“Affiliation, not just access”: Newsrooms try to move beyond membership to a focus on “belonging”

Facing declining trust, unreliable social platforms, and search traffic weakened by AI summaries, the media industry is looking for a deeper way to hold onto audiences. Could the answer be a sense of “belonging”?

“I think belonging is trying to figure out ways for the audiences to feel heard and seen, to engage or learn more,” said Matt Adams, director of audience growth and engagement at The Texas Tribune. In other words, it is less about broadcasting and more about listening.

Publishers are increasingly thinking about this type of richer participation that helps readers not just feel informed, but connected. Take South Africa’s Daily Maverick, which is known for investigative journalism and political analysis. It already has a paid membership option, Maverick Insider. Its newest launch, Daily Maverick Connect, aims to enhance a sense of community, with belonging at the center. Most of Connect is open to anyone (though there are some exclusives for paying members) and users are encouraged to use their real names.

“The name we originally planned was ‘Ubuntu.’ In South Africa, that’s a word that sort of means ‘community,’ ‘belonging,’ or ‘working together for the common good,'” explained Sarah Hoek, the Daily Maverick’s community manager. They ended up calling it Connect instead (partly because a lot of other forums out there are also called “Ubuntu”), but “that was our mindset going into the project,” Hoek said. “Belonging is definitely something we are thinking about.”

Connect launched last fall and is hosted on the Daily Maverick’s site — no Big Tech platforms here. “It’s like the ultimate Facebook group, if all the cool Facebook groups were in one place,” Hoek said. (There are “hubs” for professional networking, home towns, and home hacks, for instance.) “That’s the hope for Connect: that it’s everything you need about life, work, the country, the news — all in one place.”

Connect also gives readers direct access to Maverick’s journalists, who read and interact in the forums. “I think our readers need a space to connect with like-minded people,” Hoek added. “And I also think they need a space where our journalists are accessible so that they can be a part of the reporting.”

There’s little more emblematic of belonging than turning up to something in real life, and many news organizations have realized the power of events, both emotionally and commercial. (For example, more than half of Semafor’s 2025 revenue came from live events.) Adams pointed to the Tribune’s range of events, from the yearly “TribFest” to “community coffees” with local reporters.

At the German newspaper Die Zeit, belonging is built up through regular small-scale meet-ups, and also the larger Leserparlament, which goes on the road to two large cities each year.

“The most direct expression of belonging is our events,” says Wencke Tzanakakis, head of Freunde der Zeit (Friends of Zeit), the membership program for subscribers. “A subscriber who sits in a room with a Zeit journalist and challenges something they wrote isn’t just consuming journalism, they’re participating in it. That changes the relationship. It makes the subscription feel like affiliation, not just access.”

Die Zeit also uses its newsletters as community builders. Its weekly books newsletter drives as many as 3,000 people to monthly online discussions, demonstrating belonging in action: The reader has established a habit and chooses not only to return on a regular basis, but also to participate.

Heiko Scherer, CEO of the community platform Tchop, works with publishers on audience engagement and community-building products, giving him a cross-industry perspective on audience loyalty and retention. He is emphatic about shared identities, smaller communities and niches and giving readers a meaningful role.

“Belonging is about more than just contribution,” he said. “It’s about realizing that what you’re creating is both the readers’ space and yours.”

Like Tzanakakis, he believes audiences need to recognize themselves in content. “Belonging” has to be built into product design, he said, and he argues that it should shape the experience of using a site rather than being an afterthought. The placement of comments matters, for instance, he argued: If they only appear at the bottom of articles, readers will see that their contributions aren’t prioritized.

Everyone I spoke with noted that strong journalism is a prerequisite for a media organization to create belonging. Adams noted that The Texas Tribune has “passionate readers” because of its authoritative reporting on Texas policy and politics.

The Texas Tribune frames support as a way of helping to sustain civic information and navigate life in Texas. It recently launched two local newsrooms, the Austin Current and The Waco Bridge.

“The Waco Bridge Facebook page has become kind of a community, with the ways that people are commenting,” Adams said. “I think a lot of larger-scale newsrooms forgot about Facebook because it doesn’t really drive traffic anymore, but Waco actually has a really strong presence there.”

“I think our readers don’t just love Daily Maverick, they also love our country,” said Hoek. “We’ve come through a difficult history, and there’s this feeling of wanting a democratic South Africa to continually be better. Daily Maverick has positioned itself as part of that. So the belonging that people get by being part of our membership is to forward that mission of protecting and defending truth, creating a better South Africa.”

Die Zeit’s Tzanakakis is keen to ensure that subscribers outside big cities feel involved. “Our Zoom webinars help us really engage with and listen to those readers who live in small towns,” she said. “We don’t want to forget them.”

That concept of listening leads directly to another major issue in media: Trust.

“I think trust is absolutely key to belonging,” Adams said. “You can’t belong to something unless you trust it, and you have to feel there are other like-minded people there.” The Texas Tribune is trying to build trust through in part through its explainers and guides — “taking topics we know Texans are interested in and explaining what the effects will be, giving people an entryway into the work we’re doing here so they can see us as a trustworthy source they might want to engage with.”

Tzanakakis agreed that belonging is closer to trust than membership. Membership is more transactional, she said, while “belonging is closer to family and friends, brands and people you trust.”

Measuring belonging can be complicated. Scherer is critical of traditional engagement metrics, arguing that “too often engagement is just a rephrase of page views, time spent on site, [and] duration of sessions,” missing “the active part” and reducing everything to consumption. Instead, he feels a variety of metrics is needed: direct traffic and app opens, subscription tenure, renewal and retention rates, frequency and regularity of visits, involvement in community features, and referral behavior.

And Tzanakakis fears that community-building tends to attract people who were already inclined to engage. “We’re probably quite good at deepening belonging for readers who are already committed,” she said. “But what about those who say they simply don’t have enough time for Zeit journalism in the first place? We’re constantly experimenting with formats for exactly those reader groups, and we don’t have a clear answer yet.”

Sarah Ebner is an award-winning journalist and former executive editor at the Financial Times, where she was director of editorial growth and engagement. A specialist in newsletters and subscription journalism, she has also worked at the Telegraph, The Times and the BBC, and now writes and advises on editorial strategy and the future of media.