Given the high cost of adopting new workflow practices in news organizations, any drastic change will need to be attached to an institutional benefit. Multiple newsrooms expressed interest in comparing their metrics to their competitive set. Parse.ly currently offers a similar paid service for aggregate traffic figures among participating newsrooms. If a similar system could be developed for a NewsLynx-like system for qualitative metrics, we believe there would be enough incentive for newsrooms to converge on agreed-upon impact buckets.
The main idea here, however, is that if organizations could more clearly and quickly see a benefit this would greatly help standards and possibly wider adoption of impact measurement. Being able to see how organizations in your competitive set are doing compared to your figures would certainly be an attractive offer.
Whether standards could work, however, is a different question. On this point, too, we believe they can. Participating newsrooms said the framework of categories and levels worked well for classifying their impact events. At the very least this type of aggregate information would already work cross-organization—“what kinds of change events did the top three packages get?” etc. To go a step further, though, the specific impact tags people created did not differ significantly, giving hope that general equivalencies could eventually be found.
We are advocates of building cultures of impact within newsrooms, however, we’ve heard conflicting views on whether impact culture is best accomplished from a top-down directive or a bottom-up desire from reporters and editors. The critics of the top-down approach say that a push from leadership about the importance of impact will likely fall flat since it takes significant time and strategy or staff to implement. The people tasked with this job are usually already time-taxed reporters and editors.
Critics of the bottom-up approach say that without standardization any uncoordinated effort will mostly result in inconsistent noise—that is to say, the problem of inter-rater reliability, to borrow a social science term.
From hearing this discussion, we think any new impact effort needs buy-in from both leadership and staff. This comes when there are natural incentives for newsrooms to achieve impact. Both groups need to understand how including impact in strategy may help the organization and the editorial product. Business interests may include increased cachet with those audiences attractive to advertisers or the ability to attract funding from philanthropic sources. Editorially, staff will be more engaged with how the audience is reacting to its work and how readers could potentially be enlisted as future sources—helping reporters and editors to do their jobs of telling compelling news stories more easily.
One of the bridges between these two sides, as previously mentioned, is the bi-weekly report that some newsrooms send to the staff. These reports both clarify what impact means and give encouragement, as previously stated, that readers are interacting and engaging with what the newsroom puts out.