Re:filtered #7: Research is reporting, reporting is research

This is the 7th edition of my monthly newsletter on new civic media models and opportunities in a moment of systemic disruption.

If you're a new subscriber, thank you for being here. If this newsletter has been forwarded to you, consider subscribing.

Earlier editions had lessons from exiled media for surviving Google Zero, a review of exciting research in diaspora media, and an idea on how to calculate civic media impact.

This month, I'll share some inspiration on audience research.

Navigating the Unknown

My main project this summer is conducting research on the information needs of a group of people I can't meet.

These people live in another country. Their lived experiences are vastly different from mine. While we speak the same language, we do so in very different ways.

I've asked some media practitioners and scholars for guidance and some told me that it couldn't be done. Confronted with that skepticism, I worry they're right.

The last time I felt this way was ten years ago, when an editor at the South China Morning Post asked me to write a feature with a China angle to mark the centennial of the outbreak of World War I.

I set out to find descendants of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese laborers who supported the war effort in Europe and the Middle East, a contribution that still isn't widely recognized. There was once a massive war mural in Paris that showed France surrounded by her Allies. To make room for the Americans when the United States entered the war, Chinese laborers were painted over.

I couldn't go to mainland China for this story. I had no idea how to find people two to four generations apart. It took many weeks of dread and dead ends to find someone. This photo of a graveyard visit in France saved the day:

Kneeling in the middle is Cheng Lin. She had posted this photo on Weibo, mentioning the name of the cemetery in the post. It is the grave of her grandfather, Bi Cuide.

A century earlier, the native of Shandong province had joined hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, mostly from the countryside, to help Britain, France and the other members of the Entente topple the empires of Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans and Germany.

Like so often in reporting, this was a series of rare strokes of luck: Cheng found the grave thanks to a British commemorative medal bestowed to Bi after the war and which miraculously reached and stayed in the family.

Cheng first discovered the curious disc when she visited her ancestral home in Laiwu in the 1970s. Then a teenager, she remembered noticing the number etched along the rim: 97237. Half a century later, the number, her grandfather's military ID, led her to a database which then led her to the grave.

I am now experiencing a similar dread with this audience research. But it's a good sense of dread that is so familiar from investigative reporting and that pushes you on. It's the addictive thrill of a reporter's looking for information, fueled by the knowledge that something is out there. It just needs to be found in a similar mix of perseverance, learning and luck.

This is so different from what I originally thought audience research would be.

When I first encountered its practices in newsrooms, it was all about data wrangling to identify trends in past consumption, and draw conclusions about the future.

I wish someone had told me back then that that's only a tactical part of a broader effort that's much more similar to investigative journalism.

Ideally, audience research is reporting, before reporting.

In "Just Enough Research," Erika Hall has this helpful distinction: 

1. Generative research: "What is a good problem to solve?"  
2. Explanatory research: "What is the best way to solve the problem I've identified?"
3. Evaluative research: "Are we getting close to solving this problem?
4. Causal research: "Why is this happening?"

In media organizations, so much energy, resources and technical development go into #3 and #4, and so little into #1 and #2.

The problem here is that evaluative and causal research can only optimize a status-quo. It can't identify needs and opportunities. These feedback loops have supplanted (instead of building on) the more exploratory strategic research that often just doesn't happen.

That's especially tricky because consumption data is so compellingly precise while generative and explorative research often lack the such appearance of scientific precision.

For civic media, evaluative research can't lead to product/market fit and will not lead to any tangible social change – unless you're really, really lucky and talented, which no one ever is consistently over time.

This is a massive problem in public media or donor-funded media organizations that can't impose discipline through monetization. I've worked in some newsrooms where audience analysts, journalists and marketers have framed evaluative research as generative as a way to impose their vision of what the media organization should be doing. Perhaps I have too.

This is also a key issue for the major ongoing donor initiatives that have invested a lot of energy into data dashboards. These have their place, esp. for benchmarking, but they're secondary to strategy. The methodologies of research to get to strategy are fundamentally different.

The "Jobs to Be Done Playbook" by Jim Kalbach is helpful in how it structures  generative research:

1. Discover value: find the right problem to solve for the people you serve.
2. Define value: set the direction for addressing the problem you've identified.
3. Design value: Create solutions that are desirable, viable, and useful.
4. Deliver value: Present the solution.

One methodology he mentions are goal-based personas, based on the work of Alan Cooper in "About Face 2.0. The essentials of interaction design:"

Step 1 – Interview people: "You can interview for jobs and personas in the same session. Rather than asking users about their preferences and desires, focus on their intent, as well as what frustrates them and what success looks like."

Step 2 – Map interviews to variables: Think of variables as needs with two endpoints that create multiple ranges (e.g., functional: factual vs. interpretive, specialized vs. general; social: community vs. universal, consumption vs. participation; psychological: reassurance vs. challenge, inspiration vs. utility, education vs. entertainment).

Step 3 – Identify patterns in goals: Look for clusters.

Step 4 – Describe the resulting personas: For each cluster, create a persona with shared circumstances when reaching the goal, workarounds and frustrations. Avoid adding irrelevant detail.

Result: Fictional name; behaviors and actions; demographic and psychographic details; needs and pain points. 

In my own past work, I have perhaps overly focused on demographics rather than for pain points for sizing these groups. I'm going to give this another try.

What about emotional needs?

I've been wrestling with intangible needs and how to approach conducting research. For Kalbach, this is secondary: "first, meet the functional objectives then layer the aspirational and emotional aspects onto the solution," he writes. Many practitioners I've talked to said the same. Fair.

But that remains unsatisfactory for something as intangible, personal and social as storytelling. I found some answers in "Understanding Audience Emotional Needs in Crisis Journalism", a recent study by Seseer Mou-Danha and Elizabeth Crisp Crawford.

They looked at The Boston Globe's Facebook posts and audience comments in the year following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and employed Ronald E. Taylor's Six-Segment Message Strategy Wheel to categorize how posts and comments addressed various informational and emotional needs.

The wheel divides messaging strategies into two parts: transmission (rational, acute need, routine) and ritual (ego, social, sensory). Each of these six segments represents a different motivation or mindset.

This framework allowed Mou-Danha and Crawford to move beyond the dichotomy of functional versus emotional needs, and offer greater nuance.

They found that ritual-based messaging strategies that are community-specific and focus on social and sensory needs dominated both in posts and comments.

Social needs were met through content that fostered community identity and solidarity, exemplified by the "Boston Strong" theme that emerged. Sensory needs were addressed through vivid storytelling and expressions of emotion.

The researchers found that posts integrating these elements received more thoughtful engagement than those focused solely on facts, suggesting that journalism may be more effective when addressing both informational and emotional needs.

The study's mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative content analysis with qualitative thematic analysis, allowed for a deeper understanding of how emotional needs were met over time.

The researchers observed that initial posts and comments often expressed shock and fear, but as time passed, there was a shift towards content that promoted healing, resilience, and community restoration.

This, of course, was explanatory research. How could this be done in a generative way, seeking to identify emotional needs as they arise?

I don't know, yet.

If you have suggestions, please send them my way by responding to this email or messaging me on Signal.

Objections to generative research

Hall also wrote a great list of objections to research and some excellent responses. Sharing some gems here:

❌ We don't have the expertise. ✅ "Research is a craft and a set of skills, but above all, it's a mindset."

❌ We need to be scientists. ✅ This isn't pure science. "Your desire to find out needs to be stronger than your desire to predict."

❌ We don't have the money. ✅ "Objections about time and money are always a smokescreen using a bad model of what research is."

❌ One research methodology is superior (qual vs quant). ✅ "You want to know what is happening (qualitative), how much it's happening (quantitative), and why it's happening (qualitative)." 

❌ We already know the issue/user/problem inside and out. ✅ "Familiarity breeds assumptions and blind spots."

❌ Research will get in the way of innovation. ✅ "Understanding why and how people do what they do today is essential to making new concepts fit into their lives tomorrow." 

The book has a few more. I really encourage you to read it.

Ironically, these are also typical responses I got when I talked to historians ten years ago about Cheng Lin's story.

So here I am again, facing that familiar sense of dread mixed with anticipation of learning and insights. The task of researching the information needs of a group I can't meet feels daunting, much like finding descendants of World War I laborers' did a decade ago. 

The thrill of the hunt for information, the knowledge that there's always something out there waiting to be discovered – it's addictive in the best way. It's what makes journalism, and audience research, so similar, and so uniquely rewarding. 

Looking Back

Hackers On Planet Earth XV was amazing. I learned how to hack a WiFi network using a cute cat-shaped tool, which is scarily easy.

There were sessions on keystrokes surveillance in China; USB, WiFi, voting systems vulnerabilities; info balloons into (and feces balloons out of) North Korea; Android supply-chain attacks; improving mesh network communications based on Hong Kong protest learnings; portable security; bias testing of large language models – all major ones showed, more in relative than absolute decisions – and social justice in prompt engineering.

"The weirdos have a role to play in saving the world," rolltime said in her talk today on solarpunk (slides). Two examples:

1. Solar Protocol is a global network of solar-powered servers that route traffic based on where on the planet the sun is shining.
2. Low-tech Magazine's solar-powered website lowers its energy usage when necessary by reducing image size and limiting the use of javascript.

I would love to see more journalism conferences be more like this. It is so energizing to learn from super smart people with a sense of civic responsibility who give each other a feeling of agency, despite systems and everything. HOPE is going to be a fixture on my annual conference calendar. (Live streams were free!)

Separately, I learned a ton from Linda Setchell, Jeff Jarvis and everyone who joined our discussion hosted by Nos in New York of social media platforms and opportunities in the protocol space. My presentation (slides) looked at how autocrats have been able to exploit current closed platforms, and how decentralized protocols could offer solutions in the future.

The conversations made me wonder if we could look at platforms as the digital equivalents of bodies politic and protocols as their governance models, and design protocols accordingly. Users will always be subjects, not citizens, in the Walled Gardens of X and Meta.

The fediverse is only promising if the individual instances (aka "city states") are inclusive. Decentralized protocols allow for far greater democratization of the online space. But systems architecture and UX/UI challenges abound.

Looking Ahead

I hope August will be quiet as I focus on this research project and reconnecting with friends and family.

Two conferences: SRCCON is Aug. 15-16 in Minneapolis. I have a spare free ticket to give away. Let me know if you are interested.

NostRiga, the Nostr unconference, is Aug. 22 - 23 in Riga, Latvia. Nostr is a decentralized social media protocol that seeks to address some of the shortcomings of the ActivityPub protocol, giving users and communities greater agency to co-design their social media experiences (but also requiring greater technical literacy).

It got a lot of criticism recently because of how it has been used by far-right groups (much like how they've hijacked the bitcoin debate). To that, I can only say that the best thing to do is to do something. We need way more experimentation to eventually create civic spaces that actually foster greater empathy, kindness and connection.

For instance, if some of the learnings of the Tor Project could be applied to Nostr implementations, it could become an interesting solution to circumvent censorship. But this still requires tons of experimentation and more people wanting to have these conversations.

Inspiring in Media

Building systems that reduce harm is possible...

Case in point: Article 19 just published a series of concrete recommendations (pdf) for app platform infrastructure in general and dating, messaging and social media services specifically to protect LGBTQI+ people, and anyone else, from harassment or worse, based on input from research conducted in eight countries across the Middle East and North Africa.

Suggestions include:

• Discreet app icons
• Ephemeral chats
• Prevent non-consensual screenshotting
• Face-blurring in photos

All this could have been done ten years ago. Imagine the good it could have done and the bad it could have prevented.

... and a smart revenue idea.

Peter Erdelyi and his colleagues at the Center for Media Sustainability in Budapest recently explored the use of Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) for journalism funding. 

Such bonds align financial incentives with social goals, potentially creating a win-win-win situation for investors, governments, and communities.

SIBs for journalism would involve private investors providing upfront capital for media projects aimed at specific social outcomes. If these outcomes are achieved, a public sector partner would save money otherwise spent in less effective administrative measures and repay the investors with a return.

What I love about this is that it commits a media venture to a clear theory of change that aligns with its mission, so it doesn't get lost in grand narratives of journalistic independence as an excuse for commodified news coverage but actually use the funding to be of service.

I've heard people dismiss similar proposals as communication funding, but I've come to believe that to be a bad faith argument. Any such funding must align with a value proposition for people served to be credible and effective over time.

In such funding models, social change through publishing could also be calculated and tracked with a degree of certainty that eludes most other impact models, e.g. using lifetime civic value calculations. (It may just be very humbling in terms of how much harder it is than buying Facebook traffic used to be, but also so much more meaningful.)

That's it for this month.

To thank you for reading, here's the master slide deck from last month's Central and Eastern Europe Media Conversations. There is great inspiration on revenue, organizational development, product and mental health from some of the brightest people in journalism.

I am grateful to Boryana, Peter and Cristian for embarking on this project with me, and everyone who joined.

If you want to connect, just reply to this email, message me on Signal or claim a slot in my calendar. I may just be a bit slower to respond than usual.

I hope I managed to give you some inspiration and hope that there are great things ahead in media if only we aren't complacent.

Enjoy your summer! See you at the end of August.