{"id":216390,"date":"2022-08-02T16:14:34","date_gmt":"2022-08-02T20:14:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lionpublishers.com\/?p=216390"},"modified":"2022-09-06T10:25:46","modified_gmt":"2022-09-06T14:25:46","slug":"what-were-learning-about-publishers-needs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lionpublishers.com\/what-were-learning-about-publishers-needs\/","title":{"rendered":"What we’re learning about news publishers’ needs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What does it take to build and grow a sustainable news business?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As my colleague Anika Anand wrote for Nieman Lab last year<\/a>, our industry hasn\u2019t been very good at answering this question \u2013 in part because flashy editorial projects get all the buzz while flaws in a business\u2019s underlying revenue or operations too often get ignored.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At LION, we\u2019re trying to highlight true newsroom successes by better understanding and defining what makes a news business sustainable<\/a>, and we\u2019re also trying to answer the question that inevitably comes next:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once we identify key indicators of sustainability, what support and training do publishers then need to reach them?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I joined LION nearly two years ago, there were plenty of anecdotes<\/em> about what our members needed to build stronger businesses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Funding, of course, usually topped the list. But many of the asks from our members felt more bespoke, and in turn, so were the resources we offered to address them \u2013 a post about fiscal sponsorship<\/a> here, a webinar about copyright laws<\/a> there, a revenue AMA<\/a> whenever we could squeeze one in. Valuable information, our members told us, but scattershot, from our perspective. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we were missing was a way to measure our members\u2019 needs at scale and begin identifying shared priorities. In 2022 we\u2019ve begun to experiment with what that looks like: <\/p>\n\n\n\n