Hi, everyone. Welcome back. Welcome back to the homestretch. Yes, of the New Jersey local news Summit. So I'm honored to hand the stage over to my colleague Cassandra Tian who's going to talk about initiative that you'll be hearing more from us about in 2020 to the south Jersey information equity project. And without Cassandra, take it away.
Thanks, Stephanie. So some switching gears here from hosts presenter, happy to be joining this afternoon and talk about the South Jersey information equity project. But I'm one of the initiatives I managed here at the center. So we'll start with some background. The South Jersey information equity project, formed in 2019, as the center identified limited news resources in the region as part of our research, and that year, we joined with pa BJ, and the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists with the goal to improve the quality and quantity of news and information produced by and for communities of color. So from the start, we wanted this project to be powered, and driven by news and media professionals, and people living in and familiar with the issues impacting South Jersey. So with generous support from the Nicholson Foundation, we hired veteran journalist, former na BJ president and South Jersey resident Sarah Glover to assess the news landscape specifically for black communities and journalists. So in her research, she interviewed a dozen Black Journalists living and working in South Jersey, and in through 10 Community town halls help to examine how traditional and non traditional media outlets are serving South Jersey's black communities. And her research paper, she proposed solutions to help advance media equity in the region. So our initial research found a clear need for more resources, more information sharing and storytelling, and more, and the need for more support by black LED media ventures. So I'll unpack those points a bit. In terms of resources, identifying what's needed to elevate the skills and visibility of Black Journalists in South Jersey. For information sharing, and storytelling, how can we help increase those opportunities and stories produced by and for black communities. And in terms of support for black LED media ventures, I'll just bring up one example. That is of South Jersey journal, which was a monthly publication that launched in 2011. And that covered the growing African American communities of south of southern jersey. The southern the South Jersey journal reached a readership of nearly 70,000 by 2018, with distribution sites in Mercer, Burlington Camden, Gloucester, Salem, Cumberland, and Atlanta counties. Now unfortunately, the journal stopped publication in 2018. And in speaking of Sara's part of this project, locals indicated that they've come to rely on the journalists coverage of South Jersey news, information and cultural events. So community members did perceive a void in local news, since the paper folded. These are the kinds of information gaps that we're hoping to mitigate through our efforts via the South Jersey information equity project. So our research focused primarily on three counties, Camden, Gloucester, and Burlington and our defined area in South Jersey. But it's 32. cities, towns or municipalities have black populations of at least 20% According to the US Census. So that's significant audience that's not being reached and served by traditional media.
And just to share a couple of responses from residents who participated in our local survey, when asked about their local news coverage, a 47 year old Resident from Camden, spoke about the lack of positive news reports on the black community. There's crime in every culture, they said but yet, they perceive an over reliance on harmful racist stereotypes by news outlets. Another respondent, an educator based in Sicklerville said, complain that the six o'clock local newscast from Philadelphia had nothing to do with Jersey except about the shore and also critique the negative news coverage versus how they experience Life in South Jersey
so now to adjust, you know help adjust some of these concerns where we're in phase two of the South Jersey information equity project. And with funding from the Independent Public Media Foundation, we're beginning to implement new programs in South Jersey based on Sarah Glover's research. And our primary goals here are to amplify stories by and for the black community through or excuse me, in our three target counties, which are again Camden, Gloucester and Burlington. The second goal is to build trust and community connections do media making, and the third is to strengthen the networks between black journalists, media and communities in South Jersey. So to accomplish these goals, and create programs, such as reporting fellowships, and co creation workshops, we're seeking more input from South Jersey based journalists and media creators. So to start with sharing a 10 minute survey that seeks to gain a sense of what kinds of trainings and resources that the center might provide, and continued partnership with pap J. And also, how can we better support news and information initiatives by black journalists and media makers in the region. We also have another announcement, we've completed our search for our project coordinator. We have hired Adrienne bodak as our project coordinator, and we're still happy to have her join the sensor. This point I'd like to bring ag and up to just say hello, and tell us a little bit about herself. And her passion for amplifying opportunities for news and reporting in South Jersey.
Hello, everyone. Hi, I'm Adrienne, I'm currently reporting from home in South Jersey, the Burlington County area. Just a little bit about myself, I am a Montclair State alumni, and I have been working in media for over 10 years, yes, I went to a technical school, which leveraged actually, my experience in the field, and I've been working here ever since. So just collecting research, working in the community staying abreast on community projects, and events. Um, I have been keeping track of most of the things that I have been seeing and what people have been asking for what they need, um, amidst this time. So yeah, that's a little bit about me. Um, so throughout the three counties that I'm overseeing are being active in the servicing through this opportunity, which I thank you guys so much for so happy to be here. Um, there are so many things that I wish that, you know, divine timing, and you know, perfect timing is always at play. But I'm being in the field and within the community for such a long time that I wish that I received this opportunity so much earlier, because there's so much coverage that we could give or gave to the community within this last year. You know, being that the pandemic sprung a lot of new things on us. So yeah, I don't want to talk too much. But if there's anything else I can highlight, as far as maybe current events or community endeavors that have been going on that we can work on or introduced to the team. I'd be more than, you know, happy to speak about them.
Thanks so much, Adrian, and welcome once more to the center. We look forward to continuing to work with you. And we look forward to sharing more information with you about the South Jersey information equity project as we continue to move forward. Yeah, with our goals. Yeah.
And so you know, this project, as you mentioned, we started in partnership with pa BJ. And it's been, it's been important for us to continue that partnership. And I'm excited that we've been able to do that. And so we traveled recently down to Philly and Cassandra presented to the members of PA BJ down there. And one of the things that we've tried to do is increase their membership. And so we've, we've been paying for dues and we've doubled I think the membership of journalists in South Jersey. And maybe even if Adrian wants come back on stage in a minute talk more about this. But um, could we talk a little bit about the role that that current journalists or former journalists or people who are media makers in South Jersey, how they might connect with a South Shore theory of racial equity project and what role that they might play some opportunities we might have available for them through this.
Okay, um, well, first off, I think my contact is still up there. But if anyone is interested in being and getting involved with this project, you can always reach out to me at its yen et Cie and See at Montclair chat, right? So, um, so yeah, feel free to email me. And also, I would say that we're really keen and identifying people in the community who aren't necessarily trained journalists, but are concerned about, you know, the state of news coverage and the information gaps that they perceive in their communities. So these people will be instrumental in helping us to shape our co creation workshops and participate, and really get a chance to work with trained media professionals, and trained reporters to create to create reporting projects that are reflective of, you know, the issues that they see day to day. And their community. As we saw in some of the responses, it was just a complete disconnect. From the available news, I guess, options, disconnect between what's shown, and really what they see on a day to day basis, I think community input is really encouraged and key
up to this project. And by working with PHA we've, we've got a good base of, of Black Journalists that we've been in touch with in South Jersey that we can't get in touch with. And then something that Adrian's hit the ground running on is already identifying more media makers of color who don't have the platform, they should I'm not sure like how to even describe that, Joe, if we can bring Adrian back up on stage in a minute to that would be fantastic. And I feel like you know, putting those networks together is going to be really important. And then amplifying their voices and, and figuring out the best platforms that we can help provide to, to give them more exposure. Adrian, do you want to talk for a moment about some of the folks that you've already identified and the media makers that you see who who have a lot of promise that we could maybe help support?
Yeah, sure. So one of the things that the pandemic gratefully did for us was they kept a lot of people home. But it gave a lot of people opportunity to take initiatives into their own hands to basically make the platforms and, you know, create their own news through social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and so on, and so forth. So for example, in the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of peaceful protests were going on, just as you know, as far as the black community goes, specifically here in willingboro, a lot of my peers actually came together and created an organization for the peaceful protests, so they would be more organized in the willingboro area. One of the epicenters in willingboro is actually the marketplace in which they just closed down not too long ago, which was, you know, a very superfluous resource for our black community and willingboro, in which we did have a peaceful protest there. That would have been beautiful event coverage, because they actually did a march down the entire JFK way, leading up to the marketplace and just having, you know, positive words and affirmation spoken into the community and things like that. I'm still continuing to this day, there are open mic nights, and a lot of creatives are holding events that are very positive for our community. And it's right in Camden. It's right in Burlington, it's right in Gloucester County. And we're speaking of organizations that are fully fully prepared with the individuals that have the skills just needing the opportunity, or maybe even some of the, I guess, workshops to bring them up to, you know, news and journalism standards. But they're out here working and you know, open mic nights there is Charles Curtis, the third who also runs politics and poetry, which is actually a social media driven news resource from Rutgers Camden. And he is an alumni of Rutgers Camden, still working in news just broadcasting his own journalism and what he's seeing in a part of the three counties. I can name Charles and so many other individuals, Rebecca Peron, which is one of our council women in the community. I also spoke on voting that went on last week, like was mentioned earlier, not everyone knew the background stories on who they were voting on and wasn't always covered, that information was missing from this time around. And if we had more, you know, journalism's covering the individuals, you know, knowing who Ricardo Dale is, who we're women and, you know, our area for our counties and things like that, we would, you know, have more sense of a family or community oriented news source in the South Jersey area. So those are just some of the things that I've just been collecting, and a list of individuals who are ready to and have already been ready to, you know, continue on with the news in the area.
Absolutely. Right. If there's any questions, drop in the chat. I'm happy to pose them to myself otherwise We will probably get, we're early. We're ahead of time, so we can get moving on with lightning talks in just a minute.
Yeah, I would just add one more thing, I think, you know, listening to Adrian speak, it kind of reminds me of one of the points that came up during the visioning activity earlier today, when we think about what what do we want the future of news to look like. And one of the suggestions or one of the one of the suggestions posted was, you know, people reporting on their own stories telling their own stories. So if we may, you know, we, we have, as Adrienne said, a lot of people in the community who are looking to share their stories, but they just don't have the access, whether it be in terms of, you know, technical needs, or just in terms of finding platforms. So it's, you know, it's really been a pleasure for me, and I look forward to continuing to do little work that supports these individuals who are trying to speak to the community and beyond, you know, about concerns that are in South Jersey, but have implications for the rest of the communities throughout the state as well. So I'm really excited about this project, and, again, are really looking forward to working with aging, and everyone at the center and continuing to share our progress with you all.
And thing, I was just gonna, I'm just gonna touch on one last thing. Yeah, go ahead. Um, we do have the resources for journalism. It's just so many of our journalists also end up leaving New Jersey as well as actors area, a lot of people go to Cali, they go to Florida, they go everywhere, except for New Jersey. So that was also another thing that we also can pose to is if you're not necessarily ready, or if you're an individual who's just waiting for the opportunity to just reach out we can also fellowship with other close organizations like rec Philly, in which a lot of us jersey and South Jersey and go over to Philly, it's like, okay, well, let's go over to the city. That's the closest one there. They have the most resources, we can also fellowship with the already running media organizations to condition more journalists, interpreters. That was
yeah, that was a great point. It's an excellent point. Yeah. And so Clyde dropped a question in the chat, too. About what does the project offer organizations like his and introducing new voices? And how can organizations like his get involved? So Clyde Hueys, is he's been an advisor to the south Jersey information equity project. And he runs front runner, New Jersey, which is a fantastic website, based out of Atlanta County. So how could How could someone like Clyde in his organization, potentially get involved in the South Jersey information equity project? And, you know, what can we offer organizations like his?
Sure, so that I guess the first point I should mention is that the project does focus on Canada and Burlington and Gloucester counties, so right for the moment. So that will be one, you know, stipulation as far as getting involved with the project. But for sure, if even if you're based outside of those counties, we're interested in hearing from you and getting advice from you as well. And so I would say that the first point is, to reach out to us you have the center, you have my contact information, we are, you know, happy to hear from you and willing to work with you. In in terms of assisting you and you and your development of news and media stories, and also helping you and amplifying your platforms. Also, I would say that I had that thread there, and I lost it. But also I will say that the survey, yes, that's what it is, we are going to be reaching out to journalists who are based in South Jersey, we're just going to put open it up to members of the New Jersey News Commons, especially who are based in the region to kind of help us get a better sense of what's needed. You know. So for those of you who are, you know, Adrian talks about people leaving the area, because of the lack of opportunities, tell us, you know, if there's, you know, what we can do to help make it to help facilitate your work and your reporting in the region. So that's just, you know, direct directly contacting us filling out the survey, letting us know what the needs are. And then from there, we can begin to have more discussions about, you know, what kinds of programming and training and workshops we can implement, do the project.
Yeah. And our goal is to offer organizations like Clyde's to be potentially more content, potentially, you know, access to more media makers who can, you know, provide content and connect with the community? Like we want to? We're hoping to create a network, right? I mean, Adrian, that you're nodding, yeah, that's, yeah. Not not necessarily one singular thing. But a network that hopefully folks like Clyde can draw.
Yeah. And that speaks to also the media partners. Ships that we're looking to create to Yes, to help promote the work that will be created by the fellows who participate. Yep. So, yeah, we're also on the lookout for those as well. So if you have a newsroom that's already set up in the region, like, like Clyde mentioned, this is another opportunity to help amplify those stories.
We just hired Adrian, this week's for just getting started. Yeah. Awesome.
And another thing is, is, you know, I think there's also a reoccurring trend of just looking for news, you know, just being around and having individuals who are in the community who know what newsworthy things are, you know, what I mean, just being able to identify what news is, and just being able to report on it, write it, you know, so if you know, any, just, you know, journalists in general, or if you are just active in your community, one of the things that we will be actively looking for are individuals who are, you know, servicing the community who can actually report on what's going on. So we can have a newsworthy source of, you know, information, you know what I mean? So, a lot of times, it's just knowing what is actually newsworthy. And what we're looking to report on sometimes, too, because there are so many stories that may go out, but it's like, okay, we're not necessarily looking for that. But we just want to be honest, from all perspectives, if that makes sense as well. So, yeah, just totally tie everything together.
Thank you. I'm always so honored to have Allison Davis joins our events. And she, she posted she's out if you don't Ellison, she's a founding member, a member of any VJ. She's based up here in North Jersey. And she posted in the chat, a little bit of a history, the Garden State had an NA B Chapter Chapter A few years ago, many of the members were in South Jersey, and unfortunately, most left and those black journalists in northern Jersey joined the New York chapter of black shirt. We talked about that a little bit. I didn't know that history, though. Allison, we were talking about why is that there are any j chapter in in Jersey, and we're really proud of our partnership with with PB J and this efforts focus in South Jersey, but our work at the Center is also focused across the entire state. And so the work and what we learned from doing this intensive effort with Adrian, in South Jersey, you know, who knows where else that could go, what else might be able to do?
Especially if our South Jersey ins are already branching out to other places as well, when they return back home for the holidays, or just throw periodically throughout the year, they may have tons of more opportunities for us to branch out and, you know, show other places or learn from other places that are already super established to know what to do next.
Clyde, you mentioned if there's interest, let's talk. Yeah, yeah, let's Yeah, we I mean, we helped start the OMA New Jersey Chapter A couple years ago, which has been very quiet since the pandemic, unfortunately. But yeah, absolutely.
And that's actually a good idea, Clyde, because one of the prototypes that I was actually looking at as well was from rec Philly. I don't know if anyone is familiar with Rec, Philly. But Rec. Philly is basically a conglomerate workshop for media journalists, right? So they have workshops, they have creative sessions, they have work rooms in which people can utilize and use the equipment. They're fully equipped with anything HDMI cords, cameras, anything you need, you can like creatives can reserve and rent these spaces. So when we think of, you know, the organizations that are already put together, it's basically like, Okay, let's see what pieces of the puzzle we have right now. And how we can, you know, incorporate everyone under one umbrella and actually get the ball rolling. So I'm just excited for that, because we're just so close. We're just so close. Yeah, this is great.
Thank you, Adrian, welcome to the center. Thank you, Sondra, you've been hearing a lot more from us, all of us on this project next year. Yes. So we are a few minutes out of schedule, which is fantastic. Especially get to the end of the day. But now we're going to speed things up. This is where we start going really fast. So we're gonna jump into lightning talks. So our lightning talks are five minutes, and they cover a variety of initiatives happening all across the Garden State. So some people are going to share their screens and show slides, some people are going to talk, we've got at least one pre recorded lightning talk. But everyone only has five minutes, five minutes. That's it. I hope I don't have to shoot anyone off the stage. We've had to do that through the past at other conferences, Joel will run a timer for us. So you will see when it gets close to the end of a lightning talk that a little timer will pop up and and give notice to the speaker that their time is almost over. Because they have such a short amount of time. Our speakers are not going to be able to take questions unless they wrap up real quick. But you can still drop your questions in the q&a or even the chat box. You know, we'll get to as many as we can I have the panelists answer them. Just text instead of live. So with that we're bringing folks up on stage and I'd like to first hand it over to Joseph console's of public square shozy Five minutes floors yours needed to see. There you go. You're muted.
Yes. Thanks, Stephanie. And by the way, I'm going to be really fast. Thank you guys. Thank you CCM team for this amazing Summit. I'm glad I got to catch the last part of it. And thanks for inviting Public Square to participate in this, our first lightning round, very psyched. Good day everyone. It's an honor to address you and share some insight on the philosophical framework of public square in a very new and volunteer driven. And I mean, volunteer driven, local nonprofit news organization, employing journalism as a tool of civics and civic engagement, founded by a team of black women with a commitment to establishing a newsroom model that challenges everyone to create bigger platforms for diverse community members to construct and share their own stories through a multimedia and solutions driven approach. And so many of the conversations that that I got to see earlier sort of references that and sort of highlights that, for us in particular, it's to amplify the views and experiences of the local African diaspora Afro Caribbean, Afro Latino, indigenous and immigrant voices in global spaces. So for us, what is his connection, local news and public engagement. So the workings of a democracy demand and informed engaged citizen story, a citizenry where each member has full citizenship. In a racialized democracy, it is about the stories we tell each other the stories we create about ourselves and the stories of the othering of others. The counterbalance requires marginalized and disenfranchised voices to own the apparatus of the storytelling, and the shaping of their narratives. If this democracy is to work for all of us, all of which takes capital, out of reach of set organizations. And what we want to create is one that rests in the reality of who we are, and not the perception constructed. And that's really key in a democracy, right. We want to rest it in reality, and not in perception for non white designated Community Voices. When I speak of such a narrow binary construct of a society undergirded by whiteness as power, at the Condemnation of Blackness, the Democratic, diverse, inclusive, equitable, and equal spaces have always been racialized. In so doing, this structure has served to create and perpetuate narratives and mythologies that deny the humanity of such communities. Case in point, Public Square has been covering the story on the Rodwell Spidey brothers for several months. The case of these brothers is started in early June, this past summer, where four brothers were accosted by undercover unannounced police officers in front of their family home in the north south Ward and a summer afternoon, brothers a black police officers a white media outlets covered the initial altercation in the fashion that reinforce the stereotype. Stereotypes were associated with young black men and their lives was like mob and violence were descriptives assumptions of their backgrounds and so much more. We chose to engage with a family, neighbors and attorneys and give voice to the mom of four boys who herself has faced and continue to face intimidation and harassment. Our mission at Public Square to deconstruct the different components and tell the story from the perspective of a community. For example, I spent this morning in the courthouse to cover more of the ongoing case and amplify a story it has gone silent by most media outlets. At the hearing where the four brothers stood before the judge with their individual attorneys, their brother Justin walked into the courtroom and I think he was so reinvigorated and and just lifted by a courtroom lined with supporters for these four brothers. At the end of the hearing when everyone left a courtroom, I asked mom for her response to a proposed motion to release their son that is still being detained prior to any pretrial hearings, and she said I miss my son. I invite you to visit our website to read part one of this family striker Thank you
was fast jersey. Right. And also I should mention that Cassandra on our staff was also helped with founding Public Square and his Managing Editor, correct?
That's correct. Yeah. Transparency.
Yes, full transparency and full disclosure. Yeah. Thank you, Josie. So, next up, we're gonna hear from Simon Galperin. Simon come up on the stage of the Community Information cooperative. And you have five minutes and you know that Joe will whip you off the stage if you go over, so the floor is yours.
Happily, I'll do it halfway. Hi, everyone. My name is Simon Galperin. I'm the founder Director of the Community Information cooperative. We are a nonprofit organization dedicated to democratization of Journalism, Media and Technology. You might have heard about us from our work on info districts a vision for a nationwide network of special taxing districts to find local news and information at the hyperlocal level. You might be familiar with it with the way we fund other public services like libraries, sanitation, water, waste management, business improvement districts are common. And we envision a a that as a way to fund hyperlocal news and information to restore news deserts that are growing across the United States. We launched the project in 2016. Started the nonprofit community Book Club in 2018, and have successfully documented and seated in four districts as as a solution to the local news crisis across the country. And in 2020, we turned our focus to more practical applications of what we've learned, thinking through what a new generation of public media might look like. And we did that by launching the Bluefield information project and response to the pandemic and also to our evolving work. The blue pill information project emerged as a lab serving greater Bloomfield and Essex County in blue in in New Jersey, and exploring how we can build new services, new community sustained services for local news and information. The the way, the approach we're taking is news ecosystem restoration. Restoration Ecology is an actual field that I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in. But there are some basic elements that frameworks that we follow that are helping us get Bluefield from news desert to self sustaining news oasis. The basic steps are you stop erosion, you stop the degradation of the news ecosystem, you begin restoring nutrients. And then you replant you create the infrastructure that ecosystem needs to grow. Like all good ecosystem repair. Our started with listening through surveys, interviews, community meetings, social media monitoring, ecosystem mapping, we identified news and accountability gaps that we began to address for the purpose of creating a self sustaining news ecosystem here in Bloomfield. The way we're addressing the erosion of access to news and information in our community is through a daily curation service we're calling the news harvest. We basically keep an eye on over 150 sources of information in our community, and bring news on government, business, schools, social services and community events, to hundreds of community members, each of them a bulwark against the erosion of civic news, information and engagement in our communities and in their communities as well. This minimally viable News Service has allowed us to build a movement for news and accountability in this community. And the next step in our restoration is to begin providing some of the nutrients the ecosystem needs to run on its own.
To that end, we've been piloting training programs to give community members the tools and skills they need to meet their own info needs. And thanks to the New Jersey civic information consortium, we're changing our we're launching our first Community reporter for our trainings to help people learn those news and information scales and begin addressing their own neighbors news and information needs. Finally, the infrastructure we're seeing isn't a traditional journalism model. Instead, it will be more resilient because it will rely on community production, community governance, and hopefully one day in the future community funding so that no matter what happens to journalism as an industry, or journalists as professionals, our community can continue to meet its own news and information needs. And of course, like any ecosystem repair needs to be maintained. So we are partnering with organizations like stores AC, the Trenton journal, and the New York story collaborative to imagine a statewide collaboration, supporting news organizations like ours, depending on depending on community production and serving the news and information needs of traditionally underserved communities in New Jersey. The name of that collaborative is the New Jersey community media collective, supported by free press and local news lab at the local news fund at the Dodge foundation. So really excited about the opportunity to see this small network model for local news and information at a hyperlocal. local level, maximize its impact and efficacy as we explore statewide collaboration to meet the news and information needs of traditionally underserved communities and provide new inputs to the professional journalism class in our state. So they can help serve these communities better to thank you.
Ooh, nice. Just under the wire, Simon. Thank you so much. So next up, I'd like to welcome Shereena Zimi from the Institute for nonprofit news. And although she's with innr She lives here in Jersey. She's Jersey girl, so Shareen Oh, wait, we just lost Hurry up.
Yeah, I think we just lost Cherie. Let's see if she's back in the in the I'll keep an eye on her. For now. We'll just go to our next. Yeah, we got Mike Shapiro here. Mike Shapiro. Come on down. Yeah. Hey, I'm here.
You're up next.
How are you? Hi,
good floor is yours, sir. Oh, thank
you. I'm, I'm a little behind because I was expecting her to go before me. But let me see what I can do here. So just bear with me. We appreciate
you jumping in. We'll give Joe give him a few extra seconds.
Best I can do is eight seconds.
Yeah, I just got I'll just present this. So hi, everyone, Mike Shapiro from tap into. And thanks so much for having me here today. And I what I was going to be speaking about today is about a DIY user generated submission process for press releases and other kinds of non news content that we developed a tap into a few years ago, and how that revenue has grown over time. Basically, for those of you don't know, user submitted content, also known as user created content or user generated content is content submitted, created and submitted by an end user. At tap into this is not news. This is press releases event listings for the calendar, classified ads real estate listings, and it's clearly marked as such, when it's published on tap into the benefits of user submitted content is you're providing your readers in addition to original local news content, which all of our tap into sites provide every day, you provide readers with additional information, you also are able to generate additional sales leads. And it creates new revenue streams, both in terms of sponsored content, as well as as paid content opportunities through our DIY system. So in a fee based submission model, users are paying for their content to be published. And it's labeled as sponsored content. In a true sponsored content model. We're partnering with a business or an organization to publish their content and selling sponsorship rights to that content, which again, is labeled as sponsored content. And one of the reasons we developed this was we were getting like probably many of you, we were getting inundated with press releases and event listings and all this kind of stuff that were being emailed to, to our all of our franchisees and this was taking up an incredible amount of time, and effort to post these kinds of things. And so we developed this DIY platform, where users can do this directly through the site itself, they can choose the tap into locations, they want it published by they pay per site, and those payments split out to the franchisees of those towns. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the success of this system so far. So we built the system in 2019. In 2020, we started to really encourage the franchisees to emphasize submission of this content rather than through email through the content, the DIY content platform. And in 2020, the system brought in across our franchise sites in New Jersey, New Jersey brought in almost $40,000 in revenue. In 2021, we met with the franchisees and we said, you know emphasize more about the submission of the content through the DIY system. And when I submitted this proposal just a couple of weeks ago, the number was at $80,000 in revenue this year, however, we're now on track to well more than break 100,000 in revenue to our franchisees in New Jersey from this content, this DIY content platform. And in 2022, we're moving to a new system, which is being redesigned and redeveloped. It'll launch January 1, but there except for nonprofits that get an exemption when you submit your content through the DIY system, you will actually you will have to pay to submit content, whether it's press releases events for the calendar, etc, though, we're empowering our franchisees to grant exemptions to nonprofits in their communities, so that they will be able to submit content for free, we expect the revenue to at least double again, so that by the end of 2022, it should be bringing in over 200,000 in revenue for our franchisees in New Jersey. And so we're pretty excited about it, we think this is an interesting way to handle the delusion of submissions that everybody's been getting, and to deliver, to put value on the content on this, these press releases, event listings, etc, that our sites are publishing, because we're providing a significant audience for all of these different businesses, etc, to have their content published. So by providing value for that content and establishing value for that content, we're also deriving revenue for the franchisees who are owning and operating these local news sites in now, at 83 sites in New Jersey covering 125. Municipalities probably have a second or two left, so I just want to see if anybody has any questions.
Okay, one minute, so we're about a minute. Yeah. So in terms of what companies are paying for this, basically, you know, businesses are the primary focus of it. And then in terms of nonprofits, it really depends, you know, the nonprofit can apply for an exemption. So for example, there are nonprofits that have significant marketing budgets. There are others like rotary club that have no marketing budget, so the one so those obviously are granted exemptions, whereas the ones that have marketing budgets need to pay to reach our audience. You know, our model is 100%. Advertising based, we have no paywall. We're not a nonprofit. And thankfully, we've been able to be profitable now four straight years, and our and are tapping into sites, our franchisees are profitable as well. News is never something that anybody pays for, that's something that is covered. And that's our bread and butter of what we do. But if people want to reach our audience, then we put a we put a price on that. And, you know, in our view, sites that are not nonprofit, that's what a site should be doing. Rather than establishing a paywall and walling off people from getting the content for free. We believe everybody has the right to original local news content for their towns, regardless of their socio economic status. And so that's how we've been operating tap into and I'm proud to say we have successful tap into sites everywhere from the most Tony suburb to some of the most distressed areas of New Jersey.
Thanks. Fine. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for being a good sport and jumping in there, too. I appreciate you having me, of course. So now we'd like to welcome Shireen Azimi from the Institute for nonprofit news to the stage who although she works for Ironman, she is based here. Yay.
Yes, sorry about that. I think we had like a momentary power glitch here in Bernardsville. So let me let me just share a screen quick. Am I on now I'm on my laptop screen because I don't know what happened. Okay, I'm gonna share quick. Okay, so I'm here to tell you a little bit about what's going on in the nonprofit news world. And the just bear with me on my tiny tiny screen.
Okay, here we go. So nonprofit news different. So let me just give you a sense of our network at a glance. For those of you who don't know I NN is a national network. We now have about 350 members across the country, there's the map. Somehow, over the last two years during the pandemic, we've actually grown rapidly 25% year over year, probably the largest growth period in our 12 year history. We now have about 2500 journalists working throughout the network. But the scope of the work is actually much larger because those 350 members distribute through 3800 other media outlets, which means that every day probably 10s of millions of news, consumers are reading our content probably without even knowing that it originated in a nonprofit newsroom. A few trends I want to share with you a shift in composition. When I got started about 12 years ago, it was mostly national investigative newsrooms, we've seen an amazing growth in local and regional so if you look at this little chart, you add up local, state and regional, it's about 70% of the membership and we have seven members here in New Jersey. Also a shift in funding. It started out mostly national foundations. Now we're seeing more regional and local foundations get into the game. More individual donors not just sort of at the subscriber level, you know, a couple $100 a year to get your newspaper but significant major donations 510 $1,000 And more and more business income so this map a little chart shows local newsroom revenue mix, you'll see like you know any Gina Protoc quarter of a percent of these newsrooms revenue is coming from earned income, meaning what you think of is advertising, business sponsorship, sponsored content, and, and so forth and events. So it's really becoming a very sustainable mix, especially at the local level. And another shift we're seeing is in diversity, equity and inclusion, which we've just started tracking. But right now, more than a third of the members have staffs that actually reflect the US population, meaning, you know, over 35 to 40%, people of color, about one in three have a person of color in one of their top three leadership positions. Again, it could get better, it will get better, but you know, we're sort of heading in the right direction, and one out of five actually prioritize coverage of communities of color color. So it's not just something that they happen to do, it's actually something that they emphasize doing. Alright, what makes nonprofit news different, it's arguable, I'm going to present you present you with four ideas today. Four key qualities, alright, so it's in depth. If you're looking for the sports scores, or you know, recipes, you know, our members may not be your best bet. They really focus on hard news, they tend to have sustained coverage of issues, they do investigation, sometimes over the course of a year or two, they follow stories, they go deep, they build expertise, and they really present hard news. Second key quality is that it's accessible. There's almost never a paywall on our members, websites, their newsletters, the idea is that if you can pay and we want you to pay, then great. If you can't, you still have a right to read this news. And they also share with each other. It's a very collaborative model. So the content and resources kind of get spread across the network. Third quality is that it's inclusive. And by that I mean not only what I mentioned earlier about who's doing the reporting who's leading the newsrooms, but who they're talking to, we're seeing an increasing diversity in sources, which means an increasing diversity of stories, we like to say that our members tell stories that would otherwise go untold, I really think it's true. It's it's communities that have traditionally not had a megaphone. And it's going in and talking to those people and telling their stories, and making sure that they have a platform. And the fourth key quality, I think, is innovation. Honestly, the members don't have a ton of money. So they kind of have to do a lot with what they have. And that means often going to where people are meeting them where they are. So during the pandemic, some of the audiences maybe they didn't have great internet connections at home, maybe they didn't even have computers, but they needed to know where to get food, you know, where to get testing, what was going on with COVID. And so we saw more and more of our members doing text messaging, we saw them also hosting zoom events. And most recently, we've seen them pioneering WhatsApp, as a news distribution tool, because as you probably know, a lot of Spanish speaking immigrant communities are relying on WhatsApp to communicate. So a lot of innovation. And I'm going quickly. So I'll just leave you with this last slide. And I'll take questions if I have time. I sort of think of the middle here, right? If we want news to be a public good, then it has to sort of have these three essential qualities right, so as to be credible, and be seen as a trustworthy source for fact, based reporting, and when you have outlets that are focusing on opinions, people just aren't trusting them anymore. Oh, I've been bombed.
Perfect ending, though. That was awesome. Thank you Sheree? Yes, thank you. So now I'm so honored next welcome our colleague Ambreen Ali, from the Center for Cooperative Media to the stage and she's going to talk about the diverse source database. So Ambreen
thank you so much. And I'm so excited to share about the database with you guys today. If you haven't heard from me in the last few months, I've been talking about this nonstop. But the New Jersey diverse sources database is a collaborative that we launched a few months ago, it was born out of conversations that we had about how reporters and newsrooms can do a better job of sourcing from a more diverse pool of experts. You know, we all know that newsrooms are busy places that editors and reporters don't have a lot of time that often they're working on deadline. And so, you know, when it comes to picking up the phone and talking to somebody, you're going to go back to your same old sources. And what we wanted to do was think of some ways that we could create tools that would make it a little bit easier for reporters to one source build when they have some downtime, you know, kind of bind people on there be that they haven't necessarily talked to and get to know them and then to also just like quickly find somebody when they are on deadline that is relevant to the topics that they're covering, without necessarily reaching for, you know, whoever is in their immediate circle. So the New Jersey diverse sources database is a is a website that is publicly available. I'm going to share my screen now, so that I can show this to you It's a diverse sources nj.com. And it's, it's basically, I should probably just pull it up to show you. So here it is. It's basically a collection of profiles of experts on a variety of topics all over the state. It covers a lot of different types of beats from, you know, professors at universities on health and policy and to activists to entertainers. And we're hoping to continue growing it and you can search through this website by location. So maybe you cover a specific part of the state. And so you want to look for experts there or a specific topic area. And you can go click through learn more about the individual and have contact information for reaching them. The sources themselves are managing their profiles, and we're working with them to kind of build a community around this project as well. So providing them resources on how to reach out to the media, what to expect when a journalist calls you, you know how to kind of navigate that situation. And they range from people who are, you know, professionals have been doing this our whole lives and are very well media trained to people who are maybe members of communities that have not been traditionally called upon by reporters to be interviewed. And for reporters, we're trying to be useful beyond the database by holding events that showcase some of the experts on this website and give an opportunity for people to connect. So we've launched an event series called The SOS sampled sources event series, and we held an event last week that was on COVID, and worker rights issues. So we had three panelists speak, who talked about their, who talked about their expertise, and then took questions from reporters. And we're hoping to continue that series moving forward as a way to share just opportunities for reporters and sources to connect. This is a collaborative so we welcome media organizations to partner with us on this, if you do decide to partner with us, then the only ask is really to promote it within your newsroom encouraged reporters to use it. And to help us nominate folks at the bottom of the website at diverse sources. nj.com, you can click on nominate a source. And there's a very simple form for doing that. And anybody can do it. We've been passing it along to community organizations and universities. But we ask that anybody who has experts in mind that would be good for the database, consider adding them. And all that does is invite them to fill out a source profile, it's an opt in thing, so they decide whether they want to be part of it. But in general, we found that this is one way that maybe we can move the needle a little bit on getting our newsrooms to do a better job of covering the diversity of this state, which is truly incredible. We have so many communities represented in New Jersey, and we want to do a better job of telling those stories. So diverse sources nj.com. Thank you.
And under five minutes, awesome, thank you, every thank you for all the work that you've done on the database. And Ambreen is going to be leaving us at the end of this month. And we're going to be looking for someone else to take over this work. So if you just heard about the database, and you're like, that's amazing. I love that get in touch because I'm just going to be hiring someone just take over this really important project soon. So next up is to Sean Glover from the New York Times. So to Sean, come up on stage, turn your video on the floor is yours.
Thank you very much, Stephanie, Cassandra, and everybody else on the team Joe want to talk about how to become a better local media partner. And I want to start off with the understanding of what our position is, as local media, as local media were uniquely positioned as a platform for the common interests, and sometimes the uncommon interests in the local community. So what does that mean? Well, for one, it means that there are, you know, depending on the town, the locale that you're in, there are 1000s 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of people who are interested in what your platform has to share and say simply because of the proximity simply because it's either a home or it's where they work, or it's where they play where they you know, entertain themselves, but there are people who are willing to give us their attention. What that also means and more importantly, is that we have to listen. As local media platforms we have to listen there's an adage that you know we are born with two ears and one mouth and use them in proportion as local media. We should follow that there's far more listening for us to do formal listening that we can do and should do. And there is in speaking, or writing or spreading a narrative. And sometimes the listening is not going to come in comfort, sometimes it's not going to come to us easily. Sometimes we have to mined for the data mined for what's on people's minds mind for what they want to share. But in this day and age, fortunately, mining is not necessarily a heavy lift, it has to be consistent. But it doesn't have to be a heavy lift. Mining could be, you know, sharing polls on social media, Facebook, Twitter and allow for polls, we can utilize that feature to find out what's the pulse, what's on our audience's mind what's on our local communities minds. It also means that we could do on the street interviews, where you can get an awful lot of context, a lot of a lot of content and context, just by spending a couple of hours on the main street in your town, finding out what's the pulse of the town, you know, as a resident of X town, you know, what's on your mind and allowing people to just speak for a couple of minutes on what their priorities are, whether it's in politics in a local municipality, whether it's in arts and culture, whether it's in business, whether it's the pandemic, whatever it might be. And so, that also takes us to knowing, you know, who is our client, or customer? And then who was are those? Yeah, and then there, again, is Mr. Profit media platform, and, you know, we offer advertising as, as a service or a product of the platform, you might have certain clients and customers, but they may not be our end user. And user may be someone who just takes in the content, shares it with, you know, other people in their networks. But we have to know who's who, so that we can know, you know, who we're serving, if we're serving them? And if so, how are serving them? And how well, are we serving them? How well are we being a partner to them? We also want to know who are our partners and comrades. And, you know, the best example for me most recently has been the Center for Cooperative Media, because I was not aware of the Center for Cooperative Media for up until a couple of years ago. And these are resources, they're they're partnerships. There's a network there that I was not aware of, and, you know, look at look at me now, so to speak, you know, we're on, you know, this call and, you know, this event, because I was made aware of it and and understanding that there is more and more resources that are available. Another question to ask ourselves is what makes us uniquely unique? So being local media in and of itself makes us unique. But what makes us unique within the network of local media, in a city like New York there multiple local media platforms. So what is it that the New York Times specifically can offer? Or what is it that we have as a skill or a resource or an expertise that would make us specifically unique in that context? And so having these types of questions in mind really just keeps us in the spirit of what is it that we have to offer a value to the people that we're serving? How can we be a partner that's valuable to others consistently. Thank you very much.
Awesome, Tyshaun thank you so much. Thank you for being such a great partner, us too. At the center we've really enjoyed working with and supporting you. So next up, we've got a duo. We have cloud us from front runner in New Jersey and Kitty miles from the Trenton journal, they're going to talk about the fact that they are to have a very small group of people working as part of Facebook's new newsletter platform. So Kitty Clyde floor is yours.
Okay, well, I guess I'll start start off, um, you know, I want to thank everyone for inviting, inviting us to participate. You know, working with Facebook, Facebook has been a wonderful opportunity. For me. I'm very supportive. I have a strategic partner, manager who helps me to see things on a different way. So you know, I can't do view things when I'm creating content solely as a journalist, but also I know I need to think about creating content as a content creator. So his book has been wonderful, and helping me with that in that regard. Whatever. Glad I still can't hear
anything now so not getting anything. Oh
so I know we only have five minutes so Clyde, I don't know what's going on with your, with your audio. But um, the the face the deal that we have with Facebook for me is for two years. And the whole purpose of the deal is to make sure that the newsletter that I created enter in the trading journal is able to live on without without Facebook. So the deal so they're helping us with, with artwork, they're helping us with attorneys. They're they help us with social media engagement. That was really important. I know CLI looks like you want to say stuff out
on now. Gotcha. All right. All right, hallelujah. What I was gonna say before the one of the things that Facebook bulletin has really helped me on is connecting with people. Right now, on Facebook Bolton, I have about a 1000 followers, and that continues to grow. And I've been constantly getting contacts, which is something that that has been a I won't say difficult on my full time front runner, New Jersey website. But the people on Facebook are really active there. And they're asking questions they're probing in, it's really helped me kind of tailored, what kind of news they're looking for and what I can offer. So so that has been a benefit. And also, it has helped me grow my regular website in front runner new jersey.com. Because you want to make sure you're growing both. So we got about two minutes here.
But when Clyde can, um, I think you and I, we spoke yesterday. So when you and I we have something in common. We we both had platforms before we started our Facebook project. So um, can you speak on to why you decided to how do you decide what content goes on to your front runner, new site and what goes on to your Facebook. Right now it's
kind of mobile. I tried to focus for my my Facebook site, I tried to focus on on stories that that have a wider appeal, all of my hyperlocal news goes straight up, go straight to front runner, New Jersey calm. If it has a wider appeal. Matter of fact, I'm working on a piece on the governor's race that's going to be on my Facebook site. There is a piece that I did, it started off as a local piece, but I branched it off about black farmers, I turned that into a Facebook beats and that got a lot of publicity. So that's kind of how I'm tailoring my stories from what goes on Facebook directly to what goes to front runner new jersey.com. And that may morph as time goes along, but that's how I'm looking at it.
Can I add that for me? I don't I it's important for me not to just rely solely on Facebook as well. Yes, I look at them as like a wizard, right? They do. They're able to do certain things and you can grow your following but there's, there's there's still a lot of work that needs to be done, you know, in terms of going out and meeting people because you can get a whole bunch of followers. That's not necessarily important to me, but it's building community building community where people will trust you. They trust you as a new source. I find that more important to me than anything else. But um, they've been wonderful to work with. I have no complaints and I'm not even sure if we call them Facebook or metaverse. But they've been very
diverse, but I have no complaints either.
Awesome. Thank you both. Thanks, Clyde. Thanks, Kenny syro those audio issues club. We have another Kenny up next. Kenny catgirl from Broad Street. So Kenny is gonna join us today to talk about the ad Lab, which is an initiative that the Center for Cooperative Media has helped support with funding from the local news lab. So Kenny, floor is yours. Kenny
paging Kenny you Hear you just need to unmute and and turn on this video. That's all
we need to run like a Jeopardy timer.
Oh, that would be fine. Yeah, that would be great. Alright, so Kenny while we wait for Kenny we can go on to Tom, are you ready? Tom Bergeron? No. Okay, well, what we'll do is we will go ahead and run Clyde Bill Marcano. How about that? Yeah, let's do that. Oh, wait, there we go. Got Tom. Let me just come on. There's all right. Tom's ready. Sorry to jump that time to go for it.
No, it's okay. I just said to figure out the buttons as always do. Listen, I appreciate you guys having me on today. I'm, I'll introduce myself. I'm Tom Bergeron. I'm the editor and co owner of ROI NJ I'm not the I'm often known as the host of Dancing with the Stars, which I am not. And I'm also known as the guy who was insert the word smart enough or dumb enough to try to start his own media publication in 2017. And people often ask, you know, why did you do it? How did you do it? What are the tips for starting a media organization in this day and age of in theory at a time when media is contracting? So I came up with a five step do's and don'ts and rules for starting your own, that we are a for profit publication. And here's the here's my blog, five steps are going so one, under the idea that people are consuming content more than they ever have before. So there is a need for media, there is a one for media. And you can in theory, make money at it if you do it right. So here we go. Step one, define your coverage area. It can be big, it can be small, it just needs to be focused. And what I mean by bigger, small, but focus, consider let's say you wanted to cover education, are you going to do one school? Are you going to do one school district? Are you going to do one subject? Are you just going to cover stem? And then if you're just going to cover stem or history or entrepreneurship? Are you going to do that within a school district and town or statewide, however it is you have to define what you cover and who you cover and stick to it. When you stray from that as people tend to do they want to cover everything. That's when you become too saturated. Step number two, figure out if anyone else is covering what you want to cover. This is very key, obviously, what is your competition? Or are you filling a much needed void? The second answer is always better if you're filling a void. I give the example this way. Let's say you wanted to start an organization about covering state politics in New Jersey. Good luck, lots of competition. Lots of mainstream media, lots of of online media, all kinds of people are covering politics in the state of New Jersey, if you want to jump in Boy, that's a crowded market, but go for it. Let's say you want to cover politics, Justin Morris Plains, New Jersey, my hometown. Good for you there is I can tell you there is no one covering the political scene in Morris Plains, New Jersey, you found yourself a narrow niche, that's all great. But there's one key. Step number three, find out who your potential sponsors slash advertisers would be. If you want to make money, you're going to need advertising, you're not going to make it on clicks, you're not going to make it on, you know, other ad streams, you're going to need basic sponsors and advertisers have to figure out who your audience is. And again, how saturated the market it is. Let's say you want to do a blog on youth lacrosse and whether you've decided you're going to do boys or girls townwide. county wide statewide, you figured out your niche you're going to do boys across Great, there are tons of companies that would love to reach people who are interested in youth lacrosse. Now you have to figure out how you compete for their dollars in this particular space, there's gonna be a lot of people covered. So very key to figure out ahead of time, do you have people that are going to support your endeavor, if you don't, all you got to do is have a blog that you're that you're doing from your bedroom. Step number four, figure out who your business partner will be. This is very key. If you're doing content, you can't do the business side, period, end of story, no debate, you just can't do it. There's the ethical part of it. What's going to happen the minute you're talking to somebody and they're asking about advertising, but really there's a time element. Both sides of the business are incredibly time consuming to do well. And both of them can jump at a moment's notice. You can't dictate when the news is going to happen. You can't dictate when a potential advertisers going to call you back. You need to have one person for each so if you're a one man band, one person trying to God bless. I just think that's very difficult. You want to get in a situation where you have a clear division of responsibilities, one doing content, one doing business and try to grow those respective staffs. That's what we have here at ROI. Number five, step five. I'm going to sound like the grumpy old man yelling at the clouds here. But it comes from experience so many people who who get into media say, I'm going to do it and I'm going to do it all on video. That's what people want. Everybody wants to look at video on the phone. Everybody wants to do it. I'm here to tell you that that is incredibly challenging and very difficult to make money.
I can tell you from experience in a previous life, I worked at Yahoo, probably the biggest video media outlet on the globe. And I saw how many, how many video projects at Yahoo alone died. And you've seen it with so many startup news organizations that are going to be all video based. And it's just really hard to get people to watch videos far harder than you think it's really hard to get people to pay to put an ad on a video. And then it's really really hard to get them to do that twice after they see the numbers on the first one. We had a joke at Yahoo the video that you're looking for as the waterskiing squirrel, that's what people want. They don't want to see an interview with with the President, let alone the town council person. So I'll leave you with this. Here's what Yahoo, here's a definition of a viral video at Yahoo. Unless you're gonna have this type of thing on your site, it's not going to work. A viral video are videos that you will watch twice, and then send to a friend. So think about your viewing habits. You have to watch it twice because it's so cool. And then you have to send it to a third person. Unless your site has tons of those videos. Don't go with video. It's a tough thing. That's five minutes. That's my advice.
That's awesome. Thank you so much, and congrats on growing ROI and j into the juggernaut that you have to serve the last few years. So now we have Kenny, he's with us, right Kenny, you're there. You can hear there. Yay. I'm here. Hey, all right, floor is yours. All
right, thank you guys. And thank you for putting us on. Alright, cool. So I'm Kenny, I'm the founder of Broadstreet. Bracci is a company that does Ad Management. And we serve about 400 publishers, a lot of them in New Jersey. And we embarked on a project with Center for Cooperative Media called ad lab. And it was an effort to bring group ad sales to some publishers in New Jersey and also some sales training on the way. So you know a little bit actually a little bit about, you know, the time just spoke, my background was also at Yahoo. So prior to Rajshree, I was very involved in ad networks, I had a really good sense of how they worked. And when I started the company, Broad Street, we were originally going to launch a digital ad sales network. And we made an attempt at doing that. But we learned a lot of things along the way. And this is kind of second iteration of that. And I think some things went very smoothly, which we'll talk about today. But quick overview, concept, high level idea. You know, the training that was involved a review that and I have some of the resources, if anybody would like to see that. And then I'll talk about the sales network. Since that was part of the there's a really big focus, a lot of effort went into that known obstacles with doing something like that, pre empting, those obstacles, the model, the setup, and the successes. So there were two components. As I mentioned, one was sales training for all publishers involved. Part of it was that, you know, we can do group sales, or part of the thinking was that we can do group sales. But it would also be great if we could give everyone a really nice primer on what's really working for publishers in terms of sales. So the general process that you go through, but then for the group sales component, this idea you've probably heard before, you know, one central sales rep who does ad sales on behalf of many publishers. And we had some ideas of why part of that could work, why some of it was a little harder than previously thought. But it's all about getting a bunch of small publications together and selling to advertisers who probably wouldn't work with them individually, because it's a lot of overhead. So on the training piece, we did an eight part series that was over the course of eight weeks, and we went over pretty much all the key components of ad sales, pricing and packaging, your digital ad inventory, building your lists, organizing those lists and CRMs doing outreach so you know, what are the things that we typically say on an outreach email or phone call running successful meetings, putting together a proposal closing and renewals? And of course we had a net Batson who's the Ad Sales Director of Bristol net, very involved in you know, Bracci, New Jersey media and, you know, the Center for Cooperative Media project. But we, you know, within that expertise, we also built some resources like a media kit, template, proposal, template, advertiser case studies, things that our publishers could use just hit the ground running because we're all about actionable advice. We got an email that halfway through, someone said, Hi, Kenny, in advance of our class and hope you can offer some advice on something they said I've been following the ad lab method and I'm in the process of closing to new advertisers. So it was awesome that that training led to somebody being able to sell ads on their own as well. So quick view of the resources we had the media kit template, each one's about like some between eight and 10 pages, but you can cut and paste what you like, don't like they're in Google doc form. So it's really easy to make a copy and edit. And I'll have this link at the end. But if you do want those resources and the recordings, it's all in one big Google Doc, add lab training, or bracha. That's comm slash add lab training. So on that group sales piece, there were some known obstacles from when we had tried to do this before Produttori, probably around 2013 2014 small publishers like herding cats, very busy business owners trying to get everybody you know, either on a call or on a single email thread or responding to that, that is tough sometimes. Also, some things vary widely among publishers, ad inventory, traffic preferences, relationships with existing advertisers, we don't want to sell an ad to, you know, some, somebody that a publisher has been working with, which, you know, we ended up doing this time,
but ended up working around a little bit. There's also some issues and technical ability, hey, we need these ad tags on your site. So we can run these ads from these advertisers. Usually, people need some help. And getting that setup also need a good sales rep with regional connections. And that was awesome for that. And then, at sufficient size of sales, if you're dealing with a big enough advertiser, you're kind of competing with ad exchanges. So we want to stay with more regional advertisers. And you don't always have good traffic in certain key geographic areas. So we're missing Hudson County, I think initially, but we tried to solve all of these. So get everyone on group email thread, you know, our team set up all the publishers preset the inventory, like, Hey, we're gonna have a big leaderboard and top sidebar, this is what's required, we needed to be standardized sell on a CPM basis, just so we could, sorry, my screen switch sell on a CPM basis, so that we could, you know, in fairness, deliver the revenue from the sales to publishers based on the proportion of traffic that they served. And we kind of had to say, if we sell it, you were gonna say very family friendly and very, you know, brand conscious, but when if we sell it, we need you to run it. And then again, trying to navigate, navigate those sensitive advertiser relationships, like I said, and that took part in that we stuck to regional sales. And we did recruit a couple publishers who were in some of those areas that helped enable some of the sales. So because bracha had built up the relationships, we had a lot of contacts and we can get a couple of publishers where we needed them. The model and the plan was set up publishers but add tags in optimal positions, create a one pager and sales sheet, approach those regional advertisers and offer them basically a minimum time timer. I did I did. I already threw
your throw, that's okay. It's good. Since we're supporting this project, I was like, I'm not gonna stop.
Okay, all right. I'll rip through the slides. Give me 30 seconds. All Campaigns, we're looking at 40 seconds. That's okay. Um, and we did this for about 90 days. Here's the sell sheet and then I'll just skip to the successes. We did have some great successes with Hoboken Arts Music Festival, Mio Performing Arts Center, Montclair Film Festival, magic family getaways, and more to come. We're only 45 days and we got 45 to go. And that has been working pretty well. So thank you, everyone.
I am so glad to hear that. And I know we were rushing you off stage spare five minutes. But we will be sharing all of this publicly it will be writing about this. And, you know, we'll hear from Kenny and Annette again, soon, probably after the new year. And if you get Cassandra's newsletter, hopefully you do, and if you don't, we'll be happy to sign you up. We will share everything
we find in that newsletter. It'll be in there as well.
Yep. All right. So this is the last lightning talk of the day. Clive Mercado from a pretty Spanner before club you'll steaks takes the stage before you start playing that there Joe. I do just want to also shout out our interpreter Martha Rodriguez. If you've listened to the Spanish stream at all today, you know that she has been going nonstop the whole time. Martha, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. You have been amazing. Alright CLEVEO clever bow. Take it away.
Hello everybody. My name is Clay Wellmark Kano editor, report this panel. I want to present what is report this panel what we do here in New Jersey. For that I want to read something that I wrote for this occasion. Report this panel is one of the largest Spanish language newspaper and digital news outlet for New Jersey. We live through the the newspaper distributed in North and Central counties of the state, especially in the cities and town we high percent of Hispanics population, according to the US Census. In addition to the print edition report, this panel has a local news with sigh in The other is W. W. W Pew report this panel Netcom. We also have an email blast newsletter that we send every weekly every week with the most important information of the way to our list of subscriber. See seeing the creation of the newspaper in June 2006. The newspaper has focused on core major events occurring within the New Jersey broad and diverse Hispanic community. For 15 year, we have tried to fail the system information gap within the community. Since the mainstream media traditionally do not cover what happened in this community. And when they do, they usually report from a point of view that doesn't represent the interests of the community. From the base of the newspaper, we have kept the community informed and educate on issues of importance to a socialist struggle for more than thingie or to attend by realizing complaining about works, where it is and what they can do to prevent this abuse. labor exploitation April to motivate an effort to maintain professionalizing our field occasionally at college, and will score inform us information about a constant buy at the state and national level to a stop is abuse as well as the patient to pass an immigration reform that re apart to ascertain searches for undocumented immigrants living in the country. In 2020, during the COVID 19 pandemic, the newspaper focus of keeping the community informed about the implication of the disease prevention measure is the problem of the disease in this day and the country and the effectiveness of the vaccines. Report this panel Polish actual information based on the facts during this time. We are information we try to counteract the constant bombardment of false information about the pandemic that the committee received to social media. That him that the NRA, Mistress told stories and the media and the medical community in our COVID or COVID. Their support we will have from the Center for Cooperative Media was very helpful. We whom we cooperate through others relation of New Jersey, a Spotlight Stories, that then we're polishing expanding in our pain and the Hitec edition. In 2020. We also focus on educating the community about the important importance or the president election and implication they have for the entire population. In
in this sense, we had the opportunity to work cooperatively we established yet on various journalists stories about the election and the implication for the Hispanic community. This is Tory were publishes on the front page, both in the Star League and report this panel. This journalists cooperation was chased to one of the Center for Cooperative Media programs that allows Agni media to work in conclusion with his teammates to media. This cooperation program between the media as well as this chunk, and translation of the stories allow us in 2020, to offer to expand the community more detail and complete information about the pandemic as well as the presidential elections. Prominence like these we consider that a true container and expand to oil publication. Provide is one provider it is don't we do this program. They in a flexible manner. Recognize both the financial and estate constraint the main acting in our face this type of problem and help input information quality of the media. With benefits all resin of this day. Hera report is pan we continue to work on this program to the best of our ability. And we look forward to continue to inform and educate the community for many years to come. Free rose independent press on by woman black people. Latino is power while true define the state and the country. Thank you so much for listening to me. Bye.
Thank you. Hi, Val. And thank you, Cassandra. Thank you, Joe. Thank you everyone who presented with us today. That's it. That's the end of the 2021 New Jersey local news Summit.
Thank you stop by and a pleasure.
We hope you'll have a great holiday next week and we will be sharing the recordings, slides and everything. Probably after the weekend probably look for that Monday. So thank you all have a good night.
Take care. Bye. Get out of here do we were smoking reefer and you don't want to Potter that shit. You're smoking reefers.
