MS NOW and Chicago Public Media are both making a move beyond content.
They're investing in something media organizations haven't traditionally been built to create: relationships between members of their audience.
For MS NOW, that means a new paid membership program. For Chicago Public Media, the organization behind WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times, it means a new digital hub at Chicago.com.
They're taking different approaches, but both point toward the same idea.
A membership isn't necessarily a community
It's easy to use the words membership and community interchangeably. They're not the same thing.
You can launch a membership that gives people access to more content. You can give them exclusive videos, bonus podcasts or special newsletters. You can even give members more access to the people who create the content.
That's a membership.
It becomes a community when you create opportunities for the members to build relationships with each other.
That's what makes the MS NOW announcement interesting.
According to Semafor, the $7.99-per-month membership will include members-only content and opportunities to interact with MS NOW personalities. But it will also include "community features for members to engage with each other."
That last part changes the nature of the offering.
MS NOW isn't just putting more content behind a paywall. It's giving the people who care most about the network a way to find and interact with one another.
And that appears to be intentional. MS NOW surveyed and interviewed 18,000 viewers before developing the membership. The research found that its target audience wanted curated news, access to the network's personalities and "online spaces to interact with people they agreed with."
In other words, MS NOW didn't just ask, What else can we make for our audience?
It also asked, What can we help our audience do with each other?
Chicago Public Media is moving in the same direction
Chicago Public Media isn't putting its initiative behind a paid membership. Instead, it's building a new digital destination at Chicago.com.
The site will combine local information and resources with "community-sourced knowledge and opportunities for audience participation."
That's important because WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times already produce plenty of content about Chicago. The interesting part isn't the content. It's the participation.
Chicago Community Trust CEO Andrea Sáenz described the vision as a shared space "where people could come together as Chicagoans" while still highlighting individual neighborhoods and communities.
We don't know yet exactly what that participation will look like when Chicago.com fully launches. But the ambition clearly goes beyond getting people to consume more journalism. Chicago Public Media wants its audience to participate, contribute and connect around their shared identity as Chicagoans.
One is building community inside a paid membership. The other is building participation around a place. Neither is simply offering its audience more content.
So where do you start?
You don't need to be a national cable network or a major public media organization to make this shift.
If you already have an audience, there may be people in it who would gladly connect with one another, share what they know, help each other or participate in something together.
The difficult part is figuring out what that should look like.
That's where it's easy to start with the wrong question: Should you launch a membership, create an online space, host events or try something else?
But those are answers to a question you haven't figured out yet:
What value could the people in your audience create for one another?
That's where my free Beyond Content Workshop starts.
Instead of jumping straight to platforms, memberships or events, we'll look at the audience and assets you already have to figure out where your best opportunity lies.
You'll leave knowing where your strongest Community Revenue opportunity lies, how it could generate revenue, and what to do next.
Find Your Community Revenue Opportunity
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