This concept should guide your work — it will attract financial support
This post was originally published Aug. 29, 2024, in the Your News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models.
The 1,300 free subscribers to this newsletter know that I’ve advocated several strategies repeatedly in the past 140 posts. It’s not just because I’m stubborn (which I am). Or because I’ve run out of ideas (which I haven’t).
It’s that technological advances, media platforms, economic forces, and normal human appetites keep demonstrating the same results. People want information they can trust when they’re making important decisions in their lives. Yes, they want to be entertained. Yes, they love gossip. Yes, they love scandals and sensationalism. Yes, they’ll click on stories that provoke fear, anxiety, and hatred.
AND, they want to feel that someone speaks for them. They want to feel that someone is holding the powerful to account. And they value trustworthy information enough that they will pay to support those who produce it. In today’s media ecosystem, flooded with junk, trustworthy information is rare, treasured, and thus economically valuable.
To survive and thrive
So, my advice to media entrepreneurs — and in fact any entrepreneurs hoping to establish themselves — is the following:
- Be unique. When everyone zigs, you should zag. Find a different way of producing or delivering something. Present your product in a different way.
- Be transparent. Tell people how you made something and the care you took to make it be of the highest quality. Describe where you sourced your materials or information. More detail is better. Tina Kaiser tells how.
- Sell your value, not your price. In a world of misinformation, trustworthy products are scarce and thus more valuable. Make your product free to everyone and ask those with resources to support your valuable product. Credibility has economic value.
- Build relationships, not scale. Sensationalism attracts eyeballs but not action or solutions. Build loyalty, not volume, by serving the daily needs of your users and clients. Help them solve the problems of their daily lives — housing, water, food; health, education, employment, retirement; responsive, honest public officials. Build a loyal community, not a big audience.
- Quality, not quantity. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Be the best in your niche.
- Examples? Look no further than my 10 Reasons for optimism about the news business.
Previously, on the issue of Trust:
Wikipedia is the greatest online service of the internet age
3,000 independent news media rebuild trust around the world
In Spain, 80,000 people pay to support high-quality journalism