Deliver Deeper Customer Value

While the business model for news continues to evolve, many newsrooms believe that deeper and more meaningful relationships with readers will be critical to sustained viability. As reliance on advertising declines, some newsrooms are tethering their financial success to building and sustaining subscription revenue. This requires deep and meaningful engagement: getting to know readers very well and being highly disciplined and methodical about providing high-value reporting that readers will pay for.

Online and offline activities can amplify solutions stories, driving audience interest and creating feedback loops that can inform future coverage and alert you to the impact of your work. Activities can be implemented to collect feedback across the life of a story, from idea generation to post-publication reactions. This approach brings the public into editorial decision-making, making your newsroom more transparent and strengthening your reporting.

For newsrooms that are making institutional shifts towards solutions journalism, the ties between solutions journalism, engagement, and customer value are often explicitly articulated as a strategically interdependent relationship. (For example, read how Executive Editor Bro Krift describes the desired outcomes of the Montgomery Advertiser’s shift towards solutions journalism in this op-ed, and in our Editor’s Guide.) Some of our partners are finding success in a business model in which reporters cultivate deep and meaningful relationships with readers as they do deep-dive, solutions reporting.