Be the organizer, not the storyteller

Find out what matters to your community; it might not be your news stories This week’s post focuses on examples of successful business strategies for local news publishers. The strategies have become ever more critical as local news organizations have suffered mightily in the covid-19 crisis. Several years ago I was working in Belarus, a […]

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salesperson

Build a loyal community, not a big audience

Focus on your users’ needs, their problems, their values, their tastes Any news media entrepreneur who is trying to create a sustainable business model should keep these three things in mind: Build a media community, not an audience Focus on relationships, not scale Measure engagement, not page views What follows is, first, my message during […]

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How to fight the power of fear and polarization

Journalists have the tools to get people engaged in solving local problems “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Those were the resolute words of the wheelchair-bound man who was taking office as president in 1933. He was elected in the depths of the Depression, with millions unemployed and the economy in […]

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Are we exaggerating the power of disinformation?

We journalists assume it’s a problem, but plenty of independent data says no Consider this blog entry a followup to my recent post, Economists ask, Does advertising actually work? The alarm bells started ringing for me when I saw the article in First Draft discrediting a Rolling Stone story that depicted anti-vaxers as pawns of […]

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12 revenue sources for digital news organizations

One of my most popular blog posts from 7 years ago is still surprisingly relevant This article first appeared on my website in 2014 and it remains one of the most popular. The revenue sources are still relevant, and so are the business principles behind them. For this post, I’ve updated some of the text […]

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Dirty words that journalists have to say without blushing

A popular blog post from 2018: how to think like a businessperson Author’s note: This month, I am re-publishing some popular posts. This article first appeared on my website in 2018 and is one of the most popular from the past decade. Many of the circulation and revenue numbers in the text and the links […]

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For indigenous media, language is power

Digital media are emerging to give voice to native groups in Latin America You may have heard the saying that a language is a dialect with an army. Which is another way of saying that military and financial power impose themselves through language. Versión en español So it follows that people in Latin America whose […]

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