Personal importance is an internal realization. Individuals who not only listen but also sense that public radio has become important in their lives are more likely to become givers.

If your half-hearted efforts to engage your audience amount to robotically re-tweeting story links, or slapping a generic “Tell Us Your Thoughts” box at the end of every story, or pleading with your viewers to simply blabber on about whatever they reckon, you might as well start looking for another line of work. Authentic engaged journalism requires a human touch. p. 16

Contrary to the notion that the leading media have a strong and fairly uniform agenda-setting power, we contend that their power to set the agenda depends on context and is quite limited during periods of normal political activity. p. 4-5

The most novel and important ethical challenges come not from new competition, or a blurring of professional boundaries, or even from the retrenchment of local newspapers. Rather, the ethical transformation of journalism comes from new forms of data about the audience. In order to maximize it social impact, ethical journalistic practice now requires strenuous attention to data on audience behavior.

Associations typically treat member engagement as another sales transaction and have come to equate it with mere participation. This perspective obscures the greater value of members as partners and thwarts strategic relationships with them.

Journalists today not only need analytics to navigate an ever-more competitive battle for attention. Many journalists also want analytics, as an earlier period of scepticism seems to have given way to interest in how data and metrics can help newsrooms reach their target audiences and do better journalism.

As traditional news media struggle to adapt their practices to discontinuous changes resulting from technological advances, a digitally native nonprofit news model has emerged in the United States... news entrepreneurs are strategically using their digital-first platform to focus primarily on their public service mission, engage consumers, publish information through a variety of methods and formats, collaborate with outside media, diversify revenue sources, and provide technology training to jo

Numerous scholars have argued that the main goal of public journalism, engagement, remains important if a news organization aims to truly matter to the community it serves... If a news organization wants to serve its function in a democratic society, it must engage with its community and respond to its community. While there are numerous tenets to public journalism, this was the overall mission (Rosen, 1994). p. 907

All journalists depend on other news organizations for their sense of “what’s news today.” This means that news judgments can spread quickly through time and space. As journalists notice each other reporting the same news theme, it becomes established within a community of media organizations. p. 7-8

The main reason people don’t renew membership is because organizations struggle to show they provide value... Nearly half of members feel their content is not personalized.

We do not get the news we deserve because we, the audience, are not directly involved in choosing it. p. 80

The current crisis in commercial media is an opportunity for the profession to reexamine old assumptions about the relationship between the press, the public, and democracy. It is not enough for journalists and editors to fall back on abstract moral claims about the profession’s public role, while telling the business side of their organizations to get savvy about metrics for the sake of saving old business models. p. 44

"To attract subscribers in a noisy news landscape, news organizations must excel at a few key coverage areas"

"At the core, online communities come down to two things: people, and technology. You can’t have a community without a place for them to come together, but a platform without people is a ghost town. You need both."

The relationship strategy requires learning new skills: listening to communities to discern their needs; empowering teams that cut across our organizations to develop products and services that are more targeted to the needs of those communities and how they use information; building user profiles so we can gather, analyze, and act on data about our people as individuals; and building new revenue from new lines of business, such as events, commerce, and membership.

[Local news media] need to understand and work to meet the local news preferences of their target audiences without sacrificing the sense of social consciousness that has always encouraged the reporting of important issues audiences would at times sooner ignore. p. 234

A new news disseminator has emerged to revitalize the profession of information gathering – the non-profit news organization... many of these organizations, in considering news as a public good, work to re-conceptualize the industry for citizens, but depend upon a level of funding that might not be viable in the long term.

“Membership is not just about revenue — it’s about resetting the relationships we have with our public.”

Reciprocal journalism, as we call it, builds upon and yet departs from traditional notions of audience engagement and participation, capturing the range of dynamics through which journalists and audiences may exchange mutual benefit. p. 230

Today’s media landscape is seeing an explosion in potential Web tools for conversational journalism, defined here as citizen–journalist collaboration... Journalism-as-a-conversation stands in contrast to decades of traditional journalism as a lecture, in which the journalist alone presumably knows what is news and conducts a monologue with the public on such matters, or perhaps a dialogue with public officials and other elites.

Accountability journalism, particularly local accountability journalism, is especially threatened by the economic troubles that have diminished so many newspapers. p. 60

As traditional media downsize, hundreds of new nonprofit news organizations are popping up – some promising, but others short-lived, well-meaning startups that failed to achieve community support or financial stability or both.

Media companies are in the midst of a massive shift in revenue strategies from one primarily focused on advertising to one that is more diversified. Without a doubt, subscriptions are highly attractive, given that they guarantee a steady stream of income that is far less volatile than the digital ad market.

The growing nonprofit news sector is showing some signs of economic health, and most leaders of those outlets express optimism about the future... But many of these organizations also face substantial challenges to their long-term financial well-being.

Segmentation is important... Very few organizations target members with any sort of consistency, and instead, adopt a “one-size- fits-all” approach across the entire member base.

A media environment in which audiences’ engagement in, and appreciation of, the content they consume is as valuable (or perhaps even more so) as the size and demographic composition of the audience is one that has the potential to support content forms that resonate powerfully with segments of the media audience that would otherwise be too small to encourage the production of content serving their particular needs and interests. p. 156

Though exposure-based currencies have traditionally privileged measures of audience size and composition, many media companies, and some marketers, would like to conduct business on the basis of how engaged audiences are

"The business model of most internationally oriented digital-born news media is based on digital display advertising, an increasingly challenging market."

The impact of an analytics tool depends on the organization using it.

As it becomes easier to find the ideal content at the ideal time, the chances that viewers encounter political information as an unintended consequence of watching a less-than-ideal program, perhaps even a news program, dwindle. p. 6

"Overall, while some outlets are experimenting with tools for more substantive audience contributions to news content, we find few outlets approaching engagement as a way to involve users in the creation of news, with most in our sample focusing mostly on engaging users in back-end reaction and response to the outlet’s content."

"We are living in a golden age of new, innovative media."

Getting the connections right is the deeper challenge in journalism right now. “Getting the connections right” means all the connections: between news and opinion, between facts and values, between the editorial product and the business function, between the press and the political system, between the occupational and the spiritual crisis, and particularly between journalism and the public.

Nonprofit funding, once largely the province of public broadcasting, is becoming an important source of support for a new cohort of non-commercial news organizations — many of them digital natives — and a growing number of commercial news publishers, which are partnering with nonprofit media and in some cases accepting direct grants themselves.

Civic journalism worked. Readers and viewers got it. We learned that if you deliberately build in simple ways for people to participate — in community problems or elections — many will engage. Particularly if they feel they have something to contribute to the problem. Nowadays, this is so much easier than it used to be. All that is needed is the creativity to make it happen.

Can we really expect the market to supply quality investigative journalism that exposes wrongdoing, uncovers corruption, and holds the powerful to account? Many would say there’s simply no demand for it. The success of Mediapart, however, may provide a unique counterfactual.

For years now, people have been trying to devise business models for online community journalism that are both sustainable and replicable, but the usual sectors aren’t delivering.

"The project points to a bright spot in journalism, and highlights one of the ways that news and information providers are finding their way forward in the digital age."

Online editors use Web analytics mainly to keep track of audience behavior, but metrics are also increasingly being used for editorial decisions such as story selection, story placement, and even headline writing. p. 793

Telling stories of social life, news is a social resource. A source of knowledge, a source of power, news is a window on the world. p. 217

There are new values orienting journalism practice in an online journalism world. Journalists must reckon with how to adjust to the demands of a 24/7 news cycle, an environment of interactive engagement, and a world where one-to-many has been upended. p. 5

The emergence of a startup culture in the field of journalism is global: since the early years of the twenty-first century, new independent journalism companies have formed around the world.

Nothing has produced as much optimism as the prospect of grass-roots, citizen journalism. Observers like Dan Gillmor and Yochia Benkler see the digital media unleashing ordinary people to gather and report information outside the channels of traditional mainstream media. Those people, who Gillmor has referred to as the “former audience,” are “...learning how to join the process of journalism, helping to create a massive conversation and, in some cases, doing a better job than the professionals.”

The challenge we collectively face is not how to re-create the authoritative hierarchy of the past — for better or worse, that battle has already been lost. Instead, it is to create a new media regime that, through explicitly defined values like transparency, pluralism, verisimilitude, and practice, provides the opportunities for a wide variety of voices, interests, and perspectives to vie for the public’s attention and action. p. 324

In recent years, the news industry has seen an evolution as more legacy institutions, news startups, and nonprofit publishers have redesigned or launched membership programs. In many cases, they’ve conducted audience research and adjusted their communications from “subscribe” to “support” messaging as part of these efforts. These endeavors strengthen their existing audience development efforts and provide opportunities for staff to work together across disciplines.

Technological capabilities and features of the Internet and World Wide Web have prompted concerns about the verity of online information, the credibility of new media, and the new responsibilities placed on media consumers. Reflecting these concerns, scholars have shown a renewed interest in the credibility of sources, their messages, and the media that carry them.

Among those who do not trust the news media, the main reasons (67%) relate to bias, spin, and agendas. Simply put, a significant proportion of the public feels that powerful people are using the media to push their own political or economic interests, rather than represent ordinary readers or viewers. These feelings are most strongly held by those who are young and by those that earn the least.

We on the engagement team want to use the skills we’ve developed to do more of it. We plan to do more work that is technology- and platform-based, more engagement with those who are civically involved and more crowd-driven projects that span investigations.

Almost a third of our sample (29%) say they often or sometimes avoid the news. For many, this is because it can have a negative effect on mood. For others, it is because they can’t rely on news to be true.

We want journalists and newsrooms to feel empowered, not hopeless. Our current experiments are based on 8,728 user questionnaires and 81 in-depth interviews, conducted in 2017 by journalists in these newsrooms. We've turned the insights gathered into concrete strategies for newsrooms, and we're testing them now.

And we have to make it easier for people to form a relationship with the sites whose work they value. Otherwise Facebook and Google and maybe Apple News will own that relationship.

Arguably, what we are witnessing is a toxic combination of policy blunders on austerity, war and globalisation coupled with a new hybrid media and political system dominated by reality TV, social media and filter bubbles.

When you’re asking the audience directly for support, there’s no more compelling argument to give then “we truly listen to you, and actually make the work you’re asking for.”

Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links. Now our medium can.

Considering the fake news phenomenon, newspaper and TV reporters tend to score poorly in the honesty stakes.

However, those tasked with relaying the results of polls to the general public have not fared as well with only 20% of Australians (up 1%) rating Newspaper Journalists ‘very high’ or ‘high’ for ethics and honesty and 17% of Australians (down 1%) rating TV Reporters ‘very high’ or ‘high’.

Australians think doctors, scientists and farmers contribute the most to society and believe almost equally that priests, politicians and journalists are a detriment to our wellbeing.

For their part, Democrats consider television and newspaper reporters much more honest than do Republicans, although Democrats' honesty ratings for these professions fall below the 50% mark.