Shifting Sandboxes

Melanie Jongsma still smiles when you call her a ‘YouTuber.’ It’s not a title she would’ve imagined being associated with when she took over as publisher of The Lansing Journal in 2020. All she wanted at the time was to keep local news afloat in her hometown in the south suburbs of Chicago.

But as recently as nine months ago, some of the videos she posted to The Lansing Journal’s YouTube channel received north of 90,000 views.

“We used to consider 1,000 views really good,” Jongsma said. “That was the high end of the scale.”

The explosion was a symptom of a local government official gone rogue. Tiffany Henyard, the now-former mayor of Dolton and supervisor of Thornton Township, was the focal point of chaotic meeting after chaotic meeting. In one, she fought back against accusations that she changed the lock of another employee’s office so they couldn’t enter; in another, a resident accused her of using government money to purchase a BMW. Henyard’s currently under federal investigation.

With the increased attention came an opportunity for The Lansing Journal and its small, two-person operation to transform its traditional, text-focused digital strategy to the video realm of YouTube. With it, Jongsma sees the potential to attract new eyeballs and advertising revenue.

Meanwhile, 54 miles northwest, Daily Herald Executive Editor Lisa Miner also has embraced innovative ways to leverage a social media platform and take advantage of a massive audience at her disposal.

The Daily Herald started community groups on Facebook about eight years ago: Everything Schaumburg, Everything Arlington Heights, Everything Buffalo Grove and Everything Palatine, to name a few. Over time, the groups have ballooned in size, now consisting of nearly 100,000 accounts combined. But for so long, the Daily Herald was merely moderating the groups, hoping to create a clean space for community members to engage and stay updated on what’s happening around them. Occasionally, Miner’s team would share a story but not much else.

“We were essentially doing all this work, and perhaps we weren’t getting enough in return,” Miner said. “We were putting a lot out there, and yes we were getting some hits on the website, but how much did those hits translate into paying subscribers and active engaged users?”

Both The Lansing Journal and Daily Herald worked with the Local News Accelerator team at Medill to grow and refine their social media strategies. While they’re both legacy news outlets, they recognize the importance of expanding and monetizing their audience on platforms not traditionally utilized by local news organizations.

“You have to meet the consumer where they are,” said Jim Bernard, a consultant and former senior vice president of digital at the Minnesota Star Tribune who worked with The Lansing Journal and Daily Herald on these projects. “The audience isn’t going to suddenly wake up and say, ‘I sure miss your website.’ They’re on YouTube, or they’re in a Facebook group. You can’t just pull them back because you want them back; you have to meet them where they are.”

“YouTube As Regular Content”

The Lansing Journal started in Medill’s Local News Accelerator program in January, hoping to take full advantage of this gigantic audience for their YouTube videos. (The Local News Accelerator, part of the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, works with local news organizations on projects to transform strategy and bolster sustainability.)

For context, the population of Lansing is about 29,000, roughly a third of some of the audiences Jongsma’s videos were receiving. She initially wanted to find ways to use the YouTube algorithm to make as much money as possible through clicks and views.

What she soon determined, though, was most of that audience wouldn’t last after Henyard was no longer the main story. They weren’t local residents, and they’d be highly unlikely to become paying subscribers.

“We ended up realizing that we could use YouTube to reach our local audience and that the worldwide audience should not be a distraction to that,” Jongsma said. “All the research that Medill did showed us that people in Lansing are on YouTube, some of them exclusively; they’re not visiting our website, they’re not using Google. They’re using YouTube to find information.”

Through the course of her time working with Medill, Jongsma began to develop a strategy to harness The Lansing Journal’s YouTube channel as another means for local revenue. She honed who she sees as her target audience, curated her pitches to potential sponsors and gained confidence in her ability to sell.

She’s already sold one sponsorship for her YouTube videos and has leads on several others. Now, she said, YouTube is a key piece to her strategy to build sustainability for her organization.

“We are much more intentional now about thinking of YouTube as regular content,” she said. “When we’re talking about what stories we want to cover, we’re also asking, ‘Should we have a video with that?’ or ‘Could we tell that story better in video?’ … We’re getting more consistent about thinking that way when we’re facing new stories that come up.”

Finding Value in Facebook Groups

In partnership with Medill, the Daily Herald ran a series of experiments to see how they could take fuller advantage of this giant pool of potential subscribers in their Facebook groups.

A couple of Daily Herald reporters began sharing their stories regularly in the relevant groups, the marketing team pushed out subscription and newsletter sign-up offers on a weekly basis and they converted their largest group (Everything Schaumburg) from a public group to a private group to reduce the amount of time spent weeding out spam.

Through this work, the Daily Herald’s traffic from Facebook to their website doubled, the time spent moderating the Everything Schaumburg group was cut in about half and the newsroom started to see the value these Facebook groups could provide.

One of the pieces to the project’s success, Miner noted, was including her reporters in the experimentation. Eric Peterson, the Daily Herald’s Schaumburg reporter, already had been sharing his stories across Facebook. He then became a strong advocate for his colleagues to do the same.

“When we presented our findings to the staff and somebody would raise an issue of, ‘Do we have enough time to do this?’ Eric piped in and said, ‘It doesn’t take that much time. Here’s what you do, here’s why it’s important,’” Miner said. “And having him advocate instead of just the editors was really key.”

Now Miner hopes to continue to push the Facebook groups as a part of the Daily Herald’s workflow. The newspaper’s sports team recently started experimenting with them, and they’re hoping to leverage the audience when high school football season starts up this summer.

Miner’s also having her team meet monthly now to evaluate their practices on Facebook.

“It’s really easy when you’re in one of the accelerator programs to get really enthusiastic and you’re on board, but then you get back to the day-to-day stuff and things get busy,” she said. “You don’t want to lose the momentum, and you don’t want to slip into old practices. We’re really emphasizing it, and we are continuing to push it and to monitor use.”

Experimentation is a necessity, not a luxury

The work of Jongsma and Miner is just a subset of news organizations continuing to look for new ways to engage with news consumers. As the manager of distribution and audience growth for the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), Sam Cholke has a front-row seat to this type of innovation.

“That’s one of the nice things is, as things are changing so rapidly, there’s just a broad space to do experimentation right now,” Cholke said.

In Helena, Montana, he said, Montana Free Press decided to buy a billboard to spread awareness about the work their non-profit newsroom is doing covering the Montana state house. They’ve also bought ads on Hulu, hoping to expose themselves to the ever-increasing number of people who use the streaming service.

In Detroit, Outlier Media has covered Wayne County’s housing issues for years. About eight years ago, Sarah Alvarez, the organization’s founder, began a mass-texting program to directly connect residents to the organization’s reporting. Recipients could respond to find out if their home was on an auction list or if the building next door wasn’t properly maintained.

Then last fall when a Detroit resident Alex Alsup published an investigation to his Substack suggesting that residents might be eligible to receive a percentage of $20 million in tax foreclosure profits, he shared the data with Outlier. The organization set up a phone banking campaign to let those affected know they were entitled to some of this money. They ultimately reached nearly 500 people who, if they all filed claims, would’ve been entitled to nearly $6 million.

“[They were] almost providing a service to you through this journalism and helping you navigate a government system,” Cholke said. “It requires a very targeted distribution.”

Whether through a billboard, phone banking campaign or utilizing social media channels, creativity in newsrooms is less a luxury and more a necessity to survive in this ever-changing media environment.

It’s also why the work of The Lansing Journal and the Daily Herald holds implications for the direction of more traditional media outlets for years to come.

“People are spending so much time on social media, and that includes YouTube, compared to anything else on the internet,” Cholke said. “There [aren’t] other things; that’s what people do. If your idea is, ‘I need to reach people with a digital product,’ you have to engage in these spaces.”

For someone like Jongsma, who only in recent years came to see how YouTube could become a key component to her work, she’s clear-eyed in why it will continue to be a worthy focus for her at The Lansing Journal.

“YouTube is what we make of it,” she said. “So if we leave YouTube to the ‘YouTubers’ or the ‘influencers,’ then that’s what it becomes. But if journalism is more active on YouTube, then YouTube can be a reliable source of journalism as well.”

She added: “I think it’s important for all news outlets to realize that print or website or email or YouTube or Facebook, those are all just tools, and what’s important is the content. In order to get your content in front of different people, you might need to use different tools. You don’t have to choose print over YouTube or website over YouTube. You can use all of them and use them all strategically.”