The Triad of Local Journalism — Exploring the Sustainability Challange
(Translated from Portuguese using Google Translator and Grammarly)
The question of the sustainability of a journalistic project is seen today as the biggest obstacle to the survival of local news projects on the internet. We have the experience and tools to produce news online, but very few professionals have succeeded in managing to develop a financial income capable of guaranteeing the medium and long-term continuity of their project. The result is that nearly 90% of journalistic projects, especially local ones, fail to survive for more than two years.
The pursuit of financial sustainability, that is, a reasonably stable revenue stream, is a complex objective because it depends on two other equally important and complicated issues: the relationship with the target audience and the process of news curation. We will deal with these last two in separate texts, shortly.
Achieving minimal economic stability is a hard-to-achieve goal because the known formulas that gave excellent results in the past no longer work satisfactorily in the digital age. Financial sustainability based on selling advertising space to readers, listeners and viewers attracted by the news no longer works. The information avalanche generated an oversupply of news, which ended up reducing its exchange value for advertisements to almost zero, leaving newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations, as well as news sites on the Internet, in a difficult financial situation.
The challenge of survival affects both expensive and ambitious projects and almost all amateur initiatives, which is why academic research has multiplied, especially in the United States, where there are about 45 organizations of the most varied types trying to find alternatives that prevent the growth of the cemetery of digital journalistic projects.
Most projects explore their paths, but it is possible to point out some common outcomes:
a) Most initiatives bet on audience loyalty as a way to obtain subscribers, donors or partners who gain access to published information in exchange for providing services or news.
b) There is a growing conviction that there is no recipe that fits all cases;
c) The idea that publications cannot depend on just one source of income also takes shape. Many organizations have adopted the product basket strategy by combining subscription selling with providing services (organizing paid events and debates, conducting commissioned research, etc.) and raising funds through government or private funding, as well as individual donations. or foundations.
d) All projects seeking sustainability for online journalistic initiatives have in common the awareness that this is exploratory work, with no guarantees of a positive result.
Audience loyalty is a basic requirement for the engagement of the journalists responsible for the project with the respective target audience. We will detail, in a future text, what engagement is and how it works, but right now it is important to point out that its fundamental objective is to create an unrestricted bond of trust between journalists and the people that the project intends to reach. Trust is crucial because it will assure the public that they are giving their scarce money and time, in exchange for something that is an irreplaceable personal or collective need.
Experiences carried out so far in the United States indicate that it is challenging and quick to gain the trust of the audience for an online journalistic project. People are very used to free information products published on the Internet. The argument “Why pay for something I get for free” is still very strong and reflects the prevailing view that news is a consumer product and not indispensable for making personal or collective decisions.
Payment is no longer an exchange of a product for money, but an act of participation that involves mutual responsibilities. Exchange and participation involve different attitudes. In the exchange, you want to know if the deal was fair. By participating, you became a co-responsible partner. The charges are also different: in the exchange, you are guided by the value and quality of the good or product exchanged. In participation, the key issue is reciprocity in the management of the partnership.
Experience has also shown that the sustainability item must be included in the first decisions about the project, even before it is launched. Usually, it is left for later because everyone wants to see the product first on the street or the internet. It’s a serious misconception because changing an ongoing project to make it sustainable is a very risky operation that usually goes wrong. Financial sustainability must be taken into account from the very beginning of a project.
As we have already said, there is no single recipe for setting up a financially sustainable structure in an online journalistic project. This happens because each project involves a different social, economic, geographic, political and cultural reality. This diversity determines different ways of gaining people’s trust. But we will see more details about this aspect in the text on engagement with the project’s target audience.
