The Weekly Bulletin | February 21, 2024

Hi SODP community,

Let’s recap on what’s been happening, the new content, industry updates, tips, and more.

TIP OF THE WEEK

Today, I’d like to share a case study of how Stears executed a subscriber-focused content and live blogging strategy during an election year. There are a number of lessons that I believe digital publishers can take away.

Providing value-led content for existing subscribers whilst attracting new ones requires a lead-in strategy strategy. Stears provides economic and industry data and insight to facilitate decision-making for global organizations investing and operating in Africa.

Many larger publishers received the 'Trump bump' in the past due to key election coverage. Let's dive into Stears' success story (how we helped) and how you can do this during the 2024 election year.

Key Strategy Highlights

🔑 Addressing Paywall SEO Visibility Challenges & Retaining Audiences: Including the necessary markup, i.e., accessiblefreee and advising on front blocking - CSS approach to avoiding scraping content helped increase their explainer content and maintain users.

🔑 Turning Events Into Engagement Opportunities: Stears leveraged their unique insights and commentary to drive traffic and conversions by launching a live blogging platform during Nigeria's elections.

🔑 Unlocking SEO Potential: Stears' approach to programmatic SEO sets a blueprint for success in driving lead-in traffic and ongoing baseline traffic. They created an election center outlining all of the candidates in all region's polling numbers and biographies, which essentially aids users in learning about the candidates they could

Results

✔️ Measurable Impact: From a 2-fold increase in traffic (3 million users) in a 6-week period in the 2023 election in comparison to the 2019 election.

✔️ Credibility Boost: Earning links from reputable sites, i.e., NYTimes and The Guardian, solidified Stears' position as a trusted source of information.

Your Action Plan

Reflect on your current election coverage strategy and identify areas where you can apply Stears' insights. Can you put together an explainer series that can retain users? Can you set up a live blog to engage and convert live audiences? Can you use repositories of information and create a service that not only brings awareness to important issues but makes it an essential service for your community and audience?

SODP POSTS

Saving the News Media Means Moving Beyond the Benevolence of Billionaires

For the journalism industry, 2024 is off to a brutal start.

Most spectacularly, the Los Angeles Times recently slashed more than 20% of its newsroom.

Though trouble had long been brewing, the layoffs were particularly disheartening because many employees and readers hoped the Times’ billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, would stay the course in good times and bad – that he would be a steward less interested in turning a profit and more concerned with ensuring the storied publication could serve the public.

According to the LA Times, Soon-Shiong explained that the cuts were necessary because the paper “could no longer lose $30 million to $40 million a year.”

SPONSORED

Last time, we introduced our WordPress seven-part teardown series, where we analyze websites of prominent publishers, identifying their best practices and audience engagement opportunities. We also shared the first three episodes – WIRED, TechCrunch, and VIBE.

Here are the latest two episodes. Watch the videos on our YouTube channel or listen to the episodes as a podcast.

EPISODE 4: Time Magazine’s Timeless Premium Magazine Publishing and Distribution Strategies

We explore Time.com, which removed its paywall on June 1, 2023. And with this came a clear traffic recovery and an expansion in the publication's positioning and vertical expansion.

EPISODE 5: The Harvard Gazette: How Student Journalism Is a Super-Connector that Brings Harvard Top of Mind

When Harvard has a $51 billion endowment, one might wonder why Harvard needs to monetize their sites in the first place.

The Harvard Gazette doesn’t. Rather, it’s a super-connector of all the microsites and communities that help raise Harvard's profile internally and for alumni abroad. So what are the mechanics behind this?

This is what we discuss in this episode.

JOB BOARD

➡️ The National Hockey League (NHL) is looking for a director of multicultural content and audience development (NYC, NY, US). SEE MORE

➡️ Condé Nast is seeking a digital editor for Condé Nast Traveller Germany. (Remote, Germany). SEE MORE

COMMUNITY BUZZ

Industry News

➡️ Google responds to exposé that shows how the Reviews System Algorithm is biased to favor big brands over independent publishers. READ MORE

➡️ The New York Times is recruiting partners to test new ad-targeting solutions using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) beginning next quarter. It plans to make the new tool widely available to marketers in the second half of the year. READ MORE

Social Media Discussions

➡️ Pete Pachal on LinkedIn:

So anyway, Slack. Let me first say I'm bullish on Slack slowly becoming the way AI becomes embedded into journalism workflows. Slack is where a lot of reporting begins, and the news that Slack is getting upgraded with AI features (mainly: auto-summarization of threads or rooms) could speed up turning ideas into stories.

It's a good example of where AI has the potential to make the most difference in newsrooms right now: news gathering (as opposed to production or distribution).

READ THE FULL POST

These are the highlights for the last week.

Until next!

Vahe Arabian and the editorial team at SODP