Impact stories, such as Congress calling for an investigation into Ford and the automaker extending warranties for hundreds of thousands of drivers, a wrongfully convicted man getting released from prison, TripAdvisor adding a safety feature after Detroit women reported being raped at popular Jamaican resorts, a criminal investigation looking into the city’s mayor, and medical care finally being provided to 2,000 female prisoners.Analytics to show funders that we reach 1.36 million people every week and that we’re the largest newsroom in Michigan.A statement of our mission: to do important, revelatory and unique journalism.A letter from Peter Bhatia, our editor.Finally, we printed it as a glossy magazine to take to funders to prove that we both achieve impact and understand how to track it - which is key to attracting financial support for our journalism going forward. The Community Impact Report appeared first in print inside the Sunday paper for subscribers, then online for everyone else with a callout to become a subscriber and support our journalism. Then, we modeled our report after the Star Tribune’s and published it in December. So we sent a callout to the newsroom, asking every reporter to share how their work made a difference and we pulled the report together from there. But we knew there were more examples that any one, two or five editors could handle. Our Impact Tracker and stories that stood out for their reader response provided more than enough examples to compile our own community impact report. She was generous in sharing the lessons they’d learned. When the Minneapolis Star Tribune published its first Community Impact Report (similar to annual reports that nonprofit organizations publish, but the first we had seen from a for-profit newsroom), I got in touch with Suki Dardarian at the Star Tribune (also a Table Stakes alum). That information eventually ended up in the tracker as well. With large projects that stretch out over months, we created Google Docs and added impacts to each document as we tracked things in real time. The Free Press started using the online Impact Tracker that my team in New York built and launched this page on to share the impact stories with readers. When I came to the Detroit Free Press, the newsroom was making a significant impact in the Detroit metro area but not really sharing that story with the community. I was looking for a way to measure the effectiveness of the investigative team beyond (or in addition to) page views. Q: How did you go about solving the problem?Ī: I started tracking the impact of local journalism back in 2015, when I was an editor at the Journal Media News Group in New York. 5 (Diversify and grow the ways you earn revenue from the audience you build). one of the 7 Table Stakes and/or an outgrowth of the Knight-Lenfest initiative, etc.)?Ī: This approach is directly related to Table Stake No. Q: How is this approach related to Table Stakes (e.g. In addition to sharing stories of change, the impact report has helped us thank funders, explain the impact of the work they’re funding and lay out in one place the work for which we continue to raise money, including our summer apprentice program. Since then, we have raised $25,000 to support this beat from the Detroit-based Hudson-Webber Foundation and have been working to secure funding for two other RFA positions in our newsroom. We applied for a Report for America corps member to join the staff to cover formerly incarcerated people in metro Detroit. The Free Press started its fundraising to support reporting in 2018. We firmly believe the work we do is also worth supporting through fundraising, but we haven’t had an effective way to communicate the results of a funder’s investment. Content on the website is available to readers at no charge. We offer a print subscription and a digital e-edition, but not a digital subscription. Question: What problem were you trying to solve, and why was solving the problem strategically important for your organization?Īnswer: Our business model (print subscriptions and advertising revenue) needs to be diversified. You can also hear all about it on the It’s All Journalism podcast. The Free Press participated in the Knight-Lenfest major market program in 2018. This “win” comes from Anjanette Delgado, senior news director for digital at the Detroit Free Press and a contributor to the Media Impact Project at USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center. This is a series on Better News to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) to share replicable tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole.
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