4 Ways to Track Traditional Local Media Using Digital

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Digital and traditional media can work together. Traditional efforts often drive users to search engines, websites and social media platforms. If you own the SERP for your brand, you’ll be able to control what the user sees as they respond to your traditional media campaigns.

Facebook on Local News Partnerships: ‘We’re Just Getting Started’

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The “Facebook Journalism Project” was launched recently to meet the “needs” of a news industry concerned about all the free editorial content being made available to the giant distribution platform. In this Q & A, Josh Mabry, manager of Facebook’s local news partnerships, details what FB is doing and plans to do for community news.

Will Local News Providers Make Virtual Reality an Actual Strategy?

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Trying to predict how popular VR will become is difficult because the most accessible virtual experiences so far, like those achieved with Google Cardboard and the New York Times’ “360 videos,” reveal only a glimpse of VR’s potential.

‘Media-Nxt’: How Local News Can Finally Enter Its Digital 21st Century

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The newly published report “Media-Nxt” wants to help the local news industry not only to know what it should do, but also actually start doing it. Its main authors are the students of Sean Branagan. In this Q & A, he explains why new technology is so hard for the local news industry to adopt – but why it should and must take the leap.

Facebook Has a New Mission That Just May Benefit Local Publishers

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Facebook doesn’t call itself a technology company anymore. “It’s a “new kind of platform,” says founder Mark Zuckerberg. But I think the world – in particular local news publishers — should forget the semantics and focus instead on what Facebook is actually doing.

Ad-Tech Expert’s Advice to Local News Publishers: Pivot to Digital Subscriptions

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Ratko Vidakovic, founder and principal of the Toronto-based ad-consulting firm AdProfs, spoke with Street Fight recently about the often-rambunctious world of digital advertising and how news publishing fits into it — not always so well.

Facebook Talks About Its ‘Shared Future’ With Local News Publishers

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In recent sessions, many publishers – most of them focused on local news – are learning best practices of digital publishing that have helped Facebook attract an audience of more than 2 billion subscribers.

Nashville Publisher’s Goal From Facebook Journalism Project: More Revenue

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After considerable agitation from news publishers, Facebook launched a Journalism Project earlier this year “to better support publishers’ needs.” A six-month update said the Journalism Project has met with 2,500 publishers around the world to get their stories (and, no doubt, grievances) first hand and offer help with an array of Facebook products.

The Place of Newspapers in the Local Marketing Ecosystem

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“Digitally speaking, NextDoor is encroaching on a space that local papers really should own.” David Mihm tells Mike Blumenthal. “It’s basically a glorified forum that in my view would be every bit as successful, if not more so, if hosted by a truly local entity.”

New CEO at Daily Voice Says Full-Bore Expansion Is His Mission

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Randy Kilgore succeeds Carll Tucker, who founded Daily Voice in 2010, after a long career in print community news and will continue as chairman of the private Daily Voice company. In this Q & A, the two execs talk about the transition and what’s next for hyperlocal news network.

How Local News Publishers Can Score With Proximity Marketing

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Proximity marketing is becoming increasingly popular as brands and local merchants try to reach consumers on the go. In this Q & A, James Ewen, marketing manager at UK-based proximity-marketer Tamoco talks about how local news publishers can benefit from this trend.

Amid an Array of Metrics, Gannett Seeks to Know the ‘Why’ of User Choices

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Gannett’s newspaper chain has 110 million unique digital visitors each month putting it in the exosphere of news and information sites. But these days Jason Jedlinski, VP of product management at the company, is more focused on quality than quantity — what those many millions of users want to read and why.

Ex-Patcher Uses ‘Local Language’ to Succeed in Crowded Suburban Market

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Mike Dinan founded NewCanaanite.com in suburban Connecticut in 2014 after his job as regional editor at Patch disappeared. In this interview, Dinan tells how, despite a crowded local media market, he’s made New Canaanite succeed as a community force and independent business.

LMA’s Innovation Sleuth Finds ‘Compelling’ Breakthroughs in News Industry

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“It’s easy to laser in on the splashy headlines about M&A activity and innovation reports, but quietly, there’s a palpable spirit of innovation at work in local media across newspapers, broadcasters, and pure plays,” says the LMA’s Jed Williams.

Why Zuckerberg Needs Local News Providers to ‘Bring the World Closer Together’

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For all their limitations, local news providers are now better positioned than Facebook’s moderators or artificial intelligence to help the people of their communities come closer together. If news providers join this mission, the community will respond by giving them the trust it so often withholds.

Behind Home Page Media’s Growth in Nashville: Change and One Big Constant

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In this Q & A, CEO Kelly Gilfillan, who co-founded Home Page Media in 2009, talks about what she changed and what she didn’t to maintain Home Page Media’s credibility as a news source for its communities, keep growing and stay profitable.

Insticator Uses Trivia to Make a Serious Case for Ad Revenue

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Insticator says its quizzes and polls generate 15 billion ad impressions each month, increase average website revenue by 160% a month and heighten average user engagement by 44%. We reached out to Kiersten Toye, who is in charge of the marketing team that works with client publishers at the company.

30A Takes Its Local Media Success Story 5,637 Miles to Moscow

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Eight-year-old 30A is one of the top revenue producers among Internet news pure-plays – hitting $2.2 million last year and projected to reach $3 million in 2017. It attains numbers that elude some daily newspapers because its revenue streams include everything from a radio station to events to retail shops, as CEO Mike Ragsdale explains in this Q & A.

Is Snapchat Quietly Redefining Local?

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Snapchat’s recent moves and related developments seem to indicate an emerging redefinition of what it means to be digitally local, a redefinition that is happening under our noses and without much fanfare as Snapchat works to gain and maintain the eyeballs of Millennials.

How a Small South Texas Daily Is Building a Profitable Digital Future

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The family-owned paper, which serves a nine-county South Texas market of 250,000, has stepped boldly with both boots onto the digital landscape. Publisher Dan Easton tells Street Fight how digital readership and revenue keep the Advocate editorially and financially vibrant.