Breaking News 2: When good ads go bad

Breaking News is a series on the self-inflicted fractures breaking the news business. The first was on malvertising. This second report is on the “ad tech tax” everyone pays — in dollars, time and readership.

Digital services suite helps community papers become one-stop shop for merchants’ advertising needs

Missouri Press Service has launched a suite of digital services designed to help community newspaper publishers boost their relationships with ad clients while generating additional revenue.   Services range from creating websites and social media pages for newspapers’ ad clients to training newspaper staffs to sell targeted YouTube and display ads. Since MPS, a Missouri … Continued

RJI Fellow’s ongoing e-newsletter personalization experiment yields surprising results

Tracy Clark, a 2015-2016 RJI Fellow, believes newspapers with editor-selected email newsletters would have better engagement rates if the content were personalized to each user’s interest. She is in the midst of a pilot study with a large U.S. newspaper, which is simultaneously publishing two email newsletters: one includes editor-selected news content, the other features reader-selected stories. The personalized newsletters are based on Clark’s Reportory platform. This is a progress report.

How do we engage news consumers in the digital world?

If you operate a nonprofit newsroom, email appeals have likely become an essential fundraising tool. Yet while recommendations for how to grow your mailing lists are readily available, it’s much harder to find good information about retaining subscribers and engaging them as active community members. As a result, many successful efforts to gain subscribers are … Continued

The path to college starts with just one caring person

Can you remember being very young and wondering what you’d be when you grew up? My first goals were to be a cowboy, then maybe a fireman. A little later I upgraded to wanting to be the second baseman for the Detroit Tigers. These were all fine for kids. But as many of us grew … Continued