BlueLena

A heartfelt THANK YOU to the 300 amazing news and information friends who joined us at NC State in Durham for the 2025 News & Information Summit! Your energy, expertise, engagement and presence all contributed to making this year’s event a success. From reunions with old friends and colleagues, to new connections and collaborators, there were so many positive exchanges and interactions throughout the day. ?? Help us thank all the keynote panelists and session presenters for sharing their expertise, resources and lessons learned and sparking new ideas for you to try in the weeks and months to come. ?? A round of applause to our generous sponsors: your commitment to supporting local news and information throughout the Tar Heel state makes this annual convening possible and fuels these vital conversations and connections. Thank you Google News Initiative, Knight Foundation, North Carolina Local News Lab Fund, Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard, LLP, Elon University School of Communications, The Assembly, Beacon Media NC, NC Press Foundation, BlueLena, A.J. Fletcher Foundation, McGuireWoods LLP, CTF Communications, and Upstate, with Code the Dream. ?? Three cheers for Summit partner co-host, the North Carolina Open Government Coalition, Program Lead Sarah Day Owen Wiskirchen and volunteer organizing committee members: Lorraine Ahearn, Ph.D., Taylor Batten, Valeria C., Kyle Compton, Les High, Mary Helen Moore, Wes Platt, Emilia Rivadeneira and Alexandra S.. Your energy, passion and dedication to detail behind the scenes ensured a meaningful and engaging experience for all. ?? Many thanks to our Summit venue, North Carolina Central University, for providing the amazing space in the Alfonso Elder Student Union and all the staff who helped create the perfect setting for meaningful discussions and connections. ?? Bravo to Caryn Sterling for your gorgeous graphic representation of the event, helping document our conversations, insights & inspirations in vivid and vibrant colors. The NC local news and information ecosystem is something really special and we are so grateful for all of you and your roles in building it!?

We were delighted today for Ashley Woods Branch to team up with our friend David Grant from Blue Engine Collaborative to present a session on “How to Set Goals that Matter” at the fourth annual NC Local News Summit. This year’s event featured a record 275 attendees, and demonstrates the continued growth and strengthening of the North Carolina journalism and information ecosystem. We will publish a full recap and key takeaways from this session on our site later this week!

Today at 2pm ET we will host our 4th weekly session of the new BlueLena Academy, sponsored by Google News Initiative. This session will cover best practices and how to build a one-off reader revenue campaign. We will take you through: ? what is a one-off campaign and when to plan them ? why and how to make an appeal for reader support ? ways to optimize timing, audience segmentation, subject lines and calls to action to drive results We will also share examples and templates of successful campaigns that you can reuse for your own organization. Academy sessions are free to attend for all BlueLena clients and you can register at this link: https://lnkd.in/g7QX8XGn

???? Reminder that today's BlueLena Academy session, focusing on the audience funnel will kick off at 2pm ET. Ashley Woods Branch will lead the conversation, and we invite you to register at the link below.

New Housing Information Digital Resource for Western North Carolina. Recognizing the continuing need for truthful information, NC Local- a new statewide news hub dedicated to helping communities stay informed about statewide issues, is working with Distributed Media Lab to power a new information resource for local news publishers in North Carolina to offer their communities throughout the western region of the state. Recovering from Hurricane Helene will take time as roads, bridges and other infrastructure and new housing is rebuilt. The WNC Housing Guide provides people living in the region a valuable information resource and is now available to embed on any local news website seeking to serve their community across the region with quality information. Now, local publishers can go to the Distributed Media Lab marketplace, get the embed code for the Housing Guide collection in a format that fits their website, and place it on their websites for free. Check out the WNC Housing Guide digital tool kit for more information: https://lnkd.in/db7fEs5f Shannan Bowen Christopher Rudisill Catherine Komp David Gehring Jim Brady Daniel Williams

From public records and investigations, to rural collaborations and building community-centered news outlets, this year’s 3/12 NC News & Information Summit has an amazing line up! Here are today’s featured sessions: ??Ask Me Anything: Fundraising + Funders Hear from a group of local and national funders about inviting support, making a case and using reporting skills for grantwriting and fundraising. Bring your questions about funding, fundraising, philanthropy, and walk away with an understanding of the basics. Featuring: North Carolina Local News Lab Fund's Lizzy Hazeltine; Racial Equity in Journalism Fund’s Alicia Bell; and American Journalism Project’s Jason Alcorn. ?? How we built a chatbot — should you build one, too? Learn from the creators of the Local News Audience Assistance chatbot on how to use your newsroom’s resources, brainstorm use cases and get an overview of the tech (it’s not that complicated). Facilitated by Sarah Vassello and Yanan Sun, Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media. ? How to set goals that matter Great goals can empower you to make better investment decisions, inspire your team to better performance and help you change your community. The wrong goals? They leave you feeling powerless and dispirited. Learn the difference during this interactive session where we’ll break down how to identify great goals for revenue and products that align with your organization, using real life examples and Q&A. Facilitated by David Grant, Blue Engine Collaborative, and Ashley Woods Branch, BlueLena. Find our full schedule & registration details below. Co-hosted with North Carolina Open Government Coalition. ?? Graphics by Sarah Day Owen Wiskirchen

Donorbox is one of the select fundraising platforms we deploy and support on behalf of the BlueLena community and we celebrate this milestone and congratulate them for all they’ve done in support of thousands of organizations worldwide.

This Wednesday at 2pm ET we will host our 3rd weekly session of the new BlueLena Academy, sponsored by Google News Initiative. This session will be all about the audience funnel, understanding the various stages and how to optimize each step to deepen your relationships with readers along the path to conversion-to-paid. We will take you through: ? the funnel concept, the five stages, and tactics to move reader through it ? metrics to track and how to increase reader activation and engagement ? best practice examples for maximizing paid acquisition and long term retention Academy sessions are free to attend for all BlueLena clients and you can register at this link: https://lnkd.in/g-T5NsHX

?? Austin Williams has been part of the BlueLena team since June 2020 and now serves as our Program Operations Manager. As the go-to person for customer support, Austin makes sure your client requests are handled quickly and smoothly. He also helps new clients get up and running by overseeing the setup of their integrations, conducting training and launching publishers on the BlueLenaCXA platform. Every member of our BlueLena publisher community receives expert in-house support as a publisher benefit – no chatbots here! We caught up with Austin to chat about his new role leading the Essentials program and what excites him most about it. https://lnkd.in/gNt3X5Rp

Big news today for North Carolina journalism, and we are thrilled to join NC Local in this journey.