Does online engagement = offline action? 🤷🏻♀️
Social is largely off-limits for Canadian publishers thanks to C-18, but does that actually matter in the long run?
Hey y’all! I got back from the City of Brotherly Love where I attended two journalism conferences two weeks ago, and my mind’s been full since then. 🧠
As mentioned in last month’s newsletter, I recently attended Journalism That Matters’ Engaging Emergence unconference and the Online News Association’s ONA23: Philadelphia conference. Both made a big impact on my thinking about engagement in journalism and more broadly than that, how human beings genuinely “engage” — that is, connect — with each other.
At Engaging Emergence, I reconnected with some of my favourite people in our industry: engagement journalists. We discussed how to supercharge the impact of engagement, collaboration and solutions work in journalism by imagining the relationship we want with the people we aim to serve and what it will take to get there. My major takeaway was that our industry — including mission-driven news outlets — so often defines impact through OKRs and KPIs, but these types of performance measurement tools are used to measure the efficacy and efficiency of businesses. They don’t really illuminate our impact on the communities we’re trying to serve.
In fact, they feel quite disconnected from the ultimate goal of journalism, which is a public service meant to support democracy by helping people think critically, make informed decisions and navigate their lives. And who better to determine the “success” of our performance than the people we’re serving? I don’t claim to have the answer, but I do have some ideas for alternative metrics, as I’m working on developing The Green Line’s impact tracker with my Impact Innovation Fellow Lanxin Jiang. And I do know that community impact should be defined by community.
This feeling was further reinforced at ONA23 after I had the privilege of introducing Slate editor-in-chief and my former colleague Hillary Frey before her fantastic talk, “In a Post-Platform Media World, Destinations Matter Most.” As someone who came up during the heady but misguided days of web 2.0. news outlets that believed in infinite growth, Hillary’s talk resonated so much with me, including her point that “you can’t build an audience on distributed platforms” because of their constant evolution and therefore unreliability. They’re also a middle man between a newsroom and the people it’s trying to serve.
That makes me think about the session I co-hosted — Table Talks: Navigating C-18 and the Canadian News Blackout — and the perceived impact on Canadian publishers now that they’re cut off from social traffic from Meta products. Like I said in my interview on CBC’s Metro Morning about this topic, The Green Line has been impacted, though less so than many of our peers since we recently launched last year so the loss hasn’t been as great, and our community-driven approach has always prioritized relationship-building with our audiences and partnership-building with local stakeholders, including in-person engagement. That doesn’t mean I’m not concerned about the blackout’s impact on local democracy — because I certainly am. And I don’t like to see my fellow publishers and newsrooms struggle even more during this already fraught time for our industry.
But I also see most social media as having evolved into largely being a cesspool of polarization and mis/disinformation that inherently encourages disconnection both within and between individuals. At its worst, social encourages us to prioritize managing an external persona more than developing our own character — something Gen Z icon and YouTuber Emma Chamberlain describes as “living for the internet” rather than for yourself.
That leads me to the question I posed in my subject line: Does online engagement translate to offline action? When it comes to news outlets fulfilling their role as a pillar of democracy, that becomes a salient question. In the September edition of The Green Line’s Changemakers newsletter by Adele Lukusa, she interviews Toronto mayoral candidate Chloe Brown’s campaign manager Selom Anku who was candid in her response when Adele asked her how she felt about Brown’s strong social media support among Gen Z.
To be very honest, it didn't really do anything for us in the sense that if you guys weren't going out to the polls, we didn't care for the comments. Not to say we didn’t accomplish anything — because we are not going to say we didn't — but [the general public thought] that that's what we wanted to accomplish and that wasn't [it]. We were putting out content so that the 70 per cent that usually don’t vote felt empowered enough to go to the polls, and unfortunately that didn't happen.
So as much as we had people empowered online — and we're happy about that — when I'm going back to my drawing board, I'm going back to figure out how engagement transfers to polls. Because there are enough social media accounts doing that work, right? Because content is cool, but we're still hungry, we’re still dying, and we need policies — we need systemic change to happen.
That leads me back to metrics. Not only is social a middle man between a newsroom and its audiences, it also puts the power of your news business into the hands of these distributed platforms because they define the metrics for success — and therefore the parameters for funding.
I wonder, however painful it is in the short-term to lose some social traffic from a business standpoint, if it’s better in the long run so newsrooms start to measure ourselves by the benefit and positive impact we bring to society.
The Green Line: We’re looking for long-form pitches
The Green Line is interested in long-form pitches from experienced investigative and/or feature reporters based in Toronto that tackle the following systemic issues in the city through a solutions lens: housing affordability, queer history and the dance club scene downtown. We offer highly competitive freelance rates. If you’re interested in pitching, please send me your resume, cover letter and links to three clips (longform features).
Quick and Clean
Instead of the usual “Quick and clean,” I wanted to share my upcoming travels since I’ll be flying across the U.S. for various journalism engagements. Give me a shout if you’ll be in town and want to meet up!
I’ll be in Phoenix, Arizona, from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1 for Google’s Newsgeist North America 2023 unconference where 150 media leaders will gather for a weekend of discussion, debate and idea-sharing about the future of news.
I’ll be in Durham, North Carolina, from Oct. 2 to 4 for the 2023 Southeast News Sustainability Meetup and LION Awards Ceremony.
I’ll be in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from Oct. 16 to 18 for SRCCON 2023, a conference hosted by OpenNews for 300 developers, designers, journalists, editors and allies.
How you can support The Other Wave
My professional mission has always been to support the global movement towards more thoughtful, impactful news coverage, and all the ways that manifests. If The Other Wave gets you to think even a little differently about journalism, especially in Canada, then I will have accomplished what I set out to do. And if TOW gets you to take action and support Canadian media outlets — especially ones that strive to be innovative and inclusive — I will have exceeded my expectations.
If my values and goals resonate with you, please consider supporting fiercely independent media analysis that fills in gaps in coverage of the Canadian journalism landscape. How? Feel free to provide feedback, pass along resources, donate money or simply share this newsletter with your friends.