Complete Story
11/08/2017
You can make money off homecoming pics and 9 other simple ideas to borrow from local news
A few weeks ago, on a balmy Saturday night, much of Richland Source's tiny staff headed out to take photos of five homecomings happening around Richland, Ohio.
Last year, the for-profit news organization started making galleries from area homecomings. They'd already made them from proms and then added videos of songs from school Christmas concerts (each school gets one song.) Then, they went to an advertiser to see if they'd sponsor the photo galleries. Those sponsorships now go for $3,000 each and typically sell out early, said Jay Allred, Richland Source's president.
In two days, those galleries brought in 401,655 page views (which is more than 10 times higher than their average) doing something their community loved that helps pay for their daily journalism. This year's fancy dance season brought the site a total of 893,000 page views.
Larry Phillips, managing editor at Richland Source, shared the success story in a session at last week's LION Publishers annual conference. The session included big and small successes from local online news organizations. Here are a few of them:
Text people the weather
MPR News in Minnesota uses GroundSource to text people the weather each morning, GroundSource's Simon Galperin told the gathering.
"Using messaging, it's a really unique way to own the relationship with the audience," he said. "... I think that's a great way for local publishers to make themselves stand out and be really close and connected to our communities."
