Digital Tools to Revive and Inspire the Journalism Industry

Empowering Independent Newsrooms Digitally

We analyzed the target audience of local and independent publishers.

Specifically, we found that newsrooms with fewer than 20 journalists on staff needed the most help in these areas:

• Engaging their audiences at social scale
• Benchmarking competitors and identifying learnings from their successes
• Efficiently investing in social platforms, given their small teams
• Reaching, engaging and targeting hard-to-reach readers
• Leveraging analytics to drive page growth

We determined transformation to be a critical success metric for our audience.

The business of journalism—driving increased readership, creating video content, monetizing on social, even building brand loyalty—has become primarily digital. And smaller outlets still don’t know how to effectively adapt.

We partnered with the Facebook Journalism Project team for over a year.

We collaborated to:

1. Architect an immersive central hub, with bold imagery, inventive features and a strong editorial slant
2. Design a site that quickly and clearly communicates the mission of the Facebook Journalism Project while enticing readers to delve deeper into the content
3. Create the digital hub where journalists and publishers can go to learn from others’ successes through engaging and instructional case studies

We created marquee instructional content to attract and compel our target audience.

We developed five case studies that demonstrate the tangible value of the Facebook Journalism Project. Each is focused on a news outlet that once struggled to find footing in digital media, but by leveraging the tools and access the program affords are now held up by industry leaders (i.e. the New York Times, The Pulitzer Foundation, The Lenfest Institute etc.) as major success stories.

We created elegant long-form content intended for deep-dive education.

We developed three playbooks, designed as in-depth editorial content, that journalists and publishers can study to gain expertise in key areas: monetization, election coverage, and audience growth.

We created highly-stylized modules for quick, factual reference.

We designed an infographic template intended for modular use across the platform to recap key learnings in both case studies and playbooks. This work allows our target demographic to quickly identify facts and instructions that are fundamental to both the platform and their growth.

Deep Dive into Facebook Launch

The site had a soft launch in April 2019, and the response has been stellar. The client has been using it primarily as a tool to successfully drive increased registration for their on-the-ground training, as well as a tool to rebuild credibility with this audience. A hard launch is planned for 2020 where journalists and news publishers will be introduced to the new case studies, playbooks, and infographic template through increased advertising and communications from both the Facebook Journalism Project directly, as well as from Facebook itself. Thrilled with the work we’ve created, the client asked us to expand our thinking and help brand the Facebook Journalism Project prior to their 2020 hard launch.