In today’s media landscape, you don’t often find pockets of progress amid all the doom and gloom. But check out these numbers:
The Denver Post planned and launched a pay meter and within four months sold 5,100 digital subscriptions and increased loyal readers by 20 percent. The State Journal Register grew its Facebook audience by 10 percent, tripled the number of Instagram followers and had 20,000 podcast downloads. The Beaver County Times created partnerships that led to a 40 percent profit margin on events.
All three newspapers participated in Poynter’s 2017-18 Local News Innovation Program, which concluded this month as newsroom leaders came to St. Petersburg, Florida, to present the results from their year-long focus on sustainable digital publishing. Twenty newspapers of all sizes from around the U.S. reported increased digital subscriptions, better community engagement, and more intense focus on revenue-generating projects.
The progress offers good news in what continues to be tough times for newspapers, which include a newsprint tariff and layoffs.
Achieving digital sustainability is a process, and one that many local newsrooms are working toward. But the goal shared among this year’s cohort is to withstand onslaught and learn to thrive. Poynter’s Local News Innovation Program, a project of the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative, combines seven foundational approaches with the principles of “Performance-Driven Change” in order to help organizations achieve better results in the era of digital transformation.
Here are examples of how Poynter’s first Local News Innovation Program cohort applied the approach, called “Table Stakes,” in their
Read more here: https://www.poynter.org/news/lessons-table-stakes-innovation-initiative
