Accessibility Settings

color options

monochrome muted color dark

reading tools

isolation ruler

Photo: Pixabay

Resource

What It Takes to Shift a News Organization to Reader Revenue

Photo: Pixabay

Launching a paywall is easy. Pivoting a whole business from an advertising-centric mindset to one focused on reader revenue is not.

Despite 10 years of experimentation and increasing attention, the news industry still needs to develop some of the attitudes, technology, and skills needed to sustain exceptional membership and subscription programs.

To succeed with reader revenue, news publishers need to better understand readers and all aspects of the subscription business — data, insights, marketing, loyalty, conversion, and retention. That will require fundamental changes in our organizations.

I have spent the last seven years, first at The Boston Globe and most recently at McClatchy, working with teams dedicated to making this transition. This report is intended as a brief guide to the technical and strategic challenges that arise when building a subscription program. There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution, but everyone can be smarter about using data to support reader needs and grow subscriptions.

Among the work to be done:

  1. Data collection: We must identify, collect, and store the relevant reader data and understand its importance.
  2. Data analysis: We must analyze this data and develop insights to support business decisions and activities.
  3. Data action: We must eliminate internal business silos and streamline our operations to let data drive our decisions and to reduce the time to market for new products and features.
  4. Make reader revenue the top objective: Everyone in the business must be aligned around a core vision, goals, and incentives that support reader revenue growth.
  5. Provide a better user experience: We must improve the usability of our websites and apps to increase reader loyalty and engagement.
  6. Test and measure: We must deploy tools to test, market, and measure the performance of our subscription programs.
  7. Establish a reader-first culture: We must recognize that technology is only part of the solution and take steps to enable the cultural changes necessary for us to put our readers first.

Every organization is at a different stage in the effort to become data-centric and reader-focused. This report will discuss the steps, decisions, and actions needed to transition from a “mostly advertising” revenue strategy to a “reader-focused” approach that balances advertising and subscription revenues while building products that align with those goals.

In each section that follows we will review key questions and tactics, and provide some examples of the discussions to have and the decisions to make, and some of the vendors or technologies involved.

We also must recognize that any effort to improve our understanding and use of data must support a mission to publish meaningful journalism that serves our communities. No data and business strategy can succeed without a readership that finds value in the news coverage we produce.

To read the full report, click here.


This article first appeared on the website of the American Press Institute and is reproduced here with permission.

Damon Kiesow is the Knight Chair in Digital Editing and Producing at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Previously he was the director of product for McClatchy. He has also worked as a product manager at the Boston Globe and was the first Digital Media Fellow at the Poynter Institute.

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

Republish this article


Material from GIJN’s website is generally available for republication under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. Images usually are published under a different license, so we advise you to use alternatives or contact us regarding permission. Here are our full terms for republication. You must credit the author, link to the original story, and name GIJN as the first publisher. For any queries or to send us a courtesy republication note, write to hello@gijn.org.

Read Next

News & Analysis

Engagement or Reach: How To Best Find Our Audience

At a recent meeting of the Institute for Nonprofit News – for my sins, I now sit on INN’s board – we learned an interesting statistic: About half the organization’s members have a strategy to drive readers to their own sites/destinations, and the other half count on distributing their content via other platforms. Does it matter how we reach readers? And should we care?

Nonprofit Newsroom Survival Guide (part two)

Last month we wrote about survival strategies for nonprofit investigative journalism organizations. As we stressed in that story, key to succeeding in the long term is diversifying revenue. Now, GIJN’s colleagues at the Investigative News Network have put together a useful infographic on the varied sources of revenue that groups can tap. GIJN’s staff will be joining an INN day on managing nonprofit newsrooms, held at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference on June 20 in San Antonio, Texas. Included will be sessions on fundraising, best practices, branding and membership.