What if Scale Breaks Community? Rebooting Audience Engagement When Journalism Is Under Fire

"The capacity to respond innovatively to external threats and the 'unintended consequences' of digital transformation is a key marker for sustainable journalism innovation identified within these news organisations."

This report focuses on how three digital-born news agencies - Rappler (the Philippines), Daily Maverick (South Africa), and The Quint (India) - have dealt with audience engagement in the context of both rapid developments in a digital, mobile, and platform-dominated media environment and significant political pressure, which includes online harassment of the news organisations and their journalists and audiences. The report explores the creative responses of the three news organisations, which are all recognised for their public interest journalism. It shows how an early focus on open and online journalism at-scale has evolved - often as a matter of survival and to address harassment they receive - into a focus on developing deeper, narrower, and stronger relationships with audiences through strategies such as curated conversations, physical encounters, and investment in niche audiences.

This is the final publication of a set of three by the Journalism Innovation Project (see Related Summaries below). Anchored within the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, the project sought to identify key indicators or markers of "sustainable" journalism innovation through a study of the characteristics, structures, and practices of news organisations they characterise as succeeding at innovation. The first report from the project introduced the Journalism Innovation Wheel to demonstrate that journalism innovation can happen along many different dimensions, often concurrently. This final report focuses on the audience engagement segment of what wheel, to emphasise critical challenges that are moving from the Global South to the West.

The report is based on analysis of data from participatory action research (PAR), including fieldwork and interviews at the three news organisations in the process of actively redefining audience engagement. The lead author was embedded in the three case organisations during February and March 2019 for a week each. Additionally, she was added to internal discussion groups, editorial email lists, and agenda-setting diaries during her attachments to the newsrooms.

Each news agency is explored in some detail, including how they were founded, their audiences and staff, the context within which they operate, and the challenges they have faced and how they have overcome them. The report also explores each news agency's trajectory of audience engagement, as well as some of the initiatives and campaigns each of them has undertaken to build audiences in a challenging environment where online harassment and various forms of "platform capture" are a reality. Platform capture is described as a combination of factors that include but are not limited to "the manipulation of platforms and their mass user base for malicious purposes, such as orchestrated disinformation campaigns designed to destabilise democracies". Examples of initiatives and campaigns described in the report are the civic engagement arm of Rappler called Move.PH ("Move Philippines") and the MyReport citizen journalism portal run by The Quint.

The key findings as outlined in the executive summary of the report are:

• Relationships with communities don't just "resist" scale. Scale can break communities, especially when combined with various forms of "platform capture", including the "weaponisation" of online communities and frequent changes to platforms' products and policies.
• Once weaponised at-scale, audiences can't be recalibrated through direct engagement at scale; instead, an approach that goes deeper, narrower, and stronger is key: smaller audiences properly engaged can still play a significant role through collaboration, distribution, and impact.
• Orchestrated online harassment campaigns targeting news outlets and their journalists can be extremely damaging not only to them (creating significant health, safety, and security risks), but also to their online communities, impacting significantly on "engagement work".
• Some audience engagement revolutions come full circle. For example, Rappler's social-media-born "communities of action", which were leveraged to rapidly grow a news organisation and effect change at-scale (often in partnership with government agencies), now thrive on physical encounters and help defend the outlet against the Duterte government.
• Daily Maverick's resistance to social media distribution and brand-based audience engagement on the platforms in favour of driving engagement through events and newsletters may have contributed to its early membership success.
• Civic engagement through community partnerships and citizen reporting initiatives (e.g. Rappler's Move.PH and The Quint's MyReport) can still deliver loyal audiences and pathways to fresh revenue streams, even if some "at-scale" audiences have turned toxic.
• Technology still has an important role to play in audience engagement innovations, but that role should be editorial-led, with public interest oversight. That is the objective of Rappler's new publishing platform, which was slated to be launched early 2020.
• A key indicator for journalism innovation is the capacity to remain audience-led and reboot engagement when online communities are "weaponised", or when platforms tweak their terms & conditions or algorithms.
• Despite the risks, partnerships with the platforms connected to journalism "engagement work" are still possible, as continued use of social media and specific projects like The Quint's gender-oriented Me, The Change campaign demonstrate.
• Two-way listening is essential for the development of strong, loyal communities of action built around editorial missions. But neither news organisations nor individual journalists have to listen to all the people all the time.
• Building a membership programme is not straightforward, and in these case studies, it often involves combining existing elements (e.g., events, community partnerships, citizen reporting portals) with new approaches (e.g., bespoke (tailor-made) newsletters, access to "behind-the-scenes" content).
• Members are not seen as "cash cows", but as loyal communities and collaborators on civic engagement, editorial, and product-development projects, potentially helping the outlets grow and improve.
• Loyal audiences and members can be seen as guardians of the outlets and their mission: providing challenging and independent journalism in countries where media freedom is under threat, and democratic norms are eroding.

In conclusion, the report states that "the lessons being learned through innovative and experimental responses to existential crises in the three cases examined here are broadly instructive for news organisations worldwide. If Rappler, Daily Maverick, and The Quint can reboot audience engagement with their limited resources, while facing extreme external pressures, so too can many other news organisations in less challenging circumstances."