How evergreen and nostalgia content can help inform your revenue strategy
Jan Ross P. Sakian, American Press Institute,
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Leverage high-traffic stories to learn more about your local audiences and what they’re willing to pay for. This is a series on Better News to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) share replicable tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole.
This piece features tips from Newsday’s Shawna VanNess and Jeffrey L. Williams for news organizations looking to diversify their revenue opportunities. These insights were shared during a live Q&A session in September 2024 with alumni of the Table Stakes Local News Transformation Program.
Newsday participated in the Poynter Table Stakes program in 2017-18 and the Major Market program in 2019. VanNess wrote about leveraging nostalgia as a beat for BetterNews.org in 2023.
How can you bring new life to the same hyperlocal content? On one end, storytelling that digs into nostalgia and surfaces a shared sense of place can have a strong pull across generations. However, evergreen content — guides, lists and profiles — that are reliably updated and relevant to your community can also be why audiences engage with local news.
Newsday is a legacy newspaper-turned-multiplatform news organization based on Long Island, N.Y., that serves its audience through a portfolio of mobile and digital products, print publications and live events. With a subscriber-based business model and a hard paywall, editors are always looking for ways to draw in new readers and engage existing audiences.
Associate managing editor Shawna VanNess oversees both evergreen content and Newsday’s nostalgia storytelling projects. She and Jeffrey L. Williams, assistant managing editor for lifestyle and entertainment, shared how these stories tie into the organization’s revenue strategy with Table Stakes alumni:
Lifestyle and feature stories are a gateway for readers
Williams sees evergreen and nostalgia stories as an “instant, inexhaustible supply of material” for local audiences.
Newsday’s foundation for evergreen content is built on annual informational lists about local attractions, and the nostalgia beat is driven by look-back feature stories on notable people and places on Long Island.
Williams works with Newsday’s reporters and editors to bring fresh takes to their features, lifestyle and entertainment stories. He notes that all news pegs — from obituaries to local events — are an opportunity to dig deeper and ask: How can we connect it to our readers on Long Island?
“We want to acquaint and reacquaint people with things that they don’t know. And I think that’s pretty much the whole nostalgia movement,” he says. “In music and art and television, they’re helping people discover and rediscover things that are old to some people, but they’re new to you.”
VanNess says that evergreen and nostalgia stories tend to reach “people where they are.” This is often on social platforms like Facebook, but there are also loyal readers who still get the paper through the home delivery service.
“How do you make your news coverage part of people’s daily habit? That’s the key to retention,” she says. “We’re just giving them the tools to really lean into these often warm and happy memories, particularly at a time when you know people may be feeling news fatigue.”
VanNess notes that stories focusing on the unique aspects of a community are an alternative to the heavy, hard-hitting stories that local news can be known for. And while these universal themes can appeal to anyone, Newsday has found that there’s a niche audience in their community that’s willing to pay for access to this kind of hyperlocal content.
Spotlight local interests through evergreen and seasonal projects
Every year, Newsday produces and maintains at least 60 local guides and projects about the Long Island and New York areas.
“We get such a strong spike in new digital subscribers from the launch of these evergreen guides and annual projects, we’ve had to space them out through the calendar year,” VanNess says.
Content includes simple, scannable guides on “where to go” and “what to do” around the holidays to data-rooted projects that require frequent updates, such as databases on salaries in different industries and lists of top high school athletes in various sports.
Some of these projects can also be revenue opportunities for advertising and sponsorships. VanNess says that advertising printed in the “Fun Book,” activities guides printed in the spring/summer and fall/winter, continue to be big revenue contributors every year. Newsday’s multiplatform vertical FeedMe also draws in sponsorships from car brands, luxury appliance companies, local restaurants and establishments.
The annual critics’ guide to the 50 best restaurants on Long Island is tried and true with audiences, and a top-performing project each year. Newsday’s plan to launch the new 2024 guide includes asking its team questions on how to optimize marketing elements like SEO, social posts and in-house advertising.
“All these things really matter for evergreen content, because you want them to be a consistent source of traffic throughout the year, not just when they launch,” VanNess says.
Track trends and analyze the path to more conversions
VanNess says that nostalgia stories in particular are a “sweet spot” that satisfies both new and current subscribers. In general, nostalgia content ranks in the top 90% newsroom-wide of coverage that generates new subscriptions, alongside topic desks such as Restaurants and Real Estate.
Newsday tracks story performance through the American Press Institute’s Metrics for News tool. To see how nostalgia and evergreen content both contribute to revenue, the team watches the path to conversion (PTC) metric to see which stories are convincing readers to finally become paid subscribers.
According to VanNess, nostalgia stories related to entertainment or local restaurants typically garner at least 20% more PTCs than other stories in the same beat. This includes articles that highlight restaurant openings, updates and closings. Here are some examples of Newsday’s top-performing nostalgia stories:
Newsday also uses email newsletters to support conversions by sending out high-interest evergreen stories to a mailing list of non-paying subscribers, and then encouraging them to opt into a more specific newsletter that aligns with their interests.
The team also looks at a combination of story-specific data including reach, unique visitors, and how much time subscribers and non-subscribers spend reading a story.
For news organizations that don’t have a paywall model, VanNess suggests looking at traffic from Google Discover. Data from this feature — which allows users to customize their news feed to follow the news sources and topics they prefer — can help news teams understand what kind of coverage resonates with readers online.
Where to start in your own community
So how can other news organizations start to explore evergreen and nostalgia stories as a revenue opportunity? VanNess and Williams share these suggestions:
- Be curious and share ideas: Dedicate time to talk with reporters about local events and places of interest to surface questions and angles people are curious about.
- Let previous coverage inspire you: Go through your news organization’s photo and story archives to see if there are timely connections to local history, then develop a story or project around what you found.
- Engage existing communities online: Search for Facebook groups dedicated to remembering or “looking back” at neighborhoods and communities in your area. VanNess wrote about what they learned from developing a relationship with moderators for a large Facebook group in a previous Better News piece.
- Offer something new and secure sponsorships: Create an evergreen email series or other offerings for new residents in your area. Parts of the product can then be sponsored by local businesses and institutions. You can read more about how another Table Stakes organization launched city guides to repurpose content and increase brand awareness.
While highlighting the unique history of your community is important, Williams emphasizes that drawing clear connections to the lives of younger residents today will help make the stories stick.
“As the paper of record there, you want to be able to tell them through your archives what is new, what’s happening now, how it connects to 50, 60, 70 years ago, and why it’s important that you know these things as someone who’s in the community,” he says.
Connecting the past to the present can also address more complex parts of local history that weren’t as kind to underrepresented residents, like women and people of color. Williams talked about their approach to reporting on how Long Island was grappling with its own past in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Newsday’s award-winning documentary project “On the shoulders of giants.”
“We interviewed not only the older civil rights folks, but the younger people were on the front line of the protest at that moment,” he says. “The project was built on nostalgia, but it was actually connected to what the struggles are of younger people and millennials today.”