Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

There’s a moral imperative at the heart of journalism. But as impact has gone from moral beacon to a business metric, starting with the new generation of nonprofit newsrooms who adopted the language and standards of NGOs, impact is turning out to also be good business, for some.

"How can you trumpet journalism that has impact when the core of your business strategy has been to reduce the amount of impactful journalism?" -Matt DeRienzo

“Many commercial media outlets are taking it as a given that to show real, positive change as a result of their reporting will build a deeper relationship between their brand and their audience,” wrote Fergus Putt and Lindsey Green-Barber in a recent Tow Center report. That relationship is key to the reader revenue model powering digital growth at the New York Times, Washington Post, De Correspondent, and elsewhere.

Executive director Matt DeRienzo of LION publishers, a group that supports local independent online news publishers, agrees but says the success of national outlets has yet to trickle down to local news. This especially applies to corporate-owned newspapers whose owners have cut many newsroom resources and centralized others far from the newsroom. Digital offerings from Tronc and Gannett have fared poorly so far....

The consistent refrain for publishers in the digital age is that everyone is still trying to figure out what can work, from platforms to advertising to workable, sustainable models. But as the path to enlightenment remains covered in fog, possibly smog, the effects of the digital era’s inscrutable disruption are being felt. The clearest recent illustration was last week’s crop of layoffs from outlets new and old: HuffPost, Vocativ, Time, the Los Angeles Times.

The Reuters Digital News Report for 2017 reifies some of the trends good and bad cropping up in various organizations’ earnings reports and elsewhere, offering glimpses of what to try next, where to double down and what to avoid.

One of the more obvious findings, and one we’ve all likely memorized by now, is that the growth of digital revenue has not been enough to offset the loss of print revenue.

Subscriptions have been picking up some of that slack....