ABSTRACT

In 2018, Alabama’s largest daily newspaper, the Gannett-owned Montgomery Advertiser, set out to transform its newsroom to focus on enterprise and solutions journalism—rigorous news reporting on how people are responding to social problems, a practice that has gained attention as newsrooms have looked for innovative ways to increase audience engagement. To examine its impact, we conducted a multiple-wave survey of the newspaper’s audience before and after the transition, collected community conversations via social media data from Twitter and Facebook, and reviewed the newspaper’s website analytics. The results were mixed. Audience perceptions from the survey data revealed less engagement over time. However, newspaper analytics revealed an increased number of page views and longer engagement times on their solution-oriented news stories compared to their traditional stories. Sentiment analysis of the social media data showed a significant increase in positive sentiment and significant decrease in negative sentiment. The newspaper’s editor discusses factors that might have contributed to the results and highlights that, although the paper met obstacles, the transition to solutions journalism increased the newspaper’s connection to the community. These findings reinforce that measuring the impact of solutions journalism in a real-world environment is complex and more studies are needed.

摘要

2018年，阿拉巴马州最大的日报，由Gannett拥有的蒙哥马利广告商致力于将其新闻编辑室转变为专注于企业和解决方案新闻业的新闻–有关人们如何应对社会问题的严格新闻报道，随着新闻编辑室寻求增加观众参与度的创新方法，这一做法已受到关注。为了检查其影响，我们在过渡前后对报纸的受众进行了多波调查，通过Twitter和Facebook上的社交媒体数据收集了社区对话，并查看了报纸的网站分析。结果好坏参半。来自调查数据的受众感知表明，随着时间的流逝，参与度降低了。但是，报纸分析显示，与传统报道相比，面向解决方案的新闻报道的浏览量增加，参与时间更长。社交媒体数据的情绪分析显示，积极情绪大幅上升，消极情绪大幅下降。该报纸的编辑讨论了可能对结果产生影响的因素，并着重指出，尽管报纸遇到了障碍，但向解决方案新闻业的过渡增加了报纸与社区的联系。这些发现进一步证明，在现实环境中衡量解决方案新闻的影响是复杂的，需要进行更多的研究。