Gary Knell announced this week that he’s leaving his position as CEO of NPR to become the new CEO of National Geographic. I had the privilege of working under Knell’s tenure at his previous employer, Sesame Workshop, where I once heard him talk about the importance of the “double bottom line” in media, an idea that still fascinates me. So in honor of his news-making departure, I wanted to share some research I discovered on metrics for measuring that second bottom line that both nonprofit and for-profit paid content sites can use.For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a double bottom line is a new metric born out of socially responsible investing and social entrepreneurship that advocates for measuring social impact along with bottom-line profits (a third model is evolving that asks for a triple bottom line — profits, social impact, and environmental impact of all businesses).According to a recent report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW), there are three primary metrics a news site can track to assess it’s influence on society:

• Reach
• Engagement
• Impact

Reach and engagement are often conflated by online publishers. Reach in its purest form is the number of individuals that come into contact with your content. It reveals little or nothing about the quality of the contact or the impact of the content on the audience member. Reach is also a highly obtuse metric; the IRW report claimed that ‘proprietary formulas held by analytic tracking software companies can result in numbers that vary by more than 100%.’Engagement is a more sophisticated tool, measuring how audiences react and interact with your content. It can include anything from social media shares and commenting to syndicated content and emails to editors. Lauren Hasler of the Investigative News Network has created a rather in-depth system for tracking a story’s reach, engagement and impact. Paid content sites looking for grant funding should adopt this system and make sure there’s at least one paid staff person responsible for tracking these metrics.Impact is primarily concerned with how journalism and information change the way people think and behave. It’s hard to find causation for impact, so correlational data often has to suffice. And the IRW report basically admits there are few established practices for this. The best suggestions so far include social science studies of audiences exposed and not exposed to your content. In one great case study, the Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School surveyed more than 20,000 people and found that those who watched the film Food, Inc. had “significantly changed their eating and food shopping habits.”Keep in mind that greater reach does not always mean greater impact. Often social change occurs when the right people are informed — that could mean policy- and decision-makers or the disenfranchised and disadvantaged who gain a greater understanding of the injustice behind their hardships. In short, journalism is creating impact when it speaks truth to power and the powerless, and forgoes wasting its breath on the ambivalent.This is why narrowing your target market and knowing your audience is so critical for news sites — it’s not just a marketing advantage, but a societal advantage as well. Small, independent news sites like World Politics Review (the focus of this week’s upcoming Case Study on Subscription Site Insider) are already doing this. Large news sites, on the other hand, could create paid B2B niche publications, much like The Guardian and The Christian Science Monitor already have. These B2B publications need not be profitable; just self-sustaining enough to cover expert reporting, which can then be distilled for ad- and meter-supported consumer news. A win-win for consumers, profits, and democratic societies.