Drive audience growth and profitability from a “mini-publisher” perspective

In the digital subscription cohort for alumni of the Table Stakes Local News Transformation Program, five teams were challenged to think creatively about growing and retaining digital audiences through experimentation. In this Better News piece, each team shares the challenge it took on over the four months and highlights its biggest lessons.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: If you have the expertise to cover a topic with a robust audience, consider moving beyond a “destination website,” app or videos, and try producing a podcast on that topic. And give the podcast time to grow its audience.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Consider reaching a national audience that cares about a topic your newsroom covers well. The national audience may not subscribe because the rest of your reporting isn’t as relevant to them. How could you get them to read, interact with, and most importantly, financially support your coverage?

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Attract and serve a Spanish-speaking audience not through AI translation, but through showing respect — building capacity and being careful to ensure the information you publish is accurate, timely and culturally competent.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: As an independent nonprofit newsroom, move beyond philanthropy as a core strategy and begin reader revenue and community membership experiments in order to move toward sustainability.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: By telling and sharing stories in the Latinx community (beginning with the pandemic’s impact on people, families, businesses), you can do what good newsrooms do — reflect the communities they serve.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Use your newsroom talent and expertise to put on live events that show off your depth as an organization and offer new ways for audiences to engage with your work.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Deepen your relationship with readers and expand your news coverage of communities with a team of freelancers, creating digital hubs and newsletters to organize and promote coverage.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Refocus your community coverage to build trust and cultivate new, diverse audiences — growing subscriptions along the way.

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.

Legacy metros, locals and regionals have too few general managers overseeing too few businesses, products and services. Mini-publisher teams help close that gap.

There are four keys to success: Give mini-publisher teams a charter and ask them to put together plans needed for team success; regularly review and manage team performance; require mini-publisher teams to use the team discipline for performance; and provide mini-publisher teams with the background and support they need to master “economics for journalists” basics

Today, the most important job of senior newsroom leaders is to transform their newsrooms by putting the Table Stakes in place. Absent this, the newsroom – indeed, the whole organization – cannot escape decline into irrelevance and even extinction.