The Post & Courier of Charleston, South Carolina was in dire straights. Its traditional revenue streams — print advertising and circulation — were in decline and the newspaper needed to find a way to reverse that trend — and fast.
The Post & Courier‘s solution, according to Executive Editor Mitch Pugh, was to take a mini-publisher approach, which mobilized the editorial and sales teams into creating new content products in areas like food, politics and real estate. Over two years, the initiative generated almost $900,000 in new product revenue and increased digital subscriptions by 250 percent.
In April, Pugh wrote a report for the American Press Institute‘s Better News Initiative to share some of the lessons The Post & Courier‘s staff learned by adopting its mini-publisher model. Read the full report here.
The Better News podcast is a partnership between It’s All Journalism and the American Press Institute to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) to share replicable strategies and tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole. Sign up for the Better News newsletter to receive news about the latest resources, case studies and insights. For more news about the It’s All Journalism podcast and future episodes of Better News, sign up for the weekly IAJ newsletter.
