Unexpected Allies: How marketing and community engaged journalists can and should collaborate

Credit: Kateleigh Drumm, America Amplified

When Adam Serrano joined KCRW in Los Angeles after a career as marketing director at a sports team, he was surprised to see how separated the news and marketing teams were.

“Sports reporting is all about readership and engagement and developing a following and a buzz and getting people interested in your content,” he said. “Here, everything is a passion project: ‘I want to tell this story – I don’t know who it is for and if it doesn’t do well, it doesn’t matter.’”  

Traditionally – and for good reason – public media journalists have kept their distance from the development and fundraising departments. That “firewall” is an unbreachable barrier that separates journalists from sources of funding and protects the journalism from any hint of bias in favor of funders. It is an important foundation for adhering to the key editorial principles of public media journalism, as codified by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  

Yet there is a case to be made that in this day and age, all journalists can and should work more closely with marketing departments because, fundamentally, their goals are the same: get the stories and information out to as broad an audience as possible. And, as we continue to bring a greater community focus into public media journalism, it is important to re-define how marketing can help journalism, and journalism can help marketing. 

In 2018 the Columbia Journalism Review published a report entitled, “A guide to audience revenue and engagement.” The ideology of traditional journalism, the report said, included a powerful sense of who was “in” and who was “out” – professional journalists are in, while others, such as sources, the audience, and other departments at the journalism organization, are out. The attitude of “readers/viewers/listeners are not my problem — call the marketing department,” opined the writers, is one that badly needs to be modernized.

Many marketers in public media agree. Serrano is KCRW’s Growth Marketing Director. “We’re here for the same common goal,” he told me, talking about marketing and news. “That common goal is about the importance of storytelling…The two entities cannot be working independently of each other, afraid to talk… Bridging that gap is how you save public media.”

Brooke Bumgardner of KLCC in Eugene, Oregon, agrees and takes it one step further: “I see significant challenges [ahead] for public media and I think community engagement is the answer.” As director of membership and outreach, Bumgardner says public media needs to see the value of hosting community engagement events to provide connection for new audiences. The “die-hard” public radio people are not the people who are going to be the audience in 30 years; that audience is full of people who are busy – busy being parents, busy living their lives. “But they are seeking connection,” asserts Bumgardner, and marketing can play a role in helping community-engaged journalists provide that connection. 

Increasingly, our outreach to new and old audiences is via our digital offerings. That is a whole new ballgame when it comes to marketing and distribution. “We need to have an audience strategy in place that supports our content team and digital membership,” says Celeste LeCompte, former chief audience officer for Chicago Public Media. Marketing, audience insights, data and analytics all have to work together to provide better service to the digital audience. 

Marketing departments play different roles at different news organizations. Some run all of the social media accounts with the goal of increasing brand awareness, sponsorships and underwriting. Others are more focused on new audiences and increasing membership numbers. But each of these goals mirror the ones at the heart of community engagement journalism:  building trust in new communities, increasing awareness of the station and newsroom, using social media to reach new audiences. 

As Serrano puts it, if marketing and news exist in silos, “It means you’re creating journalism that no one can see, or you’re making billboards for a public that doesn’t care.”

The key thing is figuring out how marketing/fundraising/development can work with a community-engaged newsroom in a way that benefits both groups while at the same time adhering to basic journalistic ethics and principles. 

Some suggestions:

• Bring marketing in at the beginning and at the end of a news project. “We are out in the community and we can get questions from the community,” says Bumgardner. After content is created, then the marketing team can go back and share it with the community. Serrano concurs, saying that if marketing is brought in at the beginning it can “set everyone up for success.”  

• Communicate and be transparent about mission. Marketing and development teams are often communicating with the public about the mission of the organization and the value it brings to the community. Ensure that that “mission” is reflected in the coverage and is responsive to what community members are saying they need from the news organization.

• Be open to new platforms. Bring in marketing to help experiment with new ways to tell stories and new platforms to reach new demographics. “There’s a lot of talk about the website, and how we build assets for our website. That’s wasting our time,” Serrano says. “I’m not saying we’re throwing it away, but [actually] we’re throwing it away… As a marketer I look at a story and I’m saying, ’Here's how we can re-package it for the times.’”  

• When it comes to events, don’t reinvent the wheel. A small community engagement event or listening session with 10 people is not all that different from a “news and brews” or trivia night event with 100 people. Have the workflows and templates in place such as a brand style guide, graphics, how to’s on creating an Eventbrite invitation. The marketing team can help create those assets and then, after the event, get the word out about the event and convey its impact to the public and donors.

• Consider engagement a core journalistic activity: If a reporter is asked to attend an event or sit on a panel, don’t think of it as something that takes the reporter away from their core activity of reporting the news. Community engagement should be considered a core activity for every member of the newsroom. 

• Let marketing help distribute the stories on social. Marketing and development teams often have the skills needed to maximize social media impact and to improve SEO in headlines. Collaborate to extend reach and grow new audiences!

The work of public media journalists remains independent from those whose job it is to raise money and build audience. Yet, especially as news organizations become more community-centered in their coverage and mission, these two departments must learn to collaborate, communicate and build off each others’ strengths and skills.