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Four big opportunities that local news publishers can pursue right now

Here's how to capitalize on each one.

November 6, 2024 by David Grant

Image by porcorex on iStock

This guest post was written by David Grant, Blue Engine Collaborative’s director of partnerships.

If you’re a local news organization, research conducted by Blue Engine and LION Publishers suggests you’ve got ample opportunity in one of these four areas:

Expanding your marketing
Sharpening your analytics
Driving real value from your board
Seeking geographic or product expansion

These insights come from Sustainability Audits of 10 larger LION publishers done by coaches at Blue Engine Collaborative this summer. (We’ve summarized how those Audits point toward a definition of “sustainability” for local news publishers here).

Each opportunity’s value will differ for every publisher based on their unique strengths. Publishers that haven’t yet reached the “growing” or “sustainable” stages would also do well to think about these areas as they relate to their own business goals.

Now, we’ll break down each area and offer practical ideas about how to capitalize on it.

1. Marketing

Ineffective marketing is a key reason small businesses of all kinds fail – and local news organizations are substantially underinvested here.

How underinvested?

We learned that, across 10 strong organizations, the number of full-time employees with “marketing” in their title was … zero. (There were staff who handled marketing activities, to be clear. We call this out because we think this indicates the low level at which these organizations are prioritizing marketing).

In addition, the average percentage of revenue spent on marketing across the group was under one percent.

That’s a far cry from the two to three percent of U.S. GDP spent on marketing each year.

What can we do about this?

First, size the market for your products. Marketing spending is justified by understanding the potential return on investment of your effort. If you don’t know how big you can grow, you won’t know what’s a sufficient amount of expenditure to reach your goals.

Second, identify who owns the work. Find the agency or the employee who will own the budget and be responsible for managing the work.

Finally, build a plan to spend, say, two percent of revenue on paid advertising. In a world of lower search/social traffic, this is going to be a key discipline for staying in front of your audience.

2. Analytics

The era of publishing on vibes needs to come to a close.

Organizations are rarely, if ever, drawing a commercially viable insight out of their marketing data. Those insights are what make our sponsorship offerings more targeted, our membership or subscription requests more clear, and our audience engagement strategies more meaningful.

Why is that? Most organizations we audited don’t fully trust their analytics systems to give them usable information, are drowning in too much data, or don’t have the time to properly glean insights from them.

Second, the capacity to execute audience segmentation (essentially, looking for insights within audience cohorts and not the audience as a whole) is basic and not regularly utilized beyond donor screening.

What can we do about this?

Talk to your stakeholders. Understand the insights about the audience that really matter to your sponsors and funders. Make sure you are regularly capturing this data, whether passively through analytics or actively through surveys, on a regular basis.

Then, use existing tools to enrich your audience data. Many vendors can enrich the data you have on your audience at an affordable rate. Spending a little to add context and color to the audience you already have can pay off in higher advertising rates, better funder pitches, and more tailored membership or subscription offers. (Check out LION’s growing list of available solutions and vendors).

With that in hand, news publishers can move beyond broad descriptions of their audience behavior (the aforementioned “vibes”) to understanding how their journalism performs with different audiences, creating segmented marketing outreach to improve conversion rates, and being able to communicate audience quality, not just quantity, in pitches to sponsors and funders.

3. Boards

Many organizations are not getting the most out of their boards.

Most organizations lack clear goals for their board as a whole and for individual members in particular.

Boards, whether for nonprofits or for-profits, are often untapped resources of rocket fuel for the enterprise – to help power your growth, not just check a box.

What can you do to maximize the impact of some of your most committed supporters?

Make the board’s purpose explicit. To what extent is the board there to fundraise, give advice, or offer high-level governance?

Then, adjust the board to be both the right size and carry the right expectations. Senior staffers can work with their board chair to develop an overall board plan, individual plans for each board member, and set expectations at both levels. This may include adjusting the number of board members to make sure everyone has a role and that all roles are filled.

4. Expansion

If it makes sense for your market and capacity, ask yourself, “Who else can our organization serve?”

Nearly all the publishers we audited have been approached to serve a new market or a new audience.

Most of the publishers have supporters interested in aiding expansion or the financial reserves to self-fund an expansion.

With half the nation’s counties down to zero or one news organization, the opportunity is there.

So why aren’t more organizations expanding?

Because many of those we audited don’t have a multi-year vision for investment, organizational alignment, and goal setting that would allow this growth. Put another way: To take on a mission of this size and scope, you’re going to need a plan.

So what can you do to take advantage of the nationwide opportunity for expansion?

If you don’t have it, you’ll need some practical strategic planning. Engage your board, key staff, and other stakeholders (funders) to craft your multi-year vision and investment plan. Discuss what other markets may be of interest and gauge your core supporters’ willingness to invest in growth.

In doing that work, take what you learned from sizing your own market to size your new opportunities. Once you’ve identified your top opportunities, scope the investment and time needed to reach sustainability in each.

Next, you’ll need to make some financial decisions based on your investment needs and access to capital. Many locations with a withered local news landscape are actively seeking support from existing local organizations to expand, as publishers in the Knight Growth Challenge have found. Reach out to major commercial and philanthropic players in your target expansion markets and gauge their interest in supporting your plan.

If you can raise that interest, our last bit of advice is simple: Go for it. You have the best chance of executing on an ambitious plan against a big opportunity because you’ve already proven you can do it where you are today.

We welcome your thoughts and suggestions about how to develop this work further. Thank you to LION for bringing Blue Engine coaches into this adventure and to the Google News Initiative for supporting the Sustainability Audits and, by extension, this research.

We are grateful for the help from the participating publishers: