How local media can thrive in a connected world

Regional publisher Archant is moving away from device-based strategies to focus purely on two core trading currencies: content and audience. CEO Jeff Henry shares some exclusive insights.

If digital is the most disruptive force the business world has ever seen, for local media it seems to have been almost apocalyptic, driving us into survival mode.

During the last 15 years we have been tussling with digital disruption, focusing our efforts on trying to prevent rather than trying to get ahead of it, in the belief that this would preserve our printed and legacy products. We have been led by a survival instinct, focusing inwardly on our own platforms and relying on defensive strategies.

A symptom of this has been to allow space for hundreds of new global competitors, striving to win an audience in local and hyper-local markets, impacting almost every aspect of what we do; the creation, monetisation and distribution of content.

We know that everyone is now a publisher – that is hardly new information – but there has been a recent further shift. Businesses and brands are creating more and more content than ever before in an effort to cut through the already crowded space.

The irony, of course, is the implication that their solution to too much content in a given space is to create even more content and so on.

Therefore, as publishers we need to ensure that our pedigree in great story-telling, built over countless decades, is harnessed to ensure that our content works harder than it has ever worked before and cuts through the noise and the crowd. Each single piece of content produced now must serve a clear purpose and generate a visible ROI for us.

My first step towards this at Archant is to move away from platform and device-based strategies with a structure based around products and business units, and instead move to one single business, focused purely on content and audience. This helps ensure we are no longer distracted by product vs product or print vs digital; a position that would arguably continue to feed the sense of our being in survival mode as more and more connected devices come into play.

Instead, by sharpening our focus on our two core trading currencies – content and audience – we will allow ourselves the space to thrive in an increasingly connected world where the transient media consumer has changed the paradigm. No longer do our audiences seek us out and find us; rather our content has to seek, find and engage audiences, wherever they are.

In reality, our real challenge and opportunity is the same as it has always been – to be the best at connecting businesses and brands with our local audiences – and this will be achieved through our content.

The juxtaposition we find ourselves in is that in a digital world I do not believe that the point of difference will be around digital technology – the pace of change quickly diminishes any competitive advantage gained by new technology which rapidly becomes available to all.

Instead, it will be dependent on building real connections through people and content and using digital to facilitate connections rather than to lead or define. It will be our ability to make personal connections through our story-telling that will be the difference between simply surviving and thriving – producing relevant, unique and engaging content will no longer be enough.

We are perfectly positioned to deliver on the unique connections we have between local businesses and our audiences. We are, therefore, well placed to capitalise on the connected world, a world in which local can no longer be defined by distance, but instead by person-to-person contact.

However, the future connected world means that our stories will now increasingly migrate outside of our own local platforms, taking our audiences with it – the struggle to effectively monetise our content as an industry has been well documented. Monetising content and connections that no longer sit on our own channels presents somewhat of a more complex challenge.

Here’s one simple example.

We published a story in one of our papers, but we did not share it across any social channel ourselves. Despite this, that one story went on to generate 83,000 audience impressions outside of our own channels – just one story. We produce hundreds of great stories across our business every single day and each one has the potential to build hundreds of thousands of connections and links outside of our own channels.

It is the connections we make as a local media company that is our point of difference. So, in order to maintain our advantage in the connected world and realise the true value of our content and our position as a local media company, it is necessary to gain a deeper understanding of the digital connections we make, and the role our content has in influencing and driving them.

Through NodeXL, an open source network analytic and visualisation software by the Social Media Foundation in San Francisco, we now have the ability to explore and graph our networks. NodeXL differentiates itself by understanding each person who contributes to a certain conversation (be it around a hashtag, article, topic or a user) to be located in a specific position in a web of relationships among all participants in the conversation.

Starting from this standpoint, we are able to identify the members of our audience who occupy positions in the network that suggest they have special importance and power in the conversation, regardless of the number of followers they have or the volume of tweets they send. It can, therefore, help us understand and map the people and topics that drive conversations and group behaviour.

Fig. 1.2 Shows the connections made around the business section of our title, the Eastern Daily Press (@EDPBusiness) on Twitter over the past year. Each node represents a Twitter account and the lines between show the connection – how the conversation has travelled and evolved around our content.

Fig. 1.2

As Archant, we are the big red circle in the middle – the bigger the circle the greater the influence in the conversations.

The chart below takes the same data, but allows us to better understand how each of these conversations are linked and how our readers move the conversation from one story to the next. The circled section G2 represents the Sky Lantern conversation.

While acknowledging that this is a first step in mapping our audiences and communities, we believe that a greater insight and understanding around the connections we make and drive through our content will allow us to start to identify which types of content have the most value in building connections to different sectors of our community.

This will enable us to move the discussions beyond audience extension, re-targeting campaigns or pay-walls as a method to monetise content and audiences, instead focusing on what makes “local” unique – the real connections we are able to make through great story telling by our journalists who live within the communities we serve.