January 2, 2025 means more to me than just the second day of a new year.
The date marks 40 years since my first day in my first “professional” journalism job* — as a copy editor and page designer at The Sun/The Daily Herald (now just The Sun Herald) in Biloxi-Gulfport, Mississippi.
In 1985, the tools of that job included primitive, unreliable video display terminals, paper dummy sheets, pica poles and proportion wheels. Pagination was a new concept, and though the first Macintosh computers had been announced just months before, the desktop publishing and graphic design revolutions they would spawn were hardly imagined.
January 2 also marks 30 years since my first day in a “purely digital” media job — as director of online services for The Indianapolis Star/The Indianapolis News (now just IndyStar).
In 1995, the tools of that job included HTML manuals of style, dial-up internet access, and image-mapping shareware. The commercial World Wide Web had barely surfaced, and none of us foresaw how broadband access, the iPhone, Google, YouTube, Facebook or artificial intelligence would reshape our world.
Reflecting on these anniversaries and all that happened since, I could choose to reminisce aimlessly or lament that more of my career is past than future. But I won’t, because I’m not done yet. I prefer to draw on experience to offer a few lessons that might help those of you celebrating lower-numbered anniversaries, or even Day 1 on your first jobs in local media.
Lesson 1: Successes and failures are rarely absolute
Ever feel like you had the right idea at the wrong time? Almost everyone I have encountered in this business had that feeling at one time or another, because it happens so often.
Plenty of local media companies launched “community self-publishing” services and threaded message boards (evolved from even earlier bulletin board systems) in the late 1990s that rarely if ever gained traction or marketable audience. Staffers hated having to nudge community organization leaders to publish their information, and really hated having to police message boards. Most shut down after a few years.
But guess what? These sites had more than a passing resemblance to Facebook and other social networks that emerged more than a decade later.
The failure of community self-publishing was, thus, not absolute. The concepts underpinning it showed up later as social networks that became commercially successful by capitalizing on the personal and interest data users willingly (or unwittingly) provided. But the success of those later social networks wasn’t absolute, either. Individual platforms still rise and fall depending on user tastes, regulations and business practices — and yeah, staffers up to and including major platform CEOs still hate having to police the content!
Don’t take commercial failures as the end of the ideas behind them, nor successes as forever durable. We work in an industry full of companies with histories spanning decades, even centuries. That longevity suggests a certain patience with both failure and success that we should feel even in the toughest times, which leads me to …
Lesson 2: New product development doesn’t fit in a budget year
Over 40 years, I built a lot of products, services and related componentry. Sadly, even back when local media routinely produced 20%, 30%, 40% or even higher profit margins, product managers like me frequently worked within a small box, something like this:
We can seed-fund this new product as long as it breaks even this year. If so, we can get approval for next year. If not, we end it.**
Now it’s even harder, for legacy media at least. Shareholders expect returns but margins are tight if they exist at all. Any new product development comes from staff time and budgets “borrowed” from other initiatives. Or organizations forego product development altogether and rely entirely on outside service providers to keep them up on what’s new.
Either way, we leave our most creative thinkers and doers focused on upkeep, or rearranging furniture in current product lines, with too little time to form up anything new and meaningful from the corners of their desks. The largest media groups may have central product teams with better resources, but still budget-constrained and conflicted between corporate expectations and the needs and wishes of local teams.
Leading technology companies provide much better insulation for engineering and development teams from the pressures of operating P&Ls and impatience for ROI. But the tech companies have the funds and shareholder appetites for that, and most media companies don’t.
Fortunately, we see philanthropic funders (notably those behind Press Forward) stepping up to invest in product and service development aimed at enhancing the sustainability of local news media in all forms. Assuming these investments lead to better financial futures for local media, we must be prepared to reinvest a healthy percentage of any new income to keep momentum.
But on what, exactly? Let’s ponder …
Lesson 3: Your { newspaper | newscast | website | etc. } isn’t designed as well as you think
In 1996-1997, usability guru Jakob Nielsen consulted with my team to help us improve our nascent websites. He showed us that our efforts based on print design standards, experience and instinct — backed by no usage data whatsoever — led to deeply flawed user experiences.
A few years later, I attended one of Jared Spool’s awesome User Interface Engineering conferences, and later, got to debate him politely in an online thread on the value of a total site redesign (my side) vs. continuous improvement of an established user experience (his side).
Nielsen and Spool were right. I was wrong.
Years later, I see local news sites making all the same mistakes based on either designers’ whims or product managers’ needs to grab audience attention (and convert it to revenue):
- Intrusive, interruptive advertising forms (even beyond the paywall on subscription sites).
- Reputation-harming, nonlocal clickbait ads posing as news-ish headlines/teasers.
- Failure to optimize pages and page objects such as images, videos and scripts for fast loading and particularly for mobile.
- Horrible search experiences and almost-as-bad drill-down navigation.
We disparage pink-slime sites and made-for-advertising sites, then make our sites look and behave like them. How do we fix that?
Start by taking lessons from the gurus:
- Amazon created the de facto standard interface for online shopping; Google for search results; and Craigslist for online classified ads. Those sites represent the way most people know how to do those things. You might hate how they look or disagree with how they work, but you’re wrong to try to build a better version. Tweak typeface choices if you must, but make your versions of these experiences work the way the de facto standards work. Anything else will be harder to use, period.
- We don’t have a de facto standard for how news is presented online. Fortunately, we do know a thing or two about making information easier to process:
- Legibility and readability are important. Pick typefaces that are easy to read and optimized for contemporary screen sizes and resolutions. Sometimes they might not be the same typefaces you use offline.
- If your site search doesn’t provide a good experience, consider going with the de facto standard and implementing Google’s Programmable Search Engine instead. Even with that, you may want to “train” site visitors on how to get the most from site search: consider running searches for background articles related to the topic of a current story, then put those links in as additional resources.
- Pay attention to the hierarchy you use to categorize information on a website. Humans may seldom use all the levels in your multiple-pulldown navigation bar, but search engines rely on that hierarchy. They’ll pick up on how you prioritize and organize content categories. Refreshing the nav tree isn’t a once-in-a-redesign activity. And about that redesign …
- What Spool said about continuous improvement vs. periodic redesigns still rings in my head: Part of the reason we don’t have de facto standards for how news is presented is that every news brand seems hell-bent on redesigns every two years or so. We put site visitors’ heads on swivels every time we reinvent how to find the stories that may interest them. Continuous improvement, including cycles of user testing, may not feel quite as “mission-accomplished” to designers, but every mild upgrade helps without messing with those who liked the site just fine the way it was, thank you very much.
Creatives still have robust opportunities for experimentation where we’ve seen too little over the years: storytelling forms. Whether your news organization is newspaper-based, TV-based or purely digital, I bet a majority of news in your digital products is still presented and organized like this: headline, teaser, article in traditional news style, maybe an adjacent image, information graphic or video.
Meanwhile, TikTok and Reels, among others, have made bite-size video their default communications format. YouTube has done much the same for longer-form video, including documentary styles. But I still see local news organizations’ video efforts following the formats of linear TV news segments (or directly repurposed from them).
Where are the creatives willing to experiment with nonlinear storytelling, of the kind that industry friend Leah Gentry advocated more than 20 years ago? Where are the visionaries who want to take a critical, meaningful look at the hideous user experiences we provide as web advertising? Which reminds me …
Lesson 4: The future of local media advertising is tied to SMBs
Local newspapers, TV and radio stations long benefited from regional- or national-scale advertisers that bought local inventory through agency or representative relationships. Most of the years I have been in this business, locally sold ads for local businesses dominated — but nonlocal ads provided a welcome, fairly easy, profitable revenue stream.
In the digital era, “programmatic” has replaced “national” as the keyword to describe how nonlocal ads arrive on local news websites and apps. Programmatic ads can be remarkably easy to implement, and the gross margin on the revenue is high — though it masks the real cost to local media proprietors, which I’ll sum up as:
Programmatic allows others to obtain more value from your inventory than you do. They can sell into it for a fraction of what it cost you to create the adjacency and bring the audience; know as much or more about your site visitors as you do; and target them as well as or better than you can.
It wouldn’t trouble us if local-direct advertising were as strong as it once was. Forty years ago, newspapers were full of ads from local department stores, specialty shops, supermarkets and service providers. And don’t forget classified ads, where real estate brokers advertised homes, dealers promoted cars and companies posted open jobs. TV and radio also delivered car ads, department store sales, furniture specials and the like. Most of these ads were sold locally, directly to local owners or proprietors of bricks-and-mortar stores.
That’s almost all gone — not entirely by fault of local media, of course. Consolidation in retail, food service, durable goods and service industries played a huge role. The “chainification” of local storefronts meant advertising decisions went corporate and local managers no longer controlled budgets. Meanwhile, the internet became a far more efficient vessel for listings and sales of jobs, cars, homes and retail commodities. Adding insult to injury, nowadays, big brands have even come to see news (lumping local, national and global together) as “brand-unsafe” on the internet.
How many of your local big-box retailers buy any advertising directly from you these days? Grocers? Car dealer groups? Major employers? Meanwhile, how many of them have ads that appear on your sites via inventory you have turned over to programmatic brokers?
I bet the answers do not satisfy you.
What does that leave a local ad sales manager to do? You have to focus on what’s left: small and medium businesses, locally owned (or franchised) and operated. And take a distinctly non-programmatic, non-transactional, non-IAB-standard*** approach to relationships — even true partnerships — with these proprietors. For example:
- Unless your community is headed for ghost-town status, new SMBs start up fairly often. What do you offer for these businesses, knowing they’re probably cash-strapped and almost certainly underbudgeted for marketing and promotion? Can you provide discounted entry options in the spirit of a longer-term partnership that pays you back if the business succeeds and needs advertising to grow more? An SMB owner, especially in a startup, should favor partners who are willing to bet (and share some risk) on the future of the business.
- How many restaurants, chain or not, in your town need to hire servers, expediters, cooks, bartenders and/or shift managers? If they’re locally owned or franchised, and many are, the franchise owners should be within your reach and amenable to spending with you if you could help them fill those chronically open roles. But banner ads won’t do that. Time to think of old listings businesses as part of larger content marketing strategies.
Those are just a couple of examples. The point is: Move beyond local ad sales and standard-size banner ads adjacent to incremental news stories. To help with reach beyond your digital presence, master the digital agency**** tools and services you need to become a legitimate marketing, promotions and communications partner with local small businesses. It’s fine to make a buck, but price fairly and bet on their growth to earn loyalty. The alternative is to turn your B2B strategy entirely over to the robots. Speaking of which …
Lesson 5: Be unmistakably human in the era of AI
In a recent interview, I was asked if LMA has a stance on artificial intelligence. I said it’s way too soon to have a stance but definitely the right time to learn all we can about it, pros and cons, applications and pitfalls.
I see AI evolving into all kinds of amazing tools, time-savers, creative resources and practical capacity-builders. I also see it evolving into an enabler of all kinds of bad behavior, fraud, laziness, disinformation and destruction.
I don’t think we’ll get just the bad stuff without the good, but if the internet has taught us anything, it’s that all the good will certainly come with the bad.
The best advice I can give as we all watch the astonishing growth of AI capabilities is this:
Be unmistakably human. Leave no room for doubt when your content, products, services, emails, texts, social posts or Slack messages go out that human beings made them, manage them and will answer for them.
Learn AI, and use it for the good stuff. But when you use AI to convert a transcript of a meeting into a news story draft, or create an illustration for a feature, just say so*****, and be clear about when and how humans were involved in the final product.
The old joke, now unfortunately a routine part of reality, is that authenticity is easy to fake. That’s why I said be unmistakably human, not just be authentic. Leave no doubt in the minds of your readers, viewers, site visitors, customers, clients or colleagues that a real human being is behind your work.
In an era of ubiquitous AI, your humanity may be the best differentiator, and it has a great deal of value. It just has to.
* It was not, however, my first job in local media. I grew up in a family that ran the then-daily newspaper in my small (population 9,000) hometown for three generations. From the age of 12 until I went to college, I worked there as a carrier, mailroom clerk, janitor, photographer, correspondent, and copy editor.
** Or, worse, without the heart to give more time and resources to an underperforming product or service, nor to kill it lest we offend its stakeholders, too often we let these things linger as understaffed, underfunded “ghost ships.”
*** Nothing against the IAB or standards in general. But some of these standards work best as common denominators for programmatic ad buying, which may not be optimal for making local businesses stand out in a locally focused site.
**** Before you say “we tried digital agency stuff and it didn’t work,” I think my friend Corey Elliott at Borrell Associates has some research findings you should hear. Remember what I said about trying things and giving up if you didn’t get ROI within the budget year? Running a true digital agency takes patience and persistence. And it turns programmatic advertising from an on-site liability to an off-site opportunity.
***** To that point: the illustration that accompanies this post was created using ChatGPT/DALL-E. I prompted it very simply, on purpose: “Please create an illustrative image in 16:9 aspect ratio for this article.” When DALL-E rendered the image, it provided this explanation: “Here is the illustrative image depicting 40 years of media evolution, highlighting the transition from traditional newsroom tools to modern digital workflows. It symbolizes both nostalgia and progress.” I used the image mostly because I’m amused by the result. Besides the weird artifacts you often get when image-generating AI tries to depict words or numbers (where did “1925” come from?), the representation of 1985 and 2025 news technologies seems rather … quaint.