How we would build a local news site

Welcome to the Paywall podcast. This is episode number 27. I'm Pete. I'm here with Tyler again and we are going to finish up the conversation about local news publishing. This episode is going to be part three and the topic here is how would we build a local news publication? So welcome back, Tyler. Hello.

Hello.

Let's dig into it just to refresh a little bit. We work with a lot of local news publishers. We've looked at the successful ones and what is working there. And we're going to share with you how we would build, actually build and the tactics behind it. A local news publication to succeed in today's digital age. And before we jump into it, this is something we talked about in a previous episode. There's really one main decision point in, in, in my opinion anyway, and that is to decide whether you're going to take a donation based approach where you offer all your content for free and then upsell maybe some perks, or if you're going to draw a hard line and say, hey, we're going to sell membership here and if you become a member, then you have a certain number of perks. Ways work. We prefer the membership model which we discussed last time, and that is essentially requiring members to pay for all the perks that they're going to get. Okay, Tyler, I want you made a comment this morning. We were chatting earlier about digital subscriptions and the future of local news publishing. And I know you have a very strong opinion on what survivability looks like for local news publishers. Do you want to riff on that a little bit?

Yeah, sure. The whole. For those of you who have heard me talk about paywall project, the whole idea behind that was to generate revenue for local news publishers and to show that there actually is an appetite for, for spending money on local news, that the people in your community will actually spend money on that and to show that there's value there. And I know there are a lot of startups especially that have gone more of a nonprofit route. And I just have a couple of things. Not that's a bad route to go. It's certainly an option and it's certainly a way to continue to provide local news in a community which is very much needed. However, I will caution those who are thinking about that route as when we think about local news or just news in general, the model has long been advertising has driven our revenue and then we provide local news content as part of that. If you shift to a nonprofit model, essentially you shift from advertising to revenue to philanthropic donations. A lot of times, nonprofits are funded by large donors who just want to support local news, which is fantastic. I. I support that. I love that. I love that there are people out there who will do that. However, just keep in mind that when you make that shift, you're essentially moving your revenue from ad dollars to now donors, like large donors, who could at any point decide to change their mind or change their funding, and then you're left with no revenue stream. So the reason that I like to focus on digital subscriptions as a primary source of revenue is that that shows that people are willing to pay for the content that you produce. And even though the amounts are small, they do add up. And I think about it in terms of, like, political campaigns where people are giving, like 10 or $15 a month to their candidate of choice. It's very similar in that it's getting everyone in town to chip in a few bucks to essentially gain access to what's going on in their community. And it's way cheaper to do that than it is to not have it and to have local news in your community at all. There's actually research to support this, that when local news disappears from a community, there's more corruption in local government. Taxes can go up. There's a lot of. A lot of things that happen when government's not being held accountable. So, yeah, I like that. That's where I'll stop.

Cheaper to pay for local news than to.

That's right. That's my point. That's my point. It's cheaper just to pay a little bit per month to have local news journalists cover what's going on than it is to not have it at all.

Yeah, local news gets fed to regional news, which gets picked up by national news. It's definitely the bedrock.

And to me, local news is more valuable to me than national news because virtually any publication can report on national news anywhere you are. But local news is much harder because it's localized to one specific spot on a map. To me, there's more value in knowing exactly what's going on in my community in this little bubble, versus a national perspective.

Awesome. All right, so let's dig into that. The subscriptions model. We, as you can tell, we're fans of local, hyper local content. One of the things we've looked at is in terms of who's actually making it work, is when you're publishing content that is laser focused on your community, on your local community, and you're not going broadly. We do see regional publishers covering multiple towns, but you're Giving up the ability to go deep into local reporting. So you have to be very careful of the area that you're reporting on. And if we were to do it, I were to do it, I would have two, three, I would have separate websites, one for each town. You can hook them together with our multi pass if you wanted to give all access to all the separate websites. But that's how you go deep and really engage the local community.

Yeah. And especially for local news publishers, those who were used to making a lot of money from ads in a different era, going digital and having a digital presence, you might not ever make as much as you did when advertising was paying the bills. But the overhead of running a digital operation doesn't necessarily require building, it doesn't require a massive staff, it doesn't require a lot of. So your margins will be higher and your content obviously is laser focused. So.

Right.

Hope is that people will subscribe to that.

I'll also say that when you've engaged your local community enough, which means you have a huge email list and you have probably a mix of free registrations and paid subscribers or paid donors. If you go that route, you have a huge sponsorship opportunity. So the advertising, the traditional advertising shifts a bit where you can advertise on a website and you can generate a few bucks doing that, but you certainly run the risk of alienating your paid subscribers with a lot of advertising. So the shift is going more towards sponsored products where you might sponsor an email or you might have an article series where you're. Someone is sponsoring that article series you can sponsor like your free registrations. You can, if you have apps, you can sponsor the apps. There's, there's a lot of creative ways to generate ad revenue, quote unquote, with a sponsorship model that's just a lot more elegant.

Yeah.

And then these advertisers, they love the sponsorship model because they, they know that they're coming in with a quality, a quality approach to, and an elegant approach to the readership instead of just blasting ads.

Yeah, okay. And I think you can make a decent living having a small public, digital only publication relative to the local community that you're in. It's certainly possible.

Absolutely.

But the days of making millions of dollars, it's a lot more difficult to do that on a local level. But you can certainly make a decent living providing hyperlocal news and going the digital subscription membership route.

And that's today. Today you can do well today, which means tomorrow you can do better if you keep your eye on it all.

Yep, yep.

All right, so let's. I want to jump into a little more into tactics and the con. Let's start with content briefly, and then we'll jump into actual subscriptions. Okay. What do I publish? I want to start a. And I've talked about this. I'd love to start a local news publication for our little. Or really our three towns, which are very tightly knitted. Knit together. Grantham, Sonapee and New London. And really go deep with. With. With these three. They're all very small towns, but they're all geographically connected and socially connected. And so that would make sense. Local news, what's actually happening and creating unique reporting. So reporting on the news, Absolutely. That's the traditional way. But I would also add the curation model of curating social media, curating what's happening on listservs Locally, if there's YouTube videos, if there's college news, that affects the local area. And take the. We've talked about Daybreak in the past. I think, Tyler, you also brought up Madison Minutes, which is another one to look at, which I'm looking at on the screen here. Very similar to Daybreak. They're curating local. Local happenings from what's, you know, listservs and Facebook and Reddit, all these sort of other social media destinations where local news is being talked about, and then bringing. Curating that content and putting it together in a daily newsletter. Absolutely fantastic. Yeah.

If there's any positive byproduct of social media algorithms, it's that there's now opportunity to curate content that's otherwise you would never see, or you would see it. Maybe you see part of it. People are now willing to pay for curated content because there's just so much stuff online for people to sift through and so many different channels of places to get it from. So having it in the inbox is pretty convenient and being able to sit through it quickly.

Convenience is everything. Time is getting worse and worse for all of us on this planet. We have less and less time as things move faster. And so if you do a good job curating news for your local area, people will sign up in droves. It's just saving time is saving money today.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Okay, so that's the content approach. Yes. Create unique content to your heart's content, but don't forget to curate what's already happening in your local area. Yep. Okay, so now I want to jump into the actual subscription portion of it, which obviously we get involved with every day. And so what I would do is I would Set up membership model on the website that includes a free registration, which we talk about all the time, which you should absolutely have. You give away a few free articles and then you require free registration which captures the email address, sends it off to say mailchimp, which I would use and then you would get maybe a little extra access. So that free registration builds the list. But the membership, once somebody is receiving your newsletter daily, let's say daily newsletter, and it's driving them back to the website to read more content and essentially prompting the pitch to. To join as a member and support, support the publication support, which supports the community and engage with the community. All that messaging, even though it's paid subscriptions, the messaging is membership, the messaging is community and joining and supporting. It's all, it's the same messaging as if it were donation based. But this membership model, if you take the paid membership and you're drawing a line in the sand saying you have to pay and the. Or the. It's the same as a donation model except for the donation model. You're letting people at your content, your full content and asking for a donation. But the perks that you offer can be exactly the same to encourage people to, to pay to give you payment for your content. But we're gonna, I'm gonna choose membership, I'm gonna require the payment. And these are the perks that I would offer. One, it's pretty obvious that's full access to content. That free registered user, which is your cat, more casual but engaged reader. You're. You want them to have full access. Two, I would offer the ability to engage with others in the community and our publishing staff or authors that are writing the content through comments. So premium comments, you can't read any comments until you pay. And I screenshot here. This is, this would be. If you're watching, watching them, you can see you can offer the ability to participate, ask questions, comment on issues. And I would show the number of comments that are available, but not and not let you read the comments unless you're a paid member. Essentially that's the second perk. The third perk would be a premium newsletter. And that is essentially a full text newsletter instead of excerpt newsletter. And that speaks to convenience. Four would be a hiding ads, a clutter free experience. And five would be like a buy one, get one free. So in other words, if I buy a membership then I can give one away. So those are the five perks. And you and I, Tyler, we've been chatting about it and I think we've settled on on these five as a good starting point to really motivate that whole, that whole like subscription funnel from start to end. So your website, and I'll just mention this cause it's always worth mentioning your website has a metered paywall set up. So with leaky paywall, you're, you're leaking a few articles a month, maybe it's one article a month, maybe it's two articles a month. Google can index everything, everything can be shared in social media. Then you ask, you require a free registration if you want a little extra access to content. You still can't, still wouldn't be able to comment. You would not get the premium newsletter. You wouldn't get any of the perks, but you would get a few more articles and then that builds your, that gets handed off to mailchimp, builds your list quickly, works really well. Then your newsletter gets fired off daily. It's excerpt based, sends people back to your website to read more articles, which triggers the paid messaging, the upgrade message essentially. So that's the funnel and then the upgrade message is all about joining the community, supporting local news, staying informed. Really that local feeling of belonging. And then of course you get your perks. Okay, so let me keep, just check my notes here. All right, let's talk a little bit about the premium newsletter perk a little bit on how that would work. Just want to clarify that. So when you get somebody to join your, your email list, the way I would set it up is you have your free registration and you can certainly have a, like a mailchimp pop up or something. How you collect the email address is important. Better to have an email than not. The free registration starts the relationship though. It also forces somebody who is a casual visitor to, to give up their email address to get that extra content and stay engaged. And when you set up the free registration, what you're doing is you're setting a free tag off to mailchimp. You could target everyone on your mailchimp list for free that's tagged as free and send them your excerpt based newsletter. In other words, your newsletter has just the excerpts of the articles that are in there. And then you have to click the link. Usually it's the title of the article or the read more button that takes you back to the, to the article and then you can read the full article. If you still have an allotment on your free registration on the website, that's the free registration. Now when somebody pays for full membership, sends on payment, it would send a paid tag, call it premium or you Call it member, whatever you want to name the tag. That pay tag goes to mailchimp. And the way leaky paywall works is it's the tags get mirrored between Leaky paywall and mailchimp, which is sweet. So now the free tag goes away, gets replaced by the paid tag. If somebody cancels or if the credit card fails or whatnot. Then the paid tag gets removed with and replaced by a canceled tag. Now the. Once you have the paid tag, so on the list you can send those and this is all you can fully automate this. You can send a full text email to the everyone who's listed as paid. So I get div. So if I pay, if I'm a member, I get an email. Maybe it's one article, maybe it's 10 articles or whatever. I can have an email with full text on it. You might have a little navigation up top if it's. If you're publishing a lot of news, but if it's just a few articles, you probably don't need to bother or just have what's in this and then I can just read the whole email without having to click, without having to log in. It's just a convenient, saves me time. It's a perk. It's a great perk. And we've seen with other publishers that offer this, this perk that their, their readers, they love it. Maybe they're getting ready in the morning and this is, this is how they're consuming their news. They don't. It's no clicking, no logging in. They just know when they get their email, they get everything and it's all in one, one place for them.

Yeah. And speaking of having things all in one place, I just wanted to give a shout out to newsletterglue.com oh yeah. If you want to publish your newsletter using Mailchimp, but doing it inside of the WordPress dashboard, I would highly recommend this product. It allows you to target your tags like we just talked about. You can target the paid people, you can target free people. And also it creates an archive of all of your newsletters on the backend of WordPress. You can publish that. You can let people check out your past newsletters. It's all around an ingenious product for, for whatever system you're using, whether it's mailchimp or something else, they have a lot of integration. So worth checking that out. It's called NewsletterGlue.com yeah, that's a great tip.

Yeah, it will, it will save you time, cut your workflow down. You don't have to touch Mailchimp. You just work out a WordPress and send everything out.

Just let Mailchimp do the sending and you can do everything else inside of WordPress and not have to worry about going into that clunky backend of mailchimp. So.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yep. That definitely use newsletter glue. And then the other. The third part of the premium newsletter approach is and this is optional, but if you want to get sophisticated, you could also send out your premium newsletter earlier than let's say your free newsletter. So your free newsletter could go out at 8 o' clock or something like that. And your premium newsletter could basically you could promote early access. It goes out at 6. Again, depends on your workflow. Do you need it? Probably not. The full access, full content newsletter is probably enough. But that's another thing that we've seen publishers promote and works. Yeah.

Especially. Especially if you're a publisher who's in like the stock world. Your. Your latest information, your latest take on stuff. If you have an audience around that sector, it can certainly be a good thing to have.

Yep. So it's easy to. All these, all these perks. We're obviously we're talking about leaky paywall and whatever other platforms to integrate with mailchimp. All these are super easy to set up out of the box with the exception of one.

That's the comments.

So the premium comments. Just a quick note. You do. Because every theme is different. You do need and comments are integrated with theme functionality. You do have to make a couple of tweaks in the theme. It's not hard to do. But comments are. Is one thing that you'll have to have a WordPress developer just make a tweak to.

Yeah. And I'll say this too, if you're a mailchimp hater, you just don't like it. It's terrible. Just too much going on. You can use whatever you want. Use any other newsletter platform. And we do have an option to send subscribers to those other newsletter platforms through zapier. So if you. You have a really odd newsletter program that you like to use, then it's integrated with Zapier. Then we can integrate with it.

Yep, exactly. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about another perk which we mentioned and that's hiding ads on your website. This is something that's been actually talked about for years, but we haven't really seen publishers engage on it. The argument is, hey, we want our. We want our best readers, our paid subscribers to see our sponsors, to see our Sponsor ads. Because sponsors are saying, wait a second, you're hiding ads to all your best readers. That's the argument. However, I'll give you a counter argument here on why hiding ads is the way to go. First of all, we are starting to see it happen now and the numbers are. I think we might have talked about this in a previous podcast or definitely in an article where the opt ins between hiding ads and not hiding ads were significant. It was the number that was. It was over 10% of paid subscribers for local news publication. This was in Sweden. Decided to pay more like 40% more just to hide ads. So they had. That is very. It was a 1, 2 test. Pay. Pay X amount for full access with ads. Pay second was paid, you know, for full access, no ads. And 11, 11% of readers decided to pay 40% more just for that one feature.

Yep. And we see it everywhere. Like not just with.

Yeah.

In the news industry. You see it with, with Discovery plus, Disney plus. All of them are.

That's true.

Running some kind of spend three more dollars per month and you don't have to deal with these ads.

So.

So it certainly. And it also reminds me of something. We had a publisher. I don't know if they're still with us or not. They had a print product. Maybe you could tell this story better than I can, Pete. But they had a print product and they were actually charging more for digital only. And people were actually navigating towards digital only even though it was more expensive than digital plus print. Yeah, I don't want this paper. Stop sending it to me.

Yeah, yeah. That was Modern Drummer magazine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

For a few years, very successfully. They were charging twice the price for digital only, half the price for print and digital. And 20% of their audience decided to opt for digital only.

Yeah.

So.

So if you're worried that offering the option to hide ads for a little bit more revenue, it's going to be a drop in the bucket in terms of how many people stop seeing those ads. And your advertisers won't even notice a difference really. You'll just notice a difference in more revenue from people who are willing to pay more money to stop the advertising.

That's right. You're switching to a subscriber member first revenue model versus an ad first revenue model. So you need to really take care of your subscribers, your members first and make sure they have an excellent experience. Yep. When you hide, if you. Hey, I'm not saying don't have ads. We would absolutely have ads sponsored. We take a Sponsored approach. But they would be, you wouldn't have a, a wall of ads across the site. You'd have, you want to publish in a nice elegant way, but still there'd be ads and if somebody wants to drop the ads. As a premium member, though that group is very small. You're less than 1% of your readership. You're probably pretty far less than 1% of the readers that land on your website from social, from Google search, go directly there to see what's going on. So it's actually a very small percentage. So yeah, it doesn't really. Even if you're doing network ads, which I wouldn't recommend at all, especially for local news, the percentage of your paid is just a, it's just a fraction of your total volume. Now how do you handle the, how do you handle that? The advertiser that says hey, we want our ads to be shown to your readership. The answer is of course, yes, absolutely. And you're going to do it better like that. That's that you flip it because the reality is now you're targeting who your, who your free registered users are, who your paid users are. And when an advertiser wants access and you take a sponsorship role, then you, what you do is you build a special campaign for that advertiser and say yeah, we have, we, here's how you reach our readership. And this is where it's not my level of expertise, but if I were to do it, I would talk about doing email sponsorship for like maybe free and paid, free registered subscribers and paid members. Or the other thing you can do is which is add targeting on the website. So we have a couple of products. One is, is head dropper. The other is a what we call conditional display notice like a header bar or footer bar that you put on the bottom to target. What you do is you target who's logged into your site. As well as casual, you could do a campaign where it's like look. All right, let's look. You can reach our readers costs X amount for the package. It's a sponsorship. We're going to put you in on X number of premium only newsletters. We're gonna, we're going to put your sponsorship information in content using Ad Dropper. You can just, you can target a specific level and you can also do it through the header bar, footer bar where only paid subscribers get shown this and, and then you create a creative campaign which promotes the app brand in a nice way. So what you're doing is you're not Just you're not just shotgunning ads all over your website, you're, you're being more targeted and that allows you to have, create nice and more expensive sponsorship levels for your advertisers. Yeah.

There's certainly more value for the advertiser. If it's more tough.

Way more value. Yeah, yeah.

It's not about impressions or clicks, it's about how many times of the convert and if it only seemed by a hundred people and all 100 people want that product then fantastic. So that's right.

That's exactly right. Yeah. You can get away from measuring clicks in vm, which is proven to be completely pointless, especially with the amount of ad ad spamming and fraud going on in the ad network. Yeah.

And not to mention it's hard to filter out bots and crawlers and there's just so much, it's just easier to measure conversion.

But it's also, there's brand awareness. If you're publishing local news and there's a local store that's advertising or a local organization and you, they know they're getting in front of not only your general readership, but getting a laser targeted campaign with your paid readership through email or specific website targeting, that's value and you could just sell that as value. It's like brand recognition.

Oh for sure, for sure. And these are people in a community, in your community that have shown a willingness to pay for local news and it's, there's a good chance probably that they'll pay for whatever product that you're offering.

So.

Right. Or that advertiser's offering.

Yeah. So let's, speaking of, we're talking about advertising here or sponsorships. So another thing you can do is, and with targeting is let's say you have a paid member, your local news, you're a mission based publication. There's, you want to ask for donations. There's nothing that says you can't ask for donations while you're selling paid memberships even if you're for profit. I had this conversation last week with a local publisher who was tiptoeing like I think I, I can still ask for donations even though I'm a for profit organization. Like absolutely you can because you're mission based, you're helping the community. And so what you can do is now that you're, you know who your paid subscribers are on your, in your email list now you know what your, you can target your paid subscribers that are on your website with messaging easily through our two targeting methods. Ask for a donation to Only those that are logged in as a paid subscriber. Right. To only those who are on the paid newsletter list because then you can really get very specific about who you're talking to. Hey, thanks for supporting us as a member. We were mission based. We appreciate it. We're doing a campaign for donations for the next 30 days or whatever and then ask them to donate and send them to a payment page where they can pay more. And you could use, we have a name, your price extension you can use to, to automate the payments on that keeps them in the system and, and you will raise more money through a donation campaign and you can dip in and out during the year as you need.

Yeah. And you'll end up making giving people the option to pay more for what you offer. It's pretty, pretty powerful. So you allow your end user to decide with our name your price tool.

Yep.

To essentially put whatever number they want.

Okay, let's move on. So we've covered ads, donation, buy one give, get one free perk. So I might start with testing a, like a give away like a six month membership. So let's say somebody pays to become a full member. In the welcome email I might send them a coupon that says hey, here's your, here's six month premium membership, totally free, no credit card required. And that coupon and then a link would take them to let's say a hidden subscription level or membership level that you create in leaky paywall and, and that just links directly to that registration page. Whoever that person is just fills that out, uses the coupon and they get us and that coupon and then a link would take them to let's say a hidden subscription level or membership level that you create in leaky paywall and that just links directly to that registration page. Whoever that person is, just fills that out, uses the coupon and they get a six month let's say access. And I'm just making this one example up. You can make it as long as you want, as short as you want. But a buy one get one free. What's the purpose of that? It adds value. Oh, that's nice. I can give this to a friend or family member. But it's the viral nature that you this approach to happen. So if you have a friend and you're sending this coupon off to a friend or someone else, you have new eyeballs on your website, on your publication, you have that person, then let's say they sign up for the six month plan, they're on your mailchimp list and they get tagged as six month or whatever you want to call them and then you can send them the premium newsletter and off you go. And then they may convert to paid. Down the road, they get used to enjoying your content and then all of a sudden they can't have full access and the full newsletter and comment and engage. Now you got somebody who's really considering it. Okay, so I think we've covered all the perks. Another thing I would add is a family plan. You could use our groups extension to easily do that. You subscribe, this could be a perk. You, you subscribe and get access for three or four more family members and that's. That would be a huge perk. One of the things that we hear about a lot is password sharing. I and let's talk a little bit about that. I Somebody pays for membership, then they just give away their login to someone and they're getting around the paywall. What we've just described as far as a setup covers a lot of engagement. There are a lot for commenting and is a big one. And if you're, if people are commenting and engaged, they're not going to give away their login because they don't want anybody else commenting as themselves. So that's, that's a sort of a defense against password sharing. But a family plan, it offers a huge perk. It could be two, two, two more seats, one more seat, three more seats. Whatever you decide gives that person the ability to basically just drop in an email and send off an invitation to join as a family member. And massive perk, gets more emails on your email list. And at some point, maybe they're not part of the family plan anymore and they pay or they refer someone else. You're growing this virally. Okay, family plan gift subscriptions. Let's chat a little bit about gift subscriptions. Offer them. Let's. And I will say that you want your paid membership revenue. You want to set a goal of 20% for your paid membership revenue. If you're not bringing in revenue, if gift subscriptions are not 20% of your revenue, you have a big opportunity to sell them. When somebody pays for a membership, make sure you promote a gift subscription. Include it in your welcome email. Include a button right on checkout that says get a gift subscription for someone else and a big opportunity to sell them. When somebody pays for a membership, make sure you promote a gift subscription. Include it in your welcome email. Include a button right on checkout that says get a gift subscription for someone else. And we, I remember Talking nice, had conversations with marketeers in the magazine space, the print magazine space. That number is rock solid. There has been for decades that if you're in a giftable publication magazine, we I remember talking nice. Had conversations with marketeers in the magazine space, print magazine space. That number is rock solid. There has been for decades. And Your paid subscriptions 20% of your paid subscriptions should be that if you're in a giftable publication magazine, then gifts and so that in local news, you absolutely have a giftable publication and target that 20% level. Really? Look at your website. Is that obvious? Are your welcome emails promoting it? Are your continuous emails down the road? And Your paid subscriptions 20% of your paid subscriptions should be gifts and so that in local news, you absolutely have a giftable publication and target that 20% level. Really? Look at your website. Is that obvious? Are your welcome emails promoting it? Are your continuous emails down the road promoting it? Something to. Something to grow. All right, Tyler, how we doing?

Doing good.

Okay. All right. I'll just keep. I'll just keep ripping. Promoting it. Something to. Something to grow. All right. Down here, corporate and group memberships sell libraries. How are we doing?

Doing good.

Okay. All right. I'll just keep. I'll just keep ripping here. Corporate and group memberships sell libraries, access.