By Carolyn Shapiro

Not all academic-news partnerships involve students reporting and writing for local news outlets. Some colleges and universities lend their expertise in other ways, often with research and data analysis.

Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications launched the Local News Initiative in 2017 to offer two of the school’s specialized resources: The Spiegel Research Center, which does data mining and quantitative analysis of online readership; and the Knight Lab for Digital Innovation, which develops experimental technology for journalism outlets.

With those entities and their students, the Medill Local News Initiative is helping news organizations that lack the resources to dig deep into their readership and audience engagement data to make better decisions.

“To be effective you need to understand your audience,” said Tim Franklin, Medill’s senior associate dean and director of the Local News Initiative. “You need know what their needs are, what their interests are, to be relevant to them.”

The LNI is known for its annual “The State of Local News” report. Behind its often dreary findings about the loss of daily newspapers and working journalists is a goal to reverse that decline and bolster the news industry.

The LNI started with a pilot project with traditional newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and Indianapolis Star to dig into “terabytes and terabytes of data” from reader and subscriber behavior. Based on the analysis, several of the publications made changes, said Franklin, who came to Medill after serving as president of the Poynter Institute, the venerated journalism educational and training organization.

Medill then looked to scale up the LNI, expand it to more news outlets and offer real-time analysis. In 2021, funding from Google allowed the LNI team to create the Medill Subscriber Engagement Index and make it available for free to news organizations. At the end of last year, the index had 104 participating outlets — more than half of them small, community news providers — which received assessments on dozens of digital metrics.

“That allows a local news organization for free to see how they're performing with their local audiences, and then they can also benchmark their performance with peers across the country,” Franklin explained. “So the thing that makes this unique is that we have a line of sight into what their subscribers are doing.”

With the index’s artificial intelligence tool, news leaders can see immediately what resonates with readers and what repels them, Franklin said. “For example, they can experiment with their subscription rates, or they can experiment with, ‘What would happen if we created a new newsletter and improved our conversion rates?’ And then it spits out data of what would happen if they took these actions.”

The index doesn’t just analyze web traffic but the patterns of paying customers or subscribing members, those who determine an organization’s livelihood.

“So what we've been evangelizing is that local news organizations should be less focused on page views, which really in many cases only contribute minimally to the bottom line, and instead should be focused on building loyal readers,” Franklin said, “and then what are the strategies and tactics once you know that to build regularity and habit.”

Another LNI creation is the Medill Metro Media Lab, funded by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation and focused specifically on nurturing the Chicago news ecosystem. The lab has worked with two news cohorts, each including community-focused publications: Block Club Chicago, a digital news startup, covers Chicago neighborhoods. The TRiiBE, a relatively new online platform, focuses on the city’s Black community. Chalkbeat Chicago features reporting on city schools.

“What we have in Chicago is this petri dish, this really robust experimentation with different types of news that is reaching more people, I would argue, than has ever been reached before,” Franklin said.

For the cohort partners, Medill student fellows in its Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship specialization conduct consumer research, focus groups and online reader surveys to come up with experimental strategies to engage audiences.

With another McCormick grant, LNI recently added the Local News Accelerator to expand on Medill student work with more Chicago-based outlets.

By supporting the financial health of the news industry, the LNI is a fundamental feature of Medill’s educational mission, Medill Dean Charles Whitaker told The Daily Northwestern, the university’s student-run newspaper. For students to have real-world experience in news, those outlets have to survive.

“I think it’s important for an institution like Medill to not simply be a training ground for the next generation of journalists and storytellers but to also insert ourselves in the media ecosystem in an effort to try to cure what’s ailing local news,” Whitaker said in an October story about the Local News Accelerator.

One accelerator partner needed help with search engine optimization, always landing at the bottom of search results. Some “very tech-savvy students” worked with the news outlet on techniques to perform better in SEO, which is crucial to drawing readership, Franklin said.

Another student developed a newsletter prototype for a news outlet that wanted to capitalize on readers’ interest in entertainment, culture and restaurants. Franklin noted: “That’s the kind of work this small, community-based news organization would not have been able to do on its own.”