From November 6–10, the Lincoln Network hosted the Reboot Conference, a series of virtual conversations about the intersection of technology and policy. Day three of the conference focused on the future of online news, and included conversations with leaders of the Knight Foundation, the American Journalism Project, Substack, The Washington Post, and The Texas Tribune, among others.

Included in the November 10 discussions was a conversation between the Lincoln Network’s Marshall Kosloff and Alliance CEO David Chavern. Chavern and Kosloff discussed the state of online media, the overwhelming power of the digital duopoly over news publishers, the role of Section 230, and the profitability of digital news as we move to an even more online future.

You can watch the conversation between Chavern and Kosloff below. You can learn more about the Reboot Conference here.

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What is Mission Greenlight, and how does it work?

Getting people interested is definitely exciting, but I think how we’ll know if this is working is if it is able to sustain. Can we create a community that wants to fund these Greenlights on their own, and wants to collaborate with these journalists and editors? I think that’s the success metric.

Where did the idea for Mission Greenlight come from?

From the very beginning, it was something I wanted to get to. The idea was that social media could be a democratizing tool for news, and that was a big reason why we invested so early in social media. [Then it was a matter of,] Is the community ready for it? Are journalists ready for it? Is the product there? I think it’s just taken us some time to get there, and with the shift in our approach… we’re in a position to try an experiment like this. So, I think the timing is good for us, and the timing is good for [the community]. (Editor’s note: Within two weeks of announcing the project, Mission Greenlight had already received nearly 1,000 applications for funding. The first round of applications is now closed.)

How does Mission Greenlight help on issues where people want more detailed information, like the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic?

I think what we’ve seen with COVID and the coverage around that is there are a lot of places to find [information] that scratches the surface on a lot of topics, but it’s really hard to find a place that can do a deep dive with a group of experts that go in and really help you stay informed – and I mean informed in a sustained way. You do see a lot of great reporting that happens where they flip the lid on something, but everyone then moves on. A lot of times, though, [people want more]. How do we continue to dig in on that? I think what [Mission Greenlight] allows for is that sustained effort to continue… This allows for us to do a better job digging in and sustaining reporting on something that we’ve identified people are interested in, but there’s just not a place for them to [keep getting information] on the topic.

I think we’ll always have [that day-to-day reporting]. I think it’s important to meet people where they are and inform them of the different topics that are in the news and are important. But then, it’s being able to extend that. I think a lot of times news is disjointed and your curiosity is piqued and then you’re directed to another article on a completely separate topic, but maybe [you] want to spend the next few hours just diving really deep on one topic. How do [you] do that? And how do [you] support journalists going in and digging in on that topic that has piqued [your] curiosity? I don’t think there’s really a good mechanism yet that does that.

IJR has evolved a lot since its founding in 2012. How does Mission Greenlight fit in with where IJR is going and how you want people to view IJR?

We tried something [similar] a few years ago with Red and Blue (IJR’s now-inactive, partisan-style verticals that were designed to offer news to consumers based on which “bubble” they felt aligned with), [where we tried to] pop the filter bubbles and have people reading news that normally they wouldn’t be exposed to on our site.

Where do you see yourself and IJR in the post-COVID media landscape?

I’ve thought [about] this for a long time, and I think [the future of media] is independent; journalists that work for themselves. I think Substack has done a good job of building momentum there. I think Twitter has done a good job of scratching the surface, and Facebook, too. But a lot of the challenges with the social networks are that they don’t have the tools to monetize what these journalists do. So, I think the future is finding some organizing entity that helps to [act as an intermediary] between the journalists and the readers and helps connect them directly. But there’s obviously a huge importance to having editors and having oversight, so that will need to be a part of whatever comes next for it to really scale. You need that oversight, that structure.

I think that journalists are happy to experiment. They’re never doing the same thing every day. Every story is different. They’re constantly having to create something new. Journalists are some of the most entrepreneurial people on earth. Every day is a different mission, every day is a new story. So I think that journalists have always been eager to do these experiments, but a lot of these organizations have been holding journalists back by being afraid to rock the boat financially.

I think IJR is in an interesting spot where we’re flexible enough to experiment. Some of them will crash and burn and fail, and some of them will work out. What we did on social media obviously worked out, and some of what we’ve done with video is there. I think we’ve made some really interesting bets – some have worked, some haven’t, but that’s what we enjoy, is being nimble and being able to [take those chances].

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So why aren’t all news outlets already giving us our news this way? Familiarity. Chances are, publications are used to doing things a certain way and are trying to keep doing things that way. I get it. I had a Kindle for five years before I started using it regularly, and it was strange to me for that first year of regular use. However, I got used to it and realized how much better my reading experience was. I still read paperbacks and hardcovers, but when I want to read some trashy fiction or just don’t want to carry a 1,200-page book around on the metro, my Kindle lets me do that without effort. The same is true of digital strategy for news. You don’t have to give up your print product and devote yourself to all digital, all the time. Print news is still important to many people, but it’s not the only way to get news anymore, and denying that is hurting your readership and your bottom line.

To help you start honing your own digital strategy, I spoke with Dr. Mario García, a professor at Columbia University focused on news design, about what your outlet can be doing and how to get the ball rolling when it comes to better using both components of your news delivery system.

Start at the Top

You can’t develop a solid digital-first strategy if you’re not given the freedom to do so, which is why García says the mandate needs to come from the top. Publishers need to give their newsrooms the space to adapt to technological and storytelling advances that may seem counter to how things have been done in the past.

To do this, García suggests you “forget rank and hierarchy” of your newsroom. Younger editors, he says, likely know more about the digital landscape and can help older editors figure out the best way to produce quality digital journalism, while more veteran editors may have a better handle on what’s possible with print.

Get Out of Your Own Way

“I believe that editors are smart enough to understand, intellectually, that nobody’s waiting for a printed edition of his paper for breaking news,” García says. “People of all ages are getting their information through other platforms, primarily their phone, online, tablets, whatever. But there is also an emotional side to this where editors of a certain age have these romances with print.”

Editors, García says, are still thinking of the printed front page when they think about breaking news. They’re thinking about the big, bold headline printed across a tabloid-size page. But in 2018, no one is getting their news from the front page – not really. By the time your front page hits newsstands, the majority of your readers have already heard about the lead story. They may not know all the details yet, but they get the gist. By still presenting your front page to them as if you’re sharing the newest information there, you’re ignoring the routines and preferences of your readers.

Consider Social Media Your New Front Page

Instead of focusing on the front page, García says, you need to be breaking news on social media and online. “Think of the smallest platform first and go from there,” he suggests. That could mean breaking a story on social media and tweeting out the breaking story immediately before building the story across your other delivery platforms, including print.

As an example, García notes that The Washington Post broke the news about the Texas church massacre last fall on Twitter, then added to an online story before putting together a second-day story for their print edition the next morning.

Even if you’re not dealing with national news, though, chances are your readers will know something about a story before it lands on the front page the next morning — unless you have one of those late-night “Stop the presses!” moments we’ve all seen in the movies. That’s why García says to treat every print news story as a second-day story, even if it’s the first time you’re running that story in the paper.

Think of the News as a Multi-Course Meal

When you have a meal, García says, you don’t serve the main course before you serve the appetizers, and news should be treated the same way. While it may be easier to think of breaking news as one big story, that would be impractical and disregards how news is consumed. People want the news as it happens — they’re not going to ignore the information coming at them in hopes that you’ll print it the next morning. So you need to be offering up tastes, from the moment they learn about a story until they sit down to devour the big story.

You’ll be able to reach a large audience with a snippet of a story if you share it through social media or a smartphone news alert. Once they’ve sampled that, they’ll want more, so you should have an online story to update them as the day goes on, and then a follow-up print piece that advances the story in some way.

Forget About Print, at Least for a Moment

García says moving to a digital-first method of storytelling is easiest if you can forget about your print product while plotting coverage. In workshops he’s run, he says participants have a much easier time devising a digital strategy for breaking news if they can imagine that they don’t have a newspaper at all. When there is no other option, people will learn to work with what’s available to them.

Find a New Use for Print

Print may be a bad fit for breaking news, García says, but that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. Quite the opposite, in fact. “In many of these regional and local areas, print is the cash cow,” García says. But you need to redefine the role of print if you want it to remain valuable to readers.

Your print edition can be the first home for enterprise reporting and big investigations, stories that are original to your publication and that your readers haven’t heard about prior to your reporting. In those instances, you can be print-first and follow on with a digital version of the story.

Print is also an exceptional way to present large images. You may be able to have interactive components online, but for some stories, a large newsprint-sized graphic is ideal, and you can’t achieve the same impact on a small iPhone screen, or even on a computer screen. Instead, you should save those images for print, where people can really appreciate the size and scope of the work, whether it’s a photo, illustration or graph.

Think Like a News Magazine

When print was king, newspapers would break news daily, while news magazines would offer analysis and context each week. These days, Garcia says the successful papers are beginning to treat their print coverage the way news magazines treat theirs. That means more newspaper headlines that ask questions — “How Does X Breaking News Item Affect You?” — or offering solutions — “Why You Should Do X Because of Y Breaking News Item.”

When the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 20,000 for the first time, many publications led with the news, but the smart ones, García said, went further. At The New York Times, that meant asking Now What?, while The Washington Post opted to explain how the Dow got to that point and USA TODAY discussed whether you should invest. Why does that matter? Because people can learn from a single sentence that the Dow has hit a new record. What they need from journalists is why that single sentence matters and what it means for them.

Accept the New Flow of News

In 2018, news doesn’t break once a day. People aren’t getting their news only from a print paper or their evening news broadcast. Now, the news breaks every hour, sometimes every 15 minutes. That means publishers need to allow their newsrooms to operate at the same speed as the news.

Your newsroom should have someone designated during every shift to be the person responsible for dealing with breaking news, García says. There should be one person who, when a story breaks, shares the news on social media and then follows the story to its conclusion.

The Washington Post using Twitter to break the story of the Texas church shooting last fall is a great example of how this plays out, García says.

“You didn’t even have headlines or a regular lead for this story; you have tweets with whatever little they knew. But 12 minutes later, you already have the beginning of a traditional storyline — on the phone,” he explains. “And then you had snippets of [that story] till the next day, [when the story was published in print]. But it was an exercise to see that they were in control of a story from the get-go.”

If your outlet has recently developed a digital-first strategy, we want to know what the process was like for you. And if you haven’t, tell us what’s holding you back. You can reach out via email to jennifer@newsmediaalliance.org or tweet @EditrixJen. And if you have other areas of the news business you’d like to know more about, let us know and it may become a future How-To article.

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