Our case webinars. Great ideas presented by
the people who put them into action.

Football, basketball, ice hockey, skiing or bandy. Bonnier News Local in Sweden offers unique live video feeds of elite local sports to subscribers. The video streams are part of a full content package before and after the live events, in cooperation with leagues and clubs.The future looks bright with growing audiences and new tech improving quality and reducing costs, but there’s always more to do. In this case we’ll find out how the Bonnier team is leveraging the live sports rights they’ve acquired in collaboration with two other local media groups, to keep sports fans as loyal subscribers.

With 250 news brands, Newsquest is the UK’s 2nd largest local news group, and it recently reported stable revenues and increasing profit. Getting to this position has required a lot of innovation, particularly in digital which now accounts for 50% of the advertising revenue. Much of the success has been down to a focus on supporting local businesses. Newquest’s local sales people offer local businesses help with advertising on social media, in search as well as in the group’s own print and digital brands.

Spotlight Delaware in the small eponymous US state has a newsroom of six journalists and a mission to empower communities through independent journalism. Core to its mission is to do a lot of what the publisher calls Community Listening – to identify needs and service gaps among underserved local communities in particular. Spotlight Delaware has recently extended this effort to its branded content program, looking for sponsors who are aligned with a particular local need, e g job training programmes or child care, and want to sponsor content on that theme. As a result, both the journalism and the branded content cover stories of deep interest to the readers of Spotlight Delaware, building brand and underpinning its mission.

This case is an excellent example of how newsrooms can produce data to underpin valuable local journalism. Scottish city centres have been hard hit by the pandemic, high fuel costs and online shopping – something which the data journalism team at DC Thomson wanted to cover in a comprehensive way. The work involves painstaking and continuous on-the-ground mapping of local high streets to produce structured data. This is then published as interactive high street trackers alongside engaging stories about the people and businesses involved. The initiative won the team the Best Data Visualisation award at the WAN-IFRA Digital Media Awards Europe 2024.

A visit to Bergen, Norway proved a pivotal moment for senior management at Austrian local media group Russmedia, one of most progressive local news companies in the German speaking world. What the leaders found in Norway was a fresh approach for both reader and advertising revenue to support its local newsroom. In this webinar we learn about the strategy itself, its deployment as well as insights and challenges along the way.

This is a case about how a Swedish local news group drew a straight line from their ambitious goal for digital subscriber growth to the daily work in the local newsrooms required to achieve it. NTM’s process involves everything from measuring how subscribers consume the content on site, to taking “friendly swat teams” on the road to help local newsrooms turn the findings into even better stories that keep readers coming back for more.

The e-paper is sailing up as a super product with a strong growth curve. The reading process is the same as in print - but the product is completely digital. How can the e-paper be used tactically to develop relationships with readers and advertisers. And what about strategic challenges like exiting print? The Stampen Group in west Sweden has done careful research, tactical moves and deeply strategic tests.

At Borås Tidning in the southwest of Sweden a small investigative team is producing a big impact for its newsroom. The all female three person team is using time honoured journalistic work methods to dig up stories on questionable and illegal practices used by local businesses and people. These stories drive twice as many conversions as other articles and the team generates a flood of tips from readers – all while supporting the news title’s brand and mission. And the significance of the all female team? They win the trust of female sources.

Imagine you have 120 local news titles spread over a geographically large but relatively sparsely populated country. And imagine you were tasked with making sure they all have enough journalism and content to fill their sites on a daily basis. What would you do? This is what Norwegian local media group Amedia is faced with, and they have reached a definite conclusion: You go even more local. And you do this by turning publicly available data into hyperlocal content and building tools for your journalists to turn the data into deeper stories about your communities. Because their key finding is that hyperlocal news with the right timing and context really works to drive reading and conversions. And that hyperlocal is better than just local.

The US is ahead of the curve when it comes to the decline of local news. It may also be true to say that it’s ahead of the curve when it comes to innovation around tackling this problem. One brilliant example is Crosstown in Los Angeles. Founder journalism professor Gabriel Kahn joined forces with a PhD student in engineering and set about creating a tool whereby journalists can generate hyper local stories from publicly available, but previously inaccessible, data. The result: 114 weekly neighbourhood newsletters on everything from crime to public health, housing and traffic. And one stat to prove the value of hyper local: The open rate is north of 90%.

We've heard it many times. Print readers are getting older. The new loyal paying readers are digital only. The number of print days is going down. Time is counting for print. How long can the industry afford to keep the presses going? One of few examples that has the full transformation from print to digital behind them is LA Presse i Quebec, Canada. It is a fascinating case story based on a successful strategy that was first launched with a tablet edition eleven years ago and led to a final close down of its print editions only after five years. Would you dare to switch off the presses completely?

We have all done it. Finding a job and, then, finding a home. Both have fundamentally local focus – the closer the better. While the prevailing view in the industry is that these types of classifieds markets are lost forever, Norwegian news group Amedia has revived them in digital and now lead in driving discovery for non-active seekers.

This is the story of how the culture desk at Hamburger Abendblatt decided to think outside the box in how they reach audiences and as a result increased the number of conversions from culture content by 37% over a year. It’s about identifying new audiences, like the 400,000 people who sing in Hamburg choirs, or pop-up audiences who are in intense need of information related to a specific event. The success of the culture desk is now inspiring change
in the wider newsroom, and we hope it will inspire you too – this is about how local journalism can benefit from a focus on readers’ needs.

Over the past year, Tamedia has strategically employed automation for content sourcing and production, allowing a substantial expansion of its local newsletter portfolio in communities with as few as 5000 inhabitants. Today, the growing portfolio allows for a personalised and flexible distribution of local content and reaches up to 40% of the inhabitants of the serviced communities with engagement rates way above average. Next up: Fully automated email updates for over a thousand municipalities.

At the end of February, Amedia launched an AI sandbox, a safe environment for all journalists in the Norwegian local media group to test and use generative AI for various time saving tasks. The objective is to enable more and better journalism by letting reporters use the AI as an assistant, meaning they can spend additional time out in the community covering even more important, local stories. The sandbox environment also has a trust dimension – by setting it up Amedia acts as a guarantor of safe AI use for the purposes of their local journalism. As an additional bonus, Amedia wants their more than 1000 journalists with their use of the new sandbox to help guide their product development organically.

Bonnier News Local’s ad product “Handla lokalt” (Shop Locally) is easy to understand, easy to buy and has a natural link to social media – all of which makes it attractive to advertisers. Advertisers’ social media posts are tagged to automatically show up in a shared voice widget on the local news site. This creates a win-win-win for advertisers, publishers and readers: Advertisers get direct access to readers – in a trusted local news channel – with updateable messages in real time. Publishers can, at very low cost, sell visibility to local advertisers, who pay a set monthly fee and create their own ads. Readers find all current, relevant local ads from retailers in one place.

Looking for new ways to attract younger readers, Norwegian regional title Stavanger Aftenblad (part of Schibsted) decided to create a project writing about them rather than just for them. Combining the latest automation technology with more traditional reporting on the ground, the football vertical Mååål! (goal), has a reader promise to cover junior football like it’s the Premier League. A text robot, co-created with Norwegian news agency NTB, takes care of turning all match results into articles, while two dedicated sports journalists report from some of the matches, doing interviews and showing up for the junior football community. The result has been higher engagement – every match has a small group of really involved readers. And thanks to the reporting on the ground, Stavanger Aftenblad is building its brand with a new generation of readers.