The evolution of publishing has required revenue diversification. Whether a nonprofit newsroom, a community newspaper or a start-up, publishers are finding ways beyond traditional advertising and subscriptions to build more sustainable businesses.
Editor & Publisher caught up with three news media executives to find out what’s working. The following Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Melissa Bell, CEO, Chicago Public Media
E&P: I would think that a nonprofit would have a big donation component to revenue diversity. Can you talk to me about some of your revenue streams and where you’re seeing some growth in those non-traditional areas?
Bell: Chicago Public Media is a number of different brands, but we primarily started as the NPR membership station in Chicago. So, like many other NPR and PBS membership stations, we have very, very deep relationships with our members in our geographical area, and that’s one of our biggest areas of revenue: building strong, engaged relationships with people that financially support us throughout their lifetime.
Four years ago, we merged with the Chicago Sun-Times, which had been a for-profit news organization for many years, but we turned it into a nonprofit. And while we still have print subscriptions, we also made the digital experience a membership-first experience. This was a really big experiment at the time. ... It helped us build out the largest local nonprofit newsroom in the country. We combine forces in a lot of ways.
I think our print paper is stronger than ever before. I think our radio product is doing phenomenally well, and so we’re really excited about that experiment. And we’re now starting to think about different products. And the latest one is this community platform called Chicago.com, and Chicago.com is going to be focused on a number of different ways for people to live their best lives in Chicago.
What I love about public media is that we truly have a deep connection with our audiences because they are the primary financial driver for us. We see philanthropy as another part of our organization, but I think of that as the extension of our membership plan. As people grow older and acquire more wealth, they are supportive of our work to the levels that they can.
We, of course, have our sponsorship work. We have our event work. We still have our print subscriptions, which I don’t think we should give up on. I really think that we have a lot more to explore with a print product in the future. You know, we just did a beautiful, huge special edition on the opening of the Obama Presidential Center and we saw huge single-copy sales around that.
We’ve always had very good merch, and that’s another big avenue of income for us. We know people really want to convene with one another more, and we’re starting to see more events for our organization that connect people not just to our journalism but to one another.
We just launched a theater club, which takes about 40 WBEZ members out to a performance with the theater critic. One of the attendees said it was the best dating app they'd ever been on! I think people are hungry to get offline, and so we want to help build experiences to move them into real life with one another.
E&P: How are you forming those relationships with your members? Is it newsletters? You talked a little bit about events.
Bell: I’ve always felt in journalism that we need to have a diversified portfolio, both of products and of revenue models. One of the dangers that we have in journalism is getting very excited by silver bullets. It’s like suddenly digital advertising is going to save the loss of print revenue. Oh, The New York Times has built a really strong subscription model; everyone should turn to subscriptions. There’s just a constant series of like, maybe “this” will be our solution.
But like with any business, you need to constantly be watching what’s working in the business, what’s not working, and how are you adjusting the business models that you have?
We’re always having to adjust and change what we’re doing. We’re launching essentially neighborhood communities [online] this fall in five different neighborhoods where we’re going to be creating a stewarded conversation around hyperlocal information events as ways to get engaged in your community. So, we'll see how that is working both digitally and in person. We’re trying to approach all sorts of different paths.
Uriah Kizer, founder and publisher, Potomac Local News
E&P: How are you driving revenue right now? What’s working for you?
Kizer: It’s a mix. We’re doing display ads on websites. We’re doing our email newsletter that goes out every day. We are doing social media. We’re doing promoted events — not events in the sense we’re planning events and holding events, but people who want to advertise their event. That’s a self-serve thing, as well as posting self-serve articles to our website. We charge for those, and those come in at a pretty good rate. We have a real estate product where we work with Realtors and allow them to post their own open houses to our sites.
But a unique thing that we did was a podcast. We spent about an hour and a half. We did a video setup and a recording at a local brewery, and it was me and the Realtor. And then at one point, for one segment, we brought on the owner of the brewery. The whole point of it was to get the Realtor out of the Realtor’s office, get the publisher out of the publisher’s office, and into a place where that felt fairly relaxing. And beer helps everyone relax. Instead of talking about interest rates and inventory and staging your home for selling, we talked about the community. We talked about the best places to get a beer, the best places to go shopping, the best places to go hiking and kayaking, and stuff that locals truly want to know when they’re talking about moving or looking at an area. So, we did several different neighborhoods through that hour and a half, and it was a unique opportunity for the Realtor to brand themselves as the subject matter expert for the region, and it was very successful. Since that time, we’ve spun it off and done it with a few other clients.
E&P: How does the revenue on that work? Do people pay to be one of the subjects of the the podcast, or is it sponsored in a different way?
Kizer: I charge $5,000, and then we choose a date, we produce a loose script about four different topics that we’re going to talk about. We go to said location, or we do it remote, depending upon what the client wants to do. From there, we record and then turn it into multiple 20-minute podcast episodes. We can turn it into sponsored posts. We turn it into social media posts for Instagram, TikTok, all the platforms. And for one price, and for an hour and a half of their time, we produce 12 weeks’ worth of content, and it drips out across our platforms.
Ryan Dohrn, president and founder, Brain Swell Media; owner and CEO of Niche Media LLC
E&P: What are some good new revenue streams? What’s your read on different revenue streams other than just traditional sales and traditional subscriptions?
Dohrn: So, one of the things that I’ve seen be quite successful is newspapers using lead magnets to encourage people to give them their email address, so that they can take the email address and then use that as a revenue mechanism, as a subscription mechanism.
As an example, people love recipes. So, let’s just say that you’re a local paper, rather than paywalling and making people mad, lead magnets would pop up and say, “Hey, download 10 best recipes for fall” — for fun or tailgating, whatever. People give their email address, because they feel like they’re getting something of value for it. Then we use the email address as a way to go to local businesses and say, "Hey, we can email these people on your behalf.”
So, that’s kind of replacing the paywall with a value option to collect the same data and then use it in other ways.
Another way I’ve seen people do things is that they launch niche publications, niche magazines. So, for example, in areas where they have small towns where there's a lot of lakes, they weren't able to grow revenue from the lake publication of the newspaper, but when they began doing specialized magazines about lake life, all of a sudden, they were like, "Oh, okay, people are willing to pay for this.”
In markets across the country, media companies — local media companies — are launching “faces” magazines, a specialty publication that’s published once a year and people pay to be in that publication.
So, for example, “The Faces of Dentistry: Dallas.” As a dentist, you can choose: Do you want to be in this issue? Do you want to be the exclusive face of dentistry, the face of plastic surgery, the face of insurance, the face of coffee, the face of automotives?
And they’re very well-written pieces. They’re not submitted by the company. They’re written by an author. A writer will go and meet with the business owner and write their 700-word profile. Now, granted, they need to be approved by the advertisers, but it is keeping writers employed. It’s generating a couple hundred thousand dollars, per market. It’s a big revenue operation, and newspapers could be leading the charge, especially in markets where there’s not a city and regional magazine title.
Bob Miller has spent more than 25 years in local newsrooms, including 12 years as an executive editor with Rust Communications. Bob also produces an independent true crime investigative podcast called The Lawless Files.
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