“Community building” has become an increasingly more important strategy for digital publishers in recent years, helping to develop a loyal, engaged audience on-platform.
The Globe and Mail is no exception – from live Q&As with journalists to call-outs and reader-led content, their community work is certainly one to be inspired by. We spoke to Audience Growth Manager, Rebecca Zamon, about these initiatives.
Audience Growth at The Globe and Mail
Audience is a fairly new role for traditional newsrooms, at least only a decade or so old, and it means different things across the media industry. At The Globe, it’s made up of various ‘pieces’, pieces that take up differing amounts of attention, but also pieces that become more or less important over time.
The platform piece has changed the most, not just with X like for most of the industry, but in particular with Meta following their ban of news sites in Canada (which includes WhatsApp of course too, despite media organizations putting significant effort into this platform recently). Given this, and the growth of this platform, especially amongst younger audiences, we’ve put a huge amount of time into TikTok, getting reporters to speak about their stories and put a face to their work.
Then there’s the SEO piece, which is of course changing with AI, and the one we’re talking about today – engagement.
On this topic, one of the key features we’ve been playing with here are Q&As – organized around large events, whether that be elections, leadership race, interest rate changes (a big topic for The Globe, which is quite business-focused), or around feature stories – evergreen content not tied to a specific news moment.
The Q&As are formulated as live events on specific topics, where our subscribers can ask questions of reporters about their specific coverage, or general inquiries about things that are happening in the news – tariffs, for example, are a very hot topic right now.
There’s such a wealth of opportunity here, and it works on so many levels. Readers get the chance to ask questions and get involved in the story.
Journalists also get involved in these conversations – they get to talk about parts of the story that didn’t make the article, or go deeper into this topic that they’re so interested in and get story ideas for future coverage.
My role here has been to get the go ahead on this idea, to talk to the revenue and tech teams about it and align teams. But it’s our brilliant editors spearheading it, working with reporters to explain why it’s important to do this kind of community engagement and share the positive feedback we’ve received.
The workflow for Q&As
When we decide that we want to do a Q&A, we do a call-out with an in-article Google Form: “Did you read this article? Share your questions with our reporters and they’ll answer at X time on X date…”
This call-out happens about 2 days before the live Q&A, meaning we have some questions in advance that editors can feed into the conversation.
Readers can also submit questions live during the event, which happens around lunchtime, although we’re playing around with this timing to see what works. We have a fairly consistent traffic line throughout the day so it’s just a matter of testing.
On the day of the Q&A, we’ll reuse the article where we’d placed the Google Form, removing this call-out, and the conversation then happens in the comments section.
Our programming team will send out an alert on the app to let people know that it’s starting, but only after a few questions have already been answered so they’re entering an active space.
The Q&A then runs for an hour. Editors sit with reporters, feeding them questions, helping them navigate different situations that come up, but on the whole it’s a pretty seamless process.
After that’s all done, because the discussion is happening in the comments section, we can repurpose those questions and answers, doing a follow-up article summarizing what was shared.
Avoiding toxicity
The comment provider that we use allows people to use whichever name they’d like, so we don’t have real-name commenting. I can certainly see the value in it for reducing toxicity, but equally you can go too far, like when outlets used to link profiles with Facebook which meant people were findable and other commenters could see their whole life!
Maybe there are other ways to avoid toxic comments, for instance having journalists join the conversation as a way of reminding readers that other commenters are human beings. We’re also working on adding profile pictures for journalists in the comments section for instance. Alternatively, simply creating discussion questions, pinning them at the top, and featuring comments can help to promote good conversation.
“The live Q&As are for subscribers only (although registered members can view the conversation without participating) with the goal of increasing engagement and showing the value of the paid product.”
Subscriber engagement in the comments section is a great indicator of audience interest in the topic, angle, etc. It’s of course not something that dictates our journalism, but it’s valuable data to have to inform our work and ensure we’re providing value to our subscribers.
What would you have done differently if you were starting this project again?
One of the frustrations we’ve had is the actual discussion space, where it’s happening on the site. At the moment, it’s in the comments section, which isn’t ideal for the user experience. This is in part simply because it’s the comment section, and partly because we have some dev work to do.
When we first launched this feature, we of course made a few mistakes – for instance we once did the alert from the app and people couldn’t even see the conversation. So, like everything, it’s about learning to set up properly, test and iterate as you go. I’d recommend doing test runs prior to going live for the first time.
Another piece of advice would be to ensure there’s a cohesive flow to these strategies – for instance working with the business team and making sure that they are alerting subscribers to the event to maximize reach. It’s not always easy with news events – sometimes we’ve come up with a Q&A and run it the next day because that’s how news works, and Q&As are ultimately an added value to the news coverage. Getting all the pieces working together, and bringing everyone into the project is always tough, but definitely essential.
Going a step further with reader-led journalism
One thing that we’ve been doing recently, that goes hand-in-hand with the community piece, are call-outs for journalists to get information for articles directly from our readers. The callout might ask reader opinions, get them to share their experience and send in photos giving their perspective on an event.
For instance, Toronto had a snow day last month (fairly rare here, surprisingly) so we asked readers to submit their memories of snow days as a child, leading to a really heartwarming story pulling together all of these experiences. It’s also this kind of journalism that helps combat news avoidance and balance out the more negative news events.
We also work with individual reporters to run call-outs. For example we have a happiness reporter, who ran a call-out for readers to nominate the happiest person they know!
It was such a great piece, sharing all these stories and sharing what we can learn from these happy individuals. Wonderfully it was one of the most successful stories in the first week of January and ended up being republished into a Q&A with our happiness reporter.
Then on a more serious topic, with the trade war with the U.S., we did a call-out to ask if Canadians have changed their buying habits and how, or what products do you love that’s made in Canada. From that we created a database of Canadian companies! So it’s informing our journalism, providing even more value to readers.
One thing I’d say to anyone looking to run these types of call-outs – make sure you’re telling readers what you’re going to use the information for! And close the loop too – write back to people when you can, share the final article and help make them brand ambassadors who are then more loyal to your brand.
Thank you to Rebecca for this interview!
