Alexandra Smith

Menopause, without the noise We’re talking about it, in your inbox every Tuesday.

We @19thnews.org are launching a new newsletter! 🎉

Come sit with us:

We're hiring an audience growth manager - The 19th We're hiring an audience growth manager to collaborate across departments and develop and execute an audience growth strategy to reach the women and LGBTQ+ communities we aim to serve — particularly t...

The 19th is hiring an audience growth manager. Come help us grow in meaningful and sustainable ways! 🌱https://19thnews.org/audience-growth-manager-employee-hire/

As we start a new year, how are you measuring the value you provide to audiences?

All that said, TJR’s significance has been in culture change. Shifting perspective. Letting go of the idea that consuming journalism has to mean reading a 1,000-word story on a news website.

It helps us ask: what value and services do we aim to provide? And how might we measure THAT?

This seems like a great time to mention the dozen or so newsrooms that have come to me asking for help with building and measuring this model. Support in building a less-manual solution for this work could help a lot of news organizations. 🙏 💸

Literally, how? Slowly. Manually. I’m not a data scientist. My one attempt at learning SQL was short-lived. 🫠 I look up each metric on a monthly basis, and calculate the total. The metrics that make up TJR are not compared to each other — some inherently have more value to us than others. 🍎 🚫 🍊

It complements it by showing a broader picture of where audiences are finding, reading, watching, listening to our journalism. That data helps us identify ways we may need to diversify our audience strategy, so we’re not over-relying on one format or platform to serve all user needs.

Why views? Not all platforms where we publish our stories offer uniques data (bummer!) and we’re aiming for as much consistency as possible in the TJR metric. This model isn’t meant to replicate or replace reporting on our audience size, like uniquely monthly visitors to our website.

My most important point: TJR is not meant to be a perfect data point. We don’t discuss it in absolutes. It's meant to change the narrative we tell internally/externally about the impact of our journalism and what we value: that people actually read what we report, no matter their preferred format.

Two frequent questions I've heard on this model:

1. Why views and not a metric that better represents unique audience size?
2. Literally how do you calculate this?

Let’s get into ‘em…

Why we invented a new metric for measuring readership The media landscape is shifting. Reader habits are changing. Attention is fragmented. Platforms are untrustworthy. Past revenue, distribution, and growth models no longer reliably work. And while some...

For context, here’s the @columjournreview.bsky.social article about why we developed this metric (TJR) to help capture data on all of the ways we publish our journalism in formats across platforms and products www.cjr.org/analysis/ale...

Just got off a call with a news outlet in South America to discuss Total Journalism Reach, the ways it can help shift the conversation about our work and how it complements an audience analysis strategy.

I've had many convos like this in the past year. Here are some reflections...

ok, it took months but I do now miss sharing + connecting + discussing journalism strategy and innovation in a space that is not closed Slack groups