A Digital Transformation Plan for the Black Press

Last week we announced the first stand-alone project for Accelerate Local - a digital transformation lab for five African-American newspapers. We thought long and hard about what our first project, funded primarily by LMA, individuals and media companies, should be.

As we weighed numerous options, we kept going back to a survey that we conducted in May with publishers of color. Sixteen respondents provided tremendous insights into the challenges they face and the concerns they have about their ability to stay in business long-term.

A strong black press is essential to a healthy democracy. And that's why we ultimately chose this lab as the debut project for Accelerate Local.

Our five publishers - The Atlanta Voice, The Dallas Weekly, New York Amsterdam News, The Houston Defender and The Washington Informer - have been in business an average of 70 years. They are still reliant on the print side of their business but have not been able to make meaningful progress on the digital side of the business. Sound familiar?

It's a problem that has plagued all local newspapers for more than a decade. The black press has not benefitted from the many industry labs, accelerators and experiments that are going on right now. They have been excluded from these opportunities.

We are thrilled to change that. Our goals for this project are ambitious. We will work with each publisher on a comprehensive digital transformation strategy. We'll start with short-term opportunities that are easiest to accomplish. We'll tackle the harder items in the second phase. We know that our learnings will benefit many in the local media ecosystem including small newspapers, hyper-local news sites and small broadcasters.

We are grateful to R&D partners such as Second Street for raising their hand on day one to say "yes, we will help". Matt Coen didn't hesitate when we asked him. He said it would be his honor. As we conduct a thorough business analysis of each property, we'll figure out if contests, promotions and/or email marketing make sense to pursue as a short-term strategy. And we'll have the power of the Second Street platform behind us to execute if that is the case.

We're asking others in the industry to come forward and raise their hand. We need help on the technology side for this project. We're looking for in-kind and monetary donations to do everything in our power to help this cohort develop a successful future. From there, we'll develop a playbook and share with all publishers of color and smaller media companies.

The lab will launch on October 14 and the entire LMA team will be involved. Jack Zavoral, LMA's sales and marketing guru, will spend time with each publisher providing sales training and going on sales calls. Julia Campbell, the leader of The Branded Content Project, stands by to help any of the publishers that want to delve into this opportunity area. Emilie Lutostanski, who runs our local news resource center, will help with social media strategy. The senior team including Peter Newton, managing director, Accelerate Local, Jed Williams, LMA chief strategy officer and Jay Small, LMA chief innovation officer will all be heavily involved as well. I will personally co-manage this project along with Newton.

We'll report what we learn during the six-month lab and use the learnings to help as many small publishers as possible, especially those that serve underrepresented audiences.

There's a lot of other projects in the Accelerate Local pipeline that you will be hearing about soon beyond this first lab. As previously announced, we expect to launch The TV Membership Project in the coming weeks. Our partners will be four of the most innovative broadcast companies in North America. Beyond that, we are looking at additional consumer revenue tests and philanthropy journalism projects.

If you have an idea or want to help in any way, we want to hear from you. Reach out to Jed Williams at [email protected].

About Accelerate Local: our mission is to reinvent business models for news. To date, we have been a partner in three major industry labs: The Branded Content Project (a $1M investment from the Facebook Journalism Project with 7 alpha partners and 20 beta partners in collaboration with the Local Media Consortium), GNI Subscriptions Lab (10 newspapers in partnership with FTI Consulting) and GNI Data Lab (4 newspapers and 2 TV stations in partnership with Deloitte).