Tags containing: "business models"

The media support system needs an update

June 13, 2024 Matt DeRienzo – Newsroom Consultant

Not too long ago, the consensus was that a significant digital reader revenue strategy could only work at two or three outlier news organizations. The New York Times had the breadth and depth and quality of content for which the average person highly engaged with the news might pay. The Wall Street Journal had a large potential base of readers who needed its specialized content for their jobs and who had expense accounts that would cover it.

Beleaguered regional newspapers such as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Boston Globe eventually proved this wrong. Voice of San Diego and dozens of other local and national nonprofit newsrooms found they could have public radio-like success with small donations from readers who understood the altruistic mission of accountability journalism.

Beyond the business side

Local news organizations are right to pursue the formula. We’re past the debate over whether a significant number of readers will pay to support strong journalism. It’s been proven they will.

Industry leaders and journalism funders continue to put crucial focus on testing and improving revenue models. Many cohorts of local publishers have been trained in the business-side factors involved in a reader revenue strategy. Help on achieving the level of journalism that will capture an audience and move them to give or subscribe has been much harder to come by.

And that’s the elephant in the room: The media support system – the dot orgs, foundations and funding organizations – need to figure out how to help make the journalism at under-resourced newsrooms strong and impactful enough to generate the kind of support that will make them sustainable. (And ultimately lead to more such journalism.)

This isn’t a question of building a business model or fundraising. This is about staffing and data acumen and the knowledge and tools it takes to create powerful journalism and a user experience that audiences value and support.

As they long have, amazing training opportunities exist through organizations such as IRE, ONA, SPJ, the Ida B. Wells Society and more. But the barriers for small and under-resourced news organizations to actually take advantage and put that training to use are high.

Small is the new normal

Zooming out, we see a local journalism landscape dominated by hundreds of very small newsrooms: local independent online startups that are one- to three-person operations and legacy Black and brown news organizations. They have limited resources or are chain-owned daily newspapers whose staffs have been reduced to one or two reporters.

First and foremost, these newsrooms need more direct operational funding to employ more journalists. This is something that the massive Press Forward initiative created by a coalition of journalism-supporting foundations is seeking to address.

But the industry also needs to have teams equipped for the future. Newsrooms like these will benefit from a system of training, resources and mentorship to support “capital J” accountability journalism in news ecosystems that are now decentralized.

Readers are well-served and grateful for coverage of the day-to-day news of the community. However, every newsroom yearns for the space and resources to also do work that goes deeper, that holds the powerful accountable, that has impact and drives change. It’s the kind of work that elevates the stature of your brand, that exposes your organization to more people, that is the catalyst to subscribe or give for many.

We need great journalism

I’d argue that the same dynamic applies to advertising at many news organizations, even if they don’t realize it. They can’t compete with the price, reach and targeting of the digital ad tech that drives the biggest online platforms. But small newsrooms can make a hell of a case to local advertisers that they want to be adjacent to and associated with the kind of journalism that has the community appreciative and engaged.

This has happened in incredible (even Pulitzer Prize-winning) ways and it is exciting how quickly collaborative journalism has been embraced. But it’s never completely organic. This movement has happened in large part through the facilitation, research, training, convening and cheerleading of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Solutions Journalism Network has built training programs into its facilitation of regional and topical journalism collaboratives. And ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting/Reveal, ICIJ and my alma mater, the Center for Public Integrity, helped show a new generation of investigative and single topic-focused nonprofits how having collaboration in your DNA allows you to punch far above your weight.

Meanwhile, Report for America is building training, mentorship and additional editing support into its process, to make sure that its ambitious goal of putting hundreds of additional reporters in under-resourced local newsrooms across the country has the intended impact. And the Investigative Editing Corps is pairing small newsrooms with experienced editors to provide support for enterprise and investigative reporting that goes beyond their typical daily news coverage.

Emphasis on essentials

Technology is also playing a part in making more advanced reporting possible in smaller newsrooms, from data journalism resources such as The Accountability Project and Big Local News to the document and records-access tools of Muck Rock.

When the Center for Public Integrity focused its mission four years ago on investigative reporting that confronts inequality in the U.S., we thought about how to scale that work beyond what our 25-person newsroom could do. When we obtained secret White House documents showing the true extent of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. We shared them directly with journalists across the country, and it saved lives. After spending thousands of hours obtaining and cleaning more than a decade’s worth of data about polling place locations and closures, we made it available to power not just our own reporting, but others’ work ranging from small local news organizations to NPR, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

We followed ProPublica’s wonderful example of publishing “reporting recipes” for investigations that local reporters could follow in their own communities. This grew into a routine of sharing customized data and reporting formulas with local news organizations ahead of our own publishing. Then came full-blown, public-facing local reporting toolkits for topics such as lead contamination, hate crimes against AAPI people and threats to academic freedom on college campuses.

A lightbulb went off when we were publishing “Unhoused and Undercounted,” an investigation that proved public school districts across the country were failing to identify and serve homeless students as required by federal law. We realized that this story, using our data analysis, could be written in almost any local community in the country and have a high potential for very direct impact in helping kids.

We were offering the data and the formula of questions to ask. How could we get it — and similar investigations — into the hands of any/every willing local newsroom able to tackle it, in a way that allowed them to have impact with few resources but also an entry point to go far deeper into the topic in their community if they could?

Decentralized journalism calls for decentralized solutions for seeding and supporting the kind of work that will spark a virtuous cycle of revenue that rewards the most impactful journalism. Our media ecosystem is supported by a robust network of organizations that are focused on keeping newsrooms afloat. But like all things digital, even this support must continue to evolve. Revenue models are only as effective as audiences’ willingness to support journalism. It’s time to focus on empowering under-resourced newsrooms to deliver the highest caliber journalism, to support society – and to inspire audiences to support them.

About the author

Matt DeRienzo is a veteran newsroom leader whose work over the past four years as editor in chief of the Center for Public Integrity was recognized with a national Edward R. Murrow Award for general excellence. Previously, he served as vice president of news for Hearst’s Connecticut newspapers and as the first full-time executive director of LION, a national nonprofit supporting local independent online news organizations. He can be reached at [email protected].

Industry-Research

Collaborative models of journalism offer sustainability

March 1, 2022 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

The Center for Cooperative Media sees collaborative journalism as a way to share power among journalists, readers and others to deliver information that centers and addresses people’s needs. They believe that collaboration can be particularly impactful when it involves the community.

Researchers Joy Jenkins and Lucas Graves explore collaborative journalism in practice at a local level in Europe. Their report, Do More with Less: Minimizing Competitive Tensions in Collaborative Local Journalism, offers a local approach to journalism that serves a community rather than delivers a news product to an audience.

Their research analyzes three collaborative journalism experiments in Europe:

The Bureau Local in the U.K is a nonprofit collaboration of journalists and non-journalists (data scientists, academics, citizens, etc.) engaging in topic-driven reporting projects.
“L’Italia Delle Slot” in Italy is a collaboration among one legacy, and two start-up news organizations focused on a single topic.
Lännen Media in Finland is a co-op collaboration among regional news organizations through shared content production and distribution.

They conducted 29 interviews among journalists, senior management, community organizers, data analysts, technical experts, and others.

Collaboration models

Each of the three publications offers different collaboration models:

Lännen Media

This is a co-op model where similar news organizations join on specific topics and do not compete. They manage daily reports via video conferencing and skype with editors and share a content management system to follow what they work on in the different newsrooms.

This setup allows journalists to rotate into the cooperative from the regional newsrooms for two or three years and then return to their original masthead. While larger newspapers contribute more, all members share the costs of running Lännen Media.

“L’Italia Delle Slot

A contractor model that establishes a commercial contract to dictate the collaboration among organizations with specific areas of expertise. In this case, a large legacy news publisher combines efforts with two data-journalism-focused start-ups. In 2013, Effecinque, a start-up, began researching the increase in slot machines in Italy. Effecinque partnered with Dataninja, a data-journalism network, to investigate if slot machines in Italy correlated to the rise in gambling addiction. Effecinque and Dataninja partnered with GEDI Visual Lab to produce a web portal, data visualizations, videos, and other interactive content to showcase the details of the investigation.

This approach allowed the two start-up organizations, GEDI and 13 local newspapers, to define their roles based on areas of expertise. Further, the 13 local newsrooms provided local knowledge to tell the stories about their community using the data set.

The digital media ecosystem is a great environment to start collaborations such as establishing networks across localities and shared resources. Jenkins’ and Grave’s research illustrates three collaborative journalism models to showcase each of their unique approaches. Lännen Media’s co-op model shares resources across regional newspapers, “L’Italia Delle Slot’s” contractor model engages expert journalists on short-term investigations. The Bureau Local NGO model manages a shared database by a nonprofit. Each model offers a viable model for publisher sustainability – maintaining a healthy structure of shared economics, goals, and healthy competition.

How CUNY’s Anita Zielina cultivates change leaders in the media business

June 17, 2020 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

The outbreak of Covid-19 and the growing realization that systemic racism is a “pandemic within a pandemic” highlight the critical need for trustworthy news and information. Yet it comes at a time when the media business is fighting a major battle of its own. Disrupted by the deterioration of revenue streams and business models, and devastated by what Reuters Institute estimates could be a $20 billion drop in income available to media worldwide, news media businesses face what has been described as an “extinction event.”

At this transformative moment for news media, executives must cultivate the skills to take charge of change. Otherwise they risk being crushed by it. Planning and priorities must focus on the approaches that make journalism viable and sustainable. Which raises the question: What are the new paths to excellence and profitability? The answers revolve around retooling teams to drive culture change and manage transformation in their news organizations.

Continuing our series of DCN video interviews, I talk to Anita Zielina, Director of Innovation and Leadership at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Zielina, who shapes CUNY’s executive education and leadership initiatives, draws from her own change-making career in several media organizations. Her experience includes stints at Switzerland’s NZZ Media group, Germany’s Stern and Austria’s Der Standard, to provide insights on what’s needed to run an innovative, customer-centric, and sustainable news media business.

Here are three key takeaways from our talk:

Open career paths for digital natives

News media organizations have to improve ongoing training and overcome their own digital divides. “We are running into a terrible talent crisis in journalism,” Zielina says. Many young people entering the profession are not getting what they want most. They want the freedom to reimagine news and explore the digital storytelling technologies and models that can make it possible – and even profitable.

Be representative of the audiences you serve

Local newsrooms, which provide community coverage at a time when audiences are eager to know what is going on in their city or district, are well-positioned to come out of the pandemic strong, Zielina says. But the sustainable edge comes when news organizations listen to underrepresented communities and make a greater effort to include them as part of their newsrooms.

Revenue models are ready for a rethink

Media organizations get high marks for efforts to grasp analytics. The next step is to combine data points to arrive at a more holistic view of the consumer and what they are willing to pay for. This will require media leaders to open the aperture of how they view audiences and the value they can offer. Events, membership, exclusive content, and subscriptions can all be part of the mix. But no matter the revenue model, the requirement for a deeper understanding of “what people expect from you and why they are passionate about you” is a universal constant, Anita says.

Zielina also offers insights around the future prospects for news media and the key skills and capabilities needed to weather the post-pandemic storm.

Watch the full interview:

Industry-Research

Journalists are worried about the future of journalism

July 23, 2019 David Gosen, CCO—Cxense

Journalism has faced a number of challenges over the past few years and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. The duopoly has long been seen as one of the biggest threats to the journalism industry. However, according to our “Don’t stop the press” survey of 153 national, business, and trade journalists across the US, UK, and Europe, only 21% felt that this was a major concern.

Other factors such as the decline of quality, reluctance to pay for content, fake news and reliance on advertising revenue were all considered a bigger threat. In particular, shrinking newsrooms has a major effect on the industry, affecting both the quantity and quality of the output of journalists.

The impact of technology

Technology has been a driving factor for the growth of the news industry and has allowed us to spread information far and wide. It gives journalists the power to share the latest news with all corners of the globe and is a hugely important resource.

However, although there are many benefits with the growth of technology in the space, it has also had its drawbacks. Readers are reluctant to pay for digital content, which has put additional strain on journalism. More than half of journalists cited this as a top threat to their job.

However, 90% of journalists feel that technology has ultimately had a positive effect on their industry and has created a number of new opportunities. It’s allowed them to understand their audiences better, produce content that is more likely to engage readers and collaborate with the commercial team to create content that will drive ad revenue and subscriptions.

Journalists understand the need for paid content

Ultimately, journalists understand that their content needs to be paid for with a combination of ad revenue and subscriptions. Subscription strategies are a priority for publishers. In fact, according to Reuters Institute, 52% of publishers said building a subscription audience will be their top business priority in 2019. According to our research, an almost equal number of journalists like paywalls and understand that they are needed, compared to those that don’t like them but think they are necessary. Only 10% thought all content should be free to access.

However, quality journalism requires funding. The publishing sector is still undecided about the best way to fund its output. Our research clearly shows that some funding models actually undermine journalists’ ability to produce their best work. To combat this, media companies and their journalists need to work together to create a sustainable, best-in-class product that provides a guarantee of sustained, quality output, job security, and satisfaction—something most journalists agreed in this research, was sadly lacking.

When looking at the types of content that are currently produced, the research showed that journalists believe that ad revenue-based models favor click-bait, short-form content (67% agree), while subscription-based models support longer-form, quality journalism (84% agree). This indicated that journalists understand that paywalls are necessary to protect journalism in the long term, while still allowing them to drive revenue.

Concerns about the future

The majority of journalists felt seriously concerned for the future of the industry (78%). Their other key concerns included the poor quality of journalism, the spread of fake news, the lack of funding of online media brands, and the decreasing number of newsrooms. In addition to this, 83% of journalists believe that they have poor job security which is mainly driven by consumers reluctance to pay for digital content.

Although this may seem to paint a bleak picture for the future of journalism, our research shows that publishers are working hard to adapt to these pressures. There is a drive towards the introduction of more sustainable funding models which support long and short-form content, ultimately providing a better, more prosperous future for the industry.

Industry-Research

How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek Sustainability

April 10, 2015 Research Team—DCN

Knight Foundation has just released the third installment in a series of reports, which it launched in 2011, that track the progress of nonprofit news sites as they strive for sustainability. The report “Gaining Ground: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek Sustainability” analyzes trends among 20 local, state and regional nonprofit news organizations. It also incorporates insights from interviews with leaders of a few additional nonprofit news organizations that have a predominantly national scope. Many, though not all, of the organizations included in the study have been funded by Knight Foundation. The report is based on data collected from a cohort of 20 nonproﬁt news organizations about their mission, Web traffic, revenue and expenditures. Researcher Kate Marshall Dole led the data collection efforts and report development. Community Wealth Partners, a social sector consultancy and evaluation firm, performed the data analysis.

Key findings include:

The revenue for nonprofit news organizations increased by an average of 7% between 2011 and 2013. In 2012, revenue grew by an average of 3%; however median revenue was only 7% suggesting year-over-year revenue for half the sites was either flat or declining.
The organizations generated 23% of revenue through earned income in 2013 compared with 18% in 2011. Nonprofits remain very reliant on foundation funding, and few appear to be rapidly approaching a sustainable business model.
The most growth in earned income has occurred through sponsorships and in-person events. Though advertising is the earned income source utilized by the most nonprofit news organizations, advertising revenue was flat from 2011 to 2013.
Spending remains highly concentrated in editorial expenses, though as organizations grow in size they appear to invest more in marketing and technology.
Sites grew Web traffic by an average of 75% from 2011 to 2013, and the share of mobile traffic and referral traffic from social media grew considerably. A few sites are piloting more sophisticated efforts for tracking impact beyond basic website analytics.