The Listening & Sustainability Lab

In the American Press Institute’s Listening & Sustainability Lab, in partnership with the Borealis REJ Fund, I had the privilege of guiding four newsrooms through a crucial process: deeply understanding their audiences through listening. Audience interviews become data that help inform how a newsroom might build products and services that resonate and meet audience needs with a component of revenue.

A Step-by-Step Approach to Community Listening

Engaging with your audience requires a thoughtful, collaborative approach. Here’s a breakdown of the process we used:

Segment Selection (Impact/Effort Matrix): We helped newsrooms confidently choose an audience segment using the impact/effort matrix. This tool visualizes the feasibility and potential impact of engaging different segments, focusing on the audience’s perspective. (For those new to this, we can also create a business-focused matrix to assess impact on the bottom line).

Empathy Mapping: We used an Empathy Map Canvas (from gamestorming.com, imported into Miro) to visualize the thoughts, feelings, needs, and challenges of the chosen segment on virtual stickies. This process helps teams align on shared assumptions and identify gaps in understanding.

Outreach and Interview Planning: We developed and launched targeted outreach plans, inviting the chosen audience segment to participate in video-recorded interviews. We provided templates and guided newsrooms through crafting compelling invitations and leveraging partnerships.

Conducting and Analyzing Interviews: We conducted structured video interviews and analyzed the tagged transcriptions, synthesizing the data into actionable insights for each newsroom.

To illustrate this process, let’s look at The Atlanta Voice.

Choosing a segment

The Atlanta Voice initially considered several segments, including Atlanta’s Black-owned business community, the housing insecure, the LGBTQ+ community, and faith-based audiences. Using the impact/effort matrix, we explored which segments they were already engaging with and which held the most potential for audience impact. This helped them focus their efforts on their chosen segment: Atlanta Black-owned businesses.

Empathy Mapping

We used the empathy mapping process to understand the Black-owned business community’s perspectives. Visualizing user attitudes and behaviors in an empathy map helps teams align around shared ideas about the experiences of their audience segment. The mapping process may also uncover gaps in how our teams perceive and understand their chosen segment.

By exploring ideas and assumptions about what a users say, think, do and feel, and noting thoughts on stickies, it allowed The Atlanta Voice to imagine the world through the eyes of their segment as a way to empathize with them. The process helps teams surface and develop a shared understanding about their segment’s challenges, and acts as a natural segue into idea generation around serving their segment in meaningful ways.

Interview Planning and Outreach

The interview plan and outreach phase began with a strategic planning process, emphasizing targeted questioning to maximize interview participation. Newsrooms were guided to consider where they could physically and virtually connect with their target audiences, as well as identify potential partners who could facilitate these connections. Localized outreach materials were developed, adapting provided templates to the specific community context. These materials included compelling invitations for audience members to participate in interviews, and resources for potential partners to use in promoting the interviews. A crucial component was the use of customized sign-up forms, designed to gather specific data about potential interviewees, including demographics, interests, and contact information.

Following qualification, the focus shifted to scheduling one-hour interviews. To incentivize participation and show appreciation, a $50 gift card, provided by the American Press Institute, was offered. This incentive aimed to overcome potential barriers and encourage engagement.

Interview and Insights

We collected 73 responses, qualified 36 respondents, interviewed 18, but only 15 of our interviews met all the required conditions for consistent interview analysis including having their camera-on, maintaining a stable connection, minimal background noise, and completing the entire interview.

The audience was a rich tapestry of age groups, genders, business expertise, and industry sectors. Our primary objective was to facilitate an atmosphere conducive to open expression. This required maintaining neutrality but also a concerted effort to prompt participants to delve deeper into their ideas and viewpoints.

Interviews were transcribed and tagged using a simple “Rose, Thorn, Bud” system, along with tags for information-seeking behaviors and sources. We took the themes that emerged from our tags, and presented key insights to The Atlanta Voice, including:

• Shared challenges faced by new small business owners.
• A willingness to pay for training and resources.
• Frustration with negative stereotypes in media.

Presenting interview clips organized by tag helped the newsroom connect with the “why” behind their audience’s needs. The process also allowed the newsroom to check its own assumptions about their audience, their needs, and how they view the world around them. This process helps newsrooms generate stronger ideas for aligning with the needs of their segment.

From Insights to Products

My previous collaboration with The Atlanta Voice resulted in a product development contract, though not without its challenges. This experience highlighted a prevalent issue within legacy newsrooms, especially small to mid-sized publishers: the lack of dedicated product teams.

Unlike product-oriented organizations that prioritize audience insights, legacy newsrooms often struggle to effectively integrate this approach. Simply presenting insights is insufficient for these newsrooms. Direct participation in interviews, however, fosters a deep, shared understanding across the team, lending greater weight to interview findings. Consequently, dedicated product teams become essential for translating those insights into tangible products.

For The Atlanta Voice, I initiated the branding of a Black-owned business directory, a newsletter, and events, demonstrating one potential iteration of a comprehensive product suite derived from interview insights.