Grass-roots sites are changing global journalism
Grass-roots sites are changing global journalism
Smaller news media show other industries how to compete with search and social platforms
You’re reading the My News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models.
For more than a decade I’ve been tracking the innovators and survivors among the news media around the world. I’ve been trying to answer a question: Who has figured out viable new business models? After all, search engines and social media stole their audience and advertisers. What was left?
The decline accelerated in the 1990s when digital platforms ended news media’s monopoly of production and distribution. Newspapers, television, and radio have all suffered.
A lesson for other industries. But other industries and activities also have seen their monopolies challenged by digital competitors — real estate, higher education, shopping malls, banking, health care — you name it.
In this and two successive posts, I’m going to profile media innovators in Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Western Europe, Africa, and North America. They are a mix of for-profit, nonprofit, and hybrid models. They use a wide variety of revenue-generation methods.
The common element. I’ll touch on some successes, some failures, and some near-death experiences. By definition, innovation involves doing something that hasn’t been done before, so there is risk. What they have in common is they build from the bottom up, starting at the grass roots, focusing on their community first, not advertisers.
The bottom line. Although I’ll be writing about news media, their lessons are applicable to other types of organizations that are competing for people, financial resources, and technology.
Starting at home: Ohio
At the risk of appearing provincial, I’d like to start with my home state of Ohio, my hometown of Cleveland, and the state capital, Columbus. But this story has a familiar ring all across the country.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, which I delivered as a boy, and the Columbus Dispatch, where I worked for a decade, have shrunk pitifully. In its glory days, the Plain Dealer had a newsroom of more than 300. Today it has less than 100, many of them young, low-salaried, non-union employees. The Dispatch had well over 200. Today, a few dozen.
Both of these papers have greatly reduced print distribution. They are no longer home-delivered every day. The printed copies available at a few retail locations are thin and filled with wire-service copy and barely rewritten press releases. And their websites rely on stories that stir emotion and grab attention with sensational headlines that highlight violent crime, severe weather, traffic, and sports
I detailed the painful decades-long decline of U.S. newspapers in this article a few years ago, and the situation has only worsened. Many newspapers are owned by hedge funds or chains that are milking the last drops of value from the plants, equipment, and retirement funds.
Two local startups in Cleveland
But the point is that there is a huge opportunity for digital media entrepreneurs to fill the gaps. Two digital news startups in Cleveland and northeast Ohio are the latest examples — Signal Cleveland, a nonprofit, and Axios Cleveland, part of a for-profit chain. Both launched at the end of 2022, and I interviewed their leaders at a public event in March.
Signal Cleveland has a 19-person newsroom, the first of a network planned for the state. It also has an army of more than 600 “documenters” who are trained and paid to attend public meetings, take notes, and file reports that the editors use as tip sheets for stories. Signal has raised $13 million so far from a coalition of Ohio organizations, community leaders, and the American Journalism Project.
According to their website, “At Signal Cleveland, we produce authoritative, trustworthy daily journalism across a range of topics, including government, economy, education, health, and safety and resilience.” In its second month of operation, its website had 21,000 visitors.
Axios Cleveland is part of the Axios chain owned by Cox Enterprises of Atlanta, which launched in 2017 and now publishes daily newsletters in 30 cities with plans to expand to more. It was started by two of the founders of Politico.com. Its slogan: “Axios gets you smarter, faster on what matters.”
Its revenue comes from advertising, subscriptions, donations, events, and advertiser services. Its founding philosophy was “to put our audience first, always.”
Axios uses data on user behavior and the instincts of its reporters to select the local topics to cover. The newsletters are often chatty and written in a conversational style.
The Cleveland newsletter is produced by two veteran reporters who have covered local politics and popular culture for other media. In its first three months it attracted 18,000 free subscribers, which shows the appetite for a new source of local news.
Italy’s Il Post
This digital media startup’s name is a gesture of respect toward the fearless investigative reporting of the Washington Post. The founder, Luca Sofri, is a print journalist who has also been a TV and radio commentator.
He has managed to build a trustworthy news brand in a media ecosystem awash in sensational stories, gossip, sex scandals, and outright fabrication. Il Post is a mix of aggregation and original reporting.
Sofri reported that in 2021, Il Post had revenue growth of 76%, which was on top of the 52% growth the previous year. It had a profit of $710,000 (results here, in Italian). That allowed him to double the size of his newsroom staff to 30.
It generates a third of its revenue from advertising (pubblicità), half from memberships (abbonamenti) and the remainder from its print magazines, online courses, ecommerce, and other sources. Members get an ad-free experience and access to the daily podcast; the rest of the content is freely available. The podcast is a major driver of subscriptions
Sofri told the UK’s Press Gazette that Il Post had reached 50,000 subscribers at $95 a year. For Sofri, the key differentiator is information that can be trusted.
In Malaysia, publishing in four languages
Another entrepreneurial star in digital media is Malaysiakini, a web-based voice against corruption. Its leaders have innovated and adapted to survive several near-death experiences in more than two decades operating in a hostile environment. Malaysia has a population of 34 million, about one-tenth that of the U.S.
Malaysiakini is published in Malay, English, Chinese, and Tamil. It has received grants and loans from international donors such as the Media Development Investment Fund, Open Society Foundations, and Center for International Media Assistance.
Faced with a big drop in advertising revenue in 2001, the leaders decided to take the bold step of establishing a paywall, but only for the English edition subscribers, those most able to pay. It saved the publication.
In another typical episode from its history of publishing news in the public interest, a panel of judges in 2021 found it in contempt of court and fined it $124,000 for publishing five reader comments critical of the country’s judiciary.
Steven Gan, co-founder and then the editor-in-chief, described this as the latest government attempt to drive the publication out of business. There have been many over the years.
Readers responded by donating much more than the amount needed to cover the fine, the New York Times reported. The response is an eloquent testimony of how the public views Malaysiakini.
Its history is chronicled in a new book by journalism scholar Janet Steele: “Malaysiakini and the Power of Independent Media in Malaysia.”
Next time: Innovations in Spain, Latin America, and Poland
Great perspective, as usual, Jim. I tend to think those fading newspapers had a chance. They just didn't pay attention to what was happening to their industry -- at least not until it was too late. Good lesson for all.
excellent, looking forward next newsletter with examples in Spain and Latam