Facebook Gives Local Newspapers Tips on How to Boost Subscriptions
August 02 2018 - 7:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Lukas I. Alpert
A recently launched Facebook Inc. program to help local
publishers gain subscribers is proving to be a rare bright spot in
the social-media giant's often uneasy relationship with the news
industry.
Since March, Facebook has held training sessions with executives
from 14 midsize newspapers from around the U.S. to develop
strategies for bringing in more paying customers via Facebook and
beyond. It also gave each participating publisher $200,000 in grant
money to put those strategies into play.
The program has been met with praise from the executives who
have attended -- a contrast to some meetings with publishers that
have devolved into tense exchanges over political balance and the
spread of misinformation.
Publishers have long been wary of Facebook's outsize role in
news dissemination and its commanding presence in the digital
advertising market, which has played a considerable role in
disrupting the economics of the news industry. In January, Rupert
Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp -- which owns The Wall
Street Journal -- said Facebook should pay publishers fees similar
to those cable distributors pay to television channels.
Jim Friedlich, executive director of the nonprofit Lenfest
Institute for Journalism, which helped develop the curriculum and
is administering the grants, said it is in Facebook's interest to
help publishers. Lenfest owns the Philadelphia Daily News,
Philly.com and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Inquirer was part of
the pilot group.
"The truth is Facebook and local news organizations have a
highly co-dependent relationship," Mr. Friedlich said.
The pilot group included the Seattle Times, the Boston Globe,
the Omaha World-Herald and the Denver Post. The initial program ran
for 12 weeks, with three in-person gatherings in New York, in
Austin, Texas, and at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.,
as well as weekly webinars and weekly individual training sessions
with each publisher.
Sessions included developing strategies to boost reader
engagement through things like targeted newsletters -- whose
recipients later get subscription offers -- and how to use big news
events as marketing opportunities. Facebook also brought in experts
from areas outside the news field, including e-commerce companies
such as Dollar Shave Club.
"It really got everyone to share their notes on how to drive
subscriber acquisition in a smarter, faster and more efficient
way," said John Rockwell, director of subscription sales and
retention at the San Francisco Chronicle. "This was not just some
good PR for Facebook -- we've already seen significant increases in
newsletter and subscription signups from what we learned."
The publishers submitted plans on how they would spend their
grant money and what goals they hoped to achieve by the time the
group reconvenes in January. For example, the San Francisco
Chronicle plans to use its grant to test how best to use Google's
paid search and Adwords programs, and other digital advertising
platforms to draw in customers, Mr. Rockwell said.
Facebook said it planned to expand the program to include a
slate of nonprofit, membership-based news sites, as well as to
bring the original group back for another series of sessions
focused on subscriber retention. Facebook intends to invest an
additional $4.5 million in support.
"We went into this not really knowing what kind of results we
would get, " said Campbell Brown, Facebook's head of news
partnerships. "It turned out to be very collaborative, and in the
end the publishers said let's keep going."
Write to Lukas I. Alpert at lukas.alpert@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 02, 2018 07:14 ET (11:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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