Making money beyond grants | Sponsored by Lenfest (CJS2022 Day 2)

5:02PM May 25, 2022

Speakers:

Stefanie Murray

Spanish Interpreter

Yossi Lichterman

Mary Walter-Brown

Andrew Ramsammy

Mollie Kabler

Cassie Haynes

Leah Todd Lin

Keywords:

collaboration

newsrooms

revenue

publishers

collaborative

support

organization

grew

building

fundraising

lma

journalism

relationships

community

services

branded content

question

stations

project

terms

So next up, we have a conversation about revenue for collaborations. And I'm sitting next to one of the leaders in developing news, revenue from news organizations in this country. So we're going to take a pause while we flip out people here in the studio. And we'll be back in just a second to talk about money and collaboration. Hi, everyone. All right, so we switch out seats. And here we are. Welcome to the 1pm session about how many are making revenue and hopefully making themselves sustainable. I want to say thank you to the left,

for sponsoring this session. Lenfest has been a fantastic partner of the collaborative journalism Summit, and the Center for Cooperative Media for years. So I'm really grateful for their support of the session today. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Yossi Lichterman. From the Lenfest Institute, who's going to introduce today's session and tell you a bit more about Lenfest. Yossi!

I've

built to be able to support this session and partner with both solutions journalism network and the Center for Cooperative Media for the research we're about to talk about. So yeah, it's really an honor to be here and thrilled to support this work. And I will turn it over to Leah, introduce the panel.

Thanks, Josie. So I'm very pleased to introduce the research that inspired this conversation today. My name is Leah Todd Lin. I'm a collaborative manager with the solutions journalism network. And just a little bit by way of background Sjn has been supporting journalism collaboratives as part of our local media project initiative for the last three years, thanks to the support of the Knight Foundation. And these projects have ranged from resolve Philly, which you'll hear from today, which was in many ways a proof of concept for these solutions focused local journalism collaboratives, to most recently, this year, the launch of several new collaborations from the Great Salt Lake collaborative and the southern New Mexico journalism collaborative, who you'll hear from later today in some of the lightning talks. So the Center for Cooperative Media has identified about 40 of these permanent or semi permanent journalism collaborations across the United States, most of which are relatively new, they've been started in the last five to seven years. And we know that today, most of these collaborative journalism efforts are funded by philanthropy. And we know that going forward, philanthropy will continue to be a key part of the support for these collaboratives. But however, eventually, like any organization that wants to continue to thrive, they'll have to transition and diversify where the revenue is coming from. And part of that means asking harder questions and having a clear understanding of for the audience's that these collaborative serve. What's the job that's to be done for these audiences? And how do the collaboratives do them better than any one news organization could do on their own? So as this field matures, we wanted to know what is working now across the field to generate revenue and sustain these journalism collaborations that we all know are so important. So to answer this question, along with the Lenfest Institute, and the Center for Cooperative Media, we back in January launched a field survey. We interviewed collaborative project managers, funders and ecosystem support folks from around the country. And we ultimately identified eight innovative examples of how collaborative rent revenue experiments were happening right now and process to share with you three of which we'll hear from today. These range from new experiments and reader revenue to ways to monetize.

[Speaking Spanish]

Harry Brown, I'm the founder and CEO of the news revenue hub, we help newsrooms around the country Grow audience and volunteer donor programs. So revenue and collaboration is really at the core of what we do. So I'm excited about any conversation where we can learn more about how news organizations and collaborations are being more creative, and developing ways to raise revenue to support their services. So I'm joined today by Cassie Haynes, co executive director of resolve Billy Molly Kappeler, Executive Director of coast Alaska, and Andrew Ramsey. I'm a chief content and collaboration Officer of local media Association. We have a lot to pack into this conversation in a fairly short amount of time. So I really encourage you all to put your questions in the chat and Joe and Stephanie will make sure that we weave those into the conversation. So good, I'll go ahead and kick things I'd like to start with Andrew. News revenue hub was fortunate enough to work with Word and black as you launch to help you develop a volunteer Donor Program and membership program. But those types of programs take time, especially for startups, as you're growing audience, you slowly grow volunteer donors. So I was really hoping you could talk more about how you developed a branded content strategy that ultimately helps you bring in more immediate revenue for Word and black over the past year, and how you see that program growing.

Thank you, Mayor Walter-Brown. Well, I mean, first and foremost, I would think that it's important to recognize the tragic and horrific events that occurred in Buffalo, and how, you know, one community was completely picked out and selected to be at the end of a massacre. And now recognizing how yet again, the role of the black press is so important, and supporting a free and independent black press. And it's why things like bored and black, and the work that we're doing with the night, with night and our bloom lab, are night, LMA Blue members, so important. So I just want to say that we're thinking about everyone, the story hits close to home for one of our members that worked for LMA, and that is a part of the boom lab has family that in Buffalo and is connected to that community. And again, we we stand with that community and stand with black publishers across the US who often more often than not, did not get left out of the conversation when a local story when a black communities impacted and then it goes national. But yes, I mean, we we are fortunate that word in black, which is a collaboration of 10 black publishers coming together to to start up a national news brand and a digital startup as that I call it the world's oldest black media startup. But building that audience from the ground up takes into account that these publishers walk in with a legacy of audiences and communities that they've been able to serve, each one of them is going on some form of a digital transformation. Everything from the afro, which is some of one of our largest publishers down to you know, the Sacramento observer, which has now tripled the size of their newsroom, as a result of not only the work that we're doing with them on working black, and now the boom whap. But the trickle down effect of all of this, but specifically to branded content. Many of our publishers have really phenomenal relationships with some amazing brands that they've been able to have relationships at the local level. And one of those is ARP was the first branded content project that we did with them. And these are lessons learned from our branded content project, which is a project inside of LMA. And it's a collaborative collaboration with LMC, about how publishers can be generating revenue by doing branded content. To me, it's more than just branded content for this series that we did with AARP was specifically looking at the role of a caregiver within the black community, which is a very amorphous role within the within that community could be everything from the grandmother who's taking care of grandchild, because an unfortunate incident or situation has occurred to the neighbor down downstairs, who does everything for everyone in the building. So it really looked at that very specific role. It talked about stories within the community. And it really was a RPS goal to really to share those stories and to celebrate the role of the caregiver within the black community. So there's nothing embedded in there about AARP or you know, becoming a member of AARP, which I think a lot of people have some bad conceived notions of what branded content could look like. Ultimately, we believe that it's public service journalism, which is coming in support. As we embark upon our second campaign with with AARP, we just completed a campaign with Biogen specifically looking at how Alzheimer's is under diagnosed or not even diagnosed within the black community. And we're about to do something else soon with Deloitte, doing a creative partnership with them. So this has been able to generate significant revenue back to work in black and the publishers. Each one of these campaigns is over six figures. And again, this would not be able to happen if these if these collaborations didn't come together. You know, publishers can do only so much by themselves, but a collaboration of 10 at a nationwide scale. We're talking about big dollars and big opportunities to partner with brands that align with our mission.

Hope you're on mute Mary, one follow up question on that, Andrew, how are these partnerships and these branded content deals actually brokered? Is that something LMA did or was it a collaboration between the publishers who had those existing relationships?

Yeah, many of our publishers have these existing relationships, but some have been Kismet. where they reached out to us because of the relationship that they have with LMA. We right now or currently have our weekly newsletter, which goes out to close to 40,000 subscribers, which is sponsored by McKinsey. And that's because we, you know, Nancy had a relationship with with Raju, and just, you know, just knows the work that we were doing was very interested in what we were building. So there's a lot of goodwill that is going into this. But yes, we have our publishers that have relationships and we ourselves in terms of LMA, and LMS have relationships with a lot of our funders that are coming in.

Right, yeah, it's really important to leverage those partnerships. Okay. Molly, Costa last Alaska is one of the OGS of news collaborations growing from an informal alliance between says six Alaska Public radio stations in 1994, into a full fledged nonprofit organization with an estimated budget of 4.3 5 million. You've created cost savings for small public radio stations by consolidating back office services. Can you describe those services, including how you structure and price them? And then how is that revenue then reinvested? Into coast? Alaska services?

Yeah, thank you. We are actually fully incorporated as a single entity and show although the revenues recognized at the station level, it's managed collectively. And the stations each share in a portion of the cost of running the collaborative of back office financial, and engineering and fundraising, an IT services. So we started very small, just a couple of shared services, then we put more and more on the table and grew that into, you know, an organization that serves everyone, we'd have tried along the way, because we're small to be as efficient as possible. So the station's know, at the beginning of a budget year, what the estimated cost is for their services. And then they build their budget from there.

grown over the years.

I'm sorry, I missed the beginning. Say the question

is, how have those suite of services grown over the years, as you've gotten to know the needs and the needs have become more sophisticated?

Right, so we started sharing membership, that was one of the earliest things and now we have for fully merged financials to a single audit. We do all of our counting collectively. We do you know, let's see, Engineering and IT are centralized. We're all at a distance from one another. So our organization was paperless and ready for the pandemic years ago, oddly enough. And so we've just looked at every service and tried to figure out how can we provide a service collectively, but maintain as much autonomy in local service to the community, both in terms of local news and community engagement? So we grew from just a couple of services to completely false, we have nearly all services except for local news and local community engagement, local fundraising.

Right, thank you, Cassie. Resolve Ville a started as a solutions journalism network project and graduated into an independent organization. You've leveraged what you've learned, I'm sure going through that process yourself. And now we're offering consulting for other collaboratives. Can you talk about the services that you offer? And what kind of revenue that generates for resolve Philly, and the work you're doing collectively?

Yeah, I mean, I think, first of all, thanks. I wish I was in Chicago with y'all. But it's nice to be here virtually. Yeah, I mean, informally, Jean, and I both started kind of getting requests from different angles, even you know, before, it was more than just the two of us asking, you know, hey, can we can we check out your bylaws, can we check out, you know, the partner agreements that you'll have in place with your partners? And, and then, you know, we shared that and then people were coming back and saying, Hey, can you talk to us a little bit about your approach to, you know, building out community engagement, as you know, part of what you are how you are showing up to, you know, support your newsroom partners. And so we started talking to people a little bit more about that. And, you know, we started playing around a lot in air table. I think some folks may have seen a presentation at a previous summit, you know about air table and how we use air table to track our impact and do a host of other things. And so we started talking to people about that. So, you know, I think it grew from this desire to, you know, write the instruction manual while we were also building and flying the plane and Making our learnings as useful to other people as possible. And we are, you know, I think experts in our experience, we're experts in what we, you know, have gone through as a team as an organization over the last several years. And also, we are absolutely still learning every single day and make it a part of our process, to really, you know, reflect on on that, and find ways to integrate it both into our existing practices around collaboration around community engagement, and, you know, around leadership and organizational structure and also, you know, to support how we work with other newsrooms and collaboratives, and academic institutions, you know, in these different spaces.

Yeah, I'm curious if you can share, you know, some things that you've learned along the way specifically, that you can help other collaborative sort of accelerate more quickly. And sort of avoid some of the hurdles that might stall some of these collaborations from getting up and running more quickly. And you know, it nice any secrets that you that you share along the way that you've found

that helpful? Whatever your commitment, or investment commitment to, or investment in building structures and workflow and process is, like, just double down on it, I think, you know, we've, this pandemic, obviously, you know, kind of threw everybody for, you know, for a loop in terms of how we maneuver through this, our community engagement team was just getting some really excited projects off the ground, and then, you know, it's like, Oh, stop, figure something else out. And so, you know, the the process, how we think about building trust, and how we think about, you know, engaging with communities, that that shifts, but how you work together as a team, and kind of the steps of that process, the pieces of that puzzle, they don't, whether you're engaging virtually anything. That doesn't change. And I think that investment is not sexy. It's, it's sometimes resource intensive, if not expensive, certainly, it involves a significant time investment. And so you know, it's, it's sometimes a hard sell, especially at the beginning, when there's so much stuff to focus on. But that that workflow and those structures as processes for making decisions and a process for changing those processes for making decisions, which is something that we're going through now as an organization, you know, kind of in its toddlerhood, what works to make decisions as a team of three or six is not what works in decision making when you have a team of 20. So that was the long answer process structure or sorry, yeah.

That's a great segue to my next question, which is, I'm curious how your collaboratives have determined which revenue streams and strategies to focus on. And with so many cooks in the kitchen? How do you keep your members focused on what's really moving the needle? Or what area where you found some traction? And that's really to all three of you. Anybody want to jump in? And just take that question?

I think that's the binder for the work that we're doing in particular with Word and black. There's no question that, you know, we all agree that the Journalism which we're focusing on which is looking at inequities, in particular, you know, through the lens of the black community, and how that has impacted that community is important. But for the collaborative itself to stand and to really exist. What's the business model? And how does it plan on sustaining itself and for LMA, it is a project managed by us, but the goal is that it will become its own entity. These publishers have decided, at least for the moment now that they want to be a for profit entity. You know, we know there's a lot of discussion around nonprofit and for profit, but at least for many of the publishers that we worked with, many of them I work with, they are for profit entities, it's something that they want to pass down to the next generation. And that's the route that they have to go. But I think to you know, the involvement with our publishers in terms of because of Iran and Mary Walter Brown, you know, like they were on weekly calls with with you on on breeder revenue. They're on weekly calls, looking at that editorial, and then they're called to they just came off of right now. It's a publisher call, which is looking at the business side. And I think the business side is what is kind of bringing this all together in terms of greatest opportunities for growth. I mean, we believe wholeheartedly that journalism funded by philanthropy is a growth opportunity, which is a signal biggest portion of the revenue that is sustaining this branded content is a significant portion of this, which is sustaining this relationship. And now, you know, we, since starting with you and doing the work on on reader revenue, it's a small portion, but we know that's a long tail, it takes time to develop and cultivate relationships with readers, I want to support your content. But that, to us is a overall diversified strategy. Right? It's not putting all of your eggs in one basket. We've seen the market go down this past week, right. And a lot of philanthropy is a market based asset. When it's doing well, there's a lot of money at the end of the year that needs to be spent. And thankfully, a lot of us is in position to be able to take in that funding. But when the market goes down, how are we going to weather the storm? So I think it's looking at it from a diversify perspective. But in terms of the commonality of the agreement with within our publishers, it is recognizing that we are treating the collaboration as a business. And to me that has been refreshing to just go beyond saying that the collaboration is solely focused on journalism.

Anyone else want to speak to that one for the next question? I'm really curious,

all three of these projects were started as loose collaborations that grew into standalone entities. And I'm curious Mali, like at what point did you realize or the folks who were involved at the time realize that Coast Alaska could become something in and of itself that would have more independence and real influence on supporting these other newsrooms? What was the tipping point? In your case?

Yeah, it was a really incremental process, we started just with a conversation. And we were in essence, sort of in competition with one another for funding or funding at the state level for funding from philanthropists, we were all busy saying how unique we were. And when the existential threat came to us with, you know, state and federal funding, which was the core part of support back in the day for us, we came together and said, Hmm, you know, we really have a lot in common, and we should be able to do something different. We started really incrementally, and I don't know that there was a tipping point, a single point in time, it was more a progression, starting small collaborating, our organization was formed as a nonprofit, subsidiary of one of the stations. And then, by about 2007, we started in the 90s, we flipped and became the parent group legally, as a nonprofit and move forward from there. But it was it was a long, incremental process. Capacity building is really what we grew the most. And oftentimes, so oftentimes, I get asked, How much money are you saving, we didn't save money, what we did was make a plan and grow capacity, and stay sustainable for the long term. And then as we moved along, we began to look at other revenue efforts. And when you are an old organization, you're not sexy and new. So you don't have access to, oh, this is an exciting new project we want to invest in. So we have to be sustainable long term. And keep that in mind. Now, we have great support here. And they're in different philanthropic moments, but we're not new. So you know, everyone assumes we're fine as we're going. And one of the places that we did grow our revenue through a business strategy is consulting. So we, you know, we sell services, which we refer to as consulting. And, you know, people recognize that we understand how to support small public media stations, and we grew the capacity to do that iteratively. So we started with six stations, and now we serve 25. And each one of those is ala carte, we simply offer them what they want from us and what we can do, we're small, so we have to be really careful about capacity.

Cassie, what about you? What, what was that moment where your collaboration, it became clear, it could really be its own entity and needed to be,

I think, the power of the 15 newsrooms that worked together on the reentry project, which was the project that came before broken Philly that led to resolve. And so, you know, these 15 newsrooms, excuse me, including the Enquirer, you know, including NBC 10, including these like legacy media organizations, said we want to keep working together. Like this is a choice that were made like it was over like they didn't have to be fulfilled their obligation, you know, to participate for a year and there was nobody saying like, please, please Please, please, can we do this more, you know, like they said, Hey, this has been a really good experience, can we keep doing this and I think, you know, Jean and I coming together and really very early on recognizing the power on a auto community, you know, kind of social city wide scale, at the individual level, the power that a critical mass of local newsrooms in Philadelphia had, just by virtue of like, being in the same space once a once a month together, like that was, there was something really special there. And so the idea that this could be something more than, you know, a loose collaborative was really driven by the partners wanting to continue to engage, you know, to engage in this way. And Jean, and I kind of seizing on that opportunity pretty early to kind of harness that collaboration and, and, and do more stuff with it, you know, experiment more with what it means to kind of bring newsrooms together in this way.

And it makes me wonder, you know, how do you navigate the delicate balance of having all these players, all of these different news organizations working together? How do you address the issue of the fear of cannibalization, whether it's an audience or revenue? How do you work beyond that, to build that kind of trust and collaborative spirit that that continued to grow?

You know, I think it's a few different a few different ways. I mean, we have individual agreements with each individual partner, they have their own kind of commitments that they're making as to what purchase the participation looks like in terms of publication production, etc. And so I think there's, you know, kind of a expectation set, we don't have the same publication requirements of a quarterly magazine, as we do with the Enquirer in terms of like how folks are showing up as a partner, you know, in terms of resources, I think, we, we really, we require collaboration among, among partner organizations to access our collaborative pot of funds that's available for the, you know, for the collective pot. And I think keeping the decision making around how that money gets spent, who, you know, which projects that money supports, keeping the, you know, decision making around how collaborative coverage happens in the hands of the participants, I think, has really has really been instrumental in developing not just trust between the partners in our organization. decision but trust among one another. So there's just this like, kind of element of I don't want to say self governance, because it makes it sound I think, too formal, but this, you know, element of self organization and self direction that now, you know, exists, which I think really helps that balance, people are included, I think in in pretty significant ways that don't, that don't, you know, are wholly kind of encompassed with power structures and kind of dynamics of who has access to more resources.

And I think when that happens organically when that trust develops, I think that's when it really can be hardwired and and moved to a new level. I'm I see a question from Richard Weiss, would it be possible to hire out fundraising to a third party? Or do QI project staff need to be engaged in the Fundraising Planning, relationship building and proposal writing? Anybody want to tackle that?

I'll say quickly, that it's a choice that Jean and I have not hired out for it, that I think it could work in, you know, a structure to hire out for that work, that it's, it's work that Jean, and I feel very connected to, particularly as co founders, and so many of our funding relationships, you know, kind of are still in this these early places where, you know, we want to be stewarding that work. And also, I think it would be very, very easy for us to make a different decision in terms of the parts of the work that we wanted to own.

Molly, I know you're offered that service to your member stations to the grant writing and some of the volunteer members of fundraising. Can you talk a little bit about the trust that it takes for you to be able to write those grants for the organizations and how that developed over time?

Right. Trust is the key component in a successful collaboration. And if you can't, if you can't build trust, you're just going to spend all your time looking over your shoulder and thinking somebody's not, you know, giving you your due. So to be as transparent as possible in those kinds of processes is ideal. Fundraising. We do fundraising regionally and locally. It requires a lot of communication, but fundraising is about relationships. And so outsourcing to someone unrelated to your organization is probably not the most powerful way. To do fundraising. And that's why we say both news and fundraising are local. For example, classic public media is an on air drive. And they do that locally without any interference from, you know, regional. What we offer to clients that asked us to do fundraising is fulfillment, essentially. So we have a station that does their own prospecting in their community, we don't have those relationships, we can't do that. But once they've found the prospect, and they've expressed interest, they can be handed off to a professional person who knows how to have the conversation, build the contract, cut the spot, and, and send it back to the station. So really, what we're offering is the backroom side of fundraising and the actual relationship and finding that has to happen in the community, because those are the people using the service that you're fundraising around.

I think we're getting close to time. Does that correct? Joe? I wanted to just pose one kind of lightning round question to each of you. What if you had to come up with one word to describe the single most important element element of a successful collaboration? What would that be? Andrew?

I'll give you two words, because I don't think it's one but I definitely think it's shared mission. Molly,

trust Cassie. Plus Wanda Molly. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate all of you. I think you were a great role models have high hopes and expectations for what your collaborations will not only accomplish, but how much they're going to inspire others to follow suit. And I'm sure there will be many follow up questions for all of you. So we're going to wrap up. Thank you all for your time. Next up, we will welcome rise back for a meditation

session.