For single-subject news outlets, resourcing is the root of all challenges. As a symptom, a big constraint is limited team bandwidth, especially in the case of websites that are self-funded and reliant on volunteer labor. To succeed, a news startup needs the same skill sets as any other startup—a mix of technology, digital marketing and business strategy, all within the context of lean operations. One common hurdle our participants reported was the difficulty they encounter in managing technology and iterative design. Publishers complained about shoddy work from outsourced developers, a slow progression of design aesthetics and frustration with content management systems. Brian Kovalesky, Founder and Editor of StartupBeat, summed up the frustration: Technology for me is always the biggest obstacle. As I went along, I had to learn everything by myself. For all the talk about citizen journalism, it’s really hard. Something always comes out looking funny, or something doesn’t work. To date, almost all of the respondents use an ad hoc marketing and user acquisition strategy. Beyond maintaining social media feeds, with varying levels of consistency, publishers are only able to devote occasional energy
toward visibility and community-building activities. Often these limited marketing efforts result from a combined problem of limited know-how and resource constraints. One exception is publisher Kelly Virella at The Urban Thinker, a digital magazine about black culture that is in its prelaunch phase. Virella has used the time to develop a business plan and marketing strategy based on interviews with target subscribers. She explained her approach: I know that in order to succeed, you need a great marketing plan and you’ve got to execute it to a T, and you have to have low user acquisition costs…it’s all got to work out mathematically. I’m really committed to the customer development process, and I’m very committed to spending small amounts of money and seeing what I can learn about what I’m doing and then iterating. But I really did come to understand that there’s no way for us to make it short of having the capital necessary to fund the endeavor, because we’d have to hire a lot of people to bring our traffic levels to a point where we could actually monetize the site. Other publishers have used innovative, more improvised moves. FactCheck. org announced its launch through a postcard press release to Washington, D.C. journalists, while HealthMap pegged an awareness campaign to the release of the film Contagion. Education News Network (Chalkbeat) is hiring a dedicated director for engagement and growth, focused on digital marketing. OpenCanada has taken an approach of direct marketing at academic and industry events, as well as implementing a digital marketing strategy using a Google AdWords grant. Few sites are currently doing advanced search engine optimization or aggressive user-acquisition techniques. One common marketing and distribution practice includes cross-posting arrangements with major news outlets. OpenCanada, SoccerDrugs (Fussball Doping) and InsideClimate News have freely shared content with
mainstream media partners, which has helped to drive traffic and enhance brand awareness. Cameron Talk and Taylor Owen of OpenCanada called its cross-posts in The Globe and Mail “a milestone for credibility.” All respondents are using some form of social media outreach, and some are using well-developed social media strategies. Since its founding in 2005, Deep-Sea News has learned to segment, leverage and deploy its social media audience around a varied set of objectives. Founder Craig McClain described the approach: “We have a huge Facebook and Twitter following. We have a specific hashtag that we use online that other people post to. We have Pinterest and Tumblr.”3 He described how the advent of social media also solved a problem around third-party content, allowing him to curate or aggregate external content without featuring it on his home site: As time went on and as Twitter and things like that developed, those became better ways to draw people’s attention to content that didn’t originate with us. Not only that, but we get much different audiences. For example, if you take Pinterest, the audience there is primarily female as opposed to the male audiences that we’ve tapped into through some other outlets. So we treat them both as a mechanism to drive traffic to the main site—the blog—but we also use that as a mechanism to disperse content out that we don’t distribute through the main blog. For example, a lot of people will forward us announcements that they want to send out to the rest of the community. We don’t put that on the main site anymore…that main site is only for us to contribute longer format original writing. 3 Pintrest demographics are proven to be predominantly female, based upon several sources’ estimates, including a study released in November 2012 by Insights in Marketing LLC. “Marketing to Women—How Effective Are We at Connecting to Her?” Insights in Marketing. Insights in Marketing, LLC. 29 Nov. 2012. Web. 28 Oct. 2013.
Long-term goals for each publisher are fairly consistent: to grow operations, expand coverage and pay writers and editors who currently work pro bono. But most respondents recognized a challenge in organizing their strategic planning and business development capacity. One publication, which had no development roadmap, said its five-year plan was to “live to die another day.” In some cases the stories themselves make the enterprise harder to plan, as with North Korea News. Founder Chad O’Carroll explained: It’s really hard to plan on North Korea because unlike all the other issues we have literally the most closed media environment, unless you have an Eritrea news service…we can plan assuming the country stays closed, or plan that the country is going to open up. It’s a really tough one. Only one publisher, Daniel Drepper of SoccerDrugs (Fussball Doping), has built his website for planned obsolescence—a news outlet that’s akin to a “pop-up store,” covering a single story. SoccerDrugs (Fussball Doping) expects to shrink once it has a major breaking news story—successfully implanting the issue of doping in soccer within mainstream press coverage.