FIMS Post Austin roundup

Author

AJP Product and AI Studio
February 09, 2024

What happens in Austin shouldn’t stay in Austin 🌮

  • Travel reimbursement: Please use this link (not email) to submit your travel receipts.

  • Overheard in Austin: “I read Elon’s book and would love to see a newsroom willing to test his 5 step algorithm: Eliminate, Simplify, Accelerate, Automate, Repeat.” 🥹

Total read time: ☕️ 3 minutes

FIMS highlights:

Here are some of the items your FIMS colleagues shared during our time in Austin:

  • Amalie’s Reader Revenue Sprint results deck including the top 5 takeaways and highlights of your progress

  • Andy’s Quarterly Analytics Report

  • Kevin’s short video showing off their pilot project that will offer rural subscribers a new way to receive the local paper

  • Annika and Eric shared how they are building audience and communicating value with their direct mailer, Snoopy window marketing, and their annual impact report

  • Neil and Annie shared an approach to personality/talent branding that could boost SGE authority

  • Kelly and Liz gave us the scoop on so many useful things including Subscriber Socials, introducing a fundraising strategy to a community that thinks you’re rich and managing meetings with community leaders

  • Heidi shared a copy of her weekly communications with staff. Who else does this? I especially loved the shout-out to the skateboarding editor

  • Jaime and George(iana) pulled back the curtain on their money-making Cannabis Crawl that has expanded to three cities in six years

  • Jon told us the backstory behind their new CMS and gave us a deeper dive into its capabilities

  • Matt and Allison shared why they’re making churn reduction a top priority, plans to launch a chat bot and over-communicating with subscribers about available benefits

We’ll have greater details about some of the initiatives and sessions in the coming weeks.

Upcoming:   

FIMS Group calls:

  • Fundraising strategies with Frank Mungeam February 20.

  • Why local news may benefit from SGE with Patrick Reinhart, March 5.

Local News and AI group call (not LMA related)

  • February 29, 1pm ET Zoom Link we’ll be sharing what we’re working on

Humans are weird

Why stop at betting on the Super Bowl score when you can also wager what color Gatorade will drench the winning coach, how many minutes into the game Taylor will appear and how long Reba will stretch out the National Anthem?