The state’s non-commercial broadcaster revamped into a digital-first newsroom, yielding cross-platform projects on population shifts and mental health.
The impact of population changes on school was explored in SDPB’s ‘The Shift’
As recently as 2016, South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s (SDPB) teams still operated in very separate silos. The television unit produced content for TV and only TV. Radio focused solely on creating audio content for AM/FM delivery. The organization’s social and digital platforms were used for marketing.
But SDPB knew it had to make a change not only to keep up with the changing trends in media but to engage consumers in a very small market in a sparsely populated state. It did just that, with a radical overhaul that transformed the organization into a digital-first operation.
Not only did the revamp break down the walls between staffers so all content creators were working across platforms but it also fostered collaboration by changing internal structure. Today, SDPB’s teams are categorized not by medium but by focus: news, sports and arts and culture teams create content for traditional and digital distribution.
The effort has been a big boost to SDPB’s output and creativity, while also giving it the means to connect with audiences through two-way communication. The organization’s first digital-first project, “The Shift,” used multimedia storytelling to track South Dakota’s population changes, and explore the implications for towns affected by dwindling residents. The project won a national Edward R. Murrow Award for its use of social media. A more recent project looked at mental health.
SDPB’s Facebook following grew from just 7,000 followers in July 2016 to more than 26,000 at the end of 2017 with an average monthly reach of over 1 million, indicating that the digital-first move was a good one, according to social media manager Heather Benson.
“It’s been an eye opener for us how we could work together in ways we never worked before,” Benson said. “We now have a team that has a mindset ready to tell a story where our audience wants it to be told.”