The excellent site What’s New in Publishing has put out a new report titled The Publisher’s Guide to Navigating Covid-19, looking at eight trends that have emerged globally, as well as strategies that publishers have implemented as a result of increased web traffic.   Let’s take a look at four of those trends and see how they affect smaller publishers.   COVID-19 has changed our media habits. We’re spending more time with streaming services, social media and messenger services. Gaming has also seen a major pandemic bump. “Many people say that they expect their new habits to continue after the COVID-19 outbreak passes too,” said Simon Kemp. “One in five internet users say they expect to continue watching more content on streaming services, and one in seven (15%) say they expect to continue spending more time using social media.” Given this, they say, publishers need to find more ways in which they can make thei ...

Not that they ever went out of style, but newsletters and subscriptions seem to be peaking again. Bloomberg Media’s Justin Smith has talked about their stickiness and comfort at a time like this. Industry Dive is up to about 22 different newsletters now in 19 industries. And Digiday ran an article last week titled How Substack Has Spawned a New Class of Newsletter Entrepreneurs.   “We’re coming in with an opportunity-focused mindset,’ said Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie [whom I interviewed three years ago], fresh off raising $15.3 million last summer. “‘During the first 20-30 years of the internet, in terms of information distribution and media, the innovation has mostly come around an ad-supported model. There’s a whole 20-30 years of innovation to come that more fully innovates around a subscription model.’”   Here are some ideas on keeping the new readership—newsletters ...

Cablefax Expands Recognition for Their Diversity List; Deadline: July 10

Research last year from Northwestern's Medill Local News Initiative looked at audience data from three major metro publications. Their conclusion, according to NiemanLab, the frequency with which a reader comes back to a publication's website "is the single biggest predictor of retaining subscribers—more than the number of stories read or the time spent reading them."   So with that established, the goal becomes to entice your subscribers and would-be subscribers to check in a lot with your website and resources. Here are some ways to make that happen:   Send an email quiz or post a puzzle. I received this email this week from Lessiter Media. "To test your knowledge of soil health practices, No-Till Farmer, with the support of Indigo Ag, created a 6-question quiz, 'How Much Do You Know About Soil Enrichment Practices?' Take the quiz." For a previous quiz, they received 3,346 total submissions from Nov. 2019, through the end of March 2020. About 1,658 were new e ...

In my previous post, Stephanie Williford of EB Medicine spoke about the tremendous engagement they've been getting since they started posting COVID-19 resources. One article in particular has garnered 340,000 views when a typical, popular article used to get 10,000.   Of course, EB Medicine is not alone. Many publishers and associations have seen big jumps in their visitors and clicks due to coronavirus coverage and resource sites they've developed. The challenge for most will be keeping that engagement—and hopefully in many cases subscriptions—after the crisis has abated or in a year from now for renewals.   Here are some ideas:   Examine previous spikes and identify the readers who stayed and who left. That comes from Robbie Kelman Baxter, author of The Forever Transaction and a past SIPA keynote speaker, in an article on the What's New in Publishing site. Can you tell why they might have stayed or perhaps what ...

There will be other coverage that people will need. "So what we're trying to do [is show that] our arts writers and critics, our sports writers and critics, our food writers and critics can feel relevant now but also signal to our audience that after the COVID crisis, we'll have different kinds of coverage that they will still need," Gilbert said. "So that's really what we're trying to do to combat that challenge. But I absolutely feel that imperative every bit as much as your members do, and we're thinking very deeply about what are the things, the products, the tools that we can offer our audience and how can we bridge [new subscribers] from caring about the news in the time of the virus to caring about the news when things are going better."