What KTOO stopped doing in order to engage more deeply with their audience
KTOO became part of America Amplified in the fall of 2021. The station’s original project was to engage with the local Filipino community in Juneau and statewide, in the build-up to the Philippine presidential election in May of 2022. It was treated as a pilot project. But thanks in part to employee turnover and restructuring, the station is now able to refine those practices and apply them to all of their coverage.
First, KTOO converted their full-time Digital Editor position to an Audience Engagement Editor. This person’s primary responsibilities are to:
Identify and assign stories of interest to KTOO’s audience and the community;
Identify tools and platforms essential to innovation in storytelling, audience and community engagement, and advocate for their deployment;
Lead the engagement strategies for collaborative productions and special projects by members of the news team and other content producers at KTOO;
Measure, monitor and analyze audience engagement data and present findings and best practices.
The station has also added a full-time community engagement fellow who is responsible for hosting monthly listening sessions and other in-person engagement events and creating partnerships between the news team and community organizations.
This two-person engagement team helps the Managing Editor make assignments based on audience needs and helps reporters find new and diverse sources who have been underrepresented in our coverage. They lead the daily editorial meetings to ensure that the reporters are focused on audience needs and not just staying in their reporting bubbles.
Here’s what Managing Editor Jennifer Pemberton said made the biggest difference:
Engagement with follow-up: In order to make space for truly impactful engagement work, we stopped being “ask-holes.” We used to do a lot of what we thought was engagement, which was asking for audience input and feedback and then not doing anything with it. Now, we only do callouts for stories that we intend to follow up on and we follow up with everyone who responds. This was a very small change that has quickly led to more trust from the audience when they chose to share their stories with us.
Changing beats: We’ve also changed the focus of our beats. Juneau is the capital of Alaska, and our newsroom used to be evenly split between statewide affairs reporters and local reporters. But since we started listening more carefully to our audience and community needs, we have adjusted all of our beats to be more in line with what we were hearing – which was an overwhelming call for more local news.
We haven’t moved away from statewide news, but we’ve definitely changed our focus to news that has an impact on people who live right here in Juneau with us. And when we do focus on statewide affairs, it’s to create journalism that holds our lawmakers and power holders directly accountable for decisions that happen here in our community that hosts Alaska’s legislators for several months each year. We produce fewer stories this way, but we’ve noticed that people spend more time with these stories and share them more often than when we repeat headlines from reporting that our audience can get from other outlets.
