May 15, 2013

A flea grows in Brooklyn.

A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to attend a meeting of the revenue minds at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in midtown Manhattan. Ten independent news publishers spilled their guts on how they made (or didn’t make) money flow into the newsroom. It was intense, man.

Light Classics

One of the big revenue stars there that day was Jonathan Butler, whose hyperlocal site Brownstoner has Brooklyn real estate covered from end to gentrified end. The website does alright for itself, Butler told attendees, generating revenue via display advertising, real estate classifieds and a business directory.

But the enterprise’s true cash cow, the one from which all milky goodness flows, is event production. There isn’t a weekend that goes by in New York City when millennials aren’t throwing money around Butler’s Brooklyn Flea or his foodie fan fest Smorgasburg. The events are so successful that Butler now spends most of his energy managing them, while his staff manages the Brownstoner site.

Chalk it up to Butler’s business savvy. He has a good grasp of his audience: young people with expendable income and a taste for all things vintage and locally made. He understands what his advertisers and sponsors expect: events that will draw the right crowds and infuse cash into local businesses. And he knows that consistency is key, from weekly schedules to the highly curated collection of vendors working each event.

I give major props to Butler for decoding the revenue mystery. But at the same time, I can’t help feeling that the news business in general is still in deep financial shit. Must it rely on producing entertainment in order to bankroll journalism? And at what point does this particular revenue stream become a distraction to the creation of news content?

Even Butler expressed that high attendance didn’t necessarily translate into increased readership. From a business standpoint, it probably doesn’t matter — revenue is revenue. And as a hyperlocalist, I like to think Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg have fostered a sense of community and identity among some Brooklyn residents. But as a journalist and publisher, I cringe at the thought of adding carnival barker to my duties.

The news business is a business — I get it. But I’d rather not neglect the news part of that equation.

Disclosure: Butler’s Brownstoner recently announced plans to expand its coverage into the borough of Queens, where I’m likely to develop my own hyperlocal news site.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user 12th St David.

May 13, 2013

Back from the dead

I’ve finally torn through every episode of “The Walking Dead” that Netflix and my DVR had to offer. And my kid enters a part-time preschool program next month. So, after two and a half years of extended maternity leave, what am I to do with my newly discovered free time? Pine for Daryl Dixon and wonder if my kid misses me as much as I miss her? There’s not a lot of productivity in that.

Might as well blog. About revenue and reporting. About news neutrality and open access. Stuff like that.

Some things haven’t changed since I last wrote about the hyperlocal game in 2011. Events, sponsored content and contextual advertising are still big deals in revenue, and there are very good examples of success in each category. I’ll talk about those in upcoming posts.

What’s really reconfigured the game is technology. The ubiquity of smart phones means a more diverse audience, as well as the need to design mobile-friendly news products. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean new revenue streams. The issue of engaging the audience, and then somehow converting that engagement into revenue, is the same regardless of the technological interface.

The exceptions to that are the premium news products: mobile apps, e-books and other forms of multimedia that don’t fall into the field of daily reporting. Some of these work on the hyperlocal level, while others don’t. I’ll talk about that stuff too.

In the meantime, I sign off with this reminder: Staying afloat — financially and emotionally — in any business requires a multifaceted approach. And what works for one hyperlocal publication may not work for another. Sometimes it takes a katana, sometimes a crossbow to slay that zombie.

Jun 13, 2011

Random acts of audience engagement

Free hugsLast month, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism hosted an awesome presentation on how new journalism outlets can generate revenue beyond traditional advertising. It was bootstrapping 101, a lesson in being scrappy and resourceful without looking cheap, and it re-energized my thoughts on how to fund my future hyperlocal project. And I can’t emphasize this enough: it was awesome.

Future blog posts will explore the presentation’s seven fists of revenue fury: expertise, events, membership, subscriptions, product sales, donations and advertising re-imagined. Jeremy Caplan, director of the J-school’s center for entrepreneurial journalism and that evening’s presenter, carefully framed these revenue streams with startup businesses in mind, though even experienced hyperlocalists will find them worth a second look.

No discussion of revenue can start without an examination of audience engagement and its importance to the survival of any small business. I’ve yapped previously about a news outlet’s “emotional” value, how the interaction between reporter and reader through a website’s comments section can influence offline, real-life decisions. Advertisers appreciate that influence and recognize how it can work to their advantage. (They can also fear and loathe that influence — Yelp, anyone?) Unfortunately, emotional value as I’ve described it can’t be easily quantified.

Enter Facebook, Twitter and every other form of social media available. One way or another, they all display the number of users who follow a news organization’s account, and engagement is evident through wall posts and retweets. Emotional value finally has a number that advertisers can understand. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg!

The best part: it doesn’t matter if a news organization’s social-media activity detracts from its website’s page views, declared Miral Sattar, founder of the niche site Weddings.Divanee.com. The organization’s influence will continue to have value as long as it engages its audience, whether on its own site or elsewhere, she said during the CUNY J-school presentation.

For example, Sattar’s wedding-oriented site recently asked its audience to choose the best-looking engagement ring from a series of photos posted on its Facebook page, with votes recorded as “likes” for individual images. The activity did nothing to drive participants to the main website (ie, it did not increase the number of page views), yet it demonstrated to potential advertisers the website’s engagement and influence with its audience.

A note on social-networking numbers: bigger isn’t always better. If an organization has to follow 20,000 Twitter users just to get 15,000 to reciprocate, then that’s not value. That’s volume, the same game played by Patch and other large-scale hyperlocal operations. And it’s a game that small, independent hyperlocal sites won’t win.

Even emailed newsletters demonstrate engagement and influence to potential advertisers, Sattar and Caplan described. A long list of subscribers shows readers’ interest in the news outlet (or at least a reluctance to mark the newsletter as spam).

Furthermore, email is still considered a more personal, private form of communication, the speakers suggested. To advertisers, it means an organization has more than its foot in the reader’s door — it’s sitting in that reader’s living room, playing with the family dog, eating chips on the sofa and watching “Glee.” That influence and intimacy counts more to neighborhood advertisers than page views and search-engine optimization.

Feb 24, 2011

Where hyperlocal news meets the “like” button

On Tuesday evening, I received a message via Facebook from Cynthia Cotte Griffiths, a friend and fellow hyperlocalist from Maryland. It was the kind of message that made me wince, smile and then slap my knee at her ingenuity.

First, the wince. Cotte Griffiths announced that she and her business partner, Brad Rourke, were pulling the plug on their Rockville (Md) Central news website. After three and a half years in publication, both had grown tired of juggling content creation and advertising sales, she told me. Furthermore, competition from Patch, another indie website, the local print publication and the municipal government’s site made their reporting redundant, Rourke blogged.

Then came the smile. Rockville Central would live on as a news source through its Facebook page, where their fans were already gabbing about current events. With a combination of news aggregation and original reporting, “we can create a true community hub,” Cotte Griffiths wrote.

And then the knee slap. Even though Cotte Griffiths and Rourke won’t generate advertising revenue from their Facebook page, they can establish themselves as social-media experts with tabs on the local vibe. That can translate into serious revenue from social-media consulting, building an online presence for small businesses, nonprofit groups and even government agencies.

Then another knee slap. Facebook is already a mobile-friendly service, whether one uses its mobile website or a native (platform-specific) app. That gives the Rockville Central fan page greater reach without having to “mobilize” its own website or develop an expensive app. The technical witchcraft has already been done for them.

And still another knee slap. Cotte Griffiths and Rourke can take their social-media savvy onto Twitter, where they can generate revenue from sponsored tweets. Also, they can use the multimedia-heavy publishing platform Tumblr to build a portfolio of marketable stock photos or to publish original audio or video content, though Tumblr’s community of users is still small relative to Facebook and Twitter.

By the time I reached the closing salutations of Cotte Griffiths’ message, my knee was swollen from the slapping and I was swearing up a storm. (“Fucking genius!” came up a lot.) Sure, they’d have to stay ahead of the social-media curve in case some future service turns Facebook into MySpace. In the meantime, they can provide hyperlocal information, foster dialog among neighbors, and make bank as consultants.

One day after our Facebook exchange, the news of Rockville Central’s transition had made its way through Twitter. And by Wednesday evening, members of the Online News Association were talking about it at a mixer inside the offices of The New York Times. Some were intrigued, others were disappointed that local news would take this route.

I’m hitting the “like” button on this one.

Illustration courtesy of Flickr user Christopher S. Penn.

Feb 16, 2011

Hello, 2012 presidential primary season. Will you be my friend?

Mmm, Iowa! Where the wind comes sweeping down the plain. The Buckeye State. Birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. And the traditional starting gate for US presidential campaigns.

Every four years, journalists descend upon Iowa, stalking would-be leaders of the free world as they shake hands, kiss babies and eat their weight in pancakes. However, the upcoming 2012 campaign season promises to have a hyperlocal twist to it. Arianna Huffington, newly appointed overlord to AOL’s content-producing properties, plans to use Patch.com editors to cover the election on a “granular” level, she told The Washington Post.

Huffington’s plan is genius: employ an army of already-embeds who won’t need lodging or driving directions, and let them lay the foundation for AOL’s larger, search engine-savvy campaign coverage. “We will have thousands and thousands of people covering the election. Covering the Republicans. Covering the Democrats. Just being transparent about it,” she said.

And that’s when my heart sank. Reporting on elections can be a major drain on hyperlocal news outlets, especially those with limited human resources. So how the hell are independent hyperlocalists supposed to compete with myriad minions of The Huffington Patch?

First, they can beat Patch to the punch. Indie hyperlocalists in states with high-profile primaries (Iowa and New Hampshire, for example), as well as those in the convention cities of Charlotte and Tampa, should immediately contact larger news outlets and promote themselves as location experts. If AOL can use its hypothetical Des Moines Patch editor (more likely, someone from its Seed content farm) to blanket the Iowa caucuses, surely The New York Times and CNN can pay Cedar Rapids‘ independent hyperlocalist to work the beat.

(Incidentally, hyperlocalists from Super-Duper Tuesday states are not shit out of luck when it comes to milking the campaign coverage. They can similarly promote themselves to NPR or some other large outlet as experts in their beat’s hot topic — unemployment, gay marriage, the effect of prolonged deployment on military families, whatever.)

Notice my use of the word “pay.” The time and energy required to cover a campaign deserve appropriate compensation from whomever is doing the hiring. National exposure will not fuel a hyperlocal news outlet while its resources are diverted to the campaign trail.

To earn that living wage, independent hyperlocalists must offer coverage that encompasses more than just the who, what and where. The material must deliver a distinct local flavor and offer unique insight into how political events and the populace interact. This connection with place, and the ability to drop a reader smack in the middle of it, will distinguish the independent hyperlocalist from a Patch editor or embedded big-media reporter.

Ultimately, if a hyperlocal news site can’t beat Patch’s campaign coverage, it should join it — sort of. Local Patch sites likely will create RSS (syndication) feeds for their campaign stories, which can then stream onto a hyperlocal news site’s sidebar. Thus, the independent hyperlocal site offers its readers a portal to political coverage without having to create content.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Carl Wycoff.

« Older Entries