How important is a homepage?

Plus: Building community, online and off

Paul Gewuerz
September 05, 2024

Your weekly briefing of stories from around the local news space about business, policy, trends, and more

Hello! Here’s what’s in this week’s issue:

→ How important is a homepage?

→ How can local TV outlets adapt to new audience behaviors

→ Building community online and off

→ Arkansas newspaper launches philanthropy campaign to raise $100K

📰 How important is a homepage?

A new report from the Local News Initiative investigates the importance of the homepage for local news outlets.

The homepage of a publisher’s website was once the entry point for the world, a fact that diminished with the rise of social media and search. Now that those platforms are seeing a decrease in traffic due to AI summaries of news stories, publishers are rediscovering the power of a great homepage.

📰 How can local TV outlets adapt to new audience behaviors

Is local TV becoming a relic of a different era? Although there are bright spots around the industry, in many ways linear TV is becoming more clunky and irrelevant each year.

Teens and 20-somethings are accustomed to having on demand access to information, and even more likely to expect it in their Instagram feed.

This piece by TVNewsCheck highlights the problems facing local TV in 2024.

📰 Building community online and off

At a recent conference held by the Institute for Nonprofit News, local publishers talked about the challenges facing newsrooms in the current era of media disruption.

One of the top areas of discussion was getting people to interact with the news in their day to day lives and building a real world community, especially in the workplace.

📰 Arkansas newspaper launches philanthropy campaign to raise $100K

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has announced a philanthropy campaign to help it raise $100,000 in 100 days.

The move was announced by the Gazette’s owner, WEHCO Media, and is an experimental run of a funding plan that it may use on other newspaper properties that it owns in the future. Donors will be mentioned by name in the newspaper in a show of transparency.

This type of philanthropic campaign has been used by other family owned papers around the country in recent years, and may be a growing trend in the years to come.