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Straight from the LION’s mouth—local news lessons: The Media Roundup

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What our independent news experts learned from auditing 75 news businesses

We mentioned LION in our recent Media Moments ‘22 launch event (if only because I believe it’s a backronym) – but I wish we’d seen this before we went live. There are some fascinating insights in here about the shared challenges across a wide range of news businesses. While it focuses on the local news organisations in particular, I’d bet that many of them feel at least somewhat familiar to all news businesses:

For example! “I heard a lot of ‘I think’ or ‘I believe,’ and some of the founders had invested an incredible amount of money and time without checking any of their assumptions or evaluating them at critical junctures in their business,” said analyst Ariel Zirulnick, senior editor of community engagement for Southern California Public Radio. 

LION suggests, as a potential solution, that audience research is a nice antidote to those gut instincts. While the article itself doesn’t say it so explicitly, I’d bet that the team meant that audience research is a constant process, rather than a one-off project. Audiences shift; newsroom priorities must shift also.

The Washington Post launches a year in news à la Spotify Wrapped

Stealing an idea from Spotify, WaPo has launched a “look-back” experience but pivoted “when we learned that our readers are more interested in insights that center on their reading ‘personality’ and content discovery rather than revisiting news from the past.” Interesting idea!

TikTok, YouTube could be targeted under Australia’s media code

Now this is a mystery. It seems like the original headline for this story read that the news media bargaining code was a success – but that isn’t necessarily reflected in the story. Instead that conclusion gradually get sanded down over the course of the story reaching a nadir when it becomes clear that a lot of those payments aren’t actually going to support journalism at all.

Media Moments 2022 is live!

It’s alive! Check out this year’s Media Moments 2022 report. It’s free! And you can hear the audio of our live launch event this coming Monday.


This content originally appeared in The Media Roundup, a daily newsletter from Media Voices. Subscribe here: