TL;DR
The short version of what are you going to read:
- Project EPSILON has now become Qurio!
- We are doubling down on creating an audience engagement platform for local newsrooms, small and medium publishers, media startups, and individual creators.
- We believe it is crucial to do so, and we have a pretty good suggestion on how to approach the problems those media organizations face.
- You will be hearing more from us in the coming months, but we are also eager to hear from you now.
Moving on from Project EPSILON
A few months ago, we introduced the world to Project EPSILON, a research initiative looking for problems related to audience engagement for local newsrooms and community-powered media. We come from the independent, local news publishing scene in Greece so we are deeply interested in the topic. Here’s what we have achieved until now:
- We have compiled an extensive database of local newsrooms, single-topic publications, media startups, and individual creators that are actively involved in audience engagement methodologies for the audiences they serve.
- We have conducted over a couple of dozen interviews with audience engagement editors, community managers, editors, executives, and academics from the space. For each one of you, we can’t thank you enough for your outstanding contributions and your true collaborative spirit!
- We have identified critical problems that media organizations face regarding audience engagement.
- Finally, we have designed a solution to tackle them in the easiest, most efficient way possible.
Our end goal has always been to build an easy-to-use and affordable platform that will help small & medium news organizations engage with their audience more effectively, so they can do better journalism, get more trust and increase their revenue.
Now it is time to evolve Project EPSILON in its next phase and finally unveil… 🥁
We are Qurio
We are Qurio, an engagement management platform for small and mid-sized newsrooms enabling them to get quality feedback from their readers.
We are building a team and a company to help local newsrooms worldwide develop meaningful relationships with their communities, aiming at sustainable newsrooms where journalists and community members make change.
As a team, we are curious by nature, and we believe that curiosity is a value that drives creativity, science, and entrepreneurship. We believe that journalists should be curious about their beats and the needs of the communities they serve to learn more about their experiences and include them in the editorial process; that is the building block of social journalism.
The problems with audience engagement
Throughout our research, we encountered patterns of problems that engagement editors commonly face. For example, multiple newsrooms report that even though their audiences demand more quality journalism that cuts through the noise, they are overworked and understaffed and cannot keep up with the pace.
Another usual issue is that although audience research and engagement are recognized as something essential, the currently available solutions are not fit for their needs; the existing tools are usually ugly, boring, and can’t help the editors turn the audience feedback into actionable insights.
In my previous Medium post, I referred to our work primarily as “journalism innovation,” We fundamentally believe in this as Qurio’s value proposition. We are not building a product for the sake of it; technology is not dictating what should be made, but rather big ideas and values such as collaboration, creativity, trust, and providing service to the communities you belong to.
What we are building
Qurio can be summarized in the following three components:
- A rich toolkit of solutions covering each aspect of their audience engagement activities in an innovative and robust way
- An automated solution that helps reporters & editors do more with less
- An integrated platform that audience engagement editors can use to focus on their work
Using Qurio you will be able to:
- Ask questions on your website or dedicated landing pages. Choose any type of question you want and get detailed analytics about the results of your callouts.
- Deploy a standardized set of questions across your website and get qualitative feedback in minutes.
- Search across your audience input no matter where it came from: use filters, add labels or a star: exactly as you do on your emails.
- Customize your callouts as much as possible, following your website’s look and feel, fonts, and color palette. No more ugly forms. Honestly🙏
Let’s talk!
We want to build a product for you, with you.
If you are an engagement editor, community manager, engagement reporter, newsroom executive, or simply a creator with a homepage & vibrant community, we want to talk with you.
Our new website has one very distinct mission: to get you curious about our product. If you want to be part of it, book an online rendezvous with us so we can learn more about your problems with audience engagement and build something that fits your needs.
You can always follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook since from today we’ll be updating our channels with more content.
P.S.: Did we also say we’re hiring?
If you are a technologist who’s already working at the intersection of technology and media or wants to make your first steps in the field. Stay tuned!
Soon we’ll be adding more detailed job ads on our homepage, and if you are a Fullstack JavaScript engineer who’d like to be an integral team member building the core platform of our product and would like to join us in our mission and share the same vision feel free to email us at [email protected].
