Why won't these audiences pay for news?
How offering concrete benefits may be the key to converting the most resistant audiences, including lower-income communities.
Hey y’all! Anita here. As the end of the programming-intensive portion of the Facebook Journalism Project’s Sustainability Accelerator quickly approaches, my coaching teams are focused on launching their respective fundraising campaigns. That’s why, lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about strategies for building consumer revenue 💰
My insider’s approach
Since I ran Scarborough Discourse from late 2018 to mid-2019, one consumer revenue-related question has preoccupied my mind: How do you motivate a community that doesn’t understand the value of paying for news, or that doesn’t have the inclination, to pay for news?
While I was director of communities at The Discourse, a Canadian digital news outlet that fills in gaps in coverage in underserved communities, I tried to answer that question from the perspective of Scarberians. Scarborough, for the uninitiated, is a sprawling and diverse Toronto suburb of more than 630,000 people that’s predominately made up of working-class immigrants whose average total income falls below the provincial average in Ontario. It’s also a news desert and my hometown.
I spent many months engaging and developing relationships with Scarberians who told my team that issues such as reliable transit, underemployment and affordable housing were priorities for the community.
Back then, it was important for my colleagues and I at The Discourse to ensure our coverage was democratically accessible — that is, free — to all people, given the positive correlation between civic participation and news consumption. But we also had to balance that goal with our other aim of becoming a financially sustainable outlet.
At the time, we focused on building out our membership model. Unlike subscriptions, which are simply revenue agreements between a publisher and news consumers, membership is mission-focused and encourages consumers to pay to be part of a community of like-minded people. But membership is about more than just financial transactions; members are also invited to make non-monetary contributions, such as tips and knowledge based on their lived experiences, referrals for potential sources, feedback on stories, and more.
One workaround The Discourse team came up with was to provide an option on our payment page for willing members with the financial capacity to purchase a membership for another person who couldn’t otherwise buy one for themselves. But that still didn’t address the issue of how to directly monetize our lower-income audiences.
My outsider’s approach
In “Poor Information: How Economics Affects the Information Lives of Low-Income Individuals,” a 2018 study in the International Journal of Communication, authors Fiona Morgan and James T. Hamilton outline why income inequality often translates into information inequality. Here are a few reasons they cited:
Decision-makers with lower incomes face “stressed cognitive loads, bad choice architectures and less room for error,” which can pose barriers to paying for news
Low investment in changing the decisions (e.g. election votes) of people with lower incomes means there are “lower quantities and qualities of content created for their benefit”
Since people with lower incomes have limited consumer options and lower levels of education and digital literacy, they’re targets for fraud and deception by predatory companies
Morgan and Hamilton are hopeful that the following three things will help address information inequality because they “take people’s circumstances as a given and try to get them the information that will help them make better decisions, from the perspective of their own lives.”
Behavioural economics is about figuring out how people make decisions
Big data helps determine the best way to deliver information to specific lower-income communities
Bundling involves bringing together two or three information demands in one accessible physical location in a community
I’m particularly interested in how to create value propositions that actually resonate with communities that don’t understand the value of, or have the inclination to, pay for news. In an interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab, Morgan and Hamilton describe the value prop of The Slammer, a newspaper that prints the mugshots of people who’ve been arrested in Durham County, North Carolina, which they found in a convenience store in a low-income area:
When I think back on the value props we developed for Scarborough Discourse, many focused on intangible, esoteric benefits like reinforcing democracy, which weren’t effective enough to capture much of our target audience. In contrast, The Slammer’s value prop is tangible because it provides a specific piece of information that the publication’s target audience is looking for.
WDET, Detroit’s NPR affiliate, took a similar approach with its 2019 crowdfunding campaign. The affiliate partnered with local publication Grand Circus Magazine to create Framed by WDET, a photo book and multimedia exhibition that celebrates 10 of the city’s underrepresented or misrepresented communities through the storytelling and photography of 18 Detroit-based artists and journalists. Pledge options for the campaign started as low as $10 USD, and offered tangible benefits to donors, such as the photo book and an invitation to the public exhibition. The project also had an intangible value prop: “For backers, this project is another opportunity to support and expand the reach of both Grand Circus Magazine and Framed by WDET.”
Based on my experiences and research to date, my hypothesis is that it’s quicker to process the benefits and drawbacks of tangible rewards, compared with intangible rewards, which could help reduce “stressed cognitive loads” for lower-income audiences. For example, in the case of Scarborough Discourse, offering coupons or discounts for local grocery stores with a paid membership may have better incentivized community members to convert.
Inappropriate value props can be a significant external barrier to monetizing audiences. Stay tuned for my next newsletter when I take a look at some internal barriers…
Tell me: What do you think of my hypothesis? How would you convince communities like these to pay for news?
Shout-outs
This week, I want to give a belated thanks to Rachel Giese, editorial director of Xtra, and @JunBugFromSpace, one of my regular readers, for their kind words about The Other Wave:
In my community
Policy Options just launched “Identifying the Barriers to Racial Equality in Canada,” a new feature series of articles for which I was guest editor. Industry leaders and top scholars contributed to the series, which takes a close look at solutions that will help dismantle systemic racism in different sectors across Canada.
“Pause and Rethink,” the 2021 Canada Media Fund Trend Report, came out earlier this month. I contributed to “Disrupted viewing: audiences today,” Chapter 1 of the annual report, which analyzes the state of Canada’s audiovisual industry in the context of a global pandemic.
Speaking of which, the CFC Media Lab recently co-released a study called “Pandemic Effect Study Report: Women/Womxn-led Digital Media Businesses”; it shares insights from these entrepreneurs as they navigated the unprecedented disruption brought about by COVID-19.
J-Source conducted a Q&A with Canadian Association of Black Journalists executive director Nadia Stewart and I to mark the one-year anniversary of Canadian Journalists of Colour and CABJ’s joint Calls to Action. (Side note: I stepped down from CJOC’s executive committee on Feb. 15; read my full announcement here.)
Cool stuff I like
Last month, my friend Stefan threw himself a virtual birthday party that incorporated The Stories We Don’t Tell, a 6-year-old live storytelling event series he created with our friend Paul. Check out their new book, an anthology of 61 stories that were all told in front of a live audience at a SWDT show.
I binge-watched all four seasons of Search Party, a dark comedy about narcissistic millennial hipsters living in Brooklyn who accidentally get involved in a murder, in just two weeks. And I don't even have much free time these days — that's how good it is.
My all-time favourite podcast is On Being with Krista Tippett, which explores what it means to be human. To decompress, I recently listened to what’s now one of my favourite episodes of On Being with one of my favourite philosophers, John O’Donohue.
Tobogganing! One of the best things about Canadian winters is Canadian winter sports. With many of us still under lockdown, tobogganing has become a fun go-to in my household. So, go tobogganing. It’s seriously the best.
Last thought
How you can support The Other Wave
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