Hong Kong Free Press on building a sustainable newsroom
Takeaways
Revamped website with a new design to promote easy payments, donor engagement, news literacy, and legitimacy
Promoting legitimacy with a code of ethics, news verification, and transparency reports
Allowing for easy distribution
Context
As the Hong Kong protests raged on, Hong Kong Free Press made its mark as a digital-only, reader-supported English-language media on the island. In 2019, their page views surged over 300%, their social media reach tripled, and they had 792 donors — over three times the number of donors in the prior year. Now, they’ve switched out gas masks for pandemic face masks to report on Covid-19. In some ways, they already have a leg up on reporting on tight budgets; they’ve been thinking about how to run an independent sustainable newsroom for a long time.
Rebuilding the site
Co-founder Tom Grundy spoke to us about the gears HKFP has set into place for 2020 to sustain themselves while reporting on hard-hitting issues. Central to that mission is their website, a new version of which will launch later this year with the help of Newspack, a project of WordPress.com and Google News Initiative.
The site will make it easier and more compelling for donors to contribute money, promote legitimacy and transparency, and educate readers on news literacy. Grundy lists a few examples of how a website can promote these things, including:
Providing a wide range of payment options
Color coding to distinguish between opinion and news stories
Implementing newsroom tools such as live blogging and joint bylines
Sending out notifications to potential donors “especially during breaking news and exclusives, knowing when to ask and also knowing when not to ask”
Staying in touch with regular donors to build community
Grundy, who describes the previous iteration on WordPress as bloggy, says the website will also help promote legitimacy — an integral part of “pushing back against the credibility crisis” of news, in which many outlets are being attacked for their credibility. It’s a quality that many donors and readers are looking for. They’ve also:
Created a code of ethics that list “safety, security, how they’re funded, their impartiality”
Been accredited as a U.S. charity, verified under NewsGuard’s guidelines, joined LexisNexis, and released transparency reports
The last metric that Grundy uses to measure a sustainable newsroom is organic, easy distribution — HKFP’s social media reach tripled in the past year. They ask their staffers to contribute to distributing stories, allow sharing across as many platforms as possible, distribute stories on third-party sites like MSN, and find ways to get cited by other media.