Consumer revenue can take many forms, including subscriptions, membership and donations. And while these three types of consumer revenue serve unique audience needs and interests, the discipline required to execute each is very similar.
Native advertising can be a tremendously effective revenue driver and service to audiences. If executed poorly, however, it can quickly erode reader trust.
“We’re doing four times more in-depth investigative and explanatory reporting now than we did when our newsroom was three times larger than it is today. And I barely heard a peep from readers about most of the stuff we stopped doing.”
Reaching audiences is no longer just another function of marketing and circulation teams. The role of attracting readers/viewers/listeners belongs to everyone, including (and especially!) the newsroom.
The phrase “Table Stakes” comes from poker – the amount required to have seat at the table. The Table Stakes manual is for newsrooms, identifying what’s required to play and win the game of news in the 21st century. Developed with major metropolitan daily news organizations, it is meant to accelerate journalism’s shift to digital from print, help newsrooms evolve their practices, reach new audiences and better engage their communities.
Print and digital platforms serve different user needs, with different cycles and rhythms, and require different organizational capabilities. But a bifurcated approach divides up labor instead of maximizing coordination and it perpetuates a losing either/or-ism (“print first or digital first”) that ignore the fact that local news organization’s must be “audience-first.”
In order to overcome them, first understand the barriers to success in producing and publishing continuously to meet audience needs.
Audiences expect fresh digital news on their own schedule. Yet, too many newsrooms provide news on their own print-driven schedules.
In order to overcome them, first understand the barriers to success at publishing on the platforms used by your target audiences.
The target audience has gone elsewhere and other platforms increasingly control distribution, which means it’s now the responsibility of the newsroom to drive discoverability, reach and engagement.
The criteria should combine assessing the audiences/platforms with the greatest revenue potential and the most readiness. Most importantly: deferring ‘getting going’ in favor of analysis runs a risk of not getting going soon enough. And, mini-publisher leaders and teams learn a lot by ‘just doing it’ – by learning about mini-publishing by being mini-publishers.
Success demands shifting your news organization away from the church/state functional structure of the newspaper past to a portfolio of general manager led, audience-first, and platform-driven businesses – all of which are guided by senior leaders whose time and attention is rebalanced toward medium and longer term transformation requirements.
Take this quiz for a quick read on your organization’s gaps in serving targeted audiences with targeted content — and find out why your gaps exist.
It’s critically important to define — with the right level of specificity — the roles and skills you need.
This section focuses on how you must hold already employed staffers accountable for specific results that arise from learning, practicing and excelling at required skills, behaviors, attitudes and working relationships.
In order to overcome them, first understand the barriers to success in funneling occasional users to habitual and paying loyalists.
Using defined criteria for making key decisions is an enormously important discipline to build in your news enterprise. The best way to learn how to serve targeted audiences with targeted content is to ‘just do it.’ Get going now!
The Table Stakes outlined here are about what news enterprises need to do to “get in the game.” But you don’t just want to play. You want to win. Learn what it takes to differentiate your news organization from others in ways that help you move from “survive” to “thrive.”
This section describes ways to track progress and measure success at mastering how to use targeted content to serve targeted audiences.
Use specific, measurable, outcome-based goals to drive performance.