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At Borås Tidning in the southwest of Sweden a small investigative team is producing a big impact for its newsroom. The all female three person team is using time honoured journalistic work methods to dig up stories on questionable and illegal practices used by local businesses and people. These stories drive twice as many conversions as other articles and the team generates a flood of tips from readers – all while supporting the news title’s brand and mission. And the significance of the all female team? They win the trust of female sources.

Imagine you have 120 local news titles spread over a geographically large but relatively sparsely populated country. And imagine you were tasked with making sure they all have enough journalism and content to fill their sites on a daily basis. What would you do? This is what Norwegian local media group Amedia is faced with, and they have reached a definite conclusion: You go even more local. And you do this by turning publicly available data into hyperlocal content and building tools for your journalists to turn the data into deeper stories about your communities. Because their key finding is that hyperlocal news with the right timing and context really works to drive reading and conversions. And that hyperlocal is better than just local.

The US is ahead of the curve when it comes to the decline of local news. It may also be true to say that it’s ahead of the curve when it comes to innovation around tackling this problem. One brilliant example is Crosstown in Los Angeles. Founder journalism professor Gabriel Kahn joined forces with a PhD student in engineering and set about creating a tool whereby journalists can generate hyper local stories from publicly available, but previously inaccessible, data. The result: 114 weekly neighbourhood newsletters on everything from crime to public health, housing and traffic. And one stat to prove the value of hyper local: The open rate is north of 90%.

We've heard it many times. Print readers are getting older. The new loyal paying readers are digital only. The number of print days is going down. Time is counting for print. How long can the industry afford to keep the presses going? One of few examples that has the full transformation from print to digital behind them is LA Presse i Quebec, Canada. It is a fascinating case story based on a successful strategy that was first launched with a tablet edition eleven years ago and led to a final close down of its print editions only after five years. Would you dare to switch off the presses completely?

We have all done it. Finding a job and, then, finding a home. Both have fundamentally local focus – the closer the better. While the prevailing view in the industry is that these types of classifieds markets are lost forever, Norwegian news group Amedia has revived them in digital and now lead in driving discovery for non-active seekers.

This is the story of how the culture desk at Hamburger Abendblatt decided to think outside the box in how they reach audiences and as a result increased the number of conversions from culture content by 37% over a year. It’s about identifying new audiences, like the 400,000 people who sing in Hamburg choirs, or pop-up audiences who are in intense need of information related to a specific event. The success of the culture desk is now inspiring change
in the wider newsroom, and we hope it will inspire you too – this is about how local journalism can benefit from a focus on readers’ needs.

Over the past year, Tamedia has strategically employed automation for content sourcing and production, allowing a substantial expansion of its local newsletter portfolio in communities with as few as 5000 inhabitants. Today, the growing portfolio allows for a personalised and flexible distribution of local content and reaches up to 40% of the inhabitants of the serviced communities with engagement rates way above average. Next up: Fully automated email updates for over a thousand municipalities.

At the end of February, Amedia launched an AI sandbox, a safe environment for all journalists in the Norwegian local media group to test and use generative AI for various time saving tasks. The objective is to enable more and better journalism by letting reporters use the AI as an assistant, meaning they can spend additional time out in the community covering even more important, local stories. The sandbox environment also has a trust dimension – by setting it up Amedia acts as a guarantor of safe AI use for the purposes of their local journalism. As an additional bonus, Amedia wants their more than 1000 journalists with their use of the new sandbox to help guide their product development organically.

Bonnier News Local’s ad product “Handla lokalt” (Shop Locally) is easy to understand, easy to buy and has a natural link to social media – all of which makes it attractive to advertisers. Advertisers’ social media posts are tagged to automatically show up in a shared voice widget on the local news site. This creates a win-win-win for advertisers, publishers and readers: Advertisers get direct access to readers – in a trusted local news channel – with updateable messages in real time. Publishers can, at very low cost, sell visibility to local advertisers, who pay a set monthly fee and create their own ads. Readers find all current, relevant local ads from retailers in one place.

Looking for new ways to attract younger readers, Norwegian regional title Stavanger Aftenblad (part of Schibsted) decided to create a project writing about them rather than just for them. Combining the latest automation technology with more traditional reporting on the ground, the football vertical Mååål! (goal), has a reader promise to cover junior football like it’s the Premier League. A text robot, co-created with Norwegian news agency NTB, takes care of turning all match results into articles, while two dedicated sports journalists report from some of the matches, doing interviews and showing up for the junior football community. The result has been higher engagement – every match has a small group of really involved readers. And thanks to the reporting on the ground, Stavanger Aftenblad is building its brand with a new generation of readers.