Hi. I cannot actually see you, which is weird because when I’m sitting out there, I could see you. Look, I’m very glad to be here and I want to thank Anne for inviting me. And I can’t be in Gainesville without also thanking Dean Dian McFarlane, who got me my first job in journalism. So yes, so if you haven’t been already, please be nice to Dean McFarlane. I’m sure that’s a big problem. Look, I’m going to start with a story and I’m going to confess to you right up front that it’s kind of a sad story. And that kind of, it’s actually a pretty shitty story. I think you said I grew up in Florida and I did the first big chunk of my career in journalism in Florida. And oh, many years ago, I was a reporter in South Florida newspaper called the Palm Beach Post. And I was working there when a pretty terrible thing happened. There was a little league team that had just finished their season and the families got together to do kind of a picnic thing. And they decided to go on the Loxahatchee River to kind of celebrate the end of a good season. And when they’re out on the water, a kind of rare and terrible, terrible thing happened. Oh wait, I didn’t start, well done. I’m telling my story and I didn’t click. While they’re on the water though, one of the kids was attacked by an alligator and he was killed. His name was Bradley. And I was then a feature writer at the paper and so I got that great assignment to go recreate the day on the water when the boy died. And I still remember, I showed up at the family’s house. It took some doing but I got them to agree to talk to me. And I walked up and I have my notebook and I have box of tissues. And I walked in and I just sat down and I said to them, look, I don’t know if I can do this anymore than you can. I said, if at any point you want to stop, we’ll stop. And if you want me to leave, I will leave. And they didn’t ask me to leave. And in fact, I spent a good long time with them and they actually told me this story about their sons last day. And I did not understand what had happened at the time. But as you might guess, I’ve thought about it a lot over the years. And I realized that what had happened was I had given them control of their story, which is something that news organizations don’t do. You get in the house, you get the story. And I didn’t do this because I was being real nice. I didn’t do this because I was trying to manipulate them. I actually was hoping they would kick me out. I realized that this whole thing that we spend so much time talking about, especially in the digital age, about who controls the story is kind of the wrong way to think about it. And I just want to step back for a quick moment and say, I realize that sharing a story like that to try to make a point in a slide deck, it’s kind of dicey. I’ve actually never done it before. I’ve never told that story before. But I wanted to share with you all today because the stakes are so high in a story like that. And I’d like to be reminded as we get caught up in these questions of who’s in control of the story. I’d like to be reminded that the stakes are high not just for us. The stakes are high for other people. And they’re actually some things that are even more important than our business models or our audience retention rates. And my bigger point is that we shouldn’t be framing this as a struggle for control at all and that we really ought to be thinking about sharing control of stories with our audience, sometimes with our sources. And I think sharing control is another way of thinking about engagement. So I used a lot of time. So we’re going to speed through. Okay, you work at NPR. So what? Big stories in the world. So what? The audience. So what? So what? I want to tell you this other story about work that’s gone on at NPR. And I’m really excited to share it with you. And I take no credit for it because I didn’t do it. So I can brag on it without reservation. There are big stories going on in the world. There’s a group of people who are the global health and development team at the science desk at NPR. And they had this great idea. As they’re looking at the trends of things that happen in the world, one of the things that came clear in their work is that one of the most vulnerable groups of people in the world is teenage girls. But on top of everything else that’s going on with economic or political turmoil in a country, layered on top of that are special challenges for teenage girls because of their age and because of their gender. So they created, they went about trying to create a series of stories called 15 Girls, where they literally went around the world and talked to 15-year-old girls. And there was a whole bunch of stories. And they did a terrific job. What I want to point out in our conversation here is that the way they approached it was unique. Getting back to this point about sharing stories, they knew that they wanted to tell the stories of 15-year-old girls. But they also knew that they wanted to attract women from the audience to be part of the story. Because of the journalism, as you all know, you yourself are trying to attract new audience, it’s a struggle. And one of the things you struggle with is figuring out who you’re after. And the NPR has struggled with this in particular because we’re public media. And because, I magically got more time, because we’re public media, we have this mission to inform the public. And so we sometimes get caught up in the idea that because we want to inform the public we have to try to inform everybody all at once. And informing the public is a great mission, but it’s kind of a shitty strategy. So we, well, I mean, what’s the plan? We’re doing everything. So corporately we’ve struggled with that a bit, but I think we’ve got that settled. But way ahead of that was this group of people on the health and development team, the global health and development team. And so they wanted about putting together this project on 15 girls. But they treated it like a product, meaning they set about identifying the audience they wanted to go after, which was young women. They did market research. And then they set some goals for themselves. Now I want to be careful that I make clear that they didn’t do market research in the sense that you all do market research. And basically what they did was they looked at their blog, Goats and Soda. And they did some deep dives into who is reading what and who wasn’t reading what. It was good work, but it wasn’t market research in the conventional sense. But it did teach them some things about what women, readers were interested in or not interested in. And they developed some real kind of rules about how they wanted to present stories. If you want women to read these stories, you can’t put a man in the headline. It’s one of the things they found. And you shouldn’t put a man in the photograph either. You need to focus on the story of the girl and keep your focus on the story of the girl. And I realize that that’s somewhat self-evident. But I know, I mean, because I’ve done this, right, and we all have, you find the one little person and then you have to sort of reel back to tell the bigger picture. Little person, big picture. I think I learned that a mile away at the University of Florida. But as you start to focus more on your audience, one of the things that they learned was that they needed to say little person and stay little person. So for instance, when they told a story of child brides in Africa, they found a young world to tell her story. And obviously her father figured very prominently in her situation. And the conventional thing would have been to start with her, shift to him, and ultimately you might have even stayed with him just because that’s how things happened. But they were very careful. They were very careful when they presented that stuff. They presented the story of the father in very small pieces to keep the focus on the girl. And that kept readers. And so it allowed them to really connect with their audience, which allowed them to ask a really good question of their audience and really get them to start sharing in the telling of the story. So they had set, as I said, they set some goals for themselves. And one of the goals they had set in terms of interaction was to ask this question on Twitter and Facebook, and I think they asked on Instagram, and see if they could get 200 people to write back. But because they had done such a good job of focusing on their audience and thinking about their audience as they composed their stories, they got, oh, yeah, they got, come on, that way. They got 1,000, over 1,000 submissions. And it was remarkable. I mean, people really wanted to participate in helping them tell their story. They had set another goal where they wanted to get 5,000 mentions of their 15 Girls hashtag. They’re hoping to get 5,000 mentions on social media. They ended up getting 12,500. And as you all know, in the multiplier effect of social media, that 12,500 turned into, I want to say this right, turned into having that hashtag, 15 Girls hashtag, a peer and user feeds on Twitter 127 million times. Which is just amazing. Now of course, when you generate that kind of, when you don’t generate that kind of reach, and you do it through engagement, you tend to get good traffic. And so we don’t have to go through this whole thing, but I’ll point out two bars that are worth noting. The share rate here, which is the second from the right. Is that the right? To your right? Yeah. Stories in this series were, got 49% more shares than other stories on NPR.org. And that helped drive page views. The stories in that series got 112% more page views than typical stories on the NPR site. So that’s all good. But I know that I didn’t quite answer the question to begin with, which is, did they get the audience that they said they were after? Did all of this engagement actually yield an audience that they’d hoped to reach? And the answer is yes. The readers of the 15 Girls series, they were 47% more likely to be women ages 25 to 34, which is exactly who they were trying to connect with than a typical reader on NPR.org. It was a terrific experiment. It worked extraordinarily well. They did very, very good journalism along the way. And in my last 15 seconds, I just want to say thank you again. And I’m really pleased to talk about this story because I think it is a good example of how sharing control of a story with the audience can really be powerful. Thank you.