Civil’s Relaunch Will Include Can’t-Fail Second Token Sale in Early 2019

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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.

Cybersecurity Firm DEVCON Says It Can Knock Out ‘Bad Ads’ Costing Publishers Billions

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In this Q&A, cyber-security company DEVCON co-founder and CEO Maggie Louie details how she says her company halts “bad ads” before they victimize publishers and their readers.

Mike Ragsdale Says Putting Community First Makes His ‘Indie’ 30A Site a Big Winner

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In this Q&A, 30A founder Mike Ragsdale itemizes what he thinks his industry is doing wrong and how 30A, by making community paramount, has become the top revenue-producing site among independents.

LMA in Big Push to Strengthen Local Journalism and Build Better Communities

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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.

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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.

It’s a Whole New Tune for the News Media in Music City

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In this Q & A, Kelly Gilfillan, who co-founded Home Page Media, talks about the significance of her company’s purchase by FWP and her role in the new concern, which has disrupted the publishing landscape in Music City.

From Employee to Publisher: How One Media Veteran Did It

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In this Q&A, media veteran Shereen Siewert talks about the biggest move in her career—an exciting but risky gamble in which she would give up the security of a weekly paycheck to strike out on her own as an entrepreneurial, independent publisher.

How LEAP Helps Publishers Find and Know Their Audiences, Person by Person

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In this Q&A, LEAP co-founder and Managing Director Daniel Williams talks about what his company is doing to help local news publishers comb their markets to find customers, sometimes in surprising ways, and build profitable relationships with them.

Why Local News Sponsorships Are More Relevant than Ever

LION Loses Director DeRienzo to Hearst, but ‘Indie’ Summit Doesn’t Miss a Beat

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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.

Local News Gets New Resource Center With Special Focus on Social Media

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A Local News Resource Center to give publishers direct expertise on the “challenges and opportunities” of social media and other issues that confront the embattled industry has been set up at the Local Media Association.

Why Facebook Is Putting Its Skin in Local News’ Subscription Efforts

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In this Q&A, Facebook’s Josh Mabry, who leads the Facebook Local News Partnerships team, talks about the mentoring, coaching, and other work in these off-platform initiatives and why Facebook is backing them up with millions of dollars in funding.

How Dallas Morning News Tunes Its Ear to Connect With Its Diverse Audiences

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“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.

Success of Digital Subscriptions Depends on Reader-Focused Newsrooms, Expert Says

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“News organizations need to be laser-focused on creating distinctive, unique, valuable content for their readers. And that means they may have to stop doing some things they are doing today,” said reader revenue expert Matt Skibinski.

Nucleus Claims It Now Has Throw Weight to Outperform Platforms on Ads

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Google and Facebook have dominated digital advertising in this decade. But now, two-year-old Nucleus Marketing Solutions says it has the throw weight to tip the balance against the big search and social platforms.

How Giant GateHouse Media Performed in Harsh Duke Study of Local News Sites

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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

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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.

Civil’s Bold Plan for the News Crisis: ‘Flip the Business Model on Its Head’

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In this Q&A, Matt Coolidge, head of marketing and a co-founder at Civil, explains how a “new economy for journalism” oriented around unifying publishers and their audiences is working to flip the business model for news through such innovative approaches as blockchain technology.

Newly Launched Block Club Chicago (Out of DNAinfo) Goes a ‘Bit Old School’

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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

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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

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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).