In this edition:
- A new, in-depth effort to help you with ad strategy
- Newspack publisher bring home LION awards
- 132 Newspack publisher launched
- Get Newspack calls on your calendar
Need help with your ad strategy? Sign up for training based on your level of experience
Whether you’re just getting started or you’ve been selling digital ads for years, you already know this space is ever-changing, confusing, and sometimes down-right frustrating.
No matter you level of experience, we’ve got opportunities for growth and optimization, so let’s get together and learn some cool stuff.
We’re asking you to place yourself into one of three groups, based on your site’s current strategy and where you think your team would see the most growth:
- Early learners
- Intermediate
- Advanced practitioners
These cohorts will meet monthly with Katie Rethman, Newspack’s ad-revenue specialist, who will give an in-depth presentation on a specific strategy, followed by a group discussion on putting that strategy into practice.
Some topics span all three groups, but the conversation will be tailored to where you are in the evolution of your ad strategy. Our goal is that these cohorts will sharpen your understanding of ads, as well as provide you with a group of fellow publishers who are navigating the same waters.
Early Learner
Choose this cohort if you’re either just getting started, or have only implemented the basics. Direct-sale opportunities come and go on their own, but you aren’t actively out there pushing it. You don’t yet have an outline of what your products are and are interested in understanding “how it all works” so you can have informed conversations with your advertisers.
January: Where’s the best place to put ads on my site?
February: Putting together a media kit
March: Using all the features of Newspack Ads that best fit my needs
April: How to have a sales conversation with a potential advertiser
May: Using Newspack Listings for obits, real estate, and other paid products
June: Getting started with programmatic
Intermediate
Choose this cohort if you’re got the basics mastered. You’ve got a media kit that just needs some love. You have repeat clients for direct sales and you’re looking to optimize your programmatic stack beyond just AdSense. Your traffic is at a high enough point where it likely makes sense to move to an impression based sales model from fixed fee.
January: Putting together a media kit
February: To lazy load or not to lazy load, that is the question
March: Newspack Listings for obits, real estate, and other paid products
April: Analyzing your audience to unveil potential advertisers
May: When to move from flat fee to impression-based pricing
June: Building your programmatic stack
Advanced Practitioner
Choose this cohort if you’ve got more than one programmatic partner running via price priority. You’re ready to start looking into header bidding to optimize those aforementioned partnerships. You’re ready to tap your large pool of audience analytics to sell premium targeted segments.
January: Improving your media kit
February: Using Newspack Listings for obits, real estate, and other paid products
March: Using a CRM to create targetable audiences
April: Header bidding
May: The revenue opportunity of house ads priced against programmatic
June: Intro to yield optimization
Interested? Sign up using this form.
Newspack publishers take home the hardware from the Local News Awards by LION
The Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers’ third annual Local Journalism Awards, presented by the Google News Initiative, announced this week 25 winners across 15 categories, representing the best of independent online media across the U.S. and Canada.
Congratulations to all the Newspack publishers and their teams. Here’s the full list of winners, with judges’ comments.
Voice of OC, publisher of the year — small publication, a local nonprofit, non-partisan newsroom located in Orange County, California.
- Wausau Pilot & Review was a finalist in this category. The Reader was a finalist for publisher of the year — medium/large.
Grice Connect, Best coronavirus coverage — solo, for filling a gap in local coverage and fostering collaborations with front-line workers to provide accurate, timely COVID-19-related information to their community.
Local News Matters, best coronavirus coverage — small publication, for its free COVID-19 Information Hub that includes stories, data, easy-to-find resources and more.
The Oaklandside, best coronavirus coverage — medium/large publication, for its on-the-ground work to reach its audience with its exhaustive COVID-19 vaccination guide — an easy-to-navigate online document that is continually updated and provides answers to critical questions about the vaccine.
The Reader, best solutions project of the year, for “The Fight to Change Social Studies in Nebraska,” which demonstrated how people saw inequities in the state’s education standards and materials, and why they needed to change.
- Flint Beat and Wausau Pilot & Review were finalists in this category.
Sahan Journal, the Community Engagement and Service Award, for its audience–informed work, including collaborating with non-English language community media outlets like Somali TV Minnesota and 3HmongTV to reach immigrant and refugee communities in their native languages
- The Kansas City Beacon and Wisconsin Watch were finalists in this category.
The Haitian Times and Berkeleyside were finalists for breaking news coverage.
The Oaklandside and El Tímpano were finalists for collaboration of the year.
inewsource was a finalist for investigative report of the year for medium and large publications.
Berkeleyside was a finalist for best local election coverage.
The Kansas City Beacon and Wisconsin Watch were finalists for best coverage of protest and movements.
Congratulations to all the winners and finalists, and we’re honored to have you in the Newspack community.
132nd Newspack newsroom launched
Congratulations to newsroom leaders on your launch in the past week.
As always, you can see the gallery of launched Newspack sites here.
Get our regularly scheduled meetings on your calendar with a couple of clicks
We have a Zoom call each Tuesday to which all publishers and their staffs are invited. The time alternates by week in an effort to accommodate publishers in various time zones.
Click the link here to add the late call, set for 5 p.m. Eastern
Apple Google Office 365 Outlook Outlook.com Yahoo
And this one is for the 11 a.m. Eastern call on opposite weeks
Apple Google Office 365 Outlook Outlook.com Yahoo