Stacker’s Publisher Partnerships team attended the Online News Association (ONA) Conference in Los Angeles last month. It was a great opportunity to meet so many publishers from across the country and see the incredible work they’re doing to reach their audiences.
Read below for some of our biggest takeaways and learnings. And come find us next year at ONA 2023 in Philadelphia!
Key Takeaways
Publishers continue to seek out ways to automate repeatable stories like COVID rates, gas prices, and restaurant inspections. By allowing algorithms to do what they do best - compile and organize data - reporters can spend their valuable time adding context and color to the stories. Stacker’s Story Tech Stack allows us to produce daily stories across all 50 states and 384 metros, and we’ve recently launched county-level coverage! We were excited to see other providers like Lede AI and Gannett discussing their success with local automation.
When newsrooms partner or collaborate with one another, it’s important to clearly outline who is doing what so there isn’t an imbalance of responsibilities. One common pain point that surfaced in discussions was this lack of clarity. Stacker dedicates Partner Success Managers to each individual relationship, with an onboarding call that sets expectations early on and periodic check-ins.
Publishers are becoming more creative with how they generate their audience. This can be done through video strategy, gating content for new subscribers or cross-collaborating with other publishers on special content projects. Stacker’s newswire is able to support each of these strategies.
With data journalism on the rise, the barrier for entry is getting lower. Various tools enable journalists to easily create static and interactive data visualizations without code, like this example using Stacker data.
Publications are more focused than ever on establishing diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in their newsrooms and also representing underserved audiences in the content they produce. Going over best practices, hearing many points of views and establishing a checklist from the conference to better this was vital.
“Our partnership with Stacker has allowed Patch Labs to provide additional value to our member sites in the form of high quality reporting that is geographically relevant and that puts context around larger national trends. As the majority of our member sites are small, hyperlocal news startups, the ability to plug in to a partner like Stacker helps these sites to attract new readers while broadening their scope of coverage.”
Sarah Gayden, Director of Growth & Partnerships at Patch Labs
On behalf of the Stacker team, we would like to extend a big thank you to ONA for helping get the word about Stacker and all of the initiatives we are undertaking. If you’re interested in becoming a part of the Stacker Publishing Network, contact us at publishers@stacker.com
As Stacker partners, publishers can take advantage of:
- Data and research-driven evergreen stories that can extend the lifestyle of the biggest news stories and drive traffic from off-platform
- Licensing rights to all visuals and imagery
- Delivery via RSS, Web Portal, Email, or Slack
- Early access to new and experimental story formats
- Quarterly trend reports reflecting on the best performing stories across the network
Ken Romano, Angelica Catalano Sanchez, Esprit Smith & Adam Hurst all contributed to this blog