Welcome to API’s February series on building sustainable revenue sources by fostering local identity — whether that’s through live events, cultivating third spaces, engaging subscribers or selling community-specific products. We’re sharing ways newsrooms have successfully launched beneficial community engagement events and products that have resulted in new audiences and revenue streams, and what they learned along the way.
Local news organizations create value through a range of ways they help you engage and grow where you live — when they inspire affection or duty to your neighbor, when they help you form social bonds, when they enable you to make decisions, improve your life and help you feel like you belong.
Reporting is one route to those ends. But there are other ways local media have long helped engender a local identity — and build sustainable sources of revenue in the process. Guides on your area’s cultural food or music, obituaries and other efforts that reminisce and honor the past, collaborations with local businesses that benefit the community writ large, events that celebrate community accomplishment, and convening more broadly can all accomplish this.
Moreover, speaking to and even encouraging local identity might be a way to draw people to pay for or donate to news. As new research notes, “community attachment” plays a vital role in what motivates someone to pay for local news.
Local media outlets looking for stability can benefit from initiatives that help them attract and retain paying audiences or donors. These efforts may also reveal new opportunities for securing sponsorships, grants and advertising from institutions and businesses that don’t want to align their brand or mission to the perception of news as predominantly negative.
Publishers must consider the uniquely local problems that communities and businesses face, and work to solve them in a way that creates lasting value for consumers. This month, we’re sharing examples of how newsrooms have spun up live events, products and third spaces to experiment with new sources of revenue while fostering community belonging.
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Cultivate local identity and build revenue
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Three frameworks for how journalists can engage with non-news experts and researchers to help solve a problem, rethink a beat or collaborate on an experiment
Most newsrooms have one impact story. They tell it the same way to everyone, and then they're surprised when it lands with some audiences and dies in the room with others. The story wasn't wrong. It just never got translated.
News leaders who say they want their journalism to help people make decisions and thrive must help their community maintain a sustainable relationship with civic information, which is very different from a newsroom that aims to get people to consume more information.
