Simple ways that personalisation can deepen your relationship with your audience PLUS innovative models in local media out of the US

August 01, 2022

Good Monday morning. Personalisation, the rise of non-profit newsrooms in the US and signs of a softening, but still quite strong ad market, are highlights from this edition of the newsletter. And again, let me know how you like the new look newsletter. I'm always looking for ways to make it better and more valuable to subscribers.

Examples from USA Today, Daily Telegraph, Le Figaro, BBC, and others illustrate how news media companies around the world are using personalisation.

Personalisation has been a challenge in the past, with audiences saying that they want it but many not wanting to invest the time in explicitly setting up choices that deliver personalisation. But with increasing sophistication of AI and also clever UX and product design, INMA's Jodie Hopperton highlights small touches that give audiences a sense of having a relationship with a publisher.

In recent years, an alarming number of communities around the world have lost their local newspapers and now qualify as a news deserts. This Worldwide trend ...

Expanding news deserts in the US have been a cause for concern, so much so that journalism advocates, wary of governmental involvement in the press have called on Congress to intervene. But this video from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism looks at four promising models that could start to add back some of the journalism capacity that has been loss with the decline of newspapers. These include local digital startups and the public media group in Chicago buying the Sun Times newspapers, a paper that has traditionally served working class audiences in the city.

Local news sites have accounted for 55% of all U.S. nonprofit news sites launched since 2017, and last year, 65% of launches were local, according to the new annual report from the Institute for Nonprofit News.

By 2024, INN projects, local news sites — rather than national or global sites lik…

Another trend in the US has been the rise of non-profit news models, and Nieman Lab looks at how this trend is really about local sites going the non-profit route.

During the recent INMA Asia-Pacific News Media Summit, newsroom leaders from the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and Malaysiakini from Kuala Lumpur share how they bring their editorial departments into the centre of their digital subscription strategies.

A lot of journalists see conflict and tension between business and editorial goals, but my friend Peter Bale outlines a couple of concrete ways in which newsrooms are bringing those goals into alignment. One tactic that has been used by several newsroom is to have a dashboard in the newsroom that ranks stories not on the volume metrics such as page views but rather on content that converts audiences to subscribers. And as has been the case in so many examples, the stories that are "well-researched, investigative long-form, explainers tend to perform better to convert readers into subscribers", Eshwaren Manoharen, head of product management and development at Malaysiakini, told Peter.

Advertising: Growth with clouds on the horizon

Press Gazette has been reporting on British journalism without fear or favour since 1965. Our mission is to provide a news and information service which helps the UK journalism.

It has been a good first half of the year in terms of advertising in the UK, but the picture is complicated. One thing that leapt out at me was how digital ad spend now accounts for almost three-quarters of all ad spend, and this supported growth in ad spend both for national and regional publishers. Growth slowed, but it was still in double digits.

Roku Warns Of 'Significant Slowdown' In TV Ad Spend, But Upfront TV Deals Hit $1B - 07/29/2022

I add this because I am always interested in how advertising performs as the economic cycle starts to head south. We have a lot of noisy data right now. I don't think that video, particularly the streaming services, are necessarily indicative of how publishers will fare, but it's a data point. As the macroeconomic conditions soften as central banks fight an inflationary spike that has been seen in the US and Western Europe in decades, the economy will slow, and advertising always follows the economic cycle.

5 Reasons Why Ad-Tech Players Should Be Worried - 07/28/2022

This is a concise summary of how the softening economy and inflation are roiling digital ad markets, both for adtech players but also for the digital ad behemoths - Facebook and Google. Key point: Programmatic advertising seems especially hard hit.

Social Media: Instagram backlash

Loyal users and Kardashians forced social network to partially retreat by demanding renewed emphasis on photo-sharing

Yes, I definitely spotted this over the weekend. I saw a lot of friends posting white text on black backgrounds on Instagram as they shouted into the void asking Instagram to get back to its photo-sharing roots and also to stop trying to shove things in their timelines from accounts they didn't follow on subjects that they didn't care about. Reels, cough.

Product Management: Testing for hard skills

I’ve been involved in interview panels for a lot of PMs, and have set up hiring processes for product managers in two different startups. One of the critical components of the interview loop should…

My master's dissertation was about product management in news organisations in North America, and one of the things that stood out was that many organisations were unclear about the role. Role clarity is one of the key indicators of success for the role, and I flag up this post because I think for those news organisations who either are starting a product practice or finding that their product practice isn't delivering what they hoped for, this outlines some of the soft and hard skills that a product manager needs.