Search results for: Reader Revenue

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Analytics don’t have to clash with journalistic values. Here’s how the Buffalo News used analytics to reinforce its mission.

This research from the Lenfest Institute and The Shorenstein Center illustrates best practices in digital subscription, focusing on the finer points of applying funnel discipline and implementing tools like paywalls and pay meters. The result is a playbook full of tactics to adapt, regardless of a news organization’s size or familiarity with reader revenue.

With the revenue strategies of news organizations evolving, so are the structures and demands on the people creating new ways of sustaining news. This report from The American Journalism Project in partnership with Impact Architects and The News Revenue Hub details how a handful are accomplishing their revenue work and rounds up resources for operations and hiring.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Engaging with and fundraising to a digital-first audience doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel or put your content behind a paywall. But you may need to get input from people across different departments and create small cross-departmental teams with different expertise to complete effective fundraising campaigns.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Identify a statewide issue that requires reporting from various locations across the state. Enlist partners with a range of applicable skills who represent different localities and mediums, including print, digital, TV and radio.

The Miami Herald, Tampa Bay Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, WLRN, Palm Beach Post and Orlando Sentinel are partnering to cover the environment.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The University of North Carolina and Duke University’s student newsrooms teamed up to create the Rivalry Challenge around the Duke-UNC men’s basketball game earlier this year. There were two big parts to the challenge — a fundraising competition and a joint editorial project in print and online between the two teams of student journalists.

In spring 2019, the Winnipeg Free Press launched a yearlong pilot project through which the city’s faith groups help fund additional religious coverage.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Miami Herald in August 2018 created Sports Pass, a sports-only digital subscription plan, allowing sports diehards both in and out of market to subscribe at a lower rate than a full digital subscription.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Sacramento Bee used a SMART-goal setting process to find audiences willing to pay for its work.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: As part of a newsroom reorganization, The Philadelphia Inquirer built an audience development team to support its transition to a digital subscription business. It’s a team anchored by versatility and diversification. We wanted to create a data-informed newsroom (not data-led, as solid news judgment is just as important as ever) to achieve responsible reach and loyalty at scale for its journalism.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Durango Herald partnered with several organizations to use a solutions journalism approach to covering youth suicide, a sensitive subject that the publication had received criticism for in past coverage. The approach won over the publication’s critics and improved the community conversation around the difficult topic. The paper funded its coverage through a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network.

Retaining subscribers and members after they join is a complex business. This list of tactics is a quick and concise primer on where to start keeping people on your books, regardless of the sophistication of your marketing operation or engagement technology stack.

The New Yorker’s Dan Oshinsky outlines six different newsletter metrics to gauge success that are not open rate.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., created cross-disciplinary teams across the company — spanning the newsroom and the sales/marketing side — to launch new products in specific content areas like food, politics and real estate. The initiative resulted in nearly $900,000 in new product revenue and, in the past two years, an increase in digital subscriptions by 250 percent.

When, and how, should members be consulted about decisions, and how does that fit with membership as a revenue strategy? The balance of expectations, transparency, communication, and shared ownership can be a delicate one that requires careful tending. Emily Goligoski of The Membership Puzzle Project rounds up advice about building and reinforcing member relationships from an international complement of news organizations who are building the membership playbook.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Seattle Times blended the best of its Pulitzer-winning breaking news practices into the reporting of a major enterprise project. The result was a mix of breaking news and in-depth explanatory stories that better served audiences.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Detroit Free Press found a better way to serve one of its key audience segments — people hungry for coverage of the auto industry — than running a standard serialized project.

Gwen Vargo from API rounds up examples of well-converting offer pages to demonstrate how their design influences trust and encourages conversion. Design choices at this important stage in the funnel can make or break subscription rates.

This study by the Medill Center at Northwestern University re-centers the importance of local content in encouraging daily news consumption, which the massive data project shows is the most likely predictor of subscription and retention. As simple as it seems, this change represents a dramatic reorientation of the KPI’s for news organizations pivoting from ad-based to reader-supported models.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: WFAE (Charlotte’s NPR news station) launched a daily music podcast that amplified the voices and work of the local music community.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Bay Area News Group and McClatchy’s Sacramento Bee, two Northern California news organizations, are sharing stories, photos and video. A conversation among top editors about how to best collaborate resulted in a content-sharing and co-reporting experiment.

Examples from major news orgs and regional outlets fill this primer on the different dimensions on designing user flows that convert, gather reader data, and generate revenue.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Miami Herald rewrote job descriptions for online producers — turning their role into “growth editors” — and empowered them to work with editors and reporters to focus on audience in assigning, reporting and producing stories.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Bay Area News Group streamlined communication using Slack by creating three #bigstory channels — announcement, feeds, and logistics. The process simplified how editors and reporters communicate during big, breaking stories. It also created sub-channel threads to keep the conversations separate and easy to follow.

No single approach, even email marketing, can be the sole source of subscriber growth and consumer revenue. News organizations should connect with prospective subscribers, both on and offline with a diversified strategy. Gwen Vargo unpacks a portfolio of techniques through mini-case studies.

Peter Gray, The Wall Street Journal’s VP of Optimization, reminds publishers and mini-publishers about the simplest things that boost reader revenue. This quick read includes an outline of the WSJ’s iterative, testing process.

Email is key to reaching individual readers and measuring the success of subscription marketing. This primer from API’s Reader Revenue Toolkit covers technical and programmatic approaches to email capture.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Dallas Morning News dramatically improved headlines — and their performance — by letting everyone in on the action

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: As it expanded into the post-secondary beat, EdNC blitzed all 58 community colleges across North Carolina in one week to build relationships, surface issues, identify sources, and begin building a wholly new audience. You, too, can take the time to really get to know a targeted audience.

This case study offers insights on how three news organizations are collaborating in a joint bureau to cover state government in Oregon.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Minneapolis Star Tribune looks for gaps in a very crowded events market, then ventures in — cautiously.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Dallas Morning News, which has eight major college football programs in its coverage area and just two full-time writers dedicated to them, concentrated on its smallest but most local school and turned it into a digital subscription success story.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Carolina Public Press, a nonprofit investigative news outlet in North Carolina, created a spreadsheet to “score” each of its news stories for reach and impact — giving it the data and insight needed to improve its reporting, identify skill and capability gaps, and help its reporting reach more people and make a bigger difference.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Durango Herald created a twice-monthly speaker series to connect with new audiences, existing readers and subscribers. The events focus on a wide variety of topics, and offer a new way to engage with diverse communities.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel developed a social strategy to reach new audiences with three parts: best practices to encourage sharing, programming Facebook and creating social-exclusive content.

This multi-section report unpacks reader motivations to subscribe.

A breakdown of how the subscriber funnel works with the goal of retaining your audiences.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Use annual events to experiment with storytelling approaches, form audience/content teams, and stretch resources.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel created — and continually updates — a list of newsroom activities that don’t contribute to its audience-centric strategy in an effort to find time and resources to devote to more meaningful tasks.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Bay Area News Group had moved to a digital first publishing platform but quickly realized some writers and editors were finding an audience for their content better than others. They realized they needed to get everyone on the same page — with a suite of digital content guides.

Financial support from philanthropic sources offers all sorts of new opportunities for funding journalism sustainably. It also raises some ethical questions that can potentially challenge reader trust.

Don’t attempt to create a new franchise vertical or niche site without this advice.

How to determine you are engaging the right people with the right content.

Collaborative journalism takes many forms: reporting, deepening relationships with audiences, co-collecting and sharing data or even teaming up to build technology. Learn the basics here.

You know you need to reach your targeted audiences where they are. But how do you decide where to distribute your content, how to test other platforms, and how to determine their effectiveness? Start here.

What are your organization’s gaps in producing and publishing continuously to meet audience needs? Take these assessments to find out.

Almost all of the levers we can pull to improve newsroom performance revolve around the daily work of the staff, which is a newsroom’s greatest resource.