Trust Is Our Main Currency

We are used to hear about newsrooms mostly in the context of newspapers or big enterprises that do a lot of external communication and marketing. Therefore, as I have recently learned that the Dutch Police was operating its communication out of a newsroom, I was curious about how they work and how they organize themselves.

I asked Marco Leeuwerink, the Digital Media and Newsroom Coordinator for the Dutch Police if he could answer some questions for us. Marco immediately agreed.

With a background in international business communications, Marco has worked for several other governmental organizations before joining the Dutch police 17 years ago. Two years ago he has been asked to help the organization build the newsrooms. As we started our conversation, I was impressed by his openness, kindness and his down to earth approach to work.

Ioana: Marco, you talk about building the newsrooms for the Dutch police. Why plural? Do you operate out of more newsrooms?

Marco: We are a large organization. There are almost 65.000 people working for the Dutch police. We only have one police organization, that's different from Germany, where each Bundesland has its own police force. We are only one organization with eleven divisions; each division has its own newsroom because the local operational communication is the responsibility of the local division. I am responsible for the corporate newsroom. My day-to-day job is to make sure that the corporate newsroom is fully operational, and we develop it every day into a better, more professional newsroom.

Ioana: How did you start the project?

Marco: When we started out with the newsroom, we had press offices, social media specialists, communication advisers within the communication departments of the Dutch police. Firstly, we broke all the silos. We shuffled them and then put them at one table. We created one room where all communication disciplines work together: the newsroom. Secondly, we combined internal and external communications. Those two processes were divided. Lastly, we merged the long-term planned content and what we call the instant communication, which is based on the current events. In our newsroom, everything comes together.

The newsroom consists of three parts: Input about planned content, Throughput with instant content, Output: distribution of planned and instant content.

1.      I will explain what the long-term planned communications are. We are a governmental organization, we don't sell anything, we don't have any shareholders. Therefore, the most important for us is trust in the police– it is our main currency. Not only the trust of the Dutch citizens, but also of our colleagues and other stakeholders. We researched a lot trying to find out what helps to build trust. We have several components. For instance, cybercrime has a lot of impact on the trust in the Dutch police. If we do well on preventing cybercrime the trust of the people in our organization increases. We identified several of those topics that help building trust. The topic-managers come up with the long-term strategies. In the newsroom, I execute the long-term strategies. For example, today, on our intranet and on our website, we have a piece of content that was planned, coming from the topic of community policing. The colleagues from the planed communications thought about it and they produced it. My task is to publish it today.

2.      I also create some content based on current events. Every day we have a morning start up with all our colleagues, and we decide upon which content we are going to create and share based on the news and based on the communication plan. Every day we bring a lot of content, 80 percent is planned and about 20 percent is based on current events. There was a big interview a few weeks ago with two colleagues of mine on the New Year's Eve, because it was a big thing in the Netherlands. If we have a big, planned interview, we distribute it on our own channels and we have specific KPIs on that piece of content. In the newsroom we ensure that the KPIs are reached. If they are not reached, we steer in a different direction. We come up with other kind of content to make sure the goals are reached.

3.      Last, but not least, we distribute our content on all the corporate channels: on the social media channels, our intranet and our websites, but also, if necessary, via earned media or via newspapers or television. Every day we make a mix of content and we distribute it via all our channels, about 80% of planed communication and 20 % on instant communication. So, that's it in a nutshell.

Ioana: How many people are working in the corporate newsroom and in the other 11 newsrooms? Which functions do you work with in the newsroom?

Marco: In the corporate newsroom, we have a big crew of communication specialists. For every communication discipline, we have one or two persons who participate in the newsroom each day. Today we have: one coordinator, two editors, one of which is also a social media specialist, a spokesperson, one adviser, two engagement managers and one analyst who analyses the news and keeps track of the KPI goals, as we want, as a team, to be data driven. We like to find out what people want from us. The engagement managers respond to the people talking to us via social media. In total, every day we have six, maybe seven colleagues working in the newsroom. Nevertheless, this is not their main job. Four out of five days a week they work on the long-term strategies and one day a week they work in a newsroom.

The other local newsrooms are a bit smaller, accommodating three to five people, who combine several roles.

Ioana: How does the decision process work, who decides what and when content is published? 

Marco: Each newsroom has its own coordinator and she or he decides what to communicate that day. But of course, we have a corporate strategy that is the basis for the decision. Also we have corporate strategies per topic. And there is always room for discussion before something will be published.

Ioana: You said trust is your main currency, how do you work on building trust?

Marco: That's why we have the KPIs. As a police organization, we have a monopoly. If people need help, they cannot not go to the police, they have no other option than go to the police. But our “main competitor” is that they don't come to the police. For example, if they have been burgled or a bicycle has been stolen - I think everybody in the Netherlands has their bicycle stolen at least once in their lifetime ?? - we see too often that people don't want to go to the police any more to file their reports; or they don't want to work with the police anymore. That's why we are working on building trust. That's why we need marketing insights, especially in the data driven part of the newsroom. We do a lot of research on target groups: what do people need from the Dutch police? We try to fulfill their needs. In the long-term strategies, we always follow the same process: research – strategy – content creation and distribution – research on the effects – adaption of the strategy if necessary, to find out the needs of each target group. We try to meet those needs via the content we have.

Ioana: How can you ensure that there is no conflict of information given? How do you synchronize the communication?

Marco: For instance, this week there were three explosions at supermarkets. The local newsrooms are responsible for the communication on these incidents. At corporate level we don't interfere with their publication. And it's also the other way around: at corporate level we make the strategy for New Year's Eve and they don't interfere with our responsibility. We have extremely strict boarders between responsibilities.

Ioana: How much of your communication is insourced and how much/what do you outsource?

Marco: We have lots of professionals within the police, we are mostly producing all the content ourselves. We can do almost everything in-house. We have research and analysis departments. We have our own video specialist, social media specialists. We even produce our own podcasts. Most of the things we do internally. Sometimes we use external organizations if we do not have the skills in house. For instance, if we want to make three or four videos per day, we don't have enough people. Firstly, we outsource if we do not have the specific skills, secondly, if we don't have enough people.

Sometimes we have campaigns that we do ourselves, sometimes, if it is a large campaign or for a specific target group, we outsource. Last year, we had a campaign to prevent teenagers from committing cybercrime. There is a really thin line between just playing around on your computer and commit cybercrime. We try to prevent those teenagers from stepping over the line. We use a specific organization that has knowledge of this target group. We use external knowledge, especially in specific cases.

Ioana: With many people working in the newsroom, do you need tools that can help achieve an efficient, transparent collaboration?

Marco: This is like a search for the Holy Grail. There is no good software on the market yet to help newsrooms. Therefore, we use several tools to fill in the gaps: a media analysis tool, a social statistics tool, a collaboration tool. We are searching hard for one platform that has it all, a content management tool, but there is no tool that has it all.

On the other side, we have a lot of functional requirements, but also non-functional ones because we are a governmental, and specifically, a police organization. We have high standards regarding the non-functional requirements.

Further on, we have a special approach to our social media use, which makes it difficult for software companies. We have only ten corporate accounts, but we have 2.800 social media accounts that are used by the police: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, even TikTok. We have to find a tool that can distribute on all 2.800 accounts, and there's no affordable tool in the world that can do so.

Ioana: Interesting. Tell me more about why and how you are using TikTok?

Marco: Teenagers are on TikTok all day. We use TikTok because it is difficult for us to reach this target group. On one hand, this platform is not very natural for us as an organization. On the other hand, we must find out ways to reach out to this target group. TikTok is successful for us, not only in reach, but also in return on investment. Because we get a lot of good information using TikTok. The teenagers, if they see us doing a little dance, they are willing to share harsh information with us, such as domestic violence and so on. TikTok is another way to gain more trust from this specific target group.

We must walk a thin line between what is natural to us and what is natural to the target group. The colleagues working on TikTok used a dance to show the youth how to keep a meter and a half distance. You must find ways to be yourself and still to be on the platform. Because if I do a dance, it is silly. But if those colleagues do a dance with this purpose? It makes sense.

Sometimes we listen to our target groups to get ideas for long-term strategies, they give us input. We had some campaigns that were born out of the interaction we had day to day in newsrooms with our audience. They asked questions, sent us their concerns and we translated it into communication strategies and content.

Ioana: A good fairy comes to you and grants you a wish. What is your top wish regarding your newsroom?

 Marco: I would like to have a good content management system where we can collaborate even better than we do now, especially with the local newsrooms in the police divisions.

With compliments to Marco Leeuwerink for the interesting insights into his work.