Our data-driven journalism publication launched a year ago. Here’s what we’ve learned so far

It’s been a year since we launched our data-driven journalism publication, The Outlier, and we’ve just published our 100th chart. Here’s what we learned along the way.

Find a revenue source

Starting an online publication was something that Alastair Otter and I had always wanted to do. But it took us years to get to the point where we felt we could launch The Outlier.

We were two journalists whose careers had started in mainstream media companies that had suffered the transition from print to digital with all the disruption and staff lay-offs that entailed.

In the mid-2010s, when we both opted for retrenchment from our full-time jobs, the norm for media start-ups was to form a non-profit and get philanthropic funding and grants to fund specific types of journalism. But neither of us felt comfortable with the idea of forming a non-profit; we had no experience or contacts in the fundraising space.

After a year at Wits University’s Jamlab media accelerator programme, where we learned more about lean start-ups, we made the decision to register Media Hack Collective (MHC) as a company. But it was only a year and a half later that we launched The Outlier.

Why did we take so long? We needed a source of revenue. For us, that meant offering data storytelling and visualisation services to mostly small independent media companies and other non-profits that don’t have those skills in-house.

We’re still working on developing direct revenue streams from The Outlier, but having our own platform and publication does open us up to other revenue streams, for example, story grants. It also created a good presence to promote our data storytelling services.

Generating revenue from digital publishing is hard, and having an alternative source of income allowed us space to develop The Outlier without needing it to pay for itself right from the start.

Establish trust

The Covid-19 pandemic was a turning point for data journalism in South Africa. Mainstream media houses didn’t have the skills in-house to collect and use Covid-19 data effectively. Media Hack Collective did. So during the early days of hard lockdowns, we created a Coronavirus Dashboard and a newsletter that became very popular.

We committed to be totally transparent about how we collected and used Covid data and to make the data sets we built available and free to download. We also encouraged people to reach out to us if they had questions, comments or complaints. We tried to answer every person who contacted us so they knew that their contributions were valuable (and they were, even the complaints).

That openness and accessibility earned us the trust of our audience — to the extent that when we needed money to help us pay to distribute our Coronavirus newsletter and hire an intern to help us collect data, we crowdsourced the money we needed far faster than we’d expected.

The coronavirus dashboard helped us to firmly stake out our niche in the South African media landscape.

Create a niche and focus on quality

Towards the end of 2020, we started a plan to leverage the audience and trust we had earned with the Coronavirus Dashboard to make something that would have value post-Covid. We had to be known for more than just the dashboard. We hired two journalists to work on our paid-for projects, as well as produce our own data stories.

We started to publish our non-Covid data stories in our Coronavirus newsletter to test if there was a taste for more general data stories. By mid-2021 it was clear we needed a place to publish these stories so they were discoverable. So, in July 2021, we launched The Outlier, our first publication.

With the website in place, we started work on building an identity and an audience for The Outlier. We focused on producing quality stories and visualisations. We didn’t want to chase breaking news or publish opinion, we wanted to focus on using data to provide context; explainer and visual journalism probably describe best what we do with data.

We changed the name of the Coronavirus newsletter to The Outlier and started to move the focus of the content from Covid to more general data topics. We also reduced the frequency of the newsletter to once a month while we established a publishing schedule.

Our test was to see if our more general data stories would retain the interest of our subscribers beyond Covid. It did.

Choose engagement over reach

When you publish content online you’re competing for attention with everything that’s published on all the social media platforms and all the media websites in the world (not just the South African ones). It’s important to understand who your audience is and how you reach them, then put in place realistic measurable goals based on how you define success.

We wanted The Outlier to reach a very engaged audience that is interested in our data-driven explainer journalism — like the people who sent us emails during the coronavirus pandemic, telling us what mattered to them and what they wanted us to look at. In short, we want The Outlier to be useful, to give people information and insight that they can’t find easily anywhere else.

That means that The Outlier newsletter became our primary product, or publication, because we know who our subscribers are. We can see if people open the newsletter and that open rate is our main measure of success.

The Outlier website plays a crucial role as a “shop front” for our material so that it’s discoverable on the internet, and although page views are important as an indicator that people are finding our content, what we really want is people who visit our website to become newsletter subscribers.

Be consistent

At the beginning of 2022, our plan was to produce a fortnightly newsletter with an average open rate of 45%, while also increasing the number of subscribers. To do that we needed to put processes in place.

To maintain a high open rate we needed to be able to segment our newsletter subscriber lists into those who regularly open our newsletters and those who don’t. We decided that people who don’t open five newsletters in a row are not engaged and therefore are given the option to unsubscribe.

Quality and trust are the two things we believe make people open our newsletters every fortnight. They trust that there will be something interesting and useful enough to make it worth opening. It is important that every newsletter is consistently good.

We compiled a list of eight topics to ensure we had a good mix of material. We also have a list of user needs that we believe fit our target audience and help us to decide on the types of stories we write and the angles we chose to focus on in our stories and charts.

Put processes in place

At the beginning of 2022, we had three journalists, one of whom was interning with us for six months. Hiring additional staff was not an option, so putting in place publishing processes that make us more efficient was crucial.

Researching and writing data-driven stories can be time-consuming because it takes a lot more than simply attending a media briefing and reporting what was said, or phoning up three experts and asking them what they think of something.

The decision to make The Outlier newsletter our primary product, rather than the website, means that we are not under pressure to create new content for the website every day. Our aim is to produce one written story a week, so we have two to publish in each newsletter.

To differentiate The Outlier from other digital publications, we decided to make charts. Not all data merits a full story, a lot is interesting in itself and can be published as a standalone chart. So, in March 2022, we created a feature on The Outlier that we called Our World in Charts, an homage to Our World in Data, the Oxford University-based website that inspired us during Covid.

But making charts is a particular skill that needs to be learned. It entails being able to identify what is interesting in a data set and show it in a clear, interesting visualisation. It’s a form of storytelling that is often harder than writing 2,000 words.

There’s a quote that’s attributed to French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (and sometimes Mark Twain): “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time”. Making your point in a chart is the same, but on steroids.

To facilitate chart production, we created strict parameters. Even though everyone at MHC is able to make interactive charts, we focus on static charts that are square and have very specific fonts and colours. That way we can focus on finding the story angle and communicating it well, and not spend time fussing over gee-whiz interactives.

One year after launching The Outlier we are now able to publish a chart a day and on 21 August 2022, we published our 100th chart.

The Outlier newsletter now goes out every second Friday at around 8am and has an open rate of 45%.

What’s next

With the publishing processes now in place, we are planning to launch two more newsletters in the near future, at least one of which we hope to get people to pay for.

Being a publisher rather than simply a service provider or a company that collaborates with other media organisations (which we still love to do) has helped us to get grants. This has become another important revenue stream for us.

For example, this year we received a grant to work on a coastal resilience project from the Environmental Journalism Network. We also received support from the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge to build a data collection tool to make it easier for small newsrooms like ourselves to collect and use data in our journalism.

We are working on creating a sustainable media business with a mixed revenue model that includes collaborations/services and training as well as project-specific grants and revenue from newsletters. All of these are a work in progress.

Working in the journalism field is difficult, especially for small independent media companies in the Global South. We’ve learned a huge amount from the experiences of others, so we use this Inside Media Hack channel to share our experiences in case they turn out to be useful for somebody else. If they do, please let us know. We love to hear other people’s stories. And feel free to reach out to us if you have any advice or want to share something you’ve learned.

To follow our progress, subscribe to our Outlier newsletter.