Building and serving communities with Ryan Y. Kellett, Financial Times and THECITY

With the tsunami of content that's coming with AI, building communities - where publishers listen, engage and interact with readers - will prove essential to survive. In an incredibly interesting session at WAN-IFRA's World Congress in Krakow, Ryan Y. Kellett, 2025 Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellow for Journalism Innovation at Harvard, Hannah Sarney from Financial Times and Nic Dawes from THECITY shares how they're reimagining journalism as a collaborative, community-driven practice. 

What is a creator-model journalist? 

• Creator journalists combine journalism with elements of content creation
• Creator journalists work independently, in collectives or collaboratively
• Creator journalists run a small business with multiple products and revenue tied to ads, sponsorships and donations
• Creator journalists are accountable to their audience on social media, often by creating a para-social relationship

What can we learn from creators? 

• Be more trustworthy in sharing expertise and having bias
• Become more accessible in online spaces where audiences already consume other content
• Be more reliable in tone and style, including bits of personal life to add a human touch
• More transparency in choices made to run a sustainable model
• Be more responsive to audience feedback 

Creators are often a supplement, a new way of thinking about news, but elevate news organisations because of their resources.

But this doesn’t come without challenges, for the creators and the industry. 

• The algorithm still rules the world around us for both creation and consumption
• Is this actually the uber-fication of news, if journalists are all independent contractors? Who will do BIG investigative or accountability journalism? 
• Curating your own news feed with the creators you like is actually really hard. And it’s hard to elevate new voices
• No incentives for young journalists to train. Inconsistent ethics and editorial judgement
• Does nothing to counter polarization and conflict entrepreneurs

What can your newsroom do to lean into a creator future? 

• Share your favourite creators with colleagues and even bosses
• Identify and uncover talent on staff most comfortable with creator spaces. Give them resources and support to try something new 
• Align talent with aesthetic without forcing brand on them (where a lot of newsrooms go wrong!) – don’t squeeze them in the brand, be creator / person first 
• Empower your audience teams to explore and lead with AI tools
• Partner with non-journalist creators, paid and organic. Try academics or other subject-matter experts you trust first
• Formalise a creator-program that scales affiliate/referrals for subscriptions or registrations
• Start an in-house creator team to extend your brand at the top of the funnel 

Loyalty isn’t built by speaking louder, it’s built by speaking with

Hannah Sarney, Editorial Product Director at Financial Times, highlighted the importance of building a future of trusted journalism. How? Trust builds loyalty, community builds trust, and community is built through two-way engagement spaces.

Curate the story but also the conversation around the story 

Given that owned platforms have the highest trust, it’s here that publishers need to build conversations and interaction around the journalism.

This has already been proved at Financial Times:

• Comment readers are 11x more engaged than those that don’t
• Commenters are 46x more engaged than those that don’t read or write comments

However, research found that although 50% of subscribers read comments, only 4% actually write them. Maybe the door doesn’t feel open, or maybe the door isn’t easy to find?

Encouraging commenting at Financial Times

Protect civility

• Making community guidelines easy to find and understand
• Clearly enforced by the moderation team
• AI-powered moderation bought in to bring up the moderation baseline, re-trained off human comments, with humans still kept in the loop

Spark participation

• “Join the conversation” tag with a question to encourage readers to answer and be more thoughtful in their commenting
• Make it easy for readers to jump down to the comments section

Fostering connection and togetherness

• Upcoming live Q&A feature designed to encourage broader participation and lift conversation into the story
• Only send these questions to journalists, rather than publishing on the site immediately, making the entry-point less intimidating
• Easy-to-use, mobile-first experience
• Clearly defined roles and experts
• Easy to catch up when the event is over

Build direct 1-2-1 relationships to create stability and resilience against big tech platforms 

Nic Dawes, Executive Director at THECITY, a local news nonprofit serving the people of New York City, with a clear mission: provide news for underserved communities.

One way that they achieve this is with targeted, printed postcards via mail, a uniquely non-digital strategy to get in front of the people impacted by these stories. The postcards include explanatory journalism, a QR code to the website and question-and-answer content.

Recipients then share questions, with journalists writing back to thank them and close the loop, showing that readers are part of the process, reinforcing communities. This also helps to better serve readers as content is based on reader questions

These stories have consistently strong evergreen traffic performance, help to acquire new audiences and allow for sponsorship opportunities for different campaigns.

Although they may not be a key driver of immediate donor intent, they have the potential to short-circuit search and AI related challenges (although significant scale-up is required).