“The news business ecosystem is broken. We have a solution.” – TheNewsProject

TheNewsProject is a breath of fresh air to the news industry. The organization has created a world-class suite of technology and tailored services to address the critical need for sustainable business models in the news marketplace. "TheNewsProject solution integrates best of breed content, audience and revenue tools that a typical news venture would assemble separately at far greater cost in time, effort and dollars". We interviewed the Founder of TheNewsProject, Merrill Brown. Merrill spoke on TheNewsProject’s approaches to key problems faced by their target segments, the involvement of local newspapers at TheNewsProject and building relationships based on trust with clients. Most importantly, he shared his worthwhile thoughts on steps local newspapers, small businesses and advertisers should be taking to succeed. TheNewsProject works with many clients globally ranging from start-ups to local newspapers to NGOs. For digital start-ups and their limited resources, the focus is on creating a sustainable business model, which "from our point of view means an intense focus on two things: user experience and getting the reader revenue model right”.  Any newspaper can now be up and running quickly, efficiently and cost effectively.   TheNewsProject dives into clients’ data, subscription, membership, paywall and more to find the right reader revenue model. “Built into TheNewsProject’s platform and all strategic thinking are both the tools and models to help people think through that problem, for some sites the right approach will be membership, for other sites such as newspapers at scale the approach may be a paywall”. TheNewsProject works with several metropolitan newspapers that have already invested significantly in their digital capabilities and are thinking about new initiatives for which TheNewsProject’s capabilities are very valuable. Merrill discussed a common issue metropolitan newspapers face, having to abandon suburban distribution of newspapers because it’s too expensive and not profitable. TheNewsProject urges large newspapers to look at digital solutions to problems. As an example, some newspapers are considering multiple digital sites in easily sponsorable and monetizable categories, that correspond to the tradition content category strengths.  Merrill described this as a very important opportunity for local newspapers to create marketplaces for businesses in their town. 

Merrill believes local newspapers should focus their attention and effort on developing a much deeper and comprehensive relationship with their advertisers. TheNewsProject is helping news organizations set up agencies.  As an example, news companies can help advertisers do more than just place banner advertising or print advertising, but also integrating social and programmatic advertising. These are two examples of alternative services that newspapers usually don’t execute well,  Merrill also believes that community engagement is very important to news organizations of any size. “Newspapers traditionally sit in a big newsroom and tell their communities what’s important”. TheNewsProject as a platform supports this transformation. “This can no longer be a top-down only world, of course, the judgments and story ideas of editors are important but to do all of that without feedback about what’s on the minds of the community and what the issues are in that community is a failed and increasingly desperate approach to the news. We think community engagement is really important and we talk about it to everybody we can, and hopefully build it into the user experience we create for people on their websites and in their mobile sites/properties”. We see massive opportunities for collaboration with the Localogy community. Stay tuned we hope to have more on this in the near future.