Tweaking Your Membership Pitch, Registration Drives Subs at The Telegraph PLUS How Journalists 'Imagine' Their Audiences

April 28, 2021

Wow, there is a lot of good stuff on the internet today for the product-minded media leader - new business models in creating a company that covers the business of hip-hop, the power of known users rather than anonymous clicks and tweaking your membership pitch.

I'm also leaning academic today. Put it down to the fact that I've got a paper due next week for my master's degree in innovation management, which has my mind thinking of the importance of organisational boundary-crossing in innovation, nimbleness in resource allocation and managing relationships to prevent the negative effects of internal competition. I've got links to a couple of great papers for reflective media leaders and product managers - one about how journalists imagine their audiences and another trans-national study of how newsrooms are changing their routines to adapt to the needs of digital audiences.

The Power of Registration

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 reported 71% year-on-year growth for digital subscriptions in 2020, with digital subscription revenues climbing by 77% to £31.5m for the year."

Their strategy really shows the success of driving registrations as a first step to subscribers and the importance of known users versus anonymous clicks.

Local Indy Outlets in the US Get Boost

Report for America brings talented, diverse journalists to local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities.

Report for America is a programme to support local newsrooms with talent, and it's excellent to see so many of them go to local news start-ups in the US that could use the support.

Biz Model For Covering the Business of Hip-Hop

"It's easy for the media and others to dismiss entertainers as just being famous, and whatever they sold was a benefit of their fame — and not necessarily the business insights that came from that."

I love to see business model innovation in the media business.

Systems Thinking and High Impact Coverage

Three months ago, El Tímpano began investigating the prevalence of overcrowded housing in Oakland’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities and how those housing conditions affect the health of…

I like this reflective process. Very interesting Twitter thread on how to do this.

Adapting Newsroom Routines to Digital Audiences

Local news organizations are adapting their newsroom routines to better respond to a digital readership. These models feature different levels of online integration, but all aim to restructure news...

The innovation management master's student in me loves papers like this. Redeploying resources and reconfiguring routines are key in creating adaptable organisations.

Tweaking Your Membership Pitch

A lesson in the importance of asking your community what they want from you

Podcast Consolidation Accelerates

Rapid consolidation in podcasting is becoming the rule, not the exception.

Digital economics allow for niches but also create major pressures for consolidation. The pandemic has only increased this pressure, and radio consultants Jacobs Media pulls together the threads on this story.

Research on How Journalists Conceive of Audience

In public communication, in the absence of a clear sense of one’s actual audience, a communicator relies on a mental image of an imagined audience. But where does one’s image of the audience come f...