Audience Engagement Digital Publishing
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What we can learn from the Knoxville News Sentinel’s wakeup call: The Media Roundup

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How Gannett’s Knoxville News Sentinel got a wakeup call and shifted its coverage for Black communities

The Knoxville media market has typically served an audience that is primarily white and affluent, while practically one in four residents is a person of colour. Coverage by major news outlets followed a familiar script: lots of stories about crime, and from a perspective that was almost exclusively institutional: police, prosecutors and judges. Few stories featured Black communities in positive ways.

After a few wake-up calls, the team realised they could no longer emphasise ‘mayhem reporting’. Through a new audience engagement initiative called the Digital Advisory Group, they paired a Facebook group with one-year digital subscription trials to listen to Black voices and earn their trust. A number of other Gannett titles across the country did the same in their local areas.

How Gannett’s Knoxville News Sentinel got a wakeup call and shifted its coverage for Black communities

I know we rag on Facebook a lot (see below) but this is a first-class example of a publisher using it for good to get deeper into the communities they’re supposed to be serving. The DAG itself is not a quick fix. But as a way of reaching into traditionally marginalised groups and beginning to repair relationships, it’s a strong start.

The Athletic co-founders explain why they sold to The New York Times in their first post-deal interview

Let’s play a game: pour yourself a drink. Open this article. Every time Mather and Hansmann deflect a question with, “The New York Times won us over,” drink.

Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem

Most public activity on the platform comes from a tiny, hyperactive group of abusive users. But Facebook relies on them to decide what everyone sees. And if things are this bad in the United States, where Facebook’s moderation efforts are most active, they are likely much worse everywhere else. An excellent (albeit depressing) piece of research from The Atlantic.

America’s top 25 titles have lost 30% of print sales in two years

The country’s top 25 newspapers now have a combined average weekday print run of 3.1m, down from 4.4m in late 2019. The chart halfway down this article shows the particularly brutal effect on the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, both of whom cliff-edged in early 2020. The main reason for this is that both papers lost significant hotel sales, which have yet to recover.


This content originally appeared in The Media Roundup, a daily newsletter from Media Voices. Subscribe here: