A new year brings new opportunities for local media companies to evolve and thrive. Our staff of experts at Local Media Association and Local Media Foundation offers ways to seize 2024 with new innovation, sustainability, and transformation in mind.
When it comes to reinventing business models for news, what does the industry need more of in 2024?
Nancy Lane, CEO: The industry needs more funding for journalism, experimentation and innovation. The philanthropic community recognizes that and is stepping up more and more.
John Celestand, Program Director, Knight x LMA BloomLab: The industry needs more training for local news publishers around business operations and best practices for recruiting and attracting young, innovative and talented journalists to the field.
Julia Campbell, Chief Business Transformation Officer: Marketing dollars! We need to spend money on telling our own stories, using paid media to reach new audiences and building marketing plans to promote the good work our newsrooms do each day. It’s time to eat our own cooking and take the recommendations we would give to local businesses looking to grow, and implement marketing campaigns for our own businesses.
Frank Mungeam, Chief Innovation Officer: As an industry we need to re-examine what is our essential, unique value by re-centering around listening to, engaging and serving our communities. We must Make the Case for the essential value of local journalism as key to civic health, and point to our legacy of community impact. This will enable more philanthropic support, improve the quality of our content by clarifying our purpose, and will drive better results for our local advertising partners as well.
Penny Riordan, Director of Business Strategy and Partnerships: More collaboration. Two of our collaboratives: News is Out and Word In Black, both grew audience and revenue in 2023. This year more than ever before, I have received more inquiries about how to start a collaboration or what makes a collaboration successful. Yet, is every news organization collaborating in some way? Hardly. There’s so much potential for more collaboration. We’re just getting started.
What are the biggest revenue opportunities for local media organizations in 2024?
Jay Small, Chief Operating Officer: On the commercial side of the business, whether B2B (advertising, marketing services, events) or B2C (subscriptions, memberships), rekindling direct local relationships will matter more and more to the topline in 2024 and beyond. Digital leaders have become too reliant on “passive” third-party revenue streams (two significant examples: programmatic backfill of unsold video and display inventory, and nonlocal clickbait links placed adjacent to news and other content). We price our inventory to local clients at rates that suggest too much pride, then when we don’t sell it, accept rates from programmatic providers that suggest far too little pride! Also, the inventory passed over to programmatic providers often fills with messaging of dubious quality that compromises the news brand and devalues any inventory that is sold locally. It’s time to rebuild local B2B relationships and develop programs that bring local advertisers into that inventory at reasonable prices with high-quality messaging – be it display, video, or branded content entry points. On the consumer side, direct local relationships take on a different flavor: community listening and engagement. Transparency and a listen-first mindset go a long way. All of these moves would not only improve the revenue outlook, but build and enhance trust relationships with clients and news consumers in the communities local media outlets serve.
Dorrine Mendoza, Lead Program Director, Family and Independent Media Sustainability Lab: To echo my colleagues, trust and choice. The following is mostly from Thomas Baekdal’s incredible (paid) newsletter in which he urges publishers to make 2024 the year your primary business strategy is to become the top choice of your consumer. Choice paralysis occurs when there is little differentiation + many choices. He says subscription fatigue is a myth and that customers are really learning how to use their money most efficiently. Becoming the primary news choice involves differentiation including a hyperlocal focus, high relevance and engagement, high journalistic quality and other things many of you are already doing. One revenue opportunity I see is building trust through exceptional customer service. When people feel consistently heard and respected by a company or brand they already find value in, are more likely to trust and continue to support it.
Robert Walker-Smith, Digital Revenue Director, Knight x LMA BloomLab: The biggest revenue opportunities center around integrated solutions selling opportunities that drive revenue across multiple revenue lines, such as print, digital, social, events and branded content. While legacy solutions drive significant top-line revenue, nonlegacy solutions offer the best opportunity for sustainability for media organizations.
Going into 2024, what media innovations, events, brands or products are worth watching?
Apryl Pilolli, Technology Director, Knight x LMA BloomLab: Artificial Intelligence: AI’s potential for misinformation and manipulation is real. By showcasing examples of AI-generated content and engaging audiences in fact-checking exercises, journalists can equip readers and viewers with the skills to critically evaluate information in a rapidly evolving media landscape.
Mungeam: AI is both the biggest immediate opportunity, and the biggest long-term threat, for news outlets. Every local news outlet I work with needs more “capacity” — and in the short term, AI is the ultimate workflow assistant to simplify and speed up the repetitive tasks in all work functions in a news organization, thereby creating capacity to invest precious people-time in higher-value content and business transformation.
At the same time, news leaders must recognize that nontraditional players will experiment with automated AI content generation in ways that will quickly challenge our traditional, assumed role as a trusted source of information. How can we rise to this challenge, both by distinguishing our journalism from automated content sources, and by leveraging AI to improve the quality and quantity of reporting we do?
Small: Besides AI, which will get plenty of attention, the broadcast industry in particular will get another year under its belt in the gradual rollout of ATSC 3.0 (aka NextGenTV) — with all its potential for enhanced interactivity, specialized datacasting and other enhancements using broadcast bandwidth. The major broadcast groups are all investing to roll it out, but the things to watch are the electronics manufacturers’ adoption, and along with it, consumers’ adoption and engagement with the new features. The verdict is out on whether the advanced capabilities will all be commercialized and interesting enough to potential customers and audiences to “stick.”
Celestand: I would keep an eye on Group Black, an inclusive, mission-driven media company that invests in solutions to grow Black-owned businesses, shift more ad spending to Black-owned media outlets, and create partnerships between Black-owned brands and media companies. They were listed as the Most Innovative Entertainment Company by Success Magazine in 2023.
Mendoza: I predict products and services that help alleviate the loneliness epidemic will become vital. Approachable and solutions-driven climate information will become an essential factor in decisions from homebuying to groceries. And you have heard this from me before: pets. Information for pet owners and the amount this group will spend on information, services and treatments will continue to grow.
What disruption of 2023 will have the most severe impact in the industry in 2024?
Pilolli: Artificial intelligence: Not to state the obvious, but AI will streamline news production, automating tasks like fact-checking, data analysis, and even generating basic reports, freeing human journalists for deeper investigations and storytelling. Algorithmic curation will reshape news consumption, potentially creating filter bubbles and amplifying bias, but also offering personalized experiences and surfacing underreported stories. The rise of AI-powered news bots and synthetic media could blur the line between fact and fiction, demanding greater transparency and ethical standards from news organizations.
Lane: Cord-cutting. It’s happening at a much faster pace than anyone expected. Local broadcasters are bracing for serious disruption in 2024.
Small: Maybe not the most severe impact in ‘24, because I’d have to agree with my colleagues that AI and cord-cutting may command more strategic attention – but I believe the past few years of heightened inflation and interest rates will catch up with the media industry more significantly in the year ahead. Companies in some legacy media sectors are already struggling just to hold the line on advertising revenue and/or subscription revenue, before accounting for inflationary effects on commodities, utilities, human resources and benefits costs, among other things. In revenue, flat is the new down, and flat over time is not a recipe for sustainability. Companies that rely on working capital lines of credit or other borrowing instruments to weather tough times already find those credit instruments more expensive and hard to service. A year or two of interest and inflation stability would help a lot.
Campbell: Continued loss of audience will continue to crush business models for all types of media. Whether that loss is on linear newscasts, lower circulation or subscriptions, fewer cable subscribers, shrinking digital traffic or general scattering and fragmenting of attention, all our revenue models rely on engaged and large audiences to pay for the current staff and content production in place. Less audience = less revenue. We need continued focus and innovative ideas to regain and retain engagement with our communities.
Mendoza: Work-life balance. In 2023 we saw increased unionization, increased employee dissatisfaction and lower worker motivation. Some companies (like Costco) handled it with class while others (Wayfair, X) missed the mark. Even in this tough economic environment, incentives, work-life balance and productivity need to be right. Local news businesses willing to sacrifice or deprioritize employee satisfaction will not have a stable foundation for anything 2024 brings.
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