The World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) with the support of the Google News Initiative, and the international consulting firm Blue Engine Collaborative, has created a personalised training and advisory programme so that media outlets can implement concrete improvements in their reader revenue strategies.
The 15 organisations selected to benefit from the Reader Revenue Lab are:
- El Cronista (Argentina)
- Río Negro (Argentina)
- Perfil (Argentina)
- El Colombiano (Colombia)
- El Espectador (Colombia)
- El Tiempo (Colombia)
- La Nación (Costa Rica)
- La Tercera (Chile)
- El Universo (Ecuador)
- Periódico AM (México)
- Vanguardia (México)
- El Economista (México)
- El Comercio (Perú)
- La República (Perú)
- El Nuevo Día (Puerto Rico)
The lab is a four-month immersive experience that combines eight collective training sessions with ten personalised sessions for each media outlet with a dedicated mentor.
The selected media participate through a multidisciplinary team where those responsible for each organisation’s product, technology, marketing, and editorial area are related.
Learning, sharing, experimenting and improving
Each publisher works with a specific plan linked to its strategic objectives. But it is not just about learning theory and designing a course of action. It’s about learning, sharing, experimenting, and improving the revenue model during the programme.
“We are very pleased with the launch of the Reader Revenue Lab for Latin American media. We hope that with this initiative, participating media can obtain the fundamental knowledge necessary to bet on the growth of their income per reader as another step to achieve results of business, while sharing good practices among participants,” said Olga Britto, Director for Iberoamerica at WAN-IFRA.
Said Connie Niebuhr, Manager of Relations with the Latin American news industry at Google: “At the Google News Initiative, we support these types of initiatives because we believe that they are essential so that the media can work in a personalised way in identifying areas of opportunity and implement improvements in their digital strategies, to strengthen their business models. This is a programme where we see concrete results and a positive impact on the media and its readers.”
Training sessions, personalised mentoring
The lab is developed over four months. The programme includes training sessions on essential aspects of readership income, agile methodologies, value proposition and acquisition in digital assets, conversion and UX, newsletters and email marketing, and retention.
In addition, personalised mentoring sessions are contemplated, where the consultant will help them advance on the specific topic identified to work on during the programme, based on their needs.
The sessions are interactive workshops in which teams from different media collaborate with each other and share their case studies.
Audits and data collection and interpretation complement these sessions. The different teams form a community with the coaches and the conversations continue far beyond the shared sessions.