Throughout the recession, news organizations have reported countless stories about people struggling to pay bills, find jobs and afford health care. But traditional media outlets are not especially proactive in providing their audiences with ways to help the people they profile.
To make it easier to turn news into action, The Huffington Post launched a new section that features stories with widgets that let people make online donations to needy families, nonprofit organizations and more. Called “Impact,” the feature also provides users with opportunities to volunteer for causes, sign petitions and register for updates on stories that interest them.
The initiative is an example of how legacy media can work with the Fifth Estate not only to gain greater exposure for their coverage, but to show their audiences how they can help people in the news.
“As journalists, our primary responsibility is to cover the news,” said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Huffington Post. “But we can also give an opportunity to our community to do something beyond saying, ‘Oh isn’t that sad’ — and that’s something journalists need to be doing more of.”
In partnership with an online social action network called Causecast, The Huffington Post kicked off Impact on Oct. 13 with a St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times story by reporter Lane DeGregory and a related video by photographer John Pendygraft.
The story, which The Huffington Post first linked to on Sept. 28, is about Monique Zimmerman-Stein, who has a rare genetic disorder that has left her nearly blind. Her two daughters, who share the disorder, also have serious health problems. The Steins have health insurance, but throughout the past 10 years they’ve accumulated a half-million dollars in bills that insurance won’t cover.
The Impact kick-off post included a link to the Times story and a widget that enabled people to donate to the family. After just 36 hours, Huffington Post readers had donated $20,000. That rose to $30,000 after six days, and the target goal kept being raised.
DeGregory said that when readers contacted her to ask where to make a donation, she directed them to Impact’s donation widget. “I think everybody’s thinking about health care,” she said, “and this story really made you think, this could be me.”
Impact followed up on the story last week and featured a St. Petersburg Times video of the Steins expressing their gratitude to Huffington Post readers.
In addition to the Times story, Impact has featured some other mainstream media stories, including a Los Angeles Times piece about a homeless 97-year-old.
How Impact works
Although the Fourth Estate regularly tells stories with sympathetic characters, it hesitates to pass the hat except during the holidays. Impact asks its audience to get involved on a daily basis.
The Impact stories, which consist of both aggregated and original Huffington Post content, cover a wide variety of topics: victims of female genital mutilation, children in need of school supplies, and celebrities raising awareness of cancer.
Sunday night, the lead Impact story was pegged to a “60 Minutes” interview with David Axelrod, senior political advisor to President Barack Obama, and his wife Susan. Drawing on information from the “60 Minutes” interview, Impact encouraged users to donate to CURE, the Axelrods’ epilepsy foundation, and provided links on how to speak out to Congress about the need for a cure for epilepsy and how to look up the media’s coverage of the disorder.
Though only some of the Impact stories feature donation widgets, most of them include ways to donate to the cause at hand by linking back to cause’s Web site or to Causecast.org, the partnering site that creates the widgets and processes the donations.
Victoria Fine, associate news editor of Causecast and Impact, has written several of the Impact stories and helps select the aggregated content featured in the section. The benefit of linking to a local news outlet’s story on Impact, she said, is twofold: The outlet gets greater exposure, and The Huffington Post can publish more in-depth local news stories.
“Given the conditions of local newspapers, everyone’s on a tight ship these days. News organizations can’t be expected to make widgets and look up donation sites and talk to different charities,” Fine said. “They don’t have the time or the capacity to do that right now, so I think that’s where our opportunity is.”
When do mainstream news outlets promote causes?
So maybe media outlets aren’t “expected” to create donation widgets or similar tools. But what’s holding them back from creating them?
Stephen Buckley, publisher of TampaBay.com, the St. Petersburg Times‘ Web site, said embedding donation widgets in future stories isn’t out of the question.
“I don’t think we’d want to do that with every story, or even a lot of stories given some of the risks involved,” Buckley said. “But can I see our doing that? Absolutely. I think it’s a very good idea.”
He addressed both the benefits and risks of providing the community with a way to connect to the news they consume.
“It reaffirms the importance of your organization in the community, so everyone wins when this works well,” Buckley said. “The risks are clear; you don’t want to be directing people to a group or an individual or a family and then hear it turns out those people aren’t as bad off as they said they were, or that they took the money and spent it in a way that’s inappropriate.”
In asking people to donate to specific causes, news organizations could appear to favor one cause over another. Who’s to say, for example, that one person’s terminal illness and battle with his or her insurance company is worth donations and another’s isn’t?
There’s less risk for The Huffington Post, which touts itself as a news and opinion site — though none of the causes featured on Impact are politically affiliated.
“Impact goes beyond right and left,” Huffington said. “It’s an opportunity to move beyond ourselves and to tap into the better angels of our nature.”
