GothamSchools targets loyal and casual users with different content
This post sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
GothamSchools, like most news Web sites, serves multiple audiences: one part loyal readers and insiders and another part casual readers. But does the same kinds of content appeal to both of these audiences?
Regular readers are much more knowledgeable about a beat and some of these readers are even experts. The kind of content that appeals to these people is much different than drive-by readers, who may be new to an issue. These differing audiences with differing expectations and knowledge levels have led editors at GothamSchools to develop different kinds of content to appeal to each audience.
GothamSchools attracts a lot of insiders in the New York City education scene: teachers, principals, parents, education policy makers, other education journalists, etc. This audience is very knowledgeable and they’re coming to GothamSchools for the latest information on New York City schools. These people don’t need to wait until the dust has settled around a story; they’re fine with learning tidbits along the way.
For this segment of the audience, GothamSchools has short blog posts under the heading “Margin notes” that break news, report a story as its unfolding, excerpt another blog, give thoughts from someone in the education community, link to content around the Web and more. These blog posts can either help tell more about a previously reported story or they can help tell tidbits as a story begins to take shape. This is content, however, that most likely won’t appeal to casual readers and may even confuse some.
These posts don’t have to identify everyone because insiders know who the players are. These posts may also crowdsource and solicit user suggestion. GothamSchools’ editors view these blog posts as a place to get users involved with reporting.
“When we’re tapping into our insider pool, that’s a blog post,” writer and editor Elizabeth Green said.
On the other hand, most casual readers would be lost if they just stumbled upon a short blog post that didn’t contain any background information or identify all key players. For this audience, GothamSchools offers longer content that is written much like a newspaper story. These pieces are thoroughly reported, involve talking to lots of sources and never contain information from one side of an issue. These stories are self contained and don’t rely on other GothamSchools content to tell a larger story.
These stories serve regular readers fine, but they’re more aimed at casual and drive-by readers. A parent who may have received a link in her e-mail would benefit much more from a thorough, self-contained piece than from a short blog post that excerpts another blog or just has a tidbit about an issue.
“We’re certainly a niche site, but we have a lot of general readers,” Green said about GothamSchools ability to appeal to casual users.
This may seem like arguing semantics. How do readers even know which content is aimed at them? GothamSchools recently rolled out a new visual design that indents blog posts from the rest of the page and puts a double carrot, >>, next to these posts. By having a visual way of differentiating between stories and blog posts, GothamSchools is making it easier for readers to see which kind of content they are viewing.
Green believes that it is important to make it clear to readers when GothamSchools is reporting a story versus when it has a completed reporting story. For instance, editors may have information from one side of a story (a principal on budget cuts, for instance) and want to get that out there, but editors don’t want readers thinking that’s the whole story.
“I don’t think it’s fair to put a full story out there with information only from one side,” Green said.
In fact, sources became confused by the different kinds of content that GothamSchools offered and some even accused GothamSchools of being “just some rag,” before they realized that GothamSchools offered in-depth content to go along with short blog posts. Editors and writers were having issues with these sources who didn’t understand the difference between a blog post and a fully-reported story. Editors are hoping this new visual design will help sources realize what’s a fully-reported story and what’s a blog post that may contain only one viewpoint.
Green and other editors debated the merits of this change. There were concerns that users would not get the distinction, but so far users and sources have been receptive to the changes. Editors wrote a blog post detailing this change and others that helped users understand what was happening.
The blog posts and stories work hand in hand though. As a story is unfolding, writers and editors will file blog posts with new tidbits, links to what else has been reported, thoughts from insiders and more. After a story settles and has been thoroughly reported, editors will go back and write a complete story that will sum things up for regular readers, while also telling a complete story for casual readers.
“It’s a balance of giving a good first draft of history and with being rigorous,” Green said.
The daily roundup: a second dose of link journalism from bloggers
Lots of journalists and Web sites have link journalism posts to start the day.
Maybe it’s a Daily Dish after you Rise & Shine or a stop by from the City Hall Monitor, but whatever the name and theme, these posts almost always start in the morning. Their purpose is to give readers content to kick off the day and read throughout the day (some link journalism posts contain enough links that it would take hours to read through the contain being linked to).
Beatbloggers are already reading a myriad of sources, and many have a bunch of RSS feeds in a program like Google Reader and Google Alerts set up. The primary purpose is to keep up on one’s beat and to find potential stories, but it doesn’t take much work to make a post linking to the best content a beatblogger finds through this process. The very best news and information will most likely make for full-fledged posts (or for a topic to be researched further), but the best of the rest is still going to be very interesting to readers too.
These posts are either constructed with left over stories and news from the day before or with new stories that show up in a journalist’s RSS reader in the morning. A new trend is starting to emerge, however, where journalists are adding a nightcap of link journalism to their work. It’s something for fans of a blog, for instance, to read as they unwind at night, and if the curation is done well, it can provide a lot of content even after a blogger is done for the day.
Gotham Schools has the standard link journalism post first thing in the morning, Rise & Shine, but a few months ago it added a new bit of link journalism called Remainders. Content on Gotham Schools is bookended by link journalism posts. One contains tidbits of news at the start of the day, while the other contains links to stories to round out the day, and in-between users are treated to original reporting.
Gotham Schools covers a massive beat: New York City schools. There is plenty of quality content and documents to link to every day about a massive school district like that. How else could two beatbloggers cover a school district with thousands of schools without linking to other content?
“Since our goal is to be a one-stop-shop for New York City school news, we decided to run two daily aggregation posts,” said Philissa Cramer, one of the two writers for the site.
Cramer generally does the Rise & Shine post for Gotham Schools, while Elizabeth Green usually does the Remainders post. The two of them have a different set of news sources and Google searches that they use to build each post (with some overlap of course). This means that the sources for each link journalism post are often different, and it helps give their link journalism a bit more variety and uniqueness.
Link journalism can be a great way to add a lot more content to a blog without a lot of additional work. Cramer was already looking over a myriad of sources for news and information about the school district. While some of what she finds may make for a full-fledged post, link journalism allows her to put the best of the rest out there for her users to read.
Why waste a resource like that? Cramer and Green are two of the most knowledgeable and well-read people about the school district. Their ability to curate the best content about it is a major selling point.
Rise & Shine takes about 45 minutes to put together, according to Cramer. She and Green have gotten good feedback about the link journalism posts, and the Department of Education uses the two posts to monitor the city schools.
Well-known political blogger Andrew Sullivan also ends his daily blogging with a roundup of leftover news, The Daily Wrap. It’s a wrap up of the most interesting political stories of the day.
NYU Professor, PressThinker and BeatBlogging.Org founder Jay Rosen called Sullivan’s “The Daily Wrap” a “smart, incredibly simple blogging practice for a busy, newsy blog.”
And it’s a very simple post that any journalist can do. It doesn’t take much time, can drive serious traffic and provides additional content and insight for readers. With sites/tools like Publish2, link journalism has become incredibly easy.
Most journalists and bloggers eventually call it a day (except, it seems, for a few tech bloggers). But people don’t stop consuming content just because content producers have gone home for the day. A daily roundup post can give a blog hours more of quality content.
And, as Cramer pointed out, if a blog wants to be a one-stop shop for everything about a beat, the only sensible way to do that if with a mixture of good original reporting and quality link journalism to fill in the gaps.
