Webinar 79: Decoding Audiences and Creating Engagement Strategies

Technology has opened up new channels for journalists to better serve and understand their audiences. But few journalism schools teach in-depth audience engagement, and not all newsrooms have resources to devote to it.

In this webinar, Riki Conrey, who studies audiences as the director of science for Harmony Labs, will help journalists and media entrepreneurs better understand what they can do to maximize engagement and deliver content that reaches people who most need the information.

Conrey’s job entails using big data that flow through our culture to help artists make the world better. She examines audiences’ interests in when they're not paying attention to social issues, and in what we can say to them when they are.

Riki's team recently discovered where people get their stories about how poverty and money work in the U.S. (mostly from TV news), which U.S. audiences are most interested in stories about Native Americans (the same ones who care about history), and what kinds of stories about immigration connect with audiences whose core values include security, tradition, and family ("everyone's from somewhere").

Accurately defining your audience is complex. In the same vein, defining audiences based on demographics or politics is unsatisfying. People within the same age and gender groups, for example, do not necessarily consume the same content.

This webinar will help improve how your audience engages with your content and how you engage with them. I invite you to come and learn about the unique places an audience occupies in journalism, how to use cultural touchpoints to reason about the kind of news that audiences need, and how to deliver it to them.