Guest: Eric Barnes, The Daily Memphian

What are some of the things to consider when starting a local newspaper? How can you be nonprofit and still operate like a for-profit newspaper? How did you attract subscribers in a competitive market? What went better than you expected and what didn’t go as well? What have you learned about finding the best revenue mix? What should someone thinking about starting a local newspaper know before they get started?

In this episode of News Take, News/Media Alliance President & CEO David Chavern talks with Eric Barnes, CEO of The Daily Memphian (Tennessee), about his experience over the last four years launching a nonprofit local newspaper. Eric takes us from the very initial discussions and fundraising steps, to deciding whether to publish a print edition or be a purely a digital news publication, to how they decided what to charge for subscriptions and how they structure their organization to allow them to employ 40 newsroom staff (Hint: It’s not on pure philanthropy!) He shares everything, from how they took cues from the community to chart a practical course for advertising, fundraising, and reporting; to why they don’t do sponsored content and scaled back on podcasts; to how they found a balance that is working for them. This must-listen primer on launching a nonprofit digital news publication is full of practical tips and takeaways for anyone wanting to run a news publishing business!

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Speaker bios

Eric Barnes

Eric is CEO of The Daily Memphian, an online daily news source in Memphis that launched in September 2018. For ten years, Eric has hosted “Behind the Headlines” on Memphis’ PBS station, a weekly news show focused on local government, business and the community. Since 2019, he has also hosted “The Sidebar,” a podcast on The Daily Memphian and radio show on local radio station WYXR, that focuses on arts, culture and everything in between. Eric is also publisher of a group of community newspapers in Tennessee, and a former president and current board member of the Tennessee Press Association. He is currently president of the American Court & Commercial Newspapers and is on the board of the Local Media Association. He is a novelist and a published short story writer, and has a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s from Connecticut College.

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The post News Take Episode 112: Lessons in Practicality from The Daily Memphian: “A Lot of People Don’t Know We’re a Nonprofit” appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

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Most journalists see their profession as one that can do good in the world. They profess that their role is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” while movies like “Spotlight” and “All the President’s Men” portray them tirelessly pushing to bring the truth to light. But these portraits don’t fully reflect today’s reality: There is an increasing distrust in “mainstream” journalism in the U.S. and abroad. The Media Insight Project recently investigated Americans’ perceptions of the core values that underlie journalistic inquiry and found that they are not “universally embraced,” which may be one of the reasons that distrust in the media seems intractable.

In the study, the Media Insight Project – a collaboration between the American Press Institute (a News Media Alliance foundation affiliate) and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research – tested the public’s attitudes on five core values of journalism: care versus harm, fairness versus cheating, loyalty versus betrayal, authority versus subversion, and purity versus degradation.

The findings are stark – only “11 percent unreservedly embrace all five of the journalism principles tested and these people tend to be politically liberal.” Of the five values, a majority of respondents (67 percent) support only one: “the idea that more facts get us closer to the truth.” A mere 29 percent agree that “a good way to make society better is to spotlight its problems.”

The research was based on Moral Foundations Theory, which examines how different people, regardless of their demographic qualities or political views, respond to different moral values. Researchers grouped study participants into four clusters, and only one of those had a partisan bent. The other three clusters were mixed, with the key determining factor being how much they agreed with different journalism tenets.

Despite these somewhat discouraging findings, The Media Insight Project pointed out that journalists can use the findings from the study to frame their work to engender more trust among readers. When researchers revised the headlines and lead sentences of stories to more heavily focus on certain moral values, readers from all four clusters liked and trusted the revised stories more than the originals.

While thinking about audiences in this new way may be difficult for journalism organizations, it may benefit them beyond increasing trust. The researchers looked at how to ask respondents for financial support for journalism organizations, and as with the core values, moral leanings also played a large part. Messages highlighting journalists’ watchdog role may resonate strongly with journalists themselves, but they may not be the most successful in terms of reaching the broadest group of supporters. Unsurprisingly, messages that highlight specific moral values resonate best with groups of people who prioritize those values – people who prioritize care responded best to messages about journalism caring for the vulnerable, for example. Organizations should test their subscription appeals similarly to the framing experiment to determine how best to grow their subscriber base.

Generating trust among readers in – and support in the community for – journalism is one of the most important tasks the news industry faces. However, using this research, news organizations can effectively begin to plan for the future. The first step is to commit to understanding readers better (e.g., What do they believe? What moral values do they hold?) Once journalists have that information, they can use it to shape how they do their work. Whether organizations want to grow their subscription business, recommit to their audience post-pandemic, or reach the next generation of readers, understanding their audiences’ moral leanings and how to frame them will give good journalism a solid footing for the new age.

The post Study: Reframing Article Headlines, Messages Around Reader Values Can Help Build Trust appeared first on News/Media Alliance.