As digital publishers navigate shifting audience behaviours and declining organic traffic from search and social platforms, community building has become a priority. 

During the Building Direct Audiences Master Class, presented by the Product & Tech Initiative, media leaders from Village Media, KCRW, VG, The Washington Post, and Condé Nast shared how their companies are growing their communities and deepening audience relationships.

Village Media creates community Spaces

As social media platforms become less news friendly, news media organisations are looking at new ways to engage users. For Village Media in Canada, that has led to creating a new platform that has become a go-to resource for users and provided a meaningful way to foster community conversations.

The long-term goal, CEO Jeff Elgie said, is to “substantially diminish the presence and success of Facebook groups and NextDoor in the communities that we’re in.” To do that, it took a localised approach, giving each community its own set of Spaces based on the specific interests of that community.

“We also decided that spaces should be passion-focused,” Elgie said. “So it’s topics and/or neighbourhoods or places that you care about rather than inflammatory topics like free-for-all political discussions.”

Spaces now generates about 150,000 pageviews per month, and analytics show that the average person follows about 5.6 Spaces. To avoid the toxicity that’s so prevalent on other platforms, hosts have a moderation function, but Elgie said that because the Spaces are so passion-focused, “they almost protect themselves. The moderation requirements are really, really small.”

And the benefits of an online community have extended beyond the platform: “We’ve seen some small businesses that have opened in the community that have found new customers through Spaces just because that’s where they've learned about them,” Elgie said. “And we’ve seen evidence of other discussions about Spaces groups forming in real life, which is a real key priority for us.”

No fake friends for KCRW

When it comes to building an audience, there’s “no time for fake friends,” according to Nathalie Hill, the chief audience officer at KCRW, Los Angeles’ public radio station. Building strong and engaged communities is not only key to the station’s outsized audience, Hill said, but also critical to navigating the uncertainties of today’s “media hellscape.”

Viral success may seem appealing, she said, but it doesn’t create the kind of community that KCRW thinks is far more valuable. When a community is based on real human connections, you have more than just traffic or views — you have “people who actually want to hang out with you” and who will follow you wherever you go.

Community can help news media organisations counter the threats of constantly shifting algorithms, the competition from increasing AI noise, and the volatility of ever-changing advertising and sponsorship revenue streams. Hill shared how KCRW is approaching sustainable and scalable community building with “The Five Ps:”

• Promise.
• Personalities and Partners.
• Products.
• Participation.

A community strategy like KCRW’s means working on building real relationships, not “just collecting fleeting audiences.” It means identifying the dead ends where connections stop, and looking for ways to continue the relationship. And it means focusing on the Ps.

“The community promise is the foundation,” Hill said. “You can start small, but think about one thing you can do this week to deepen your community connections. Really identify the promise of your community, what people can expect from you every time. That promise is what allows your community to feel at home no matter the platform.”

VG enables live commenting

Can a publication build community around live commenting? Does community exist in real-time commenting on a news story or event? Launching such a feature during one of the most highly watched events — a presidential election in the United States — is exactly what Schbisted’s VG had in mind.

Schibsted’s news project manager, Helle Skjervold, said the decision to launch live commenting for the 2024 U.S. election was a mix of strategy, experimentation and a little risk.

Prior to launching real-time commenting, Skjervold assessed Schibsted’s content and coverage of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. That coverage was “not mobile-first,” and more so a typical conversation held within a physical studio with commentators discussing election results amongst themselves.

“As a user you’re just looking in,” Skjervold said. “You’re just kind of eavesdropping on their conversation and we wanted to change that. We don't think that it is particularly user-centric or modern. So, we really wanted to shake things up for the 2024 elections.”

One of the biggest changes in covering the 2024 U.S. election was the point of view. A customised split screen was built to feature commentators and reporters speaking directly to the cameras, and thus the viewers.

“And this is sort of our hero statistic of the night,” Sjkervold said, referring to a graph showing the age distribution of viewers and commentators. “This is exactly the audience that we’re trying to skew better towards.”

With this live commenting feature, VG successfully reached their targeted audience, a younger, more technologically savvy demographic Additionally, there were more men engaged than women, another graphic VG is trying to reach as they “are the ones who are losing trust in mainstream media the fastest.”

Comments are community at The Washington Post

Known for its quality journalism, The Washington Post had to accept the reality that for a lot of its readers, the comments on articles was the product, not necessarily the articles themselves.

So the company built a tool around changing the way that it and its users think about commenting.

“They’re coming to have a conversation about something they care about or shared interest that they have with other like-minded people,” said Gitesh Gohel, head of product design for The Washington Post.

Community is often thought about as an overarching thing that happens over an extended period of time and while that’s true, The Washington Post had to think of it under a different framework.

Each article is its own community; it doesn't have a long lifespan and that’s OK, Gohel said: “People come together and then they disperse and then they kind of reform with different people.”

The Washington Post began to see that its platform had multiple entry and exit points and it could no longer think of articles as the only front door. In addition to reported journalism, the team identified three more layers for people to engage with their content. This framework allowed them to better rethink why people may be coming to their site.

“Comments and conversations could be the primary reason why people are actually coming to your platform,” Gohel said. “And that’s what they’re getting in that initial visit and maybe then they’re being connected to other parts of who you are and what you create. Some readers come for the article, some come for the conversation.”

Condé Nast builds community across its brands

Condé Nast, home to brands that include Vogue, Wired, Bon Appétit, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and GQ, is developing a scalable yet brand-authentic community framework to deepen user engagement.

“Our brands are extremely nuanced,” Mindy Yuen, senior director of product, said, adding that Bon Appétit and Epicurious, for example, naturally lend themselves to recipe discussions. This makes commenting and discourse integral to the experience, and enabling these features on the site increased engagement and time spent on-site by 400%.

In contrast, The New Yorker, which covers news and sensitive topics, requires a more nuanced approach to community engagement. Yuen explained that enabling community features on such a brand could potentially backfire in ways that could harm the brand: “The challenge here, and we’re still working through this, is being able to scale maintaining that authenticity.”

From a product perspective, Condé Nast fosters community through a suite of interactive features designed to elevate content, promote user-generated contributions, and enhance reader participation.

To create a sense of belonging and participation around those features, Yuen said the company developed a set of scalable “building blocks”—foundational backend services that can be customised for each brand.

These include comments, reactions, user profiles, feeds, forms, bookmarking, and more. While these backend components are shared across brands, their front-end implementation is tailored to each brand’s unique audience needs and engagement style.

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