RJI Futures Lab
Tyler Fine
Jake Godin
Teddy Nykiel
Chelsea Stuart
Convergence capstone students
Fall 2013
Table of Contents
I. Introduction to the Futures Lab......................................................................................3
II. Semester Accomplishments.........................................................................................5
III. Preliminary Research................................................................................................13
IV. Research Questions..................................................................................................15
V. Research Methods.....................................................................................................17
VI. Audience Research…………………………...............................................................29
VII. Survey…………………………..................................................................................33
VIII. Interviews……………………...................................................................................36
IX. Recommendations…………………...........................................................................37
X. Appendix….................................................................................................................38
I. Introduction
The Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) Futures Lab is a digital show focused on highlighting innovative trends, technology and practices across platforms in the journalism industry. Weekly web episodes target an audience of newsroom leaders, staff, and similar-minded people with an interest in the future of print, digital and mobile reporting. These episodes cover topics ranging from mobile apps and digital tools, to crowdsourcing and event recaps.
The goal of this digital-only news organization is to inform viewers specifically on how journalism is moving forward, and what that development can be anticipated to look like in the future. The newsroom budget allows reporters, host and editor to travel across the state and country for stories. This semester, the team reported from Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Atlanta.
The newsroom operates out of its namesake Futures Lab, a home to Missouri School of Journalism faculty and student body. The lab acts as a real-world testing venue for the latest in journalistic technology, monetization and management, and routinely hosts leaders in the media across the nation and globe.
Production Cycle
Production for the show routinely follows a Monday through Friday schedule of pitching, reporting, editing and filming. The weekly episode typically ranges from 2-3 segmented stories, each approximately three minutes long and lasting a total duration of 8-10 minutes. The show content is often a compilation of Skype or Google Hangout interviews, still images and videos shot with the SnapzPro program. Less often but every once in a while, in-person interviews and footage were possible and included within an episode.
Every 8 a.m. Wednesday the team met to discuss story ideas and deadlines. Host, Reuben Stern, filmed the show on Friday in the RJI studio with the production assistance of RJI Technical Director Travis McMillen. Episode content including anchor intro and outros, supplementary links and information were completed in advance of the show recording, and story drafts uploaded to the RJI practice lab YouTube account by the end of the day Friday at latest. Video editor, Olga Kyle, polished each week’s video for publication Monday morning.
This semester’s RJI Futures Lab team was composed of four capstone students, three graduate students, and two faculty members acting as host, editor and mentors. Of the capstone students, Tyler Fine worked in audience development, Jake Godin worked on iPad development and research, and Teddy Nykiel and Chelsea Stuart reported alongside graduate students Laura Davison and Sarah Harkins while the third and final graduate student, Greg Mantell, built a sources database.
A small team of three reporters and the faculty continued weekly web episode production throughout the summer until the start of the fall semester. Since then, episodes 23-39 have been produced. Reporters consistently worked on 2-4 stories per week, and spent anywhere between 10-20 hours on an episode depending on the length, subject matter and interviews. Collaboration was common, and each segment usually edited by 1-2 reporters, host and video editor before it aired on the website and iPad app. To see a two-minute video highlight of this semester’s stories, follow this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z6sn4TUEhc
Each week prior to the episode launch, the social media or audience development manager works with the reporting team to coordinate preview updates for the episode on Twitter and Facebook, if possible. Once the episode has launched, updates are posted to all social media feeds, and sent out via the RJI Newsletter. Reporters share the episode link with all relevant sources via email and Twitter. Additionally, after each episode launch the social media manager works to update all media outlets with posts relevant to the most current episode. These updates can include mentions of important sources and topics within the video, or articles and other media related to the content of each episode.
The social media/audience development manager also works with reporters and the RJI Communications team to facilitate partnerships with fellow industry outlets as well as provide as much audience development and engagement as possible throughout the week. When the team is traveling covering events social media feeds may also be updated with live coverage or interaction during the events, such as ONA13.
The editorial mission statement, which was created by the fall 2012 Futures Lab research capstone group:
“RJI will help newsrooms leaders across the country make their organizations more innovative by providing a weekly video digest of fresh ideas, techniques and developments that can move journalism forward. Our reporting will include:
● Behind-the-scenes case studies of cutting-edge work,
● Profiles and interviews with leading innovators,
● Tips on integrating new technologies across multiple platforms,
● Insights from the latest industry research, and
● Management tips for fostering innovation at all levels, in all types and sizes of newsroom.
This program should be easily viewable across computers and mobile devices. Content should be available for automatic download/delivery, with customizable notification when new content arrives.
Ideally we'll figure out a way to make this social as well, so the intended news industry audience will be able to share their own expertise and learn from each other, too.”
II. Semester Accomplishments
A. Reporting
1. High Profile Sources: We were able to secure several top-level sources from well-known companies. For example, in episode 36, we interviewed Major Garrett, the CBS White House Correspondent; in episode 27, we talked to Rob Barrett, the VP of News and Finance at Yahoo!; in episode 38, we interviewed Mary Hockaday, head of the BBC Multimedia Newsroom and Michael Golden, The New York Times Company Vice Chairman.
(Relevant Episodes: 27, 36, 38.)
2. In-person Interviews: The spring 2013 capstone group’s first recommendation was to have more in-person reporting in stories. We were able to do this largely because many RJI events brought various journalism professionals to campus. We were able to take advantage of this at the Five Years Past/Five Years Forward event and the Journalytics Summit in September. Our team also took reporting trips to New York, Chicago and San Francisco to gather interviews and b-roll. Finally, we took advantage of opportunities to conduct interviews locally at the Columbia Tribune and the Columbia Missourian.
(Relevant Episodes: 27, 30, 35.)
3. Stories about mobile: The spring 2013 capstone group’s sixth recommendation was to emphasize stories about mobile. We addressed mobile journalism in at least three episodes this semester. We’ve addressed tips for reporting on mobile, mobile app tools, analytics on mobile and mobile revenue models.
(Relevant Episodes: 31, 34, 35, 37.)
4. Themed Episodes: Early in the semester, our reporting team made it a goal to produce themed episodes rather than episodes with three random stories. For example, we dedicated episode 35 to talking about ways to use analytics in the newsroom where we featured three individual stories all about analytics.
(Relevant Episodes: 35, 37.)
Futures Lab Fall Highlight Reel: http://youtu.be/6Z6sn4TUEhc
B. Audience Development
To develop and grow the RJI Futures Lab’s audience, we began by researching the different techniques and trends in audience development and engagement. Because our intended audience is news leaders and industry professionals, we researched search engine optimization and meta data trends to determine the best ways to reach our audience.
1. Social Media
When the semester began, we had roughly 98 Twitter followers,120 Facebook likes and 29 YouTube subscribers. Our social media feeds typically only featured one update per week announcing the release of the most recent episode.
Our first steps in increasing audience engagement were to update our social media pages with the latest information and images. We revamped our YouTube page by adding new descriptions, a channel trailer, and new playlists to make our page more dynamic and interesting for our viewers. We also searched and followed nearly 1,000 new professional Twitter accounts, direct messaging some to alert them of our show.
We began tweeting multiple times a week, using hashtags that were deemed popular among journalists and newsrooms. We began mentioning and following each source we used in our videos as well in an effort to build not only a stronger audience, but a stronger relationship with our sources. We also began updating our Facebook page with new information and supplementary articles and content every week to go along with our videos. These efforts were based on my preliminary research, as well as the trends I saw in our peers and competitor websites.
We worked to have a more active presence during industry events such as the ONA 2013 conference. Some of the RJI Futures Lab team attended the conference and introduced new people to our show and social media feeds. We kept up with conference from home and tried to frequently tweet live updates and information from the conference as well.
During this time we saw the largest increase in our social engagement. Through these efforts, we began to see an overall upward trend in engagement. Our Twitter following more than quadrupled, our YouTube subscribers nearly doubled, and we saw an increase in likes and engagement on Facebook.
2. Partnerships/Engagement
In addition to social media work, we also sought to increase our presence in the RJI Newsletter, partnered with ASNE to be a part of their newsletter, and worked on a symbiotic relationship with PBS Mediashift to continue to increase our reach and engage with new audiences. As a team we sought to share, retweet, and post videos and updates from the show on our own personal feeds. Whereas we had little to no engagement on the show’s social media at the beginning of the year, we are now regularly engaged with our audience.
Through this semester’s work, we saw a general increase in our engagement numbers over the course of the semester.
Of our top 10 viewed videos on YouTube, 3 out of the 10 came from the last two months.
Our subscribers not only increased in number but in frequency over the course of the semester.
Besides two large spikes in the beginning run of the show (which were a result of two episodes being picked up by larger organizations), the show saw an increase in regular YouTube viewership over from August into December.
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Again eliminating the two outlier episodes, the videos produced from August to December also saw larger spikes in viewership within the first few days of release. We believe this may be due to active social media promotion before and immediately following each episode’s release.
On the RJI Futures Lab landing page we saw an increase from August to December, as well as a gradual increase from previous semesters.
Again eliminating the outlier episodes, looking at our YouTube view totals, as well as views of each episode page on the RJI site, we can see an upward trend in views throughout the semester.
We determined this data from YouTube and Google Analytics, as well as our own personal data recordings from each episode. This data has proven helpful not only in measuring our audience numbers but in determining which episodes and topics gained the most attention as well.
C. Professional Opinions
We had the opportunity to have private meeting with two industry professionals, Elizabeth Osder and Brian Stelter, to talk about our show and get feedback from them about how to improve. Here’s what they had to say:
1. Elizabeth Osder
We met with media consultant Elizabeth Osder (http://www.osder.com/) to get a professional opinion about how to improve our show and our audience. She pointed out that our target audience should not necessarily be top-tier newsrooms like the NYT, but rather smaller newsrooms that are struggling to keep up with the digital revolution. She also specified that within news organizations, we should be targeting the top decision makers and newsleaders because those are the people that have the power to make innovative changes.
More of Osder’s suggestions included:
· Starting a “Tech Talk” segment of the show to highlight technology and gadgets relevant to people in the news industry.
· Including broadcast-style stand-ups with a reporting talking through bits of news. Osder said this could add variety in been the story packages we currently use.
· Buying ads on Poynter, Digiday or TechCrunch.
· Adding components of audience involvement - a question for viewers, reading feedback from the audience on last week’s episode or giving tips like, “3 things to try in your newsroom this week.”
Osder succinctly summarized what each Futures Lab story should address, and we have adapted this phrasing to include in our Futures Lab Handbook so that reporters in the coming semesters can use this targeted approach to storytelling:
1. Show me something interesting
2. How is it being used?
3. Why is journalism better for it?
2. Brian Stelter
Approximately a week before Brian Stelter left his position as media reporter for The New York Times and joined CNN Worldwide as a senior media correspondent and host of “Reliable Sources”, he met and spoke exclusively with the RJI Futures Lab reporting team.
Stelter’s takeaway lesson was, “News should be both serious and fun,” as he explained to us how we can strategically work to set our newsroom apart from and ahead of our competition. We collectively brainstormed differentiation from narrowing our story topics and breaking through public relation walls, to potential roundup segments. Stelter also shared some advice about developing long-term story sources. Finally, he told us about some of his hopes for the future of journalism, like an app that would deliver local newspapers to your phone based on your location. The opportunity to meet with Stetler was a chance to learn more about the media industry individually and as a team in our endeavors with the Futures Lab.
III. Preliminary Research
Since the Futures Lab was already up and running before we came in as capstone students this semester, we began with preliminary research to take stock of what has been done before us. Prior to this semester, there have been two other studies about the RJI Futures Lab – one in 2012 and one in spring 2013. From reading through the two previous final reports, we learned the following: