Center for Cooperative Media Hosts Journalism Sustainability Conference

As the media industry changes, and advertising dollars get reallocated across a myriad of media platforms, how can local news and information outlets survive and thrive? What does real sustainability look like—and how can we help each other get there?

The Center for Cooperative Media brought together industry leaders to tackle these questions at its third annual conference, Sustain Local 2016, on Thursday and Friday, October 6 and 7.

Sustain Local 2016 featured multiple keynote discussions, along with panels and workshops focused on major business and organizational challenges facing local news publishers across the country, with speakers from NPR, Hearst, USA Today, and others.

Over 165 attendees gathered to listen to local news entrepreneurs and leaders discuss generating the kind of revenue needed to support the work of local journalism, with a special emphasis on creative business models, sales and membership strategies and events development.

“In today’s world, a single stream of advertising dollars isn’t enough to pay the bills; advertising spending has shifted dramatically and the amount going in to local media properties simply isn’t enough anymore (in most places) to sustain the business,” explains Stefanie Murray, Director of the Center for Cooperative Media.

A major focus of the conference was learning how to build various streams of revenue that are reliable, as it’s fairly well accepted now that multiple sources of income are what media entities need to survive and thrive. Major panel themes included monetization strategies, reimaging public media, building a pipeline of consumer revenue, investing in audience connection and navigating the path to sustainability, among others.

“We’re thrilled with how Sustain Local turned out,” says Murray. “This event was completely focused on business models and revenue, which made it very unique among its peer journalism conferences. We’ve gotten great feedback from attendees so far; folks are saying they found the conference highly valuable and that they came away with real, tangible ideas that they can put to use immediately in their business.”

Through the use of partnerships, collaborations, training, product development, research and communication, the Center for Cooperative Media works with more than 150 partners throughout the Garden State, including hyperlocal digital publishers, public media, newspapers, television outlets, radio stations and multimedia news organizations. The center is a grant-funded organization based at Montclair State University’s School of Communication and Media.

The mission of the Center for Cooperative Media is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey citizens.

“We’ve built one of the most successful networks of local journalism organizations working together collaboratively in the country, one that is being replicated in places like North Carolina,” says Murray. “We bring to the table a deep understanding of the challenges that local publishers face, and that’s unique.”