DETROIT, MI — How do you engage readers with local reporting? That’s the question that Diana Lind is tackling in Philadelphia. Lind recently joined Philly.com as the new director of digital audience development, a role created to better connect the community with journalism produced by the newsrooms of both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News. After a year of highly-publicized internal turbulence, new reader-focused energy may be just the thing Philly.com needs.
During her six years as executive director and editor-in-chief of Next City, a nonprofit Philly-based magazine focused on urbanism, Lind was a thoughtful voice on producing sustainable and ethical journalism in the modern era. (I write for Next City). In July, she examined “why audiences love local media, but won’t support them.” In a September interview with Philadelphia Magazine, she spoke about gender in the newsroom.
“As someone who believes in the role of media to affect change in cities, I can’t think of a better way to have an impact in Philadelphia than to help reinvent the region’s biggest media company’s online presence,” Lind wrote in her Next City farewell letter.
Lind began work at Philly.com on December 8, not long after the city’s papers softened their strict paywall policy and announced that they’d finally synchronize their three websites onto this single digital platform. We asked her about what she learned from her experience in nonprofit media, and how that translates into the future digital outreach of Philadelphia’s newspapers.
How do you describe your experience with Next City, particularly in how it transformed from a print magazine to a digital one? What have you learned in creating a home for longform urban journalism on the web?
About five years ago, Next City, like most independent print publications, had to figure out a new direction when it became clear that publishing a quarterly magazine was not going to be sustainable. In the summer of 2011, we decided to continue our legacy of strong reporting through an online, subscriber-only weekly series of longform stories. We were especially lucky to have Don Chen at the Ford Foundation support this transition which really enabled a new period of growth for us. We found there was a tremendous audience for this in-depth work, and over three years we had thousands of subscribers, but ultimately the paywall stifled our growth. My last move as executive director and editor-in-chief was to remove the paywall, ask readers to donate instead, and try to integrate the longform more into Next City’s growing daily feed of content. Throughout the experience, we learned that longform content is really popular, even without fancy multimedia, because it breaks through the noise of bitesize daily content. The challenge is figuring out how to support this kind of work, when daily blogging is comparatively fast, cheap and easy.
Some observers may be surprised by your trajectory–moving from what is ostensibly “new media” to “old media.” Why did you make the jump?
Because my primary focus is working on a strategy to build an engaged readership for Philly.com, I actually didn’t think of the job as “old media”. I was attracted to the job by a sense of tremendous potential to improve the work of Philly.com (and the Inquirer and Daily News) and an eagerness to play a role in fulfilling that potential. The papers and Philly.com have a large impact on the city already, but it could be bigger, and so as someone focused on urban affairs in the past, I also hope to help expand the role the company’s journalism can play in Philadelphia’s civic dialogue.
Your role–director of digital audience development–is a new one at the company. Why is there are a need for this position, and how will you go about fulfilling it?
There’s a need for the Inquirer, Daily News, and Philly.com to figure out what readers want from these publications, and there’s likewise a need for the company to figure out how to generate revenue from its audience given that print subscriptions are declining and online advertising is only able to make up part of the difference. My job is to help answer these questions by partnering with editorial teams on creating new projects or products that appeal more to our readers, and partnering with marketing on new outreach to readers, particularly through events. So what that means is we’ll be redesigning Philly.com next year, hosting some new events, and developing new coverage on topics that we know will resonate with readers, like a microsite dedicated to Philadelphia’s mayoral election in 2015.
What do you make of the fraught internal politics of the Inquirer and Daily News? Did it give you pause before you decided to join the company? And how, as a newcomer, do you intend to navigate it?
I’m generally oblivious to stuff like that, and in this case I particularly felt that it was irrelevant. The company has been through so many ownership changes in the past decade and now finally has stable ownership in Gerry Lenfest–that has given the company a sense of a fresh starting point. And now that Philly.com is the sole web presence of the two papers, it’s required everyone to put politics aside.
To get the digital media presence of the papers to where you want it to be, what challenges are you facing? What gives you hope?
We have a strategy to make Philly.com the best city and regional news site in the country, and what gives me hope is the team I work with. We have people who have been here a long time who have institutional knowledge and dedication, as well as new hires who bring fresh eyes and a skepticism of the status quo. Our main challenge is, in my opinion, just the ticking clock. Can we get all we need to get done as soon as possible? Change takes time in a company of this size and yet readers are impatient to see improvements.
Why is this work important for Philadelphia, and beyond?
This work is really important for Philadelphia because the Inquirer, Daily News, and Philly.com have enough resources that their coverage of the city, and the feedback loop created, can shape the city. Outside of the city, I think the work that’s about to unfold at Philly.com will have lessons others can learn from–and, if we do things right–emulate.
Anna Clark is a journalist in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in ELLE Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Next City, and other publications. Anna edited A Detroit Anthology, a Michigan Notable Book, and she was a 2017 Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy, published by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt. She is online at www.annaclark.net and on Twitter @annaleighclark.