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 publishers can overcome loss of Facebook traffic

Now that Facebook has made clear that it will not be promoting journalism to its users, all of the publishers who were getting much of their traffic there should look elsewhere. (Frederic Filloux of Monday Note has one of the best analyses of the company’s announcement.) What now? Well, there are several tactics and strategies […]

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Think small: the new metrics of engagement for news

Forget about the big numbers of total page views per month or unique users per month. Fans are engaged and willing to give their time and money. Those numbers are misleading and meaningless. They had meaning only in the days when the media business depended on mass media, massive audiences, and products aimed at the […]

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Web users are lazy, selfish and ruthless

(Versión en español aquí.) Somebody brilliant said that, and if we need any proof we need look no further than a study by Comscore and the Newspaper Association of America. The data show that the 108 million unique users of newspaper sites in June 2011 spent an average of just over a minute a day, […]

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