Looking Past the Pandemic, Journalism Funders Focus on Retention of New Readers
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Journalists COVER A COVID-19 RESPONSE BRIEFING BY NEW YORK GOV. ANDREW CUOMO IN MAY. lev radin/SHUTTERSTOCK
Over the past eight months, local nonprofit outlets have amassed ever-growing audiences composed of new readers and subscribers in need of the latest information about an ever-changing health crisis. These outlets now find themselves at an inflection point. How can they retain these readers throughout the winter and beyond?
Funders like the Knight Foundation, the Lenfest Institute and Facebook were looking into reader retention before the pandemic struck and have been rolling out findings across the spring and summer. They’ve concluded that outlets should compel new subscribers to sign up for newsletters, empirically analyze retention rates, fine-tune the billing process, roll out premium content, and host virtual events.
Researchers have been tackling this challenge, as well. In early October, University of Oregon journalism professor Damian Radcliffe released “The Publisher’s Guide to Navigating COVID-19,” arguing that outlets should dial back pandemic coverage and offer a broad mix that will get non-COVID-related content in front of audiences.
Attract, Retain, and Convert
Funders understood early on that the pandemic presented nonprofit outlets with an opportunity to attract new readers, retain them and—ideally—convert them into donors.
“If anything good comes out of this calamity,” Steve Waldman, president and co-founder of Report for America, told me in April, “it might be the realization by the philanthropy world that civically important local journalism has to be partly a philanthropic function. Community journalism won’t survive without community support.”
Outlets were able to engage new audiences by providing discount subscriptions, lowering paywalls and simply reporting on local COVID-related news. Many readers then expressed their gratitude in the form of financial support. In May, American Journalism Project CEO Sarabeth Berman told me she was seeing an “increase in small-dollar gifts because readers feel their value so viscerally these days.”
Berman qualified her optimistic observation with a crucial caveat: “It’s hard to know what the terrain will be like over the long term,” she said, especially if readers’ appreciation of local news starts to wane when the crisis subsides and the economy plunges into a recession.
She wasn’t alone. From day one, funders realized the challenge would be keeping these listeners engaged throughout the pandemic and into the indeterminate future. As Jennifer Preston, the Knight Foundation’s vice president for journalism told me, “funders need to pay attention to how people are using technology and media differently during this crisis, and especially how news organizations… are innovating to reach traditionally underserved audiences.”
Best Practices in Audience Retention
One funder that’s been ahead of the curve in its focus on audience retention is the corporation that’s partially responsible for journalism’s pre-pandemic troubles.
Facebook launched the Retention Accelerator Program in 2018 to help local newsrooms optimize their subscription and membership models. Last year, it committed over $20 million to continue the program in the U.S. and expand the model globally.
The Lenfest Institute administers the program grants and shares lessons from the program. In June, Facebook Journalism Project Program Manager David Grant took to the institute’s blog to convey some key findings gleaned from a cohort of 16 participating outlets like the Los Angeles Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Lenfest-owned Philadelphia Inquirer.
Grant cited three key takeaways to help other outlets—for-profit or otherwise—retain readers: Immediately drive habitation among new subscribers, take a data-based approach to understanding why retention rates fluctuate, and fix billing problems that can drive up subscriber cancellation rates.
As far as the first strategy is concerned, Grant writes that publishers successfully retained new subscribers by incentivizing them to read newsletters, explaining and reinforcing subscription benefits, and setting up “triggers” that activate when a subscriber loses interest.
Add it all up, and the cohort’s participants generated more than $3.9 million in “lifetime value” from more than 12,000 retained subscribers during 2019 and the early days of the pandemic. (Facebook updates its audience retention findings on its Retention Accelerator Program webpage.)
The Lenfest Institute’s findings came a month after the Knight Foundation published a piece by MediaShift.org founder and executive director Mark Glaser encouraging outlets to offer new forms of paid premium content that engage new readers while generating revenue.
Glaser also looked at outlets that have successfully rolled out sponsored videos, exclusive advertiser content and virtual events to attract and retain consumers. “At this moment when people need local news literally more than ever, designing a project that brings your audience into the work you do will help cement the bond between your outlet and your readers,” Oriana Leckert, senior journalism outreach lead for Kickstarter, told Glaser.
Combatting “COVID-Fatigue”
The public’s desire for trusted local news intensified as the spring turned into summer. In June, the 2020 INN Index found that 62% of the Institute for Nonprofit News’ 250 outlets focus on local and state reporting. “It is clear that local reporting is a growth area,” wrote the index’s Michele McLellan and Jesse Holcomb. “More than one-third of the outlets are local, up from one-fourth three years ago.”
The index also found that 33% of local news outlets’ revenue comes from foundation grants, down from 43% in the 2019 index; 40% comes from individual giving, and around 25% comes from earned revenue.
All of which brings us back to Radcliffe’s study on how newsrooms are retaining audiences they’ve built from COVID-19 coverage.
Speaking to Poynter’s Kristen Hare, Radcliffe was struck by the “continued subscription bump that many news organizations and media outlets have seen during the pandemic.” Conventional wisdom suggests subscriptions should drop, given ongoing economic uncertainty, but the exact opposite has occurred. Radcliffe attributes this trend to outlets’ generous introductory subscription offers and other incentives. As a result, “the challenge moving forward will be to reduce churn and retain as much of that audience as possible,” he wrote.
Outlets seeking to minimize churn should “look at the way that newsletters, podcasts and your website can point people to non-COVID content,” Radcliffe advised. “The initial pandemic traffic bump appears to have been relatively short-lived. And the longer the pandemic continues, the more we’re going to see COVID-fatigue among audiences.”
Radcliffe also found that outlets have become more confident in “making the ask” to get audiences to pay for content. “Hopefully, that’s a legacy of the pandemic that will continue: News and media organizations will feel more comfortable explaining why audience support is needed, and in turn, audiences recognize this need and feel that their needs are also being catered for.”
