Audience (formerly), Business Models, Curriculum, Events, Home Page, JTM News, Seattle, Technology

What questions do you have?

The first full day of JTM/PNW was possibility day — a series of conversations about questions. Here are some of the topics:

  • Can open government online help sustain the new news ecology?
  • How can we create sustainable freelance in an increasingly decentralized newsroom?
  • What is possibility, solution journalism and how can I do it?
  • Do we respect the audience and, if so, how do we show it?
  • What can academia do for the “new news”?
  • How can journalists support community and remain fact-based, truth tellers?
  • How can we pay for city hall beat reporters and Olympia gavel-to-gavel coverage?
  • How can technology better serve journalism?
  • Can you survive the new “free” economy?
  • After the crash, how can we re-connect local audiences with journalism that isn’t hyper-local?
  • How is journalism different with the tool is a Wiki?
  • How do we ensure that the new news ecology is infused with diverse voices?
  • What should journalism be in the 21st Century? What should community be?
  • What aspects of traditional media journalism need to be preserved and what should be jettisoned?
  • Can issue advertising be leveraged to support new forms of issue journalism?
  • How can I sustain my local blog and sustain it as a business?

Today we move into anwsers.

Business Models, Home Page, JTM News, Member News

Demystifying Advertising in Hyperlocal News Communities

Submitted by Michelle Ferrier on Thu, 10/01/2009 – 11:21am

Two hyperlocal efforts described their advertising strategies in a recent conversation sponsored by the Journalism That Matters collaborative. Tracy Record of WestSeattleBlog.com and Barry Parr of Coastsider.com discussed the advantages of ad servers, pricing, and some do’s and don’ts of ad sales in the hyperlocal space.

Do
•    Publish awhile before selling ads. WestSeattleBlog.com ran for two years before it took ads. Coastsider.com didn’t start selling ads for four years. Having another revenue stream (like a job) helps during the startup phase.

•    Develop a page design/platform that accommodates ads…even if you don’t have any yet. That means building in multiple positions – leaderboards, banners, buttons, text ads. The challenge is a design that has enough ad positions…more