Describe your initiative, what you see as the strongest elements of your program, and what makes it unique:

Our initiative involves further building out the DIY functionality on our TAPinto local news sites to enable readers/nonprofits/businesses to pay through the site itself to have the content they have published on TAPinto promoted on Facebook. The payments would be distributed to our TAPinto franchisees. The system would enable local businesses and others to utilize Facebook’s Paid Partnership program from a local news perspective and create a new revenue stream to sustain local journalism.

Branded content is an important revenue opportunity for media groups and advertisers because …

Local news sites provide a direct communications channel with residents in their town and have the trust and credibility in their local community. By engaging in branded content opportunities, local media is able to offer local and regional businesses and organizations high-quality advertising products that allow them to leverage the connections and relationships local news sites have built, to help them succeed.

The aspect of the Branded Content Project Beta Group that excites us the most is …

Learning from peers and other leading publications regarding their branded content initiatives and contributing to their knowledge base regarding our initiatives.

We hope to learn [fill-in-the-blank] through the Branded Content Project:

How we can further utilize branded content to increase the revenue of our franchised local news sites to help keep local journalism sustainable and profitable.

If a media organization were just starting to sell branded content, we would tell them …

Ethics and your reputation is everything. Be sure that branded content appearing on your site is fully disclosed and transparent to your readers.

Meet Team TAPinto