CCM is excited to announce the launch of the Growth Mentorship Program: Building a Plan for Audience and Revenue Growth to support New York City metro area publishers as they continue their work of sustaining a community media newsroom in an ever-expanding digital landscape. Drawing from survey results and daily conversations with publishers, this new pilot project of CCM’s Advertising Boost Initiative (ABI) will follow two tracks: digital analytics and media kit design and development.
Initially the program will serve 11 media outlets from the NYC metro area, with the hope of expanding to more outlets later. These media outlets are from the Latino, South Asian, Arab, Russian, African, Irish, Black / Caribbean and local communities, and operate in five languages in addition to English.
Digital Analytics
The one-on-one sessions will be facilitated by mentor Chris Lewis, a digital product and UX leader who teaches at Georgetown University and has run digital product strategy for numerous media outlets including one of the most successful NPR affiliates in the country.
Over the course of eight weeks, publishers will be able to leverage tools to collect, analyze, and make use of different types of data to drive their organization’s revenue, audience, and advertising goals. They will also be able to target newsroom data, used by advertising agencies to determine a website’s traffic, growth, and engagement, and develop a business plan around the data.
The digital analytics track, which began with a kickoff session on September 27, 2022, includes participants from eight media outlets across the NYC metro area serving the Indian, Pakistani, Arab, Russian, African, Irish, Black / Caribbean and local communities.
Media Kit Design and Development
Through one-on-one sessions, a coach will work with publishers to create or revise customized, industry-standard media kits for each news organization.
Well-developed media kits can give community outlets a competitive advantage in the digital media landscape and let publishers better communicate with sales teams and advertisers.
The media kit track is set to begin in the fall of 2022 and will initially support three outlets covering Latino, African, and South Asian communities in the NYC metro area, and expand to a total target of 12 outlets.
ABI was launched in 2020 to act as a liaison between NYC government advertisers and community media, and soon grew to support nearly 200 community media outlets across all five boroughs. It has grown beyond its original mandate to develop a range of resources and programming to build capacity among NYC community media and to improve equity in city government advertising, and is now working to expand statewide and in other cities across the U.S.
For more information on the program, contact Darlie Gervais, Advertising Boost Initiative Manager, at darlie.gervais@journalism.cuny.edu, and Jehangir Khattak, Director of Communications, at jehangir.khattak@journalism.cuny.edu.