Re:noted #6: Say what readers can do because of you. Then count it.
Last call for our book club, which starts tomorrow. Plus, five steps to measuring whether your journalism is useful.
👋 Hi all! Two quick items from the Service Desk to share with you:
You can still join the book club
Our book club on Making the shift to service starts tomorrow, Nov. 10.
It’s inspired by Meditations for Mortals. The idea is that we each do one workbook page each weekday, plus some extra readings, then get together to talk about how the ideas are showing up in our work.
Over the five weeks, you’ll get familiar with the core concepts of service design and leave with a clearer strategy: what you promise, to whom, and how you’ll know it’s working.
Logistics: On five Tuesdays (Nov. 10 and 17, Dec. 1, 8 and 15), we meet for 60 to 90 minutes in our pixel world on gather.town. (A little preview of the space below!)
We offer two slots: one for Asia/Pacific evenings and European mornings, and one for European evenings and mornings in the Americas. No matter where you, join whichever session best suits you (or both!).
If you sign up, you can still join tomorrow, Tuesday, and the following weeks. The space stays open throughout if you want to virtually co-work or meet up otherwise.
Shifting to measure utility instead of reach
We’ve been writing monthly columns for the Reynolds Journalism Institute on things that are on our minds that might be useful.
The latest is a thought process that aligns with the book club's work on shifting to service-oriented journalism practices: How to measure whether your journalism is useful.
Most newsroom metrics track content and product: how far a story traveled, how many emails a registration wall collected. Few track whether you keep your promise: that because of you, readers can do something they couldn’t do before.
Teams usually fall into four measurement traps: setting goals too broad to measure, like “build trust”; stopping at engagement; counting how much they publish; and chasing reach.
We suggest measuring outcomes: observable changes in what someone can do, decide, or navigate because of your service. Impact is what many outcomes add up to over time.
Defining the outcome is harder than counting it, so the five steps start there:
- Name the job readers rely on you for.
- Shrink it to one outcome: finish the sentence “A person can now ___.”
- Look for signals, such as people coming back, acting on what they learn, or dropping another source for yours.
- Pick one number per signal, and a team to own it. Editorial, product, marketing and revenue then measure against the same promise.
- Write down what each number can’t prove.
The example is inspired by a similar real case in our coaching work: a weekly newsletter for people who run trains and buses. Its supplier newsletter works if a railway manager can now spot a supplier problem before it reaches their system. The team counts managers who open most issues, managers who say an alert made them check or change something, and managers who heard about a problem first from the newsletter.
This gives us guideposts to then measure: if fewer than ten managers say they spotted a problem by the end of the second quarter, we interview five readers and adjust; under three, we drop the section.
Read the full column at RJI, with the whole example and a fill-in-the-blank statement to use with your team.
If you try any of the steps in your own work, write and tell us how it went by responding to this email! Also email us if you think this is complete nonsense and we’re vandalizing the Sacred Temple of Journalism.... in that case we can just keep counting clicks until it collapses completely 🔥📉🏛️📉🔥.
Patrick & Madison