Welcome to our November Need to Know series on influencer partnerships and how one local newsroom approached it from an experimental framework as a way to test whether it could become a permanent segment of their freelance work. Each week, different people from the Houston Chronicle team will walk you through their approach.
How a local newsroom got started in working with influencers
News creators are so hot right now. And rightfully so: it’s been a constant theme on LinkedIn since that Pew study came out last year, was a popular topic on the journalism conference circuit this season, and it feels like every month, another high-profile staffer announces they’re going solo as a journalist-creator. What’s a local newsroom to do?
At the Houston Chronicle, we’re implementing a two-prong strategy of working within the creator economy. The first one is to internally train and support staffers in making creator-style videos (which many newsrooms are also moving toward as an off-platform strategy). The second one — and the topic of this month’s series — is to meaningfully partner with local creators.
In October 2024, we noticed a local food influencer had been sharing our Top 100 Restaurants guide, which resulted in a noticeable number of new subscribers. We knew those new subscribers could be credited to this influencer because we hadn’t yet launched the latest Top 100 list, and she had been pointing her followers to the old list while mistakenly broadcasting that it was the newest list.
We ultimately invited her, and several other food creators, to our annual food event where we unveiled the correct Top 100 Restaurants list. But despite the influencer’s error, it was a glimmer of possibility when it came to engaging new audiences. What if we could strategically work with a creator so we all have a seat at the table? Could we purposefully collaborate and grow together?
We participated in this year’s API Influencer Learning Cohort as a way to create small-scale experiments that tested how to do exactly that, while navigating potentially thorny issues around ethics, control and impact.
There’s no one right way to get started, but in this series, we’ll walk you through what we did. Upcoming editions will be written by the various stakeholders on our team, including the local food influencer we worked with.
– Jennifer Chang, senior director of innovation & experimentation
Finding the right influencer
Because we had already seen some success in the food creator space, we knew that we wanted to experiment with food content. Food is also a topic that generally performs well for us, with a healthy local creator ecosystem in Houston.
In the API Learning Cohort, and from our own conversations and research, we realized one of the most important decisions you’ll make is choosing who to partner with. Here are some things to consider.
If you find the right creator who aligns with your mission, you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches down the road. For us, it was more important to find a creator who understood and valued what we did and also wanted to create accurate content, rather than someone who simply had the biggest numbers. The collaboration went smoothly as a result.
We started with a creator brainstorming exercise with internal stakeholders, and we used the API’s guide to mapping your local influencer landscape as a starting point. There’s more to come on our own internal selection process, but we highly recommend starting with the API guide.
Schedule a Zoom or phone call to explore a possible partnership, and treat that process like a blind date of sorts. Are there any red flags in how they communicate? Do you get the ick when they talk about their content creation process? If it takes them a while to respond, consider it a flag for how they might treat deadlines. Give yourself permission to discuss possible partnerships with several creators and move forward with the best fit.
In that initial meeting, it might be useful to ask what their long-term goals are. If they have aspirations to host a podcast or author a newsletter, it could be a sustainable way to grow together.
What do you want to measure?
From our initial success with the Top 100 Restaurants list, we knew it was possible to drive conversions through creators. So in our proposal, we wanted to collaborate on a set number of videos, where each video had its own KPI. Here’s how we did it:
Conversions mean different things to different newsrooms, but for us, our north star metric is new subscribers. We wanted to see if promoting an area food guide would result in new subscribers the same way the outdated Top 100 project did, so one video was crafted with exploring the subscriber-only food guide as the call-to-action (CTA). Another video showcasing our inaugural food tour had a CTA to enter our contest by following the Chronicle’s newly launched food Instagram account, while a third video’s CTA was to sign up for our food newsletter.
We tracked everything with custom UTM codes and made sure these call-to-actions and goals were clearly outlined to our creator in writing. Creators will want to ensure their work is being properly credited, so they’re likely willing to make the CTA clear.
There were many positive comments we saw in the videos that highlighted our new restaurant critic and food tour, including ones that seemed pleasantly surprised by what we were doing and how it seemed to challenge their perceptions of the local paper. While comments weren’t initially a KPI, we began to track those types of comments as a way of measuring changes in sentiment or trust-building.
One last thing
If this is your first time working with a creator, give yourself extra time. There were a few bureaucratic hiccups on our side (mostly with our parent company’s legal department, since we were creating a new category of freelance agreement), and a major breaking news event that landed in the middle of our collaboration, so I was grateful to have extra time baked into the process. At the end of the day, independent creators are freelancers. They’re also juggling other clients, their personal lives and possibly even a full-time job.
Ultimately, we could not have partnered with a better creator. Shawn Singh is creative, deeply cares for Houston and was a delight to work with. (You’ll hear about our partnership from his perspective in next week’s installment.) The content from our collaboration performed well enough that we immediately began discussing how we can work together in the future, beyond this initial batch of videos.
+ COMING UP: In the next few weeks, you’ll hear from our creator, ethical concerns from the newsroom and how we navigated them, as well as where we see our strategy evolving and scaling from here.
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