There’s an acute challenge for hyperlocal news. Local businesses are perfectly adept at connecting with their own audiences on major platforms. They rely on Facebook, Instagram and Google for their distribution, making the local rag redundant. There’s also the issue of scale. How do you make a scalable model that…

Cornwall Reports has been behind a hard paywall since it launched in 2016. It has 600 subscribers mostly paying £30. Alongside the use of casual payments — which contribute 1% of total income — it presents growing evidence that in the right environment, it’s possible to get people to pay…

Since benchmark data was gathered by academics in 2014 on annual income for independent and hyperlocal media in the UK, I’ve been keeping a close eye on what are realistic returns. Most are one-man bands or small teams, operating on self-service platforms such as Wordpress complemented with social media. With…

We have been working on a project called Ping! Trends which is a collaboration between the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and Omni Digital in Bristol. The aim of the project is to bring specifically tagged and themed hyperlocal journalist’s stories together to offer more opportunities to generate revenue…

Decision making is one of the biggest challenges when it comes to web-indigenous revenue models. What should we try? Should we do a membership model? Shall we do events? These are all questions I get asked by independent and community media on a regular basis. The challenge is how —…

Media executives in Belarus championing independent and web-indigenous journalism are faced with added challenges to the online revenue model. Not only do they need to combat squeezed ad revenues from dominant social media platforms but they exist in a weakened political economic market. From my work with 16 media in…

The limitations of indirect funding models via advertising and transaction based funding models for journalism are shifting focus to extend audience engagement and trust with an associated commitment of financial support. In 2013 — local news paywalls were a total disaster so…

I am keen to help independent journalism outlets optimise their revenue diversification strategies. A focussed portfolio of revenue streams is a critical part of that. Knowing that for community-driven news organisations, reader revenue is an increasingly popular business strategy I have been developing a new methodology to better understand and…

Alongside Dr Rob Watson and Dr Jennifer Jones we have been working with Internews Europe to develop a Strategy for Resilient Local, Civic and Community Media. The overarching question is how can we can best support and build a resilient set of networks that can sustain, advocate and demonstrate the…