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News, information and much more for independent online news publishers. 
LION expands outreach to local online news publishers
 

LION Publishers, which fosters the viability and excellence of independent local news, has vastly opened up its membership to additional organizations that are working to water local news deserts around the country.

In significantly broadening its tent, LION continues addressing the rapidly declining volume of local news and information available to communities. Going forward, LION will work intentionally to build the capacity and sustainability of ethnic media, public media, niche publications and university-based local news initiatives, said Kelly Gilfillan, the newly elected chair of LION’s board of directors.

Related: LION searches for new executive director. A Q&A with interim executive director Steve Beatty. And why Matt DeRienzo returned to newspapers.


Miss 2018 LION Summit? Catch up with articles, video

If you were unable to join us for this year's LION conference, the country's largest gathering of local independent online news publishers, you can catch up with video of many of the sessions here. They include invaluable presentations and discussions on revenue ideas, audience development, journalism and engagement for the local online news business. 

Poynter spotlighted "three cool ideas" from the conference you can use at home. And the LION website has writeups on a number of this year's presentations, including:

- How Richland Source found private money to support ambitious reporting, with no strings attached.

- Local online news publishers use events to engage readers and build their brands.

- Investigative reporting on a shoestring budget.

- Committee to Protect Journalists asks local news organizations to help it monitor threats to press freedom.

- Local news legal issues workshop: Libel and invasion of privacy.

- Local news legal issues workshop: Copyright and digital media.

- Legacy black media companies still battling myths.

- Companies pitch ideas to streamline technology so you can focus on newsgathering.


Donations to nonprofit news organizations will be doubled

This year's #NewsMatch program is underway, with a coalition of foundations offering to match donations made to an expanded number of nonprofit news organizations -- 155 of them -- through the end of the year. Numerous local news sites run by LION members are participating.

"Each organization is eligible to receive a total of $25,000 in matching funds for donations from individuals up to $1,000. The public can find and donate to these trusted, independent news organizations at newsmatch.org." "

"In the early days, digital nonprofit newsrooms were run by investigative reporters who believed the public service mission of journalism had to continue," writes Karen Rundlet of the Knight Foundation. "But those same reporters-turned-publishers didn’t necessarily have all the skills to run a financially sustainable organization. Today, nonprofit newsroom leaders are using NewsMatch to strengthen their own capacity and learn the ins and outs of membership drives and community engagement from experts and top trainers. They are working to establish their permanent place within the news ecosystem."


What will replace a beleaguered local newspaper industry?

"Over the past 30 months, The (San Jose) Mercury News has lost 34 percent of its daily print subscribers. It’s lost 19 percent of its Sunday ones, dropping to 118,000 copies," Ken Doctor writes in a piece asking what will replace local newspapers that are a shell of their former selves. "This is the state of the local daily newspaper business today: Simple survival is the question. Which prompts another question: Are we moving into the NINO age? As in, newspapers in name only, to borrow from the RINO slang of pre-Trump Republicanism."

We've got an answer, of course -- the emerging ecosystem of local independent online news publishers.

Editor & Publisher asks: Can nonprofit news help save the media industry?

Related: Still looking for a brighter bottom line in the newspaper business. What nonprofit digital newsrooms need next to grow their audience and find revenue.


News About Local Independent Online News Sites
 
CITY BUREAU: How volunteer coders helped City Bureau make Chicago's public meetings more accessible.

GOTHAMIST: Craigslist founder donates $2.5M to New York Public Radio to help with Gothamist relaunch.

WAUSAU PILOT: From Employee to Publisher: How Media Veteran (and LION Member) Shereen Siewert Built Wisconsin's Wausau Pilot and Review.

WHEREBY.US: "We’ve been helping Miami vote for three years. Here’s what we’ve learned."


Tools and Tips: Advertising and Revenue
 
AD BLOCKING: Chrome will soon ad-block an entire website if it shows abusive ads.

AD FRAUD: This Ad Fraud Scheme Stole Millions, But Almost No One In The Advertising Industry Wants To Own Up To It. The next frontier in digital ad fraud: local markets.

AD SPENDING: The online advertising business continues to grow at double-digit rates, according to the latest report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

BLOCKCHAIN: Alas, the blockchain won't save journalism after all.

CROWDFUNDING: 2018 has been a record-breaking year for journalism Kickstarters (though only about 1 in 5 actually get funded).

FOUNDATIONS: The Crisis Has Become More Acute." What Two Major Funders Are Doing to Strengthen Journalism. Impact lessons from a community foundation investing in local journalism.

FUNDRAISING: Free resources for fundraising on Giving Tuesday.

MEMBERSHIP: Five Steps to a Stronger Membership Program. Six questions you should ask yourself before launching a membership model. Five lessons from the Guardian's membership strategy, three years on. Can membership-focused The Correspondent “unbreak news” in the United States? Before communities can invest in news, newsrooms must invest in communities. How working with communities helps make journalism that is worth paying for. Total customer lifetime value illustrates long-term investment. ‘We learned not to treat everybody the same’: Why The Independent chose a membership-style model over paywalls.

MOBILE: How Publishers Can Zone In On Location-Based Mobile Apps. Tailoring Your Mobile Strategy To Connect With Consumers. Back to the future: How mobile-first and print-first newsrooms are similar.

NEWSLETTERS: How’s your newsletter doing compared to other news orgs’ newsletters? This tool lets you find out. Making a Newsletter: What happens before nonprofit newsrooms hit “send?” Is the email newsletter a business product or an editorial responsibility? How newsletter publishers re-engage lapsed subscribers. Inside Quartz’ obsessive approach to email newsletters.

PODCASTING: The Financial Times sees podcasts leading to paying subscribers. How Podcasts Became a Seductive—and Sometimes Slippery—Mode of Storytelling

SEO: Study: SEO Suffers From Lack of Context.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: Inside The Facebook-Sponsored Boot Camp To Help Local Pubs Drive Subscriptions. Facebook’s and Google’s subscription tools offer publishers modest improvements. So some people will pay for a subscription to a news site. How about two? Three? How to get the email addresses you need to drive new subscriptions. Beyond email: Other tactics to drive users to subscription offers. Four kinds of content readers will pay for. With “straightforward and unsexy” email, The Christian Science Monitor has hit 10,000 paid digital subscribers in a year. How the San Francisco Chronicle Increased Digital Subscriptions. How flexible paywalls used as segmentation tools are key to acquisition, retention success. To goose subscriber growth, The New York Times plans to try a flexible meter. Grand Junction Daily Sentinel Provides Free Subscriptions For Local College Students.


Tools and Tips: Journalism and Technology
 
CLIMATE CHANGE: Five tips for localizing climate change stories. Covering extreme weather: What to avoid and how to get it right.

CRIME: Mugshot galleries might be a web-traffic magnet. Does that justify publishing them?

COURTS: Why editors need to make court coverage a top priority.

ELECTIONS: Research: The importance of trusted news sources during an election. The margin of error: 7 tips for journalists covering polls and surveys. During the midterm elections, local fact-checking was scant. The media’s eagerness to discount the ‘blue wave’ feeds a dangerous problem. Facebook Groups are “the greatest short-term threat to election news and information integrity.”

ENGAGEMENT: The journalism industry knows engagement is necessary to survive. But this study shows formidable barriers stand in the way. Namely, themselves. “To do deep community engagement, you can’t just buy a tool.” How well are journalists really listening to their audience? How WBEZ Launched Curious City and Started the Curious Project. Community reporters have the opportunity to connect directly with their audiences. But are they earning reader confidence? How The Durango Herald created a storytelling series to connect with its community. Reader Engagement: Making Strangers Less Strange. Five ways the BBC will boost its audience engagement in 2019. Twenty-five newsrooms have attempted to bridge divisions — in person. Here’s what they’ve learned. News companies can increase engagement by creating rewards-based habits. Social media, breweries and cartoon mascots are helping revive voters' connection to their local area. How journalists can use participatory budgeting to better serve their communities. Using "radical hospitality" to bring communities together to discuss important issues. How the Agora Center supported a city-wide conversation about housing.

FOIA: Illinois has a searchable online database of public employee salaries. Does your state? How 21 Newsrooms Pooled Funds for Texas Public Data. The public have a right to know when the powerful seek to gag the vulnerable.

GUNS: A solutions journalism approach to covering gun violence. After Thousand Oaks, media draws faulty line from PTSD to murder. How Pittsburgh's WESA mobilized its newsroom to cover the Tree of Life shooting. After Pittsburgh shooting, national outlets relied on local papers, and vice versa. Journalists should use caution when reporting on new shooting details.

NATIONAL NEWS: Here’s how local news outlets can access quality national content at no cost.

PHOTOGRAPHY: What do newspapers lose when they use non-professional photography?

SEXUAL ASSAULT: Is the news media complicit in spreading rape culture?

SOURCES: Partisanship of journalists’ Twitter networks tends to show in their work. Journalists Quote Social Media Content Ever More Frequently.

STORY COMMENTS: If you let commenters go after your reporters, it hurts your credibility with other readers.

TRUST: Conservatives trust conservative media. Here’s why. Lessons learned: Seven ways news outlets can rebuild trust and sustainability. Anger toward media spreads into local communities

VETERANS: Why Quality Journalism Matters When We Talk About Honoring Veterans.

VIDEO: Welcome to the age of the hour-long YouTube video. Why publishers should invest more resources in Twitter video.


Industry News

ALT WEEKLIES: After 31 years, Creative Loafing Charlotte lays off staff, will be online-only.

APPLE: “Of the major three — Facebook, Google and Apple — Apple probably kept the furthest distance in engaging with regional and local publishers.”
 
BBC: How the BBC quietly built one of the world’s largest collaborative journalism efforts focused entirely on local news.

BOSTON GLOBE: The shrinking Boston Globe pursues funding alternatives for accountability journalism.

CALIFORNIA FIRES: States of emergency: How California newsrooms are reporting deadly, destructive blazes. As city burns around it, a newspaper staff rises to cover unspeakable tragedy.

CANADA: Postmedia continues its downward spiral.

DFM: Owner of The Denver Post laying off 107 at Colorado Springs service center.

DIVERSITY: Newsrooms have failed spectacularly at achieving racial diversity. By the year 2000, U.S. newsrooms were supposed to have achieved staff diversity reflecting that of the population — but in 2018, they still haven’t. ASNE's 2018 diversity survey results reflect low participation but encouraging shifts. Newsroom employees are less diverse than U.S. workers overall. A bot now tells Financial Times reporters if they’re only quoting men.

FACEBOOK: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis. Mark Zuckerberg defends Facebook as furor over its tactics grows. Facebook probably didn’t want to be denying it paid people to create fake news this week, but here we are. Washington pummels Facebook: ‘Big tech can no longer be trusted.’ Facebook paid PR firm to smear Google.

Facebook will reduce reach of ‘sensationalist and provocative’ content. How do Facebook’s News Feed algorithms impact non-profit publishers? Facebook expands breaking news feature.

FAKE NEWS: New election, same viral political hoaxes.  ‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America. How The Wall Street Journal is preparing its journalists to detect deepfakes. Deepfake-busting apps can spot even a single pixel out of place. There was less misinformation during the midterms than in 2016. But its form has changed. Audience development shifts focus from Facebook traffic to generating revenue. Yes, Facebook referral traffic crashed and burned — but not for these nonprofit publishers.

GANNETT: In cities across America, newspapers told you there was an election the day before — but nothing about it. With no election results, Gannett newspapers edge into the future for their print product.

GATEHOUSE: Omnivorous GateHouse continues to swallow local papers.

GOOGLE: Google’s terrible new news feed thinks I’m mainly interested in misogynists and down jackets. Will Google’s homepage news feed repeat Facebook’s mistakes?

HEARST: Broken trust at the Houston Chronicle as investigation shows a reporter's sources may not exist. Hearst Connecticut cuts 30 people through layoffs and buyouts.

LINKEDIN: LinkedIn expects media biz to bring in $2 billion in 2018.

LOCAL REPORTING: Need a local reporter in [state] with [expertise]? This directory wants to blow away parachute journalism.

McCLATCHY: How McClatchy plans to pursue national advertisers’ digital budgets.

MINNESOTA: Minnesota holds its own as small-town newspapers shrink across America. 

PRESS FREEDOM: Trump argues in court filing that he can limit journalists' access to White House. CNN's Jim Acosta's actions to Trump don't represent the best of journalism. Government Leaks to the Press Are Crucial to Our Democracy. So Why Are We Suddenly Punishing Them So Harshly? How to criticize the press—responsibly.

TAMPA BAY: Tampa Bay Times cuts 16 newsroom jobs.

TRIBUNE: Capital Gazette, Carroll County Times and other Baltimore Sun community papers form union. Owner of The Virginian-Pilot, Daily Press offers buyouts to newsrooms. With job cuts looming, Tribune Publishing offers buyouts to staff. Tribune Publishing (the former Tronc) draws multiple bidders.

TV: Scripps Buying 15 Cordillera Stations For $521 million.

TWITTER: Twitter's Explore tab starts sorting stories into sections. Dorsey says Twitter is thinking about an edit button to fix typos in tweets.
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