The City, New York: A case study in hyperlocal, hybrid digital engagement
Now just over six years old, The City is aimed at New York’s underserved neighbourhoods – of which there are many.
“There are huge swathes of the city that are home to millions of people that are not reflected in journalism at all,” explained Executive Director Nic Dawes.
The City’s solution is to take its “pretty rigorous” investigative reporting directly to the community most affected, and deliver impactful information upfront, for further engagement.
The concept, called the Open Newsroom, is an interaction session (live, mostly – but also virtual) kickstarted with a “highly targeted” direct marketing invitation in the form of a QR-coded postcard.
That The City is relevant, and meeting a need, is reflected in the responses to this hybrid engagement technique, which has yielded manifold benefits:
1) effectively ups engagement
2) boosts brand awareness
3) increasesreportingacumen(anddeliversevergreen stories)
4) activatesrelationaltrustwithpartneringorganisa- tions; and
5) stimulates additional revenue
‘There’s no question that our ability to stand up as a new organisation in a crowded and contested market, in a deeply complicated city, would not have taken place to the effect that it has had we not started designing our coverage, designing our identity and relating to our readers in a way that not only treats the communities we serve as important, but treats the community that we build around our work as effectively.’ – Nic Dawes
Perhaps even more telling, is that the direct marketing method yields greater returns than paid acquisition on social media.
“We get about a seven to eight times better CTR (click-through response) on these postcards than we do from the classically high-performing paid acquisition through Meta,” Dawes said.
“They’re fundamental to our ability to rely less on search and to get ahead of the problem of search summaries that are intermediating us out of the picture.”
Reinforcing trust with transparency
Connecting with readers this way not only encourages further and ongoing engagement, it helps build trust. Reader feedback is also boosting The City’s reportage. “Their propensity to engage with us goes up significant- ly, and frankly, it results in us doing much better work because a lot of the questions we get are ones that we wouldn’t have expected.”
The City’s transparent response to this – republishing its findings and showing where and how it was based on that feedback – also had a reinforcing effect, added Dawes.
“People really love it. We get consistently strong evergreen performance from the stories that come out of open newsroom style conversations, both digital and in-person, and we’re able to refresh those stories and keep them alive – because as the story evolves, the questions evolve and they keep coming in and keep coming back.”
The proof it works lies in the fact that: “These stories are consistently in the top half of our monthly stories for con- version to newsletter subscriptions, which tells us clearly that they build the kind of trusted relationship that will enable people to hand over a newsletter and an email address,” Dawes said.
The Open Newsroom: Collaborative power, amplified
The Open Newsroom is a live event initiative – held at local libraries or community centres – that also calls for collaboration with local community organisations “that can come with some of the same anxieties as working with creatives,” he said.
The benefits of collaborating outweigh this though, as they stretch beyond audience development, into revenue building.
“It not only enables us to be more responsive, more trusted and more relevant, but also to build direct, 1 to 1 relationships with our audiences and communities that can provide a degree of resilience against Google zero and other forms of AI-related disruption,” Dawes affirmed.
“It also empowers you with proxies in the community to enable you to use the relational trust that those organisations have, and that you might lack – much in the same way that creators have relational trust, and that lets you use the power of organising to build the conversation.
“All of this brings with it a lot of opportunities for building our email list and for revenue opportunities, whether those are in growing our reader contributions or in the form of sponsorships, small and large,” Dawes said.
He drove this point home by referencing an upcoming community session on the preservation of general wealth in black neighbourhoods, which garnered enough sponsorship from a major bank to “cover the cost of this reporter pretty much for a year.”
“So there are real commercial opportunities along with list building and trust building opportunities in this space.”
About the World News Media Congress Playbook
This case study was first publshed in WAN-IFRA’s new playbook, 7 priorities where publishers must excel, which is based on the major takeaways from our World News Media Congress in Krakow.
The playbook is freely available to WAN-IFRA Members via our Knowledge Hub.
Non-members who were Congress attendees can receive the report via an email request to: customerservice@wan-ifra.org
