The Challenge
The company's Customer Insights team began 2023 with a traditional three-wave election research plan, mirroring the approach used in 2016 and 2020: an initial pulse in August, a second wave near the primaries, and a final wave close to election day. The first two waves, totaling twelve weeks of quantitative work, pointed to a consistent and somewhat unremarkable conclusion: that voters on both sides were fatigued and largely disengaged from the political conversation.
Stakeholders, underwhelmed by these findings, considered scrapping the third wave altogether. Then the political landscape shifted unexpectedly, rendering the prior twelve weeks of research largely obsolete overnight. The team suddenly needed a fresh, accurate read on audience sentiment - but classic research timelines, often spanning six or more weeks per wave, could not keep pace with a fast-moving news cycle where headlines could shift the story within hours.
The Solution
The company partnered with CloudResearch to pilot Engage, an AI-moderated interview platform designed to close the long-standing gap between quantitative research (which can reach thousands of people but offers limited information) and qualitative research (which is a powerful tool for fully capturing participant sentiment, but has traditionally been limited to a handful of people and requires months of analysis).
The team utilized Engage to conduct qualitative-depth conversations at quantitative scale. The AI interviewer follows a semi-structured discussion guide, dynamically rephrasing and following up on participant answers in real time, while capping conversation length so respondents' time isn't wasted. Once interviews are complete, researchers can query the collected data in natural language to surface themes, quantify how prevalent each theme is, and run segmentation analysis directly on qualitative responses: a capability previously out of reach for qualitative data.
Applied to two major news moments, the DNC and the RNC, the workflow followed a tight weekly cadence:
- Friday: align with stakeholders on research goals and discussion guide
- Monday–Tuesday: field over 1,000 interviews with subscribers and prospective subscribers
- Wednesday: analyze results and deliver insights to stakeholders using Engage's analysis and reporting suite
In four business days, we went from start to finish – a cadence and timeline I was very unfamiliar with, not one I’d done before.
The Results
The accelerated methodology let the company tackle nuanced, previously hard-to-answer questions within the same news cycle they were reporting on. The company went from research-kickoff to stakeholder ready insights in four business days, a 7.5x acceleration over the six week approach.
Two examples stood out:
- Headline performance on abortion coverage: Comparing two similar headlines, the team found that emotionally charged, policy-and-strategy framing (e.g., referencing a candidate's political "weakness") drove stronger engagement than a more localized, state-specific framing: quickly explaining a real engagement gap that analytics alone could not.
- Perceptions of editorialization in political coverage: A segmentation analysis on qualitative interview data, not previously feasible at this scale, revealed two distinct reader segments with opposing views on fact-checking and historical context. One segment saw added context as diluting objectivity; the other valued it as essential nuance, highlighting a genuine tension newsrooms must navigate.
Beyond the specific findings, respondent experience data suggested the approach was well received: 95% of participants reported being satisfied or very satisfied after their interview, and a similar share said they'd be willing to take another AI-moderated survey on a different topic. Notably, researchers observed that some participants felt more comfortable discussing sensitive subjects, such as personal experiences with abortion-related policy, with an AI interviewer than they might with a human one. Built-in safeguards, such as detecting copy-pasted text and redirecting off-topic responses, helped preserve data quality throughout.
What's Next
Having proven the model on two high-stakes news moments, the company's Customer Insights team sees this mixed qualitative-quantitative approach as a template for closing the long-standing gap between the speed of the news cycle and the speed of research. Where research previously had to be finalized well before a news moment or risk being outdated on arrival, this workflow lets the team run rapid, in-cycle studies that stay relevant to what readers are experiencing in real time.
The broader goal is to routinely pair the newsroom's journalists' editorial expertise with fast, representative audience insight. This allows reporting teams to understand not just what stories to cover, but how different reader segments want that coverage framed, contextualized, and delivered.
About This Organization
This organization is a global news and business information provider, delivering journalism, data, and analytics to consumers and enterprises worldwide. It is known for authoritative reporting backed by one of the world's largest news-gathering operations.