Pros of digital acquisitions: Reaching audiences where they are

NJ PBS GM Joe Lee sees NJ Spotlight News’ hybrid news operation as a way to reach audiences who don’t watch traditional television programming.

The newsroom, which produces a weekly half-hour television show and website focused on New Jersey, also reaches people who consume news elsewhere, including on social media and YouTube.

“If you don’t play in those spaces, I think you risk falling behind,” Lee said.

NJ PBS, owned by the WNET Group, is one of several public media stations that acquired digital news services in the second half of 2010. Others include KPCC with LAist, New York Public Radio with Gothamist, Colorado Public Radio with Denverite and Philadelphia’s WHYY with Billy Penn.

Executives from two stations, LAist and NJ PBS, described how digital news outlets helped launch their digital presence.

But having a digital news service doesn’t protect stations from the financial pressures and layoffs that have plagued public media since 2023. LAist underwent buyouts and eliminated positions in July, and New York Public Radio announced a second round of layoffs. next year. WNET also cut jobs, although Lee said the impact on NJ Spotlight News was “minimal” but declined to provide details.

One of the acquired locations, DCist, was closed by WAMU in Washington, D.C. earlier this year.

“20 years ago, in the analog broadcasting world, broadcasting NPR content and having a few local radio shows was enough, but in the digital world, that is not enough,” said Kristen Muller, LAist chief content officer. “We’re not going to find new audiences this way. (…) If we didn’t have a digital audience now separate from radio, I would be very, deeply concerned about our importance to this city.”

In its earlier days as a private digital news site, LAist had nearly 800,000 monthly visitors.

KPCC acquired LAist in 2018 and adopted its own brand identity in 2023.

Muller told Current that the site currently has 1.2 million monthly active users and averages about 1.8 million to 2 million pageviews per month.

“Ignite our digital presence”

In 2019, NJ PBS acquired NJ Spotlight from the Community Foundation of New Jersey, making it weekly NJTV News and NJ Spotlight are combining under one multi-platform brand, NJ Spotlight News.

The basic strategy was to combine the talents of both units to create “one of the larger newsrooms in New Jersey and use Spotlight to really launch our online presence,” Lee said.

Producers on the broadcast team write for the digital site, and digital reporters appear on-air, Lee said.

Coverage of the weekday program is distributed on the NJ Spotlight News website and on its YouTube channel, which has 55,500 subscribers. The goal is to make the content available on as many platforms as possible, Lee said.

“Why limit it to just broadcasts?” Lee said. “We know our audiences will use multiple platforms… (and) consume news in different and diverse ways. We strive to be extremely efficient with the time and resources we put into crafting the story and making sure it’s available on all platforms.”

In California, KPCC’s 2018 acquisition of LAist did not involve new staff, Muller said. The news site, one of a group of news sites formerly owned by Joe Ricketts, was acquired in a group purchase organized by New York Public Radio. The deal, which was funded primarily by anonymous donors, included Gothamist for WNYC and DCist for WAMU. Each station made its own decisions regarding facility management and integration.

For KPCC, “the challenge became how to start creating content that was more digitally native and that would attract the audience that LAist.com had,” Muller said.

News had to learn a new internal workflow, and staff had to be proficient in both broadcast and digital, Muller explained.

“I think initially there was a wave of staff who felt like they came to do radio. They were into audio storytelling and they felt that was no longer the only priority,” Muller said.

“We had a lot of turnover in 2018 and 2019, but it was an opportunity to hire people who had the skills,” she added.

Trading is an essential part of the process of connecting public media stations with a digital newsroom, according to the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy’s 2021 report, “Public Media Mergers Playbook.”

The report shows that changing staff can help build a new organizational culture.

At LAist, platform-agnostic journalism starts with the recruitment process. When recruiting, LAist looks for reporters who can find a good story and explain why it’s important to Los Angeles residents, Muller said.

“It’s harder than … figuring out how to format a digital story or how to write copy for broadcast,” Muller said.

Slow start of monetization

The wave of layoffs that hit the public media this year hit stations with digital news services.

In July, LAist agreed to 21 employee buyouts and eliminated seven additional positions. When the buyout was proposed in May, Muller said the organization was facing a $4 million to $5 million budget shortfall for the next two years.

Part of the reason was “slower-than-expected digital monetization” and overall cost growth that had not kept pace with revenue, a Current spokesman said in July.

To accelerate digital monetization, LAist is experimenting with digital memberships, Muller said.

For example, the site tested an “instant pay” option that allows mobile readers to make donations with the “click of a button,” Muller said. Mobile users make up 75% of LAist’s audience.

She added that this feature outperforms traditional donation methods by 26%, and 60% of people who have used it are new donors.

LAist plans to add an “instant payment” feature to its newsletters and mobile app by the end of the year, Muller added.

While sponsorship has been a challenge for public media around the world, efforts to increase advertising sales on digital platforms needed a reset.

“It was very, very difficult,” Muller said. “As an organization, we continue to move away from strategies and tactics that work on broadcast platforms but won’t work on digital. It’s a lot of learning.”

NJ Spotlight News recently hired an integrated media salesperson to look at all assets suitable for sale.

“We’re taking a different approach rather than just silence – this is what we do for underwriting and this is what we do for digital sponsorships,” Lee said before filling the position. “We are looking for a professional who understands both and can leverage both so that we can gain growth in this part of the revenue pie.”

As the digital side of an organization grows, sales staff must adapt, said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute.

“They’re not the same people,” Edmonds said. “It’s not the same skill set.”

He added that the same idea could also be applied to journalists in the newsroom.

“People who are good at one thing are not necessarily good at another,” Edmonds said.

“We Bought a Habit”

In a Wyncote Foundation report published in July, station leaders who chose to cover local news said the choice required profound changes. (Wyncote is the founder of Current.)

One of the authors, Wyncote senior journalism advisor Feather Houstoun, told Current if a station wants to really make a difference in its digital news presence, acquiring the site is a good way to accelerate that effort.

“Changing organizational habits without importing outside skills is more difficult,” Houstoun said.

Edmonds and Poynter compared this strategic move to a large bank taking over a smaller one.

“It’s much easier to start with something that already exists,” he said. “Someone else put in the time, expense and capital to start this. You don’t have to create this staff or send your own staff to the seeding phase.”

Muller said it would have taken KPCC at least a few years to build social media like LAist at the time of the acquisition.

“Instead of trying to create a habit… we bought the habit,” Muller said. “People used to read news on this website. They weren’t there to listen, they weren’t there to push, they were there to read the local news.