When Michael Meister started at the Arizona Republic in 1984, the only place his photos showed up were in the newspaper. Now and then, Meister would see someone pick up the paper “and I would think, ‘oh my, they’re looking at my picture.’… That was the only feedback that I got back from the reader.”
Tuesday, May 19, marked the Arizona Republic’s 125th anniversary. In that time a lot has obviously changed. Even in Meister’s 31 years, a lot has changed.
The Republic, like all Gannett papers, went through a reorganization last year. And some of the changes they made have been successful. Compared with last April, the Republic’s social media referrals are up 232 percent, said Nicole Carroll, vice president, news and executive editor. Compared with that same time last year, unique visitors are up 70 percent, she said.
The Republic’s goals were to keep emphasizing quality journalism, Carroll said, and devote more resources to connecting with their digital audience.
Here are three ways this 125-year-old newspaper is doing that.
1. Experiments
Meister, director of visuals, doesn’t have to wait until stumbling upon someone looking at one of his images anymore to know if people are seeing them. And visual staff aren’t just using analytics to gauge how well they’re reaching people, they’re actually going out and reaching people.
Once a month as part of the city of Phoenix’s First Fridays events, staff from the Republic’s visuals team set up pop-up galleries in empty storefronts. They display their images but also offer a portrait studio that leads people back to the site.
“We decided that we wanted to bring what we do visually out to the people,” Meister said. They have a large screen with their images. They hand out business cards. It seems archaic, he said.
“We just wanted to be boots on the ground, in the street, talking to people.”
Another project, AZ365, shares a picture a day about Arizona using reader-submitted photos and staff photos. And last summer when the circus came to town, a woman called and asked if the Republic could help her find a way to take photos of the elephants. The paper paired her with a photographer and the two shot side-by-side and built a slide show of both sets of images in a piece called “She loves elephants. We love elephants. So we took these pictures together.”
For the 125th anniversary, the Republic’s Pat Shannahan created the video above using a Gannett tool that had previously only been used to create native video advertising. Shannahan, a senior photojournalist and senior storyteller, also created a Gigapan using images and pages from the Republic’s 125 years.
“We wanted to try some new things in how we present our content to our readers,” Carroll said.
2. Going live
Megan Finnerty first started the Arizona Storytellers Project in 2011. Now, the monthly events that include Republic journalists have sold out for the last year and a half. On the eve of the Republic’s 125th, the storytelling night was devoted just to journalists. It, too, was sold out.
This isn’t just people getting up on stage and talking. They’re telling. And, like writing a story or producing a video, there’s work that goes into that telling.
“When we take that time to prepare exactly what we want to say, that is a very different way of communicating deeply about these important moments in our lives,” said Finnerty, a features and entertainment reporter. “Ask someone to talk about it, they would, but you wouldn’t know how it changed them, just what they did.”
People want more intimacy and trust with their media, she said, and “to me these nights make total sense for a newspaper because we are sincere people who want what’s best for our community.”
For the journalists on stage Monday night, storytelling brought shape to their stories, she said, and let them share with the audience not just what happened, but how it happened and what it meant to them.
The storytelling process feels very close to journalism, Finnerty said. The tellers need to be accurate and direct, they need to be transparent.
“It’s an editorial product,” she said. “It’s deeply authentic, just like a news story is.”
Arizona Republic photographer Michael Chow tells a story during the 125th anniversary of The Arizona Republic ‘Stories About Stories’ Storytellers event at Phoenix Theatre on Monday, May 18. (Photo by Michael Schennum, Arizona Republic)
3. Audience
Tech and experimentation have been part of the Republic’s culture for a long time, said Keira Nothaft, consumer experience director for the innovation team. Last year when Gannett reorganized, Nothaft was put in charge of a four-person innovation team.
Their purpose, she said, is to create and promote content that connects readers, increases engagement and loyalty, meets the Republic’s business needs and makes the paper indispensable to the community. They work to add multimedia and interactivity to the site.
The Republic doesn’t have a development team, so the group works to aggregate research, test third party tools, report back on how they work and share what they’ve learned.
From that, they’ve created an internal digital playbook with links to those tools, directions on how to use them and all the tools in their CMS, plus tutorials. They also have a compilation of projects to look at as inspiration, including The Guardian’s “NSA Files: Decoded.”
“Somebody has to be keeping track of all of these great advancements,” Nothaft said.
A lot of this is possible because the newsroom is open to experimentation, Finnerty said. And they’re open because they’re also getting the time and space to do work they care about, “and that’s deeply satisfying.”
When he first started at the Republic, Meister only could guess how his work reached people. Now, he has a much closer connection to the community, both digitally and in person. And he knows that community has a lot more options now, too.
“We’re just trying to connect to those people.”
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