For the last 15 years of my career, I have tried to solve various content syndication challenges at different companies.
When I worked at Patch, the earliest versions of our home-grown content management system couldn’t cross-post across hundreds of sites in our network. Later versions eventually solved this problem, but for the first year, we editors would have to copy/paste from email when we wanted to pick something up from a nearby town within the region.
This challenge also applied at GateHouse Media, with hundreds of sites across the country. When we acquired another newspaper company, we would eventually move that company’s sites onto our CMS, but sharing content was still a challenge. Much of the benefit of being in a large newspaper or broadcast group comes from sharing content in a breaking news situation, but we wouldn’t be able to take advantage of that until the site was on our common tech stack.
Today at Local Media Association, a majority of my work is supporting our collaboratives, including News is Out and Oklahoma Media Center. One general goal of our collaboratives is to reach new audiences by sharing and creating content on one site. We also bring in revenue on that site through advertising and reader support, which goes back to the publishers in the collaborative.
We also serve as fiscal agents and business advisors to other news collaboratives that focus more on specific reporting topics or covering a specific region.
Collaborative journalism has had a huge impact on the industry. In my experience supporting and leading them, news organizations grow their revenue and improve their journalism by participating in collaboratives. As the industry continues to face revenue challenges, we can no longer afford to be competitive in every circumstance.
Yet similar challenges remain to the ones I encountered in other stages of my career: How to share that content across the various content systems and websites in the group. Even if we succeed with that piece, monetizing and measuring it remain problematic. Yet the general goal of collaboration is still the impact the journalism can have by being distributed across many websites.
Given the importance of collaboration for the industry to survive and thrive, we can’t ignore this problem and continue to copy/paste. From my experience in supporting collaboratives, sometimes measuring and tracking any metrics on their storytelling comes as an afterthought. Yet measurement (of any kind) is important for continued philanthropic support, reaching advertisers and the audiences we serve.
At the Collaborative Journalism Summit in Detroit in May, this topic was so important that two sessions on the agenda addressed it. We at LMA have also spoken on this topic and shared our workflows with those interested.
Dave Gehring, CEO and co-founder of Distributed Media Lab, has a solution that several collaboratives have used, including some at LMA and some newsrooms in California. Andrew Haeg, the network product manager at the Institute for Nonprofit News, also shared a new tool that INN was developing called On the Ground. Some collaboratives have also used The Associated Press tool called StoryShare.
We at LMA have also created a toolset from several readily available components for our collaboratives, which l explain in more detail below.
Despite these efforts, no perfect solution exists for this challenge of sharing content across content systems, developing revenue streams or tracking metrics. Some may say that we should all get on the same CMS, but that is unrealistic.
The beauty of collaboratives is that they bring together different types of news organizations to work together on a project: commercial and public broadcasters, traditional newspapers and digital startups. All of those companies have their own business goals, so we should always expect a collaborative to have a broad range of technology providers in most cases.
As we think about how to solve this problem for the industry, I’d like to share what I think is the minimum viable product for a tool like this.
My colleague Apryl Pilolli, technology and innovation director of the Knight x LMA BloomLab, has also worked on this challenge extensively. Her ideas are also reflected in this list:
It must be RSS-driven
An RSS feed of content from a section or category from a website is easy for most newsrooms to generate. To solve the problem of copy/paste, the best way for this tool to work is to ingest the content automatically. CMS providers and media companies already do this with third-party content partnerships.
It should display as a widget
Often when we work with newsrooms on distributing content from a collaborative, a company’s representative to the group (usually someone from news) has to go back to that company’s technology or product team and (probably) beg to get the collaborative content on the site. But most news sites already have embedded widgets, and implementation of these typically is copying/pasting code in the places you want it on a page template. This is a technology task that large and small companies can easily do.
It’s also important to think about the goal of most collaboratives, which is to share their journalism as broadly as possible. In the case of our Covering Climate Collaborative, we wanted newsrooms to be able to share all climate-related news from the collaborative partners in either sections or the homepage of each site. Think about embedding that widget of relevant content on the weather section, halfway down the homepage or at the bottom of the article page for maximum visibility.
Our method includes a low-cost tool called Rss.app, which ingests multiple feeds and allows you to customize the widget display. Want a four-tile horizontal widget? You can do that. And because the feeds flow into Rss.app, they automatically update with new stories.
It must be able to serve ads
Yes, this is where some people reading this may get a little uncomfortable. At LMA, we believe one of the best ways to sustain a collaborative is through advertising — in particular, branded content — that is relevant to the audience or topic at hand.
Examples of branded content on collaborative sites include one from AARP targeted to an LGBTQ+ audience or Black audience. Each collaborative can always be selective regarding clients it engages, but we have seen interest from companies looking to reach many media outlets’ audiences at once through a collaborative partnership.
Think about the impact of those messages running in the widget across all collaborative members. And because they run on collaborative members’ owned-and-operated sites, they receive revenue as well.
DML’s tool does this. Our toolset (mostly assembled by Pilolli), also can serve ads through Google Ad Manager, but it’s not perfect and requires a bit of custom coding.
It should take readers back to the originating site and track those clicks
Some people in the industry may fundamentally disagree with this product requirement. If someone is on a site, sees an article in the widget, and clicks through, wouldn’t it be better to keep them on that site?
Our take is this: If we are truly tracking the impact of journalism across all collaborative members, we need those metrics on those sites. Of course, many collaborations will post their original stories on their own sites and track metrics there, but tracking the impact of the work across the group is important. Also, tracking the impression load of a widget isn’t enough, and if one of the click-through units is to an advertiser, it’s not telling the whole story of the work. This also allows for credit to go to the originating site, whether that is a member site or an umbrella site for the group.
With all of the technological advances we’ve made as an industry to embrace digital, I’m surprised this problem still exists. Maybe it’s because, in my previous roles, the expectation was that scale and efficiencies were the best way to sustain the industry.
And maybe it’s because collaboration and content sharing across news organizations is still new. Since a lot of collaboration efforts are driven by the newsroom, the technology challenges aren’t solved right away because the newsroom has to reach out to a different department.
We think collaboration will only continue to grow, so the need for this type of MVP tool will become more crucial to the sustainability of collaboratives.