below their expectations, especially in terms of financial gains.
Nonetheless, they ended the initial phase of the project determined to continue. Here are the Conclusions and Lessons Learned and Next Steps:
Conclusions
- A full test would require a much larger investment over a longer period of time. Six month time frame of this test was not long enough to build the audience and credibility needed to attract large amounts of financial support.
- The results were sufficiently encouraging. We believe that this model could be self-sustaining. We may need to choose a different strategy—focusing on fewer communities.
- There is interest on the part of the journalists in keeping the project going, but we don't have resources to maintain the relationships.
Lessons Learned
- You have to design the site to display on fresh content.
Its not enough to have fresh content, you have to design the site to reflect that.
- Journalism is one element of a community site. You need other content and activity. Note: 10% of the visitors went deeper into the community supported journalism section.
- It takes more than six months to establish a readership/reputation for a community web site.
We never found “the story” to establish a site as a go-to news and information destination.
- "Support Us” links did not generate contributors. Actual donors had some other, more personal connection/pitch.
We tried both large display buttons and included specific appeal at the end of each story.
- Include underwriting staff in the planning. Why? When underwriting staff joined the process, it was apparent that we couldn't pitch just the “idea” of the web site.
- Social media promotion is important.
Stories that got the most readers were the ones that went “viral” in a small way with links on Facebook and passed on through links in email.
- Many professional writers are not used to writing for the web.
In particular: If you want to include links to relevant resources in stories, you need to explicitly require, plan for it or train the writers to include it.
- We had difficulty in translating some of the print stories to interesting radio. Most of the radio stories were interviews with the editor about the stories on the website.
Follow-up
- We are considering creating a local news bureau that would share coverage of local stories with a variety of media.
- We have started producing grants that could support this effort, including the community journalism effort.
SLIDES FROM MARY'S WEBINAR:
Slides from Northern Community Interent ppt
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