The 8:05

News about the news

Headshot of Michael Armini
by

A few weeks ago, CNN, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and Gannet News announced hundreds of newsroom layoffs. Other news organizations called it a “bloodbath,” and Northeastern Professor Dan Kennedy lamented “an ugly week of cuts” in his Media Nation blog. While this particular burst of job losses happened within a few days, it is simply the latest blow in the steady hollowing out of commercial news media. 

This is unfortunate no matter how you look at it. A free press plays a vital role in informing citizens and allowing democracy to flourish. But if the business model is irreparably fractured, what can be done? One positive trend is the rise of non-profit, mission-driven news organizations. Some, such as The Marshall Project, focus on niche areas such as criminal justice. Others, like CommonWealth Magazine, provide in-depth political coverage in markets that are increasingly not well-served by commercial news outlets. 

These non-profit outfits don’t have the brand recognition of their commercial counterparts, but many are thriving due to philanthropy and a clear sense of mission. As a colleague recently said of the commercial press: “Survival is not a compelling mission statement.” The non-profits are also taking advantage of people’s heavy reliance on search engines to read about topics and news they’re interested in. If people land on their sites and the quality of coverage is high, they’re likely to come back. 

Northeastern’s in-house news organization, News@Northeastern, is seeing a similar surge in traffic coming from “organic search.” Today, half of the traffic on the News@Northeastern site (the red slice below) is coming from search engines. Another sizable chunk (the green slice) is coming from direct sharing, which is people sending links to their friends and colleagues. This means that the majority of people reading News@Northeastern today are not affiliated with the university.

A graph titled 'Traffic Sources' with the subtitle 'News@Northeastern'. It shows two pie charts, one for 2019 and one for 2022 that show a breakdown of traffic from Organic Search, Direct, Social, Daily Newsletter, Referral, and Other. It shows that from 2019 to 2022 there was an increase in Organic Search and Direct traffic and a decrease in Newsletter traffic.

This development is largely based on a strategy we put in place several years ago. In addition to reporting on news about the university, we began covering timely topics in the world, and inserting Northeastern faculty members to illuminate the issue. The news team’s coverage of the war in Ukraine is a stellar example of this strategy at work. Not only does this entice ordinary readers to discover Northeastern’s coverage, it also helps reporters at mainstream news organizations find faculty experts to quote in their own coverage. 

The success of this approach led many of us to conclude that the name “News@Northeastern” no longer makes sense. It’s a moniker that was conceived and launched when the content of the news channel was primarily news happening “at” Northeastern. And now, after crowd-sourcing suggestions for several months, we have finalized our rebrand: Northeastern Global News will launch on Monday, January 9. Here’s a sneak peek:

A screen capture of the Northeastern Global News website.

Beyond the snazzy redesign, Northeastern Global News will have enhanced functionality and more intuitive navigation. Our goal is for the acronym NGN to take its place alongside other three-letter news brands such as PBS, ABC, CNN, and BBC. The university’s vice president for communications, Renata Nyul, sums up NGN’s twofold mission succinctly: “We are the official source of news about Northeastern, and we provide timely news coverage of the world through a uniquely Northeastern lens.”

When we first launched News@Northeastern we had a sort of first-mover advantage. Many other universities were still issuing traditional press releases. Today, maintaining an in-house news operation is becoming commonplace in higher ed—which is why we need to take the model to the next level. NGN launches in 21 days.

More of The 8:05