Patch was never the cash cow that former-AOL CEO Tim Armstrong predicted it would be. When he bought the company in 2009, he hoped its network of hyperlocal sites would, in aggregate, generate enough reach and revenue to transform it into an advertising behemoth. Those plans didn’t pan out, however, and in 2014 AOL sold Patch to an investment firm. Patch went on to become profitable, but only after significant downsizing and reduced coverage.
But even though Patch as a whole didn’t flourish, a lot of its individual sites found traction, and this opened a lot of entrepreneurial journalists’ eyes to the potential for lean local news sites in underserved communities. One of those journalists was Tom Sofield. After reporting for several years at a Patch site in Levittown, PA, he saw there was a real market for the type of news he was providing. …
These days, nearly every mainstream media company has some kind of podcast operation, but the book publisher Macmillan invested in the medium before most media executives had even heard of podcasting.
In 2007, it partnered with Mignon Fogarty, who’d launched Quick and Dirty Tips, a network focused on producing evergreen self-help podcasts covering grammar, finance, parenting, and other niches. It adapted this content across podcasts, website articles, books, and online courses; this allowed for revenue diversification in an era when most podcasts were still struggling to sell host-read ads.
Later, Macmillan expanded into narrative podcasts, developing one of the first fiction properties to be simultaneously adapted into a teleplay, novel, audio book, and live event series. …
Charlie Meyerson had the kind of background that was perfect for launching a Chicago-focused newsletter. While majoring in journalism at the University of Illinois, he worked at the student radio station, and his first job out of college was at a station in the Chicago suburbs. In 1998, he made the leap to the Chicago Tribune, and he ran the email newsletter program there for a decade.
It was about eight years later that he launched Chicago Public Square, a daily newsletter that now counts thousands of subscribers. It’s formatted as a simple news digest, something that can be scanned quickly before a reader goes about their day. …
Joseph Clements did what a lot of people do when they start a new blog: he wrote a few posts, got bored, and largely abandoned it.
But then something happened that pulled him back in. He logged into his analytics dashboard and saw he had received a few thousand hits from Google searches. The blog, Smoked Barbecue Source, served as kind of a beginner’s guide to cooking barbecue, and apparently a lot of people were stumbling upon it while conducting research on Google. …
All across the world, thousands of entrepreneurs are experimenting with ways to solve the local news crisis. Some have launched local blogs. Other built town-focused networks. Still others debuted daily newsletters.
Quite a few local news startups these days are nonprofits. But Alec Saelens and a few of his colleagues decided to try out a very specific model: a media cooperative. These involve group ownership, not just among the publication’s staff, but also the local community members as well.
A few years ago, they launched The Bristol Cable, an investigative news startup that boasts on its membership page that “there are no majority shareholders or commercial investors, and we do not accept corporate advertising.” …
If you want to launch a new high quality podcast, the learning curve can be steep. First there’s the equipment and software for actually recording it. You have to learn how to edit the audio, purchase music rights, and find a web host. And those are just the technical aspects; most non-podcasters don’t realize how difficult it can be to find an entertaining show format, book interesting guests, or ask engaging questions.
If you’re a full-time content creator, you’ll probably have the patience to figure all this out on your own, but many executives who want to dabble in podcasts as a form of content marketing want someone to guide them through the process. That’s the gamble Angela Connor made when she opened a physical recording studio in Raleigh, North Carolina. Angela’s career spans across journalism, marketing, and public relations, and recently she noticed that many of her local business clients were starting to get interested in podcasts. …
The CMS space for publishing is crowded these days. For large publishers you have all sorts of publisher-focused platforms like The Washington Post’s Arc and Vox Media’s Chorus. For individual authors, there are extremely simple platforms like Substack and Medium that you can start publishing to in a matter of minutes.
A decade ago, the landscape looked completely different. If you didn’t build your own custom CMS, you were probably publishing to Wordpress. …
AmazingRibs.com has the kind of diversified business model that most media companies would envy. It runs a membership program with over 15,000 paying subscribers. It sells programmatic display ads. It even published a bestselling book about the “science of barbecue and grilling” that continues to move copies years after it hit the market.
And it also runs a thriving ecommerce business, one for which its staffers submit grilling equipment to thorough testing before publishing reviews. Those reviews contain affiliate links for readers to buy the equipment, and those links drive a lot of purchases. …
Ernie Smith’s newsletter Tedium often gets the kind of exposure that most indie newsletter writers can only dream of. A few days ago one of his articles was upvoted to the top of Hacker News. It’s been featured in an episode of the hit NPR podcast Planet Money. Its individual issues have been syndicated in Vice, Atlas Obscura, and Popular Mechanics.
Some of this exposure came by design. Early on in Tedium’s existence, Smith began securing syndication deals with editors at several mainstream publishers. …
The last decade hasn’t been kind to local print newspapers. The rise of platforms like Craigslist, Facebook, and Google has devastated their advertising revenue streams. Private equity firms bought up entire newspaper chains and then bled them dry. Even those newspapers that haven’t shut down experienced massive layoffs and are often running on skeleton crews. This retrenchment resulted in the emergence of so-called “news deserts” — regional information vacuums where no comprehensive news coverage exists.
As a journalist who covers the media industry, I’ve long been fascinated by the internet startups aimed at filling these vacuums. There’s TAPinto, a network of franchise sites that sprung up out of New Jersey. …
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