Industry News on Audience
When Alexandra Bacaj heard that the American Press Institute was putting together a program to help newsrooms engage diverse audiences, she immediately encouraged her colleagues at KPBS to apply.
With start-up funding from a remarkably successful Kickstarter campaign, Block Club Chicago debuted in 2018 as an independent 501(c)(3), journalist-run newsroom. Today, Block Club Chicago has reporters covering a majority of the neighborhoods across the city, but there are still some “gaps” in community coverage that they hope to fill as the newsroom grows.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: As a digital news start-up, the Border Belt Independent partners with local newspapers to provide them with long-form stories at no cost. It helps grow our audience and provides them with in-depth reporting their readers expect.
Manchester, Vermont, is like many other charming New England villages — steeped in centuries of history and serving as a gateway to the Green Mountains. It’s also a hotbed of news publishing innovations at the Manchester Journal, covering the small local population and the hundreds of thousands of annual tourists and visitors.
The Center for Media Engagement, with funding from The Lenfest Institute and Independence Public Media Foundation, analyzed over 60,000 local media articles across 86 sites and the perceptions 1,500 Philadelphians have about their local media. These two analyses, and the comparison between them, allowed us to examine where there are gaps in the news ecosystem.
More than 100 guests had gathered in the American Museum of Tort Law in Winsted, Connecticut, to celebrate the launch of the Winsted Citizen for a community hungry for news. Winsted is also where Ralph Nader was born and delivered the local newspaper as a boy, and the Citizen is his gift to his hometown, which had become a news desert.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Consider your readers not just as political junkies or sports nuts, but as multi-dimensional people who love politics and are enamored with baseball (or both). When you do that, you can open readers to a wide range of different coverage they didn’t know you had.
The new report features stories from European news publishers that embraced an audience-first mindset during their participation in the Table Stakes Europe program. By choosing specific target audiences and starting to produce journalism that serves their needs, the companies were able to create loyal new readers and accelerate their digital transformation.
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