Joe Mitchell, Deputy Director of PINF, invites the sector to help shape a new way to measure the success of local news - with the goal of tracking progress, supporting newsroom self-assessment and unlocking investment.
As avid readers will well know by now, PINF’s ten-year mission is to regenerate local news in the UK by 2035.
But it’s not just any local news. We dream of seeing newsrooms that meet the “ASPIRE” standard developed by the Local News Commission in 2025. That is, news that would be:
Accountable: Putting the interests of local communities before newsrooms’ own political or commercial interests. This means finding out what local people need and want from local news and being accountable for meeting these needs.
Sustainable: Ensuring that local news providers have the means of covering their real costs without being dependent on one source of funding.
Public interest: Meeting PINF’s definition of public interest news.
Innovative: Striving for better ways to serve the community. We encourage local news providers to review the impact of their work and experiment with new approaches to drive accountability, sustainability and engagement.
Representative: With leaders, workers and contributors from the widest possible range of backgrounds, enabling local news providers to speak to, for and with all the communities they serve.
Engaging: With content that is not just important but also compelling, with local news providers using all the tools at their disposal to tell gripping stories about what is going on.
This sounds all well and good, but how can or should we measure those things? How does one judge whether a newsroom is ‘engaging’? These aren’t binary concepts, there’s an amount of subjectivity.
The answer is to break these ideals down and look for indicators. For example, having a podcast on top of an email newsletter does not guarantee that a newsroom is Engaging, but it’s an indicator. When we put it together with several other indicators — e.g. does the newsroom get significant readership or listenership? — we can get a workable impression.
And it’s not just about measuring whether we're achieving our mission. We also think we can help others achieve their missions through this work. Newsrooms themselves might like to see how they’re doing against the ASPIRE benchmark — a kind of self-diagnostic tool along the lines of LION’s Audit that Beckie wrote about last week.
As part of our Local News Fund stream, we’re also looking to understand the sector’s appetite and readiness for social finance — which also requires data on the newsrooms’ financials and plans.
Can we kill three birds (clay pigeons, please) with one stone?
We’d love your help reviewing the long list — and longlist — of questions and metrics below. Do you think they would be realistic as we try to track the sector, provide a self-diagnostic tool for newsrooms, and help develop a pipeline for social investment? Do you think something glaring is missing?
The simplest way to comment is to go this Google Doc — but do email me if you prefer.
We hope to then test these questions on a few newsrooms — let me know if you’re a newsroom that’s keen.
Accountable
Ownership, legal structure and decision-making power
- Does it have a mission lock? (e.g. charity or CIC or CBS or Coop or ...)
- If not, is it a company limited by shares / guarantee / unincorporated…
- Do readers/members have any legal power?
- Do employed staff have any legal power?
- Is it locally owned?
Regulation
- Is it a member of a PRP-approved regulator?
Audience research
- Does it have a target audience? Who? What size?
- What tools or processes does it use to gather feedback from audiences?
- How often does it review this feedback?
Transparency
- Does it publicly share data on reach, impact, membership, finances, diversity?
- Does it share impact metrics?
Sustainable
Context
- When did it start operating?
- Has it operated continuously since starting?
- Is it growing, stable or shrinking? By revenue, reach, impact?
Roles
- Does it employ anyone on payroll whose main job (>=50% of their time) is revenue generation?
- Does it employ anyone on a freelance basis whose sole job is revenue generation?
- Does it employ anyone whose job is predominantly product development and technology?
- Which part of the newsroom could benefit from additional staffing?
- If it were to have significantly more revenue, what would its next hire(s) be?
Pay
- How many FTE employees / permanent contracts / fixed term contracts?
- How many freelancers?
- How many volunteers?
- Does it pay the real living wage?
- Does it offer locally benchmarked / sector-benchmarked salaries?
Succession
- Is the founder still involved / leading?
- Does the leadership have a succession plan?
Vibes
- Do staff feel like they can achieve their workload?
Management
- Are there regular staff/volunteer check-ins?
- Does it provide training and onboarding?
- Does it have a staff handbook?
Revenue
- What does it use to monitor fundraising / ad sales / subscriptions rates …
- What’s the revenue compared with last year?
- Is it reliant on one single revenue stream?
- Are the proportions of revenue changing?
- What % of revenue comes from regular small donations / membership fees / subs?
Buisiness model / planning
- Is there a clear business/revenue model?
- Is there a budget / cashflow forecast for this FY?
- Is there a three-year plan / KPIs / SMART goals?
Marketing
- How does your audience/community find out about it?
- Does it do any marketing? (paid for, social media)
Insurance
- Does it have insurance?
In the Public interest
Content
- Does it cover local elections?
- Does it cover local government meetings or decisions?
- What is the primary geographic focus?
- What proportion of stories are local? What proportion is public interest content?
- Does it do … investigative / solutions / constructive / positive / community … journalism?
- Does it cover critical information needs?
Impact
- What is the mission, vision, values statement - or equivalent?
- What is the social impact goal?
- How is social impact recorded and measured?
- What is its most compelling impact story?
Innovative
- Does the newsroom regularly review its approach to best serving the community?
- Is there evidence of trying something new recently?
Representative
Outcomes
- What's the difference in staffing vs local population demographics (and socio-economic indicators)?
Process
- What steps have been taken to make the newsroom representative of the community it serves?
- What work still needs to be done here?
- Does the newsroom have policies on … hiring / accessibility / safeguarding / salary scales / harassment / diversity?
- Does it publicly advertise all jobs? With salary info?
- Does it publish the rates it pays freelancers?
- Does it offer flexible working?
Co-creation
- Does it practice public engagement or co-creation approaches?
Engaging
- How is audience reach / interest measured?
- How often is this reviewed and how is it used to guide the work?
- Does the newsroom publish text / audio / video?
- Is there an audience feedback tool?
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