Chance favors the prepared - thoughts from LMA/LMF board strategy session

The last time the LMA and LMF boards met in person was March 2020. COVID was looming and the world shut down shortly after our meetings took place. Never did we think it would be two years and four months before we would gather in person again.

Last week both boards came to Detroit, along with key staff members, to work on the continuation of our current strategic plan. The mood was upbeat and joyful as we reconnected with each other and met some of the newer board members for the first time in person.

The 24 directors who participated in the meeting represented the full spectrum of local media – including large companies such as Scripps, The Globe and Mail and Sinclair Broadcast Group; independent media organizations like The Seattle Times, Shaw Media Group, Star-Tribune Media Group, WRAL and Beasley Media Group; digital startups such as The Daily Memphian and Black Girl Cleveland; Black publishers like The Atlanta Voice and Sacramento Observer; and R&D partners including Borrell Associates, Dream Local Digital and Adcellerant. 

Graham Media Group, led by LMA board chair Catherine Badalamente, hosted us for this important industry gathering and our partners from Google News Initiative and Meta Journalism Project joined us on day two for more brainstorming. We also had an opportunity to tour The Michigan Chronicle/Real Times Media, thanks to LMF board member Tanisha Leonard, where we were wowed by their new video studio that was built during COVID. 

This kind of gathering forces everyone to think about the local media ecosystem as a whole, rather than their particular place in the industry. It’s powerful. 

While we were there to double down on LMA’s four strategic pillars – business transformation, industry collaboration, journalism funded by philanthropy and sustainability for publishers of color – we discussed a lot more. 

Five major concerns stood out during the course of the two days:

• Trust in news
• Attracting younger audiences 
• Building and nurturing one-to-one (first-party) relationships
• Technology barriers
• Culture issues

All of these issues are daunting to address or fix. All are essential to our long term sustainability. 

We spent a lot of time talking about trust in news. These are unprecedented times. Many consumers lump local news in the same category as cable news. We know it’s different but not everyone else does. We need to better tell our story. We’re the media that warns you when a hurricane is coming to your town. We bring down the bad guys like Jeffrey Epstein. We hold government officials on both sides accountable. It was The Times-Union, a Hearst newspaper in Albany, NY, represented by our LMF board member Erica Smith, that did the investigative reporting that led to the Democratic Lieutenant Governor’s resignation. We’re not one-sided when it comes to wrongdoing by government officials. We could all list countless examples here. How do we tell this story in a way that resonates with people? The Washington Post’s “Democracy dies in darkness” campaign was highly effective. We need something just as strong for local media. 

We welcome our industry partners and the funding community to come together to talk more about this. It’s not something that LMA can or should tackle alone.

We’re also not going to solve the younger audience issue or culture problems with a lab or cohort. We focused on what we could do over the next three years after acknowledging these big huge obstacles that are hovering over local media like a dark cloud. 

We looked at what’s working. Our top initiatives are Word in Black, the lab for journalism funding, Meta Branded Content Project, Knight x LMA BloomLab and the LMA technology resource center. Right behind those are News is Out, LMA Covering Climate Collaborative, Local News Resource Center, fiscal sponsorships and other industry collaboratives such as Oklahoma Media Center. 

All of these initiatives focus on “teaching to fish” rather than just issuing a playbook. Don’t get me wrong. We love playbooks. But they aren’t enough. Cohorts are the next level up from a playbook, and they are effective, but can also fall short. It’s the intensive, hands-on, heavily supported initiatives that produce the best results. 

As we look to future projects, we are keeping this in mind. We identified 10 possible areas of focus and soon we’ll narrow it to two or three. We know we need to work closer with broadcasters as they experience further disruption. We have a lot of ideas on how we might do that. We welcome input. We are already seeing how the BloomLab, with three dedicated leaders and technology stipends, can be a model for other segments of our industry. We’re especially interested in independent and family-owned local media in small and/or rural markets. We understand the importance of collecting first party data; we’re thinking about how we can help in that area. This is just a small sampling of the ideas we are talking about for the future. 

As our facilitator Dr. Jennifer Madden told us, “chance favors the prepared.” We certainly believe that at LMA. We made a lot of decisions during that March 2020 meeting that set us up for success during COVID. We think it’s also good advice for all local media outlets. Always be thinking three years out, even if the funding for a new project isn’t there today. 

We’ll keep you posted on our progress. By September we’ll have a plan in place to share with the industry. It will definitely be a continuation/acceleration of the four pillars in our current plan. Don’t hesitate to reach out with your input and ideas. It’s never been more important for us to work together to reinvent business models for news and remain essential to our democracy.