How to audit your newsroom for audience listening

Editor’s note: we’re publishing the first instalment in the upcoming series of columns by Morten Ro examining how newsrooms can listen to their audiences better. You can read the article below or listen to the audio version narrated by the author.

The call for deeper audience listening has become a novel classic at media conferences and movements to improve journalism. Especially when discussing crises related to decreasing trust, hostility on social media and news fatigue. 

It’s regarded as a crucial key to unlocking the ears of Gen Z and everyone else who grew up with social media. It addresses the core of assertive communication: “If I don’t feel heard, I’ll stop listening and go somewhere else”.

Yet, my experience is that most media organisations believe they already have the skills, tools and operations to listen to the audience. And if they acknowledge that they could do better, the returning question is: How?

Drawing on my history of advising newsrooms and designing engagement strategies, I will share my learnings and operational tips on how to screen your organisation for actual listening capabilities – and how to design for more and better. It comes with the eternal fact that none of us have the privilege to define ourselves as great listeners. We need to do quality checks with others consistently. 

When auditing for audience listening practices in newsrooms, I’ve often found myself questioning some repeated beliefs about what listening means. For clarity (and anonymity) I’ve distilled these beliefs into one fictional newsroom that believed they were listening. We’ll call it The Daily. The name is entirely made up and holds no references, but the learnings are based on true stories. It could be a newsroom near you. 

In this piece of fiction, we’ll meet some key newsroom characters. They are great people, but also invented personas who embody some repeated misconceptions in the industry. 

So, what does audience listening mean?

Before we move into fiction, I’d like to note that the call for deeper audience listening makes perfect sense to most people, but what it actually entails in a newsroom is hard to specify. This is what we’ll try to fix together with our generously transparent personas. 

So let’s begin with the obvious first question: What does audience listening actually mean?

Let me offer my definition:

Audience listening is when your audience feel heard in your editorial decisions

Makes sense, right? Maybe even obvious?

That’s good. So please dwell a bit on this definition and consider whether you find this adequate enough for a deep dive – and whether this answers the many times you’ve heard a call for deeper audience listening at the conferences of your choice. 

Accepted?

If not, I’m eager to hear yours as my next columns build on this.
If yes: Great! So, let’s turn to The Daily to audit for this. We’ll begin with breaking down audience-directed efforts that I often hear as somewhat misconceived listening practices. Turns out, our fictional newsroom at The Daily holds all of these (what are the odds!).

The most important distinction you need to make here is on roles. What roles do the listeners in your organisation hold and what roles do the people you listen to hold in the particular moment. And in that process, please keep in mind that what we’re looking for is editorial decisions making audience members feel heard.

Break-down 1: Customer listening is different

Listening happens in many places in a modern organisation – and many of them have distinct disciplines attached to them. The Daily had actually prioritised deeper listening for quite a while. The CEO, Mario, had strengthened a lot of customer-centric efforts in the organisation, such as: 

• Enhancing focus group tests at the analytics department.
• Improving retention efforts at customer service.
• Scaling up business and satisfaction surveys.
• Gathering user-centric feedback at the tech department.
• Mario doing public Q&As on strategic initiatives.

Mario was very proud of The Daily spearheading a customer centric approach. What he had yet to realise, was that very little of this was actual audience listening. Simply because of the roles: people weren’t interacting with the journalism and didn’t talk to a journalist. It was mostly business strategy. Which is critical too and may overlap in insights. 

As an industry we need to realise that audience listening is fundamentally different from customer listening. This was a wow-moment for Mario. 

Break-down 2: Dashboards don’t listen

We’ve all benefited tremendously from the explosion of performance metrics driven by cookies, algorithms and AI. Real-time analysis of consumption is available to every newsroom that decently defines itself as data driven. It has redefined our entire way of working and gaining insights about how the audience consumes and interacts with our journalism.  

At The Daily, editor-in-chief Vanessa, had been at the forefront of implementing this through the past years – even developing custom scores from a variety of reading and conversion metrics. 

What Vanessa was missing was the crucial fact that dashboards don’t listen. They extract and analyse behaviour, not expressed thoughts and needs. 

As much as we’re able to gain insights from data, we often forget the simple fact that data is transactional and not relational. Nobody feels heard. It basically isn’t listening. 

Vanessa realised that the dashboard introduced a new awareness of the audience, but that listening required an actual dialogue that cookies don’t provide. 

Break-down 3: Opinion and comments are hard listening posts

Even while digitalising, Vanessa had insisted on keeping the good old opinion pages with edited pieces from the public. Because that’s an open mic for people being heard, as she recalled.

Well, yes. This is public debate as we know it from the print-first days. But it’s not audience listening, simply because their capacity is not as an audience member at that moment. They’re debaters and very rarely see any journalism responding to it. Vanessa had never thought about it that way.

But that’s where we have comments and social media, having revolutionised distribution and dialogue. People comment on our actual journalism. And yes, people certainly are audience members when responding and we might have a strong effort in place to catch up and be present in the comments. At The Daily, too. But here it’s all about our role as journalists in that effort.

The Daily’s moderating team had a very classic role: to keep the tone on track, quiet outbursts and keep the conversation going to gain reach. The team lead, Claire, was a skilled moderator – especially from her empathetic skills to make commenters feel heard. And sometimes she was even able to get posts into articles. 

Yet, Claire and her team were consistently overwhelmed with quieting commenters who acted like they were shouting at a wall and were angry about not getting a reply – even though they did respond. No matter how hard the moderating team worked, it felt like people didn’t listen – and didn’t feel heard.

Claire couldn’t solve these frustrations – and her team had a long wishlist for changes in algorithms at the platforms to improve public dialogue. Which they knew would never happen. But what Claire needed to do was making Vanessa and Mario aware of the organisational blockers for the audience to feel truly heard. They needed a conversation with these questions:

• Is our newsroom actually dedicated to bringing audience inputs up in the main editorial meetings? 
• Do our moderators have time, tools and seniority to actually do this? 
• Do we invite for actionable audience inputs rather than just debates, likes and shares?
• Is the journalist who wrote the piece present in the comments and sometimes builds their followup work on top of commenters’ inputs?

The point here is that in most newsrooms, opinion and commenting mostly happen on the side of the actual journalism. Often handled on a distance from investigations and decisions (culturally, hierarchically, often physically, too). It’s a side dish to the main course and the chef has outsourced it to juniors. 

Which makes sense, because opinions and moderation is hard and messy work – and it’s a heavy lift to filter for quality, focus and actionability. Unless this is your main priority – above reach and likes. 

Your listening skills depend on your ability to advance these inputs to actual decisions that respond to them.

Break-down 4: The inbox doesn’t equal insights 

Moving on to an obvious tool for insights and listening: The mail inboxes we offer to our audience. This is a crucial channel for both ordinary and extraordinary stakeholders to be heard by editorial decision-makers. Chances are that a majority of suggestions, ideas, perspectives and probably your best real life cases connected through good old email. 

And with that richness of inputs comes a problem to an audience listening effort: Your inboxes are a mess! Or to be more subtle: A cacophony of voices and roles.  

As in any other newsroom, planning editor at The Daily, George, easily filtered professional voices from non-professional ones. As a routined journalist, he was skilled at screening for invites, pundits, stakeholders, commenters, supporters and disruptors who were mostly professional interventions to his work. And he instinctively listened differently when a non-professional and low-power individual shared something that originated from an honest real-life experience and need. He knew that their best and most unique stories and cases originated from this. And that this deep listening was a crucial – and meaningful – part of his job that paid off tenfold when they hit journalistic gold.

But this is where roles get really important to distinguish. Because most journalistic gold does not come from people acting as audience members, but as someone with a personal interest in coverage. No matter how legitimate and honest, their reason for connecting is more than just a mere audience member. George knew this, but had never thought about the need for that distinction

These emails often provided other types of journalistic items such as tips, research and suggested sources on an existing story or agenda – and this truly is material for listening to people in the role of audience. What the team needed to ask themselves honestly, was: 

• How much of this do we have time to read and decide upon while producing?
• Do we respond?
• Do we credit the audience members who contributed to our decisions? 

George was exhausted and disillusioned through this meeting and eventually snarled at Vanessa: “Well, find an AI bot to do that, ‘cause I’ve got important stuff to do!”. Deep down he knew that a human reply would actually make the difference on whether these audience members would write again another time. 

And then there’s the interesting, but not very actionable emails that land in the inbox: Ordinary people sharing a wondering, question, perspective, encouragement or information need. 

These emails – George knew this – often drowned in urgent and actionable counterparts. Because, well, the wheels kept turning. In a slow or inspirational moment he might go through these and make a mental note. But the writer never got more than an auto-reply and any eventual ideas initiated by them were not credited to them. At the end of the day, they weren’t heard. 

You probably know where I’m going here. These last chunks of emails might be packed with listening gold. Providing clear insights of what individual audience members think deeply about – they’re just hard to analyse, regard as representative and act upon.

Unless we give it structure and attention. This took a while at The Daily, but after organising these emails with help from the guys at tech and analytics, George’s list of longterm plans exploded with solid inputs for rainy days. 

Break-down 5: Audience engagement formats have potential

This is where things start to get interesting from an audience-centric point of view. Formats such as live chats, events and Q&As have gained ground through the past decade and offer the kind of direct conversation that defines true audience engagement. The newsroom gets a chance to interact with engaged audience members of real flesh and blood in a journalistic setting. And audiences are offered various ways to share their perspective.  

When I met The Daily, they were getting up to speed with these formats. Anne, who was in charge, was particularly proud of their expert Q&As who engaged audiences by getting their questions answered by invited subject matter experts. She was a bit disappointed as our listening audit filtered these out and she had to realise it was more of a facilitation than actual listening. Yet it was clear that her formats holded the strategy and culture for deep listening to happen. So we spent our time finding ways to collect and learn from the inputs they were given while engaging. 

In order for this work to get powerful, we got creative around some wonderings:

• How might we make these formats not just end products, but bespoke stepping stones for our next stories?
• How might we offer a window into considerations that have not yet been decided upon?
• How can we collect inputs systematically? 
• How can we improve our learnings, discussions and decisions from the rich inputs we get?  

As with opinion and social media, it’s crucial for the quality of your listening that the audience engagement efforts are not organised as a side dish to your classic journalism, but as a continuity to what you present as the main dish. If the audience are to be truly heard, you want to show how your events don’t happen in an isolated space. Concretely.

As a creative who gets energy from the perspective of all sorts of people, Anne loved this exercise. And slowly, but forcefully, she turned the engagement efforts from side-gig that the newsroom rarely had time for, to a powerhouse of fresh insights that the journalists wouldn’t miss in the world. 

Along with Claire and George, Anne gradually became ambassadors for fresh insights and deep knowledge about where they’re audience were at. Given the ressources by Vanessa and Mario, they were able to structure their respective listening posts for the newsroom never to run out of original perspectives. 

Listening from scratch

As we leave The Daily’s realisations about the power of structured listening, they’re in the midst of eliminating most of their copy-paste stories from news wires and competitors. They’ve found it more meaningful to build capacity for better listening and original stories that are founded in realised audience needs. 

And not just more meaningful, but better for the business. Because their pivot to audience-first practices is directly addressing the crucial needs to improve loyalty, engagement and trust. This makes retention a completely different game that builds on top of your actual product: Your journalism.  

Please mind that even though The Daily is invented, it’s based on true stories. And transformative ones. 

Every act of practising our listening skills begins with stating the room for improvement. It’s a mindset and a practice that needs to permeate the newsroom culture in order to gain ground for creative solutions and attentive curiosity.

In order to build truly powerful audience listening projects that give you actionable insights, you need to start from scratch with that single ambition: How do we make our audience feel heard in editorial decisions? 

That is a difficult question, but it’s possible to answer. And it requires a design process that is patient and intentional.

In the following columns, I’ll share my learnings about how to approach this process and what it can lead to. As I write, I’m very curious to hear your inputs and perspective on what I’ve missed or could clarify. 

I’ll do my best to listen.

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