"E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine hosted by Mike Blinder

Industry sales guru Ryan Dohrn is the creator of the 360 Ad Sales Training system and is a globally recognized media revenue consultant who has created more than 600 corporate sales strategy programs. To date, he has taught more than 20,000 business professionals how to sell better. In this segment of E&P Reports, E&P publisher Mike Blinder, who also has a sales consulting background, goes one-on...

A recent study conducted by The Whitman Insight Strategies Initiative and Creative Circle Media Solutions takes a deep dive into how a global pandemic has affected the actual feelings and emotions of local media consumers. One of the key takeaways revealed from "The Covid-19 Societal Impact Study" is that even though half of those polled say that they lack confidence in news media, those perceptio...

It was just a few years ago that a group of local citizens bought the Half Moon Bay (Calif.) Review from Wick Communications, a sale that included the 122-year-old newspaper, a pair of magazines and the building they occupied. And just a few months ago, those same local entrepreneurs decided to expand their small, local media empire and purchase the Pacifica (Calif.) Tribune, which has served thei...

Schneps Media is Rocking New York With Hyperlocal Free Weeklies    In 1985, Victoria Schneps-Yunis began a community newspaper in her living room called the Queens Courier . Today, that one free weekly has turned into the largest local media company in New York State comprised of newspapers, magazines, websites and events. Victoria's son, Joshua Schneps, now serves CEO and publisher of more than 7...

John C. Tompkins left college his junior year to buy his first newspaper. Today, he is owner of News Media Corporation, a company that owns 65 different newspaper titles in eight states, serving smaller cities and towns with populations between 5,000 and 50,000.   Tompkins also boasts good cash flow from his properties, even during a pandemic, and claims that the reason his newspapers maintain pro...

"Vision25: Building Racial Equity in Newsrooms" is a new initiative started as a collaboration between the Online News Association, the Maynard Institute and OpenNew s, with a goal to be a major catalyst creating social change within journalistic institutions that help newsrooms be anti-racist and collaborative, and where journalists of color feel like they truly belong. Vision25 is creating progr...

The Branded Content Project, an initiative by the Local Media Consortium, Local Media Association and Facebook Journalism Project, today released the results of a report on content marketing in collaboration with Borrell Associates Inc., which found that, despite the effect Covid-19 had on businesses, content marketing remained relatively steady and is projected to be more of a priority in 2021. "...

Aequalitas is Latin for "equality." But there is very little equal to today's struggling media outlets at the growing Aequalitas Media Group, who now owns eight publications targeted to the LGBTQ+ Reader in several U.S. major markets. Plus, their sought after ad network has become popular with some very large brands that want to connect to their claim being a "single point of contact to almost 100...

Dr. Samir Husni is "the country's leading magazine expert," according to Forbes magazine; "the nation's leading authority on new magazines," according to min:media industry newsletter; "a world-renowned expert on print journalism" according to CBS News Sunday Morning; and The Chicago Tribune dubbed him "the planet's leading expert on new magazines." It's no wonder he is better known in the industr...

One of the most anticipated media studies is the yearly release of the Borrell Associates' Local Advertiser Survey where thousands of local advertisers complete more than 40 questions, yielding unique insights about current and future marketing plans.  Although the study is being fielded now to be released in November, Borrell has been issuing "snaps" of the data they are accumulating via "chart o...

In Memphis, Tenn., the Daily Memphian just celebrated its second anniversary. The website currently boasts more than 14,000 digital-only subscribers each paying an average of $9/month for the content created by a team of more than 45 fulltime and freelance journalists. Plus, they push 20 different email newsletters to the more than 45,000 subscribers they've managed to garner in this short time. B...

This week's installment of E&P Reports is a recording of a live broadcast, hosted by E&P publisher Mike Blinder for the Association of Alternative Newsmedia's AANOVATION 2020 virtual annual conference. This one-hour roundtable is a discussion on the future of news media. Topics include: Will reader revenue ever rise to a level to fund our newsrooms; how to recruit and maintain talent in turbulent...

Many people were shocked last April when the Tampa Bay Times, the flagship newspaper of the Poynter Institute and the largest newspaper in Florida, made the decision to reduce its print frequency to only twice a week on Wednesdays and Sundays. To this day, the 11th largest media market in the country has no daily print newspaper. It was reported that the reason for this decision was the effect tha...

Ken Doctor Finally Reveals Lookout Local For more than a decade, media analyst Ken Doctor sat on the sidelines evaluating, commenting and even making sweeping predictions about where the news publishing industry was heading and how he felt about the factors that impacted it. But today, Ken has moved into the fray as CEO of a new startup he has been teasing the industry about called  Lookout Local...

A new 10-minute survey is asking local journalists and news publishers to share their story and experiences as part of a project examining the health of local newspapers. The project is supported by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and is seeking to find how local news is coping with COVID-19, corporate downsizing, concerns about  "fake news," mistrust in journalism, "n...

This year, Christian Hendricks, president of the Local Media Consortium, will head-up the judging for Editor and Publisher's EPPY Awards. He will work with a panel of judges made up of media leaders with backgrounds in website design, marketing/advertising, editorial, technology, education, and management. In 2019, EPPY winners included the Boston Globe, CNN, the Weather Channel, USA Today and the...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused economic damage across virtually every sector of the news publishing industry with many newspapers already closing, and others are facing closure if the economic climate doesn't change quickly. News deserts are being created by the end of local journalism, but HR 7640--The Local Journalism Sustainability Act (LJSA)--may be part of the solution.   The LJSA addresses...

The Cushing (Okla.) Citizen has had many owners since its first issue came off the press in 1895. Today, (along with two other nearby publications), it is in the capable hands of J. D. Meisner, who purchased the paper with his wife, MaryLee, one month before COVID-19 wreaked havoc on the local economy. After downsizing, J.D. now maintains profitability while still serving his three small markets....

Last year, the Maag-Brown family, owners of The Youngstown (Ohio) Vindicator, announced it would shut down after serving its local community for 150 years. As a result, 144 employees and 250 carriers were laid off. Not finding a buyer, the family made an announcement to their 34,000+ subscribers in June 2019 that their last edition would be published Aug. 31. Hearing the news, Ogden Newspapers put...

The Local Journalism Sustainability (LJS) Act is a bi-partisan bill that would provide tax credits to support subscriptions, advertising and journalists salaries for the news industry. Introduced in Congress on July 16 by Arizona Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick and Washington state Republican Rep. Dan Newhouse, the bill was the "brainchild" of Francis Wick, CEO of Wick Communications who began cha...

Called a "take back the night" movement, The Relevance Project is a coordinated promotion and marketing campaign by The Newspaper Association Managers (NAM). It's designed to reposition, rebrand and harness the collective reach of 9,600 newspapers throughout the U.S. and Canada to create a uniform voice spreading important messages about the unique value community newspapers deliver to their reade...

The entire industry was stunned when WEHCO Media announced they were planning to stop printing their flagship statewide newspaper, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and only deliver it to their subscribers via a paid web/ APP based platform. After many market tests, their final solution to keep their audience was to purchase iPads and offer them to their print subscribers for free. Now more than a ye...

Ryan Dohrn is a globally recognized media revenue consultant who has helped newspapers, niche publications, broadcast stations and online publishers generate more than $500 million in new revenue. Recently, Dohrn and his company, 360 Ad Sales, reached out to media partners to send in their sales proposals that closed deals and those that did not. After analyzing the results, they learned what comm...

In March 2018, the McClatchy-owned Idaho Statesman began to print their newspaper in Twin Falls, a 2.5 hour drive from the Boise market. That June, the Adams Publishing Group's (APG) Idaho Press decided to take advantage of this change by implementing an aggressive plan to expand its news coverage and distribution area by doubling down on traditional print publications and increasing local news co...

With the unpredictability of COVID-19's impact on the local advertising ecosystem, Borrell Associates has revised its 2020 advertising and marketing forecasts. The bad news is that the previous 2019 forecast, which revealed local ad spending would increase, has been revised to show a decrease of 13 percent with print, broadcast and radio advertising dropping even more. However, there is some good...