Partnership creates new hiring solution for local media companies

Plus: DeepSeek citation explanation

Author

Paul Gewuerz
February 13, 2025

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:

» Partnership creates new hiring solution for local media companies

» DeepSeek citation explanation

» Questions at the National Trust for Local News?

» Lee Enterprises suffers major cyberattack

🎧 Small Press, Big Ideas Podcast: Smarter Digital Ad Sales for SMBs

🤝 Partnership creates new hiring solution for local media companies

Editor & Publisher has announced that it has taken over management of MediaRecruiter.com, which recently merged with The Media Job Board, to offer a new hiring solution for the industry. Under the partnership, job postings will gain more exposure across all affiliated sites as well as 25+ national job boards, “reaching both active and passive job seekers across the media landscape”.

📝 DeepSeek citation explanation

Nieman Lab explores how AI startup DeepSeek compares to competitors when it comes to citing it’s news sources. Some takeaways:

  • DeepSeek hallucinated URL’s and provided broken links (similar to ChatGPT)

  • The chatbot was more likely to self-censor or pivot it’s answers to stay within safeguarded rails

  • It didn’t always link to the publisher who originally broke a story

In other words, not so great.

❔ Questions at the National Trust for Local News?

This piece from Poynter questions if the model of the National Trust for Local News is not living up to its mission. The trust, which buys and operates news orgs as opposed to providing grants, recently had it’s CEO step down. The article dives into the author and other outside source’s suspicions that the remote operating model may be inherently flawed.

⚠ Lee Enterprises suffers major cyberattack

Publishing giant Lee Enterprises suffered a major “cybersecurity event” last Friday, affecting dozens of local publications. Initially, publishers were unable to build and publish pages online, with lingering effects still happening as late as Monday.

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Small Press, Big Ideas

A podcast about the business of local news

Smarter Digital Ad Sales for SMBs

Small business owners typically have a lot on their plate, as many entrepreneurs reading this are likely all too aware. For a small business looking to advertise their services locally, the thought of boring banner ads or a history of underwhelming success from digital advertising has probably left a bad taste in their mouth.

This week’s guest on the podcast is taking a stab at that fixing that. Christian Scherbel is the founder and CEO of Smartico, where they enable regional news publishers to deliver 1,000’s of local display and video ads for their local SMB advertisers without any effort.

In our conversation, Christian explains how Smartico uses the power of AI, always with a human touch, to extract and repurpose advertiser’s existing digital assets to create beautiful images and videos that bring the brand to life.

Unlike other programmatic ad solutions that simply prioritize clicks, Smartico tracks attention metrics, measuring how much time users spend on an ad or landing page. This helps SMB advertisers see tangible value from their campaigns.

Christian also illustrates Smartico’s business model, including how they aim to be a profit center for publishers (they don’t make money unless the publisher does), how Smartico enables direct sales for publishers as opposed to relying on networks like AdSense, and how exactly he landed here after starting his career as an aviation engineer.

Have a listen to the full episode on your podcast app of choice (links above), or read my full summary and listen to the pod on my website: Smarter Digital Ad Sales for SMBs

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