All Collections
Case Studies
Newsgathering
The Atlanta Voice's Strategy for Using CrowdTangle to Report on the Black Community
The Atlanta Voice's Strategy for Using CrowdTangle to Report on the Black Community

The Atlanta Voice has used CrowdTangle to track trends for the local Black community that larger news organizations may overlook.

T
Written by Tess
Updated over a week ago

Key Takeaways:

  • Use Overperforming to find stories that are relevant to a large news story, and then find your local angle.

  • Track performance of your publication and use the metrics to determine which topics send the most traffic to your publication.

  • Double down on technologies like CrowdTangle to become stewards of news and information for your community.

Founded in 1966, The Atlanta Voice has been providing news and commentary as the largest Black community newspaper in Georgia. Their use of CrowdTangle has been fundamental as they continue to navigate the changing landscape of hyper-local news communities. The following interview questions were answered by Jeremiah Long, Director of Digital Media and Marshall Latimore, Editor In Chief.

What are your main use cases for CrowdTangle?

We mainly use CrowdTangle for two cases:

1. Compiling data for internal use and for research for our reporting.

2. To create data visualizations using data from Facebook and Instagram to write stories about trending topics.

How has using CrowdTangle to track your social performance helped you grow your brand?

We use CrowdTangle to look at our growth trends and compare those trends to our own platforms as well as our business competitors. We look at the data to determine which topics send us the most traffic. We send that data to Marshall (our Editor in Chief) so he can filter it over to the reporters and journalists.

How has CrowdTangle helped you cover the Atlanta community?

We used CrowdTangle to identify Overperforming posts during the 2019 Super Bowl. We discovered early on that a video produced by the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta was Overperforming, so we had one of our journalists write an article about the video.

We also use CrowdTangle data to compile our yearly "Best of" series at the end of the year. We look at Overperforming posts across various Atlanta news, sports, entertainment, and foodie sources to compile our "Best of" listicles.

How is the way the Black press covers local news different from how other local news publishers cover an area?

The local Black press covers topics that are not a focus of the "larger" news organizations such as AJC or CNN. We cover local elections and politics, local churches, homelessness, black-owned small business news, HBCU sports, and African American oriented human interested pieces.

CrowdTangle has helped us cover these subjects because it allows us to research trending topics in the niches that are important to our readers. We use key words and Overperforming data to find trend lines that are not easily researched or discovered through traditional search or data analytics using Google or the on site platform analytics.

The Instagram data we can access has also been invaluable to show growth trends on pages. Ex: When "Olde Town Road" became a hit record for Lil Nas X (a Georgia native), we were able to research and show when the account gained traction on Instagram.

What do you hope for the future of the Black press?

Like many aging American institutions, it is our hope that the Black press finds new relevance, long-lasting value, and, of course, sustainability, among this new highly evolving technological landscape.

This involves leveraging emerging technologies like CrowdTangle to become even better stewards of the news and information our readers value most while figuring out new and more compelling ways to present such content on the devices and platforms our readers use most frequently.

Fortunately, our team has been able to achieve some significant breakthroughs with our audience utilizing CrowdTangle, which has made a compelling case for an enriching partnership and relationship with the CrowdTangle and Facebook teams.



Did this answer your question?