Diversifying audiences and revenue: News Revenue Hub launches texting and advertising labs to empower newsrooms and communities

The News Revenue Hub, a nonprofit that’s helped news organizations raise more than $100 million in reader revenue, recently launched two exciting new R&D initiatives for newsrooms: an inaugural SMS cohort and a mission-driven advertising and sponsorships lab.

The SMS project, which kicked off earlier this month with eight industry leading Hub newsrooms, will test text-messaging (“SMS”) engagement and revenue strategies throughout the year. Participating newsrooms will implement individual SMS strategies, execute different experiments and share findings among cohort members. The goal is to build best practices for delivering news and information to communities and reaching audiences that may not otherwise have access to news.

The eight newsrooms participating in the 2024 cohort include Berkeleyside, BridgeDetroit, Deep South Today, El Paso Matters, Richmondside, San Antonio Report, The Oaklandside and Wisconsin Watch. All current clients of the Hub, the newsrooms will work closely with Hub product and consulting experts throughout the cohort duration to test strategies and chronicle results. By the end of 2024, the Hub will measure the impact of the program, share the findings in a future case study and scale new best practices to other Hub newsrooms.

“We increasingly see the News Revenue Hub as a research and development lab that can help our newsrooms design and test new strategies, and then scale learnings to other Hub clients,” said Mary Walter-Brown, the Hub’s founder and chief executive officer. “Broadening and diversifying audiences is a top priority for all of the news outlets we serve, and leveraging texting tools to reach people who don’t regularly read newsletters, use news apps or visit news sites will likely be an important part of an effective strategy.” 

While the participating newsrooms have unique goals for their SMS projects, the Hub will closely study the effectiveness of SMS development for reaching new mobile audiences, promoting election guide information, and reaching communities that may not have broadband. 

The Hub’s Mission-Driven Ads and Sponsorships Lab launched in March and is designed to help newsrooms diversify their revenue streams by developing stronger advertising programs.

“The lab’s ultimate goal is to return ad spends– at the national and local level– to quality journalism,” said Sarah Bishop Woods, the Hub’s chief of staff and project lead.  “By developing and testing a new sales and reporting metric that measures advertising success based on impact rather than impressions and clicks, we hope to revive advertising as a meaningful revenue stream for the independent newsrooms we serve.”

Bishop Woods signaled the three-decade shortfall in advertising and sponsorships revenue across the industry, with similar adverse effects for newsrooms in the Hub. “In a recent survey, we learned that the majority of our newsroom partners are selling little to no advertising, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they don’t have staff capacity to sell ads at scale or compete in the CPM-driven (or cost-per-thousand-views) landscape,” she explained. She also noted that newsrooms place a high value on their mission and want to ensure they establish relationships with brands and businesses that align with their principles. 

Through the lab, the Hub will work with each newsroom to develop an advertising and sponsorship program that represents and promotes their unique mission, and help them broker conversations between national brands and local businesses alike. Just as it does with its membership services, the Hub will provide hands-on training and support for sales teams to help them design advertising pitch strategies, pitch decks, campaigns, packages and pricing.

The eight trailblazing newsrooms participating in the Mission-Driven Ads and Sponsorships Lab include Bridge Michigan, CT Mirror, El Paso Matters, Honolulu Civil Beat, Deep South Today, San Antonio Report, The Hechinger Report and The Nevada Independent. As with the SMS cohort, these newsrooms are all current clients of the News Revenue Hub, and will work closely with Hub staffers throughout the duration of the lab. The Hub will share findings when the lab concludes and plans to offer new advertising support services to all Hub newsrooms upon its completion.

Walter-Brown said both of these projects align with one of the Hub’s top priorities in 2024, which centers around helping newsrooms further diversify their audience and revenue streams. “We’re all stepping back at this moment to ask, what does journalism need to survive and thrive?” she said. “We have to look at long-term sustainability, and in order to do that, we have to expand our relationship with communities–local residents, businesses and philanthropists–who have a stake in accessing quality news and information.” 

The News Revenue Hub, which was launched in 2016, has long been a leader in helping newsrooms grow their audience and revenue — and the SMS cohort and ads lab are extensions of that focus. Walter-Brown envisions the Hub’s next chapter as an R&D, or research and development, resource for independent newsrooms. 

“The Hub has always been a real-time learning laboratory for newsrooms,” she said. “Everything that we’ve learned throughout these eight years, we’ve learned by helping newsrooms experiment and then sharing and scaling out the takeaways. The SMS cohort and ads lab are perfect examples of the type of experimental work we can and are eager to continue to do.”

The Ads & Sponsorship Lab is supported by the Google News Initiative and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and the SMS cohort is funded by the Rapoport Family Foundation. For more information about these initiatives or other Hub R&D efforts, please contact, [email protected].