This module is about producing original, in-depth, issue-led journalism designed to inform the public debate.

In a previous module about identifying the target audience and its information needs we dealt with the first stage in establishing a strong media business.

This second stage deals with producing content aimed at meeting the needs of that target audience group.

Establishing a differential

To survive in a fiercely competative media world a news organisation must offer something different. There are many demands for the attention of your audience. What you offer has to stand out.

For a broadcaster or publisher with a public service remit the role is to cover the stories that are often ignored by others. This doesn’t mean that your editorial proposition has to be worthy, boring and dull. Just the opposite – these will be stories about the issues that really concern your audience.

These stories will need to be produced in a way that uncovers angles and reveals information that will help your audience better understand the issues that affect them.

Such issue-led journalism is essential for informing the public debate.

It’s the opposite of simply repeating the information handed out in news releases, or reporting about official, stage-managed events.

Those stories have to be covered, too, but the role of the journalist is to dig where others don’t and to shine a light in dark places in order to uncover information that, otherwise, might remain hidden.

It means journalists have to set the editorial agenda rather than be led by an agenda set by others – that is the role of the journalist.

But setting the framework for that to happen is the role of the senior management team. This modules looks at how to do that.

Defining an issue-led journalism strategy

Image by David Brewer released via Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0

Gather your senior management team. Include representatives from editorial, commercial, technical and business development. It will be the same team that helped you identify the target audience in a previous exercise.

In that exercise we looked at the target audience profiles, and tried to imagine the issues that most concerned them. Now we turn to the part of the process where you list those issues.

Wherever this exercise has been carried out, the answers are roughly the same. The issues that most concern the target audience are usually:

• Jobs
• Homes
• Health
• Education
• Crime
• Environment
• Security
• Future
• Technology
• Transport

Your list of 10 issues might be different, but it will probably contain many of the above.

Note that politics and corruption are not listed as main issues, despite being suggested as such almost every time this exercise is carried out. This is because politics and corruption are often common to all issues, rather than being issues or topics in their own right.

Involve your senior editors

So, we have made a start. This list is the beginning of your unique editorial proposition which you will investigate on behalf of your audience.

However, at this stage, it all looks a bit dull. These are just words. We need more. So we move onto the next step.

Gather some of your senior editors and invite them to think of 10 topics for each issue. For example, let’s take health. Topics under the issue of health might include the following:

• Hospital waiting lists
• Abortion
• HIV/Aids
• Fake drugs
• Lack of medicines
• TB
• Malaria
• Health education
• Hospital cleanliness
• Quality of medical staff

Ask the editors to write down at least 10 topics for each of the 10 issues. So, we now have 10 issues, multiplied by 10 topics for each issue, which equals 100 ideas. But these are still words on a list.

Now comes the fun part.

Involve all your producers and reporters

The editors now hand this list to the reporters and ask them to think of at least three story ideas for each topic.

The reporters gather and discuss the ideas, thinking of how to illustrate each issues through examples reflecting the lives of the target audience groups identified earlier.

A reporter might know someone who has had a back-street abortion. They might have heard that hospital waiting lists in their area of the town are lengthy. Perhaps they have heard of someone who has become sick after visiting hospital. Or maybe they could imagine a scenario and then talk to people in the street to see if they know of such an incident and can introduce them to someone who can tell their story.

Let’s take the topic of health education. We might find that the list compiled by the reporters looks something like this:

• Young people unaware of the risks of HIV/Aids
• Stigma preventing people from admitting they are ill
• Illness spread through the poor preparation of food in hospitals

Whatever the story ideas your reporters suggest, at the end of this stage of the exercise you will have three story ideas for each topic.

So you now have 10 issues multiplied by 10 topics multiplied by three story ideas, which equals 300 possible stories.

These stories will be timeless, meaning that they are not related to a particular event or announcement.

They will have a long shelf life, meaning that they will not go out of date quickly.

And, most of all, they will be stories that are unique to your news organisation, and which you are likely to want to return to in the future in order to follow up developments.

You will be producing stories that, had it not been for your news organisation, would never have been told.

This is your unique editorial proposition, which is your market differential.

The Planning Editor

These stories are then managed by the planning editor, who has the responsibility for ensuring that all the story ideas are well planned, produced for multiple devices, and followed up.

S/he will keep a calendar with these stories plotted. Each story will have a follow up date. It might be three months or six months, perhaps even a year. But it is important that each story is revisited to find out what has changed since it was first covered.

Please refer to the training module about forward planning for media organisations in which we look more closely at the role of the planning editor.

So we now have 300 story ideas revisited at least once a year, which equals 600 stories.

This is about 12 original stories a week.

These are stories that your competitors won’t have. They will be forced to follow your lead.

However, by the time they do, you will have published the next set of original stories. They will be forced to follow again.

You will have taken control of the news agenda. This is now the central part of your editorial strategy to provide issue-led journalism that informs the public debate so that your audience can make educated choices.

This is responsible journalism.

And it is clever journalism, too, because, if your audience feels you are covering the issues that matter most to them, they are more likely to trust you and continue using your news services.

This will increase your opportunities for revenue generation.

Monitoring and saving costs

Now you have the list of issues, topics and stories, share it with your sales and marketing team so that they can build campaigns around the content they know you are planning to produce.

The strategy above also saves resources and costs.

You can often cover several well-planned stories in the one trip making sure you get the best value out of your journalists, technical teams and editors.

Becoming a news leader

When I did this with the Serbian broadcaster B92 in Belgrade in 2005, the competition started to ask where they got the news releases from – the competitors were accustomed to having all news delivered via the wires, through news releases, or via organised and stage-managed news conferences.

They found it hard to understand that the stories were produced through the process of journalism forward planning and not as a result of the process of public relations.

Once you have decided to produce issue-led journalism there will be no stopping you. You will be the agenda-setters.

I have carried this exercise out from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe and the results in all cases have been impressive.

The post Establishing a market differential with original journalism first appeared on Media Helping Media.

This module looks at how media organisations need to plan ahead in order to produce original content that not only informs the public debate – by examining the issues that are of most concern to the target audience – but also ensures the most efficient use of resources.

In a previous module which covered ‘establishing a market differential with original content’ we looked at how a media organisation can develop a content strategy aimed at producing more than 10 original stories a week. All the stories would be focused on the needs of a clearly-defined target audience.

Now we look at how those stories should be managed.

First of all, ask yourself this question: Are you in control of your news organisation’s editorial agenda?

You might think you are, but an examination of what prompts or stimulates you to cover news might reveal flaws in your news strategy.

It could be that the majority of the news you cover on any given day is directly or indirectly controlled by others.

A forward planning strategy, based on original, issue-led journalism, can reverse this.

Forward planning is not about the everyday diary events that all are aware of. That is day to day planning.

Forward planning is far more important in terms of setting your media organisation apart from the competition.

It’s fundamental to a converged newsroom strategy delivering content to multiple devices.

Typical sources of news

Let’s look at some typical sources of news:

1. The news wires that you subscribe to
2. Diary events that are in the public domain
3. News conferences called by politicians, businesses, NGOs etc
4. News releases sent by public relations companies
5. Following the stories the competition has produced
6. Dealing with unexpected events
7. Monitoring social media
8. Exploring unique angles to ongoing stories
9. Stories produced by examining data
10. Keeping in touch with contacts
11. Investigative journalism
12. Planned thematic coverage (such as health, environment, crime etc)

The problem is that some media organisations rely on the first six sources.

However, a modern, responsible media organisation, that exists to inform the public debate with thorough, objective, fair and accurate journalism, will spend time investing in the last six sources of news, particularly the final category – planned coverage.

And this is where the planning editor comes in.

Taking control of your news agenda

It’s worth analysing what prompts or stimulates the news decisions in your media organisation. The results might make uncomfortable reading.

It could be that the majority of the news you cover is stimulated by others.

In 2013, senior editors who have worked at three global news organisations were asked about the percentage breakdown for the news sources listed above.

Averaged out between the three interviewees, the answers given revealed the following news source dependencies:

• Wires 37%
• General diary events 10%
• News conferences 6.5%
• News releases 6.5%
• Following the competition 20%
• Unexpected events (breaking news) 9%
• Original journalism 11%

This means that 89% of the news agendas are stimulated, prompted or inspired by others, with only 11% of the news being classed as original.

The challenge for all news organisations, whether they are global, national, regional broadcasters or publishers, is to reverse this by taking control of the news agenda and increasing the amount of original journalism produced.

Allocating resources for forward planning

The first step is to set aside resources for planning.

This doesn’t necessarily mean hiring new staff. It could mean reassigning some staff by taking them away from following the leads of others and, instead, encouraging them to invest their time in producing original, investigative journalism that focuses on the needs of the target audience.

The first position you need to fill is that of the planning editor.

This person can do other tasks in the newsroom and need not be dedicated solely to the task of planning, however their job is to set out what will be covered tomorrow, next week, next month and three months ahead.

If you refer back to the modules about establishing a market differential, you will remember that we discussed how a news organisation can produce 10 original stories a week by introducing a simple content strategy focused on the needs of the target audience.

The planning editor is in charge of this strategy on behalf of the media organisation.

They control the content produced. They attend all news meetings and must have a say in what is covered.

The person in charge of the day’s output – the editor of the day – needs to be able to rely on the planning editor to supply at least one original story a day.

But the planning editor will need resources to produce this content.

Setting up a forward planning team

In the case of a TV station, the planning editor will need at least one reporter, a camera crew, and the use of an editing suite.

This small planning unit might even have an intern attached to the unit who works as a researcher, looks for new angles to stories on social media, and looks after the cross-promotion of the stories produced so that they get maximum exposure on all the news organisation’s outlets.

Prior to the setting up of the planning role, these resources would be dedicated to news on the day, and used to respond to the news agenda set by others (as set out above).

What needs to happen is for the news managers, as a team, to prioritise effort – see our training module in this series entitled “Prioritising production effort with a journalism value matrix”.

They will have agreed to the editorial priorities for serving the target audience with original, in-depth material. Once they have done this, they will find that there are existing resources – currently used covering stories that are not a priority – which can be freed and allocated to the planning editor and his/her team for the creation of content that provides a clear market differential.

Shared planning calendar

A useful tool for the planning editor, and the whole team, is a shared online calendar. You can use any of the free options that are available. Google calendar works fine for this.

The planning editor needs to set up the newsroom planning calendar and plot all the events that have been agreed.

For each event a follow up date needs to be set. It might be three months ahead, or six months.

An automatic reminder can be sent out a week before to remind the team that the story needs following up.

Every editor, producer and reporter should have write access to this calendar. When a story is covered by a reporter, s/he will be expected to enter one of three things in the calendar.

1. a follow up date when the story should be revisited to see what has changed
2. any dates mentioned in the piece for future meetings etc, and
3. new angles that emerged during the story research and production that need to be produced.

This shared, planning calendar is now an essential element of your centralises, command-and-control superdesk (please refer to our module on creating a converged newsroom).

The planning editor is the custodian and curator of this strategic asset. It exists for the purpose of producing original in-depth journalism.

But it has a revenue and a cost saving function, too.

Revenue generation

If the calendar is shared with the sales and marketing team they can plan advertising campaigns around the content being shared.

This advertising strategy must never influence the editorial decisions made, of course, but by simply knowing what thematic coverage is being planned, aimed at which target audience segments, the sales and marketing team will be in a better position to discuss deals with their clients.

Cost savings

And then there is the cost saving of planning ahead.

There will be times where a well-planned story can produce more than one item from one trip.

It might be that the planning editor is covering an issue such as hospital cleanliness. While on that story a reporter might cover two or three angles, such as disposal of hospital waster, infections caused by inadequate inspections and bad hygiene habits, or management corruption or incompetence.

With good planning, interviews, footage, and research can be managed in order to produce three stories from one visit.

These stories can then be offered as a mini series, running on consecutive days or weeks.

They would tie together nicely in an online special section under the category of health.

And they would link together well as related stories.

The planning editor not only helps a news organisation produce a content differential, but s/he also helps introduce efficiencies and revenue-generating opportunities.

It will take about a month before the efforts of the planning team start to filter through; only then will the benefit of prioritising news resources become evident.

As you start to establish a converged/integrated newsroom delivering content to multiple devices, you will find that one of the most important roles is that of the planning editor.

The post Strategic forward planning for media organisations first appeared on Media Helping Media.

As set out in the first module in this series, “Strengthening a media business – the four essential steps”, the first step in setting up a media business is to identify the audience groups you plan to serve in order to achieve your goal.

You need to know about their information needs, their aspirations, their lifestyles, how they consume news, whether they share it or not, and why they rely on you for their news.

You can do this by hiring an expensive market research team, or you can do this yourselves by carrying out local audience surveys and talking to your audience. My preference is the latter.

In my experience this works well, and the exercise can be carried out in less than a day. Here is how.

Involve senior managers

Gather your senior team from editorial, sales & marketing and business development.

• Obtain some existing market data; it’s likely that the local audience segments have already been identified. If not, it’s not difficult to work them out.
• Focus on three or four of your target audience segments and aim to meet most if not all of their information needs.
• Try to imagine one character that best represents each group.
• Download pictures from the internet of people who fit the character profiles you have identified.
• Give these people a name, imagine them as real people; these characters will help you define your content strategy.

Ask the following questions:

• What are their interests and what stories would they read?
• What are their concerns? You need to find the answers they require.
• What stories would they probably not be interested in?
• What is their lifestyle, are they married, in a relationship, single, have they got children?
• Are you catering for their personal and lifestyle interests?
• What are they likely to buy and what are they unlikely to buy? Make sure you have the right adverts in your output.
• How do they consume news? Do they watch TV, listen to radio, access news online, or use smartphones and tablets? Are you publishing on all of these devices?
• Do they use social media to engage with content? If so, what platforms are they using?
• Are you stimulating those conversations and engaging with your audience? If not, why not?

Audience profiles

Once you have finished these profiles, share them with your senior editors and production journalists and reporters so they know who they are creating content for.

Print out the pictures of these character profiles and attach them to the newsroom walls.

Make sure every story is written for these audience groups and uses the language that they understand.

Encourage the journalists to look at the images when they are writing their stories to ensure that every fact presented and every question asked are of value to the target audience groups your media organisation has decided to serve.

Do the same with the sales and marketing team so they know what adverts the audience would be interested in seeing. Advertising throughout all output areas should reflect your users’ interests and aspirations.

Focus groups

Consider setting up focus groups representing the different audience profiles you hope to serve. Invite members of these groups in for snacks and a chat. Talk to them about your output and editorial plans.

Consider inviting representatives to join an audience panel to offer you regular feedback about what worked and what didn’t work.

Try to find out what you did well and where you could have done better.

Ask them what stories helped them and what stories they found uninteresting.

Use this information to continually refresh your unique editorial proposition so that it is always focused on the latest feedback from your audience panel.

The post Identifying the target audience and its information needs first appeared on Media Helping Media.