In this marketing for local news series, Kamila Jambulatova, American Press Institute’s Senior Communications Manager, shares advice and exercises to help small teams effectively promote their journalism and offerings — from building out marketing and outreach plans to mapping your audience journey.
As a marketing and communications professional with a journalism background, I’ve spent a lot of time helping small teams create efficient processes to promote their work. I understand what it’s like to juggle multiple organizational needs and balance strategic work with hands-on tactical upkeep. Successfully and efficiently marketing your work can be hard, especially for local news teams with limited resources, but marketing yourself to your audience is an essential skill for news organizations to drive revenue and promote sustainability.
Your newsroom may not have a dedicated marketing team, so you might have to simultaneously tackle community engagement, reporting and promotion. Or perhaps you are a one-person marketing leader in your organization. It’s possible that part of your existing role — community outreach, audience engagement or connecting with underserved voices — also falls under the marketing umbrella.
Either way, my hope with this series is to encourage you to discuss marketing with your team, assess your current processes and find small but powerful ways to improve your audience experiences.
Share with your network
You also might be interested in:
Practical exercises inspired by Tom Rosenstiel's The Next Journalism aimed to help news leaders further level up their journalism and give their communities the information they need to thrive.
Create capacity by getting better at knowing what deserves your limited attention, what you need to learn next and how little you may need to spend to learn it.
Through working with local news organizations and teams via coaching, programs and research, the American Press Institute has seen how outlets build resilience through interpreting data and evidence together, making informed decisions and adapting to what isn’t working.
