LMA in Big Push to Strengthen Local Journalism and Build Better Communities
The Local Media Association is working to build a Business Model Accelerator that will chart sustainable revenue paths for local media and, in turn, enhance the vital role that they must play in their communities. In this Q&A, LMA Chief Innovation Officer Jed Williams sketches out this far-ranging quest to give local news a central place in community and ensure the industry will be around for the long run.
Veteran Reporter Makes Journalism Bloom in ‘News Desert’ of Luther, Okla.
In this Q&A, longtime journalist and communications specialist Dawn Shelton talks about how she started the Luther Register News, what she has in mind for news deserts in nearby towns, and how the Pecan Festival may represent an important part of the financial future of her new independent journalistic publishing enterprise.
LION Loses Director DeRienzo to Hearst, but ‘Indie’ Summit Doesn’t Miss a Beat
To find out what the Summit of Local Independent Online News Publishers accomplished, I went to longtime journalist Steve Beatty, who was editor and CEO of the award-winning, investigative website The Lens in New Orleans for eight years before joining LION as a consultant last January and who, with DeRienzo’s departure, has been named interim director.
How Dallas Morning News Tunes Its Ear to Connect With Its Diverse Audiences
“I’m not saying that an audience-first culture didn’t exist at the newspaper, say, 75 years ago. But how do we reach today’s audience? It’s not enough to put all the news that we decided is important on the front page and expect everyone to read that as part of their shared experience,” says Nicole Stockdale, director of digital strategy at the Dallas Morning News.
How Giant GateHouse Media Performed in Harsh Duke Study of Local News Sites
I went to Bill Church, senior vice president of news at GateHouse Media—the biggest publisher of newspapers in the U.S.—with questions about the quality of GateHouse sites that were put under the microscope in a 100-community study from Duke University that painted a critical picture of news deserts across the country.
How Reddit and Local Media Consortium Upvoted Each Other and Became Partners
But Reddit and the LMC each has something that the other wants. Reddit would like to tap into the LMC’s huge pool of 470 million unique visitors and turn many of them into subscribers. LMC publishers wants to learn from Reddit how to make their readers more engaged. Now, old media and new media are teaming up.
Newly Launched Block Club Chicago (Out of DNAinfo) Goes a ‘Bit Old School’
Last November, discount-stock-brokerage billionaire Joe Ricketts summarily shut down his DNAinfo operations in the Windy City and New York. But in a fast-paced reinvention, the DNAinfo/Chicago team has Kickstarted its way back onto the streets and into the neighborhoods with the June launch of Block Club Chicago.
A Probing Look at Local News Comes to Some Disturbing Conclusions
To accurately gauge the quality of digital local news and assess its impact on communities, you would have to do what no one has wanted, or dared, to do. You would have to look at enough websites, enough stories and videos, in enough communities until you were glassy-eyed. Researchers behind a new study did just that.
Local News Publishers Still Mired in Ad Fraud, New Pixalate Data Shows
According to new research from Pixalate, a cross-channel fraud intelligence company that works with brands and platforms to prevent ad fraud and improve ad inventory quality, about a quarter of all smartphone app video and smartphone app display activity is “invalid traffic” (the technical term for what is largely fraud).
Civil’s Relaunch Will Include Can’t-Fail Second Token Sale in Early 2019
In this Q&A, Civil co-founder and CEO Matthew Iles, Vivian Schiller, CEO of the Civil Foundation, and Matt Coolidge, co-founder and head of marketing at Civil, detail how their decentralized and community-owned journalism network can be a realistic answer to the “duopoly” of the giant Google and Facebook search and social platforms.