Create links with regions and communities, especially in times of crisis

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BACK TO LOCAL MEDIA

 

 

“During Covid, we had enabled local artists to give a concert. So that has nothing to do with the editorial team, […] but I think it’s a project that wasn’t bad for the company. So, the artists sometimes came and played live with the guitar in the studio.”
  • Editor-in-chief at Radio Fréquence Jura, translated from French
The USP (Unique Selling Proposition) of local media is that they report on local issues and potentially can connect the local population. This requires a strong, visible connection to the region. The exceptional situation during the coronavirus pandemic has increased trust in the media (Fürst & Rieser, 2023, p. 146) as the population wanted reliable information from the media – in local terms, from the local media. In this situation, the local media had a special responsibility in terms of providing information, but also in terms of promoting (a sense of) local cohesion. While Radio Fréquence Jura, for example, made its studio and airtime available to local musicians, Telebasel visited local small businesses, portrayed them, and thus supported local companies that have suffered the most from the pandemic.

Outside of times of crisis, it is just as important to establish local ties and thus maintain close contact with the local population. Bajour achieves this with the “Basel Person of the Day” section, in which someone from the population is prominently featured every day, including the reason for the honorary title. Both well-known and unknown members of Basel society can become Basel Person of the Day. The Nouvelliste in Valais relies on listening to the population: with the new newsletter La Matinale audio, users receive the most important news of the day on their phone and can have the articles read to them – by the voice of the region, an artificially generated voice that speaks the Valais dialect of French.
 

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Examples:
  • Basler*in of the day at Bajour
  • Newsletter read aloud with a voice that stands for the region at Le Nouvelliste
  • Ostsee-Zeitung with the face of the day, a section for community building through active representation of its members within the newspaper in the form of short portraits
  • Dresdner Neue Nachrichten with its transmedia involvement of the readership in connection with a print series in the form of online ranking of readers’ photos and a photo story, thus additionally involving the target audience
  • Westdeutsche Allgemeine with its mini-series on systemically relevant professions in the Corona pandemic, experience reports as protocols in first-person form with integration of topic-relevant statements from politics
  • tactile.news/Radio Euskirchen with the concept of an interactive piece of furniture in public space that uses AI to create a semi-autonomous outdoor studio
  • Merkurist, interactive and participative topic generation and feedback loop: users create so-called ‘snips’ as suggestions for topics in the respective region, the community can then vote (‘O-ha! Button’). As soon as enough positive reactions have been collected, there is the possibility that the topic will be researched and reported on by the Merkurist editorial team. Reports based on Snips are then freely accessible on the region’s homepage. Funding via advertisements and sponsored content