Building growth through tastemakers and their communities

“The clearer the editorial profile of a particular niche, the higher the potential to build a loyal and paying audience around it.”

To multitask without losing focus is difficult, and in the coming year, it won’t be any easier for publishers. To end the third-party cookie era in a proactive way, publishers will have to figure out a strategy to get advertisers first-party access to their target audiences.

Just like everyone else, they’ll have to master the uncertainties the pandemic has brought upon us. And publishers have to elevate their subscription game. But how, and in what direction?

The era in which every news site covers more or less the same set of topics and stories is over. The challenge now is differentiation and segmentation — the rise of the niche, if you will. The clearer the editorial profile of a particular niche, the higher the potential to build a loyal and paying audience around it.

How to differentiate? Building expertise, credibility, and audience in a niche area of interest is not easy, and larger legacy newsrooms will surely find it more difficult to adapt. And, of course, none of it will work without deeper investments into editorial, which, against a landscape of more than 16,000 newsroom jobs being killed in the U.S. alone in 2020, isn’t looking good.

We might never see some of those jobs again, but others might find their way back to us in 2021. One predictable way to grow a paying audience is to hire journalists with an established profile and following in a certain area. Kara Swisher, covering tech, and Ben Smith, covering media, being lured to The New York Times are examples. But it can also be done in a way that is simpler and with more humble ambitions.

Media organizations can learn from the Substackization of media (and the consequent Substackerati) to see how journalists’ expertise can be channeled through newsletters to build their own communities. But the better way to respond to this trend is to invest in those journalists and experts, hire and put them into the center of a growth strategy, and then let them guide the entire marketing subscription funnel, including their own newsletter, podcast, and weekly column. Their communities don’t even have to turn into brand promoters for the entire organization, so long as they’re registered and keep coming back to their respective favorites.

Eventually, those personality-centered communities may even serve as an excellent gateway for advertisers to reach their target audiences. But that’s one to see in 2022.

Pia Frey is a journalist and a co-founder of Opinary.

To multitask without losing focus is difficult, and in the coming year, it won’t be any easier for publishers. To end the third-party cookie era in a proactive way, publishers will have to figure out a strategy to get advertisers first-party access to their target audiences.

Just like everyone else, they’ll have to master the uncertainties the pandemic has brought upon us. And publishers have to elevate their subscription game. But how, and in what direction?

The era in which every news site covers more or less the same set of topics and stories is over. The challenge now is differentiation and segmentation — the rise of the niche, if you will. The clearer the editorial profile of a particular niche, the higher the potential to build a loyal and paying audience around it.

How to differentiate? Building expertise, credibility, and audience in a niche area of interest is not easy, and larger legacy newsrooms will surely find it more difficult to adapt. And, of course, none of it will work without deeper investments into editorial, which, against a landscape of more than 16,000 newsroom jobs being killed in the U.S. alone in 2020, isn’t looking good.

We might never see some of those jobs again, but others might find their way back to us in 2021. One predictable way to grow a paying audience is to hire journalists with an established profile and following in a certain area. Kara Swisher, covering tech, and Ben Smith, covering media, being lured to The New York Times are examples. But it can also be done in a way that is simpler and with more humble ambitions.

Media organizations can learn from the Substackization of media (and the consequent Substackerati) to see how journalists’ expertise can be channeled through newsletters to build their own communities. But the better way to respond to this trend is to invest in those journalists and experts, hire and put them into the center of a growth strategy, and then let them guide the entire marketing subscription funnel, including their own newsletter, podcast, and weekly column. Their communities don’t even have to turn into brand promoters for the entire organization, so long as they’re registered and keep coming back to their respective favorites.

Eventually, those personality-centered communities may even serve as an excellent gateway for advertisers to reach their target audiences. But that’s one to see in 2022.

Pia Frey is a journalist and a co-founder of Opinary.

José Zamora   Walking the talk on diversity

Nabiha Syed   Newsrooms quit their toxic relationships

Renée Kaplan   Falling in love with your subscription

Sue Cross   A global consensus around the kind of news we need to save

Mandy Jenkins   You build trust by helping your readers

Jody Brannon   People won’t renew

Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Cassie Haynes   A shift from conversation to action

Astead W. Herndon   The Trump-sized window of the media caring about race closes again

John Saroff   Covid sparks the growth of independent local news sites

John Davidow   Reflect and repent

Celeste Headlee   The rise of radical newsroom transparency

Gordon Crovitz   Common law will finally apply to the Internet

Samantha Ragland   The year of journalists taking initiative

Joshua P. Darr   Legislatures will tackle the local news crisis

Sara M. Watson   Return of the RSS reader

Edward Roussel   Tech companies get aggressive in local

Natalie Meade   Journalism enters rehab

Loretta Chao   Open up the profession

Pablo Boczkowski   Audiences have revolted. Will newsrooms adapt?

A.J. Bauer   The year of MAGAcal thinking

Jonas Kaiser   Toward a wehrhafte journalism

Julia B. Chan and Kim Bui   Millennials are ready to run things

Chicas Poderosas   More voices mean better information

Brian Moritz   The year sports journalism changes for good

Raney Aronson-Rath   To get past information divides, we need to understand them first

Marissa Evans   Putting community trauma into context

Whitney Phillips   Facts are an insufficient response to falsehoods

Mike Caulfield   2021’s misinformation will look a lot like 2020’s (and 2019’s, and…)

C.W. Anderson   Journalism changed under Trump — will it keep changing under Biden?

Kawandeep Virdee   Goodbye, doomscroll

Janet Haven and Sam Hinds   Is this an AI newsroom?

Nikki Usher   Don’t expect an antitrust dividend for the media

Talmon Joseph Smith   The media rejects deficit hawkery

Candis Callison   Calling it a crisis isn’t enough (if it ever was)

Heidi Tworek   A year of news mocktails

Anna Nirmala   Local news orgs grasp the urgency of community roots

Jim Friedlich   A newspaper renaissance reached by stopping the presses

Brandy Zadrozny   Misinformation fatigue sets in

Masuma Ahuja   We’ll remember how interconnected our world is

Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli   Defund the crime beat

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting dodged a bullet in 2020, but 2021 will be harder

Basile Simon   Graphics, unite

Cory Haik   Be essential

Bo Hee Kim   Newsrooms create an intentional and collaborative culture

Nico Gendron   Ask your readers to help build your products

Jennifer Choi   What have we done for you lately?

Jeremy Gilbert   Human-centered journalism

Hossein Derakhshan   Mass personalization of truth

J. Siguru Wahutu   Journalists still wrongly think the U.S. is different

Juleyka Lantigua   The download, podcasting’s metric king, gets dethroned

Rachel Glickhouse   Journalists will be kinder to each other — and to themselves

Christoph Mergerson   Black Americans will demand more from journalism

Catalina Albeanu   Publish less, listen more

Mike Ananny   Toward better tech journalism

Rishad Patel   From direct-to-consumer to direct-to-believers

Mariano Blejman   It’s time to challenge autocompleted journalism

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   Stop pretending publishers are a united front

Colleen Shalby   The definition of good journalism shifts

Tamar Charney   Public radio has a midlife crisis

Kate Myers   My son will join every Zoom call in our industry

Jennifer Brandel   A sneak peak at power mapping, 2073’s top innovation

Ariel Zirulnick   Local newsrooms question their paywalls

David Chavern   Local video finally gets momentum

Benjamin Toff   Beltway reporting gets normal again, for better and for worse

Marcus Mabry   News orgs adapt to a post-Trump world (with Trump still in it)

Ben Collins   We need to learn how to talk to (and about) accidental conspiracists

Ernie Smith   Entrepreneurship on rails

Beena Raghavendran   Journalism gets fused with art

Victor Pickard   The commercial era for local journalism is over

Annie Rudd   Newsrooms grow less comfortable with the “view from above”

Delia Cai   Subscriptions start working for the middle

Matt DeRienzo   Citizen truth brigades steer us back toward reality

Kerri Hoffman   Protecting podcasting’s open ecosystem

Garance Franke-Ruta   Rebundling content, rebuilding connections

Sam Ford   We’ll find better ways to archive our work

Andrew Donohue   The rise of the democracy beat

Sonali Prasad   Making disaster journalism that cuts through the noise

Julia Angwin   Show your (computational) work

Robert Hernandez   Data and shame

Sarah Stonbely   Videoconferencing brings more geographic diversity

Don Day   Business first, journalism second

Anthony Nadler   Journalism struggles to find a new model of legitimacy

Steve Henn   Has independent podcasting peaked?

Gonzalo del Peon   Collaborations expand from newsrooms to the business side

Cindy Royal   J-school grads maintain their optimism and adaptability

Bill Adair   The future of fact-checking is all about structured data

Jer Thorp   Fewer pixels, more cardboard

Zainab Khan   From understanding to feeling

Marie Shanahan   Journalism schools stop perpetuating the status quo

Amara Aguilar   Journalism schools emphasize listening

Charo Henríquez   A new path to leadership

Kristen Muller   Engaged journalism scales

Rachel Schallom   The rise of nonprofit journalism continues

Ariane Bernard   Going solo is still only a path for the few

Ståle Grut   Network analysis enters the journalism toolbox

Parker Molloy   The press will risk elevating a Shadow President Trump

Jacqué Palmer   The rise of the plain-text email newsletter

Imaeyen Ibanga   Journalism gets unmasked

Sumi Aggarwal   News literacy programs aren’t child’s play

Ben Werdmuller   The web blooms again

David Skok   A pandemic-prompted wave of consolidation

Rodney Gibbs   Zooming beyond talking heads

Gabe Schneider   Another year of empty promises on diversity

Danielle C. Belton   A decimated media rededicates itself to truth

Michael W. Wagner   Fractured democracy, fractured journalism

Francesco Zaffarano   The year we ask the audience what it needs

Alicia Bell and Simon Galperin   Media reparations now

Megan McCarthy   Readers embrace a low-information diet

Linda Solomon Wood   Canada steps up for journalism

Richard Tofel   Less on politics, more on how government works (or doesn’t)

Logan Jaffe   History as a reporting tool

Ray Soto   The news gets spatial

Joanne McNeil   Newsrooms push back against Ivy League cronyism

Francesca Tripodi   Don’t expect breaking up Google and Facebook to solve our information woes

John Ketchum   More journalists of color become newsroom founders

Cherian George   Enter the lamb warriors

Nicholas Jackson   Blogging is back, but better

Cory Bergman   The year after a thousand earthquakes

Pia Frey   Building growth through tastemakers and their communities

Doris Truong   Indigenous issues get long-overdue mainstream coverage

Moreno Cruz Osório   In Brazil, a push for pluralism

Ryan Kellett   The bundle gets bundled

Laura E. Davis   The focus turns to newsroom leaders for lasting change

Chase Davis   The year we look beyond The Story

Stefanie Murray and Anthony Advincula   Expect to see more translations and non-English content

Rick Berke   Virtual events are here to stay

Jesse Holcomb   Genre erosion in nonprofit journalism

Mark S. Luckie   Newsrooms and streaming services get cozy

Sarah Marshall   The year audiences need extra cheer

Patrick Butler   Covid-19 reporting has prepared us for cross-border collaboration

Matt Skibinski   Misinformation won’t stop unless we stop it

Errin Haines   Let’s normalize women’s leadership

Tonya Mosley   True equity means ownership

Shaydanay Urbani and Nancy Watzman   Local collaboration is key to slowing misinformation

Jessica Clark   News becomes plural

Tshepo Tshabalala   Go niche

Mark Stenberg   The rise of the journalist-influencer

An Xiao Mina   2020 isn’t a black swan — it’s a yellow canary

Alyssa Zeisler   Holistic medicine for journalism

Aaron Foley   Diversity gains haven’t shown up in local news

Tim Carmody   Spotify will make big waves in video

Taylor Lorenz   Journalists will learn influencing isn’t easy

Nonny de la Pena   News reaches the third dimension

Tanya Cordrey   Declining trust forces publishers to claim (or disclaim) values

Nisha Chittal   The year we stop pivoting

Kevin D. Grant   Parachute journalism goes away for good

Andrew Ramsammy   Stop being polite and start getting real

Hadjar Benmiloud   Get representative, or die trying

Meredith D. Clark   The year journalism starts paying reparations

Zizi Papacharissi   The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth

Joni Deutsch   Local arts and music make journalism more joyous

John Garrett   A surprisingly good year

Ashton Lattimore   Remote work helps level the playing field in an insular industry

Burt Herman   Journalists build post-Facebook digital communities

M. Scott Havens   Traditional pay TV will embrace the disruption

Alfred Hermida and Oscar Westlund   The virus ups data journalism’s game

María Sánchez Díez   Traffic will plummet — and it’ll be ok