Products that reinforce your identity

How can you bring new life — and new revenue opportunities — to the same hyperlocal content? What about a non-news revenue stream that gets your name into unexpected places? From building on nostalgia and a shared sense of place to repackaging evergreen content into reliably updated guides or even collaborating with community institutions to create something new, products relevant to your community can offer new ways for audiences to engage with local news and funders to support your work.

Benjy Egel outlines key steps in building an audience-first strategy when creating a revenue-generating product for The Sacramento Bee: community engagement and reporting that builds trust, meeting audiences where they are with the information they want, leaning on community partnerships and getting the newsroom on board.

Sometimes you might have a good audience and a good topic but can’t quite turn that into revenue beyond digital subscriptions and pageviews. Zach Urness and Cherrill Crosby write that the Oregon’s Statesman Journal found that a podcast offered a new revenue stream in the form of sponsors.

Partnering with a local organization to produce a product is beneficial in many ways, but Angela Evancie with Vermont Public Radio noted that it’s worth setting expectations at the outset about how any collaboration will or won’t affect the content your outlet produces.

Building products based on your audience’s interests can make your news organization and its coverage part of people’s daily habits and community.

What others are doing

• How evergreen and nostalgia content can help inform your revenue strategy
• How a craft beer collaboration helped Vermont Public Radio grow audience and revenue
• The Statesman Journal expanded its audience and gained new sponsors through a podcast focused on the Oregon outdoors
• How the Bangor Daily News used e-commerce as an unexpected tool for community service
• How 8 news organizations are using API grants to evolve or iterate upon current revenue experiments
• 4 audience-first takeaways from The Sacramento Bee’s restaurant cookbook strategy

Try it out now

• The Digital Transformation Guide from the American Press Institute shares proven revenue strategies for local media, as tested by news organizations in the Table Stakes Local News Transformation Program. It also outlines ways to develop a product-thinking mindset.
• Learn more about API’s Local News Summit on Local Identity, History and Sustainability, and request an invitation by tomorrow at 11:59 p.m. ET