Month: July 2024

By Dan Kennedy

If we’ve learned anything about news publishing in recent years, it’s that the giant tech platforms are not our friends. Google is embracing artificial intelligence, which means that searching for something will soon provide you with robot-generated answers (right or wrong!), thus reducing the need to click through. Facebook is moving away from news. Twitter/X has deteriorated badly under the chaotic leadership of Elon Musk, although it still has enough clout that President Biden used it to announce he was ending his re-election campaign.

So what should publishers do instead? It’s no secret — they’re already doing it. They are using email newsletters to drive their audience to their journalism. A recent post by Andrew Rockway and Dylan Sanchez for LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers reports that 95% of member publishers are offering newsletters, up from 81% in 2022. “The decline in referral traffic,” they write, “will likely lead to more direct engagement by publishers with their audiences.”

Some observers worry about newsletter overload as our inboxes fill up with email we may never get around to reading. That’s potentially a problem, but I think it’s a more serious problem for larger outlets, many of which send out multiple newsletters throughout the day and risk reaching a point of diminishing returns. By contrast, users will value one daily newsletter from their hyperlocal news project with links to the latest stories.

Newsletters are crucial to the success that Ellen Clegg and I have seen both in the projects we write about in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Essentially, we’ve seen three newsletter strategies.

• By far the most common approach publishers use is to offer a free newsletter aimed at driving users to their website, which may be free or subscription-based. The Massachusetts-based Bedford Citizen, for instance, sends out a daily newsletter generated by its RSS feed and a weekly human-curated newsletter. The Citizen is a free nonprofit, but once they’ve enticed you with their top-of-the-funnel newsletter, they hope they can lure you into becoming a paying member. Ellen and I interviewed executive director Teri Morrow and editor Wayne Braverman on our podcast last February.
• The Colorado Sun, a statewide nonprofit, offers a series of free and paid newsletters, while the website itself is free. The paid newsletters represent an unusual twist: Some of them feature deeper reporting than you can get from the website on topics such as politics, climate change and outdoor recreation. At $22 a month for a premium membership, users pay no more than they would for a digital subscription to a  daily newspaper. Editor Larry Ryckman talked about that in our most recent podcast.
• In some places, the newsletter is the publication. An example of that is Burlington Buzz, a daily newsletter that covers Burlington, Massachusetts. Founder, publisher and editor Nicci Kadilak recently switched her newsletter platform from Substack to Indiegraf, and her homepage looks a lot like a standard community website — which shows that it’s a mistake to get too caught up on categories when newsletters have websites and websites have newsletters. Ellen and I talked with Nicci last year.

What’s crucial is that news publishers have direct control of the tools that they use to connect with their audience. Gone are the days when we could rely on Facebook and Twitter to reliably deliver readers to us. We have to go find them — and give them a reason to keep coming back.

Correction: Burlington Buzz has moved to Indiegraf, not Ghost.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Dan and Ellen talk to Larry Ryckman, editor and co-founder of The Colorado Sun, the subject of a chapter that Dan wrote for our book, “What Works in Community News.” The Sun was launched by journalists who worked at The Denver Post, which had been cut and cut and cut under the ownership of Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that the Post staff called “vulture capitalists.”

The Sun was founded as a for-profit public benefit corporation. A PBC is a legal designation covering for-profit organizations that serve society in some way. Among other things, a PBC is under no fiduciary obligation to enrich its owners and may instead plow revenues back into the enterprise. And we’ve found that for-profit models are rare in the world of news startups. But that changed last year, when the Sun joined its nonprofit peers. Ryckman explains.

Dan gives a listen to a New York Times podcast with Robert Putnam, the Harvard University political scientist who wrote “Bowling Alone” some years back. In a fascinating 40 minutes, Putnam talks about his work in trying to build social capital. He never once mentions local news, but there are important intersections between his ideas and what our podcast and book are focused on.

Ellen reports on an important transition at Sahan Journal in Minnesota, one of the projects we wrote about in our book. The founding CEO and publisher, Mukhtar Ibrahim, is moving on and a successor has been named. Starting in September, Vanan Murugesan will be leading Sahan. He has experience in the nonprofit sector and also has experience in public media.

You can listen to our conversation here and access an AI-generated transcript. You can also subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Our Reinventing Local TV News project, which is part of Northeastern’s School of Journalism, is getting a lot of attention from the trade publication Editor & Publisher. Professor Mike Beaudet, who heads the project, is the subject of a feature story in E&P and is the guest on this week’s E&P vodcast.

Beaudet, who’s also an investigative reporter with WCVB-TV (Channel 5), tells E&P’s Gretchen Peck and Mike Blinder that the goal is to come up with new ways of storytelling to appeal to younger audiences — a demographic that gets its news almost entirely by smartphone rather than a traditional television screen. Here’s how Beaudet puts it in an interview with Peck:

People are cutting the cord, and the whole idea of having “appointment television” has gone out the window, especially for younger people. That’s the challenge: We can’t rely on this audience to find local TV like you could in years past, as they get older, because they’re not consuming content the same way.

Mike and his collaborator, Professor John Wihbey, presented at our What Works local news conference at Northeastern last March. Given that local television is in relatively good financial health compared to the newspaper business, it’s vitally important that people like Beaudet and Wihbey come up with solutions before the problems of an aging audience become acute.