📻🎙️🛜 As public broadcasting faces cuts, KQED leans into digital community building
A Bay Area radio station cracks the code on digital conversation (and shares their playbook)
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Coasting down California street in San Francisco, radio tuned to local station KQED on a regular weekday morning, you might hear the host plug their Discord.
Yes, this NPR affiliate station hosts their own local digital space on Discord, a chat platform very similar to Slack, but developed originally for gamers. We write about Discord often, and it’s been in the news recently.
KQED’s Discord, approaching three thousand members from across the Bay Area, was created in part by Francesca Fenzi, Digital Community Producer. Below, I talk to Francesca about why KQED’s Discord community is so special. We get into the weeds, including on how it works, the limitations of the platform, and this vulnerable moment for public media in the US.
This is a rare case study that perfectly bridges our two main projects at New_ Public: It’s both an experiment in public media audience building and commenting, as well as a carefully stewarded, prosocial, and public-spirited local digital space. Wow!
Francesca joined one of our recent steward fellowships, and she helped us develop our guide for local digital stewards. Now, she’s created a playbook that’s even more targeted: “How to Create a Digital Community for Your Newsroom”. This is such a cool resource, and if you’re interested in what we’re doing here, I strongly encourage you to take a look through it, and to share it with journalists.
–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public
How the Discord community came to be:
I am a journalist by trade and have been a producer of public radio for over a decade. I came into this role with the goal of building a digital community for our talk radio show, “Forum”. It’s a call-in public affairs program and daily news show that's on the air for two hours every day. We invite panelists to come and share their expertise.
The show is hosted by two journalists: Alexis Madrigal and Mina Kim. What I really love about this show as a listener and also as a producer for the program, is that it is a true meeting place for people in the Bay Area to come together and talk about issues that are important to them. Listeners can call in.
So, the goal of our digital community was, “How can we translate what exists on the air, in this cool space, into the online environment?” Our digital community is between one and two years old. It’s a place for people who are curious, civically engaged, and wanting to talk with other people who are as informed about the news and Bay Area culture as they are.
How the community hosts difficult conversations:
If you come across anyone in public media who's cracked how to have non-contentious conversations about national politics, please let me know so we can learn from them — particularly for a show like “Forum” that covers both serious political and technical topics and lighter cultural topics. It’s famously challenging to have meaningful discourse across some topics on the internet.
As a media organization whose mission is to educate and inform the public, regardless of their viewpoint, we felt like it was inauthentic to say not to talk about certain subjects in a space that we host. We want people to be educated about these things that they care a lot about, whether they always agree with our reporting or others in the space, or not. So that creates a puzzle.
I learned a lot from spaces where people have already evolved really useful moderation tools for keeping controversial subjects in check. Reddit has encountered everything that could possibly happen in a digital forum space so they have good suggestions for how to run yours. And I think a lot of our media peers are doing interesting things already with their comment sections.
It was a little bit of borrowing from many different places and comparing that against our own public media mission. NPR has its own ethics guidelines and standards that we follow for the most part. They differ a little bit from some of our commercial peers. So yeah, it was a hodge podge, putting it all together.
The value that the Discord community brings to the station:
We set out to build a digital community, thinking that it would be an opportunity for us to potentially cultivate an audience that may be more likely to subscribe and become members of KQED as an organization, ideally sustaining members with a recurring donation.
We also were thinking about it as a potential tool for expanding the audience, reaching demographics that are perhaps less our central, core radio listenership. Public radio is definitely going through a bit of an identity crisis in terms of how to connect with younger or more online audiences.
We found that a space like Discord really helps deepen relationships with people who are already a little bit more invested in you. It's actually a really great way to get to know and build genuine trust with people who are already maybe interested in KQED.
What we've found in terms of being able to translate that into monetary support is encouraging but not definitive. Each time we have polled the community, about every six-months, there has been more willingness to support KQED. I will caveat by saying that what people say they will give and what they actually will give sometimes doesn't line up.
But we do have a lot of encouraging signs. People are saying that this is enough of a value add to them that they'd be willing to give a couple extra dollars to help sustain it.
What's been really exciting is that we have consistently had between ten and 15 percent of members actively engage as we've grown. We define that as people who log in, visit at least three channels, or post more than three messages over the course of one week.
We reach more people on Instagram, but in terms of conversational engagement, we have not yet cracked that code on traditional social media. We have on Discord.
Why KQED wanted to put together this playbook of what they’ve learned:
We compiled all of these tools and tried to track our steps in this playbook that we have built and released — modeled in no small part off of New_ Public's stewardship playbook. We tried to recap how to get projects like this off the ground. We’ve found that stewardship and encouragement from leadership are both so necessary.
I feel incredibly fortunate because we had buy-in for this Discord project at a leadership level. That buy-in and that desire to experiment in this space coming from the top really, really helped.
And the hidden work of community managers in building these spaces is that they also have to be educators and cheerleaders for the project internally. How can you bring the rest of your talented and media-savvy colleagues along with you?
We also worked with a cohort of three other public radio stations in California who have since launched their own Discord communities. So we tried to share techniques for getting the word out.
The importance of sharing this playbook now:
As you probably know, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS have been defunded by the Trump administration and in addition to that, Congress recently passed some clawbacks of previously committed funding. We're in fairly dire straits as a public media industry, in terms of how we're funding the work that our public relies on, especially for rural stations with a smaller and less sustaining audience.
And so as we were building this guide, even before the current funding setbacks, we wanted to make sure that this experiment doesn’t only benefit us, as an organization that has access to more resources and community financial support, because of our audience and market positioning.
We want the playbook to benefit public media broadly, and the media industry more generally. Not everyone can hire a digital community manager to spend two years figuring out how to build something like this. So the idea with the playbook was to benefit not just KQED, but everyone who can learn from our success or floundering.
Insights about moderation, stewardship, and tools:
We have landed on a combination of several tools that help support low-touch oversight of our Discord community. Discord does have a number of built-in automated moderation features, which are really helpful. That was a great help when it was truly just me.
We also cultivated a sub-community within our Discord of community volunteers and people who were actively involved, to set a model for civil discourse and behavior. They're kind of between a moderator staff member and a true member of the public. We give them some badges and extra recognition for being more involved in that way.
And now all of the engagement producers who work with different KQED shows are a part of the Discord community and can keep an eye on it. Online safety for staff was evolving as we were building the plane. We recently switched over to having administrative accounts on the server.
So people leading any kind of confrontational interaction, those accounts are now anonymous in a fun Discord way: Our mod accounts are named for KQED's mascot, and not something that says something like “KQED news.”
True communities work best when people really do know who you are, but for the folks who are laying down the law, I think it's okay that the community can't necessarily directly access them.
Should every media organization be doing this?
Everybody in media should be trying to solve the pressing question of how to have direct conversations with and build trust with their audience. We know that audience trust is one of the biggest hurdles and changes in the media landscape right now.
We found from this digital community project, that having a true two-way relationship with even just a slice of our audience has demonstrated true gains in terms of trust, understanding, and indications of support.
There remains room for experimentation and growth and refining of how we do this. Discord comes with a ton of benefits over more algorithmic platforms like Instagram or Bluesky or Twitter. When they change the algorithm, it changes your business model. The way you’re reaching your audience is subject to decisions being made by a third-party, for-profit company whose goal is growth and shareholder returns, not audience education.
Discord is still a for-profit company, which is sort of limiting. For example, our user data goes to Discord and not to us. We don't have the ability to stay in touch or generate audience member lists based off of the community that we built on Discord. That would be truly beneficial for our pipeline of audience members into subscription donors.
We should perhaps be trying to develop either our own platforms or open source models that others can learn from and take. I think we're probably ready for a reboot. The way that we're thinking about how to invest in our digital infrastructure for the future should include a strategy for community building.
– Francesca Fenzi, Digital Community Producer, KQED
Thanks Francesca!
Ready for apples, cider, and apple cider donuts,
–Josh
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