Welcome to the FIMS Lab newsletter

In this edition:

• FIMS Lab highlight: The Record Journal makes an annoucement

• One Marketing Thing: Keeping 🎯 email lists

• 🤖 One AI Thing: AI Resistant Journalism

• One Trending thing: Animal houses

Total read time: ☕️ ☕️ 4 minutes

FIMS Lab highlights:

A few of the dedicated holiday deals I received as a newsletter subscriber this past week. Looking forward to hearing about everyone’s results!

For more inspiration:

• The Salt Lake Tribune had an animated promotion

• Richland Source included local news in their Small Business Saturday promotion

And for those who hadn’t seen, The Record Journal made an announcement on Monday

One marketing thing: Clean your email list

Matt McGarry is a newsletter operator.

He runs a newsletter growth agency and recently published a piece about sender reputation I found interesting, mostly because I’d recently had an experience where I signed up for a newsletter and after a few weeks received a “Hey, we noticed you haven’t opened our emails lately. Are you still interested?” type of message.

I didn’t think anything of it. Then, one day, I realized I’d stopped receiving the newsletter. I tried to sign up again, but it soon became clear my email address had been “blacklisted.”

Aggressive? Perhaps. But this is the type of action McGarry recommends to protect your sender reputation. Google, Apple, Yahoo and others now rank engagement (clicks, opens, replies, adding to primary or address book etc.) higher than subscribers.

More importantly is that reputation will determine how new subscribers get your emails.

“You can’t outgrow bad engagement and sender reputation by adding new people to your list. The only way to improve sender reputation, and therefore improve engagement is to clean your list,” he writes

Here’s how.

One AI thing: Establish authority 🏆

There’s a lot of speculation that generative AI will negatively impact local news search referral traffic. Here are several highlights from the video that can be implemented now.

Search engines like Google, with a generative AI experience, will show fewer news links (three to five down from 10) and may not surface local news sources at all.

In the example below I typed, “Montclair New Jersey cannabis laws 2023” into Google’s search bar.

With the AI assistant enabled, results are remarkably different.

While we don’t know exactly how the search experience will evolve or what signals will be given priority, subject matter experts from Gannett, AP and our Adriana Lacy recommend the following:

• Authority matters. Specifically, EAAT, the acronym created by Google as a component of their search quality guidelines. It stands for Experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness.

“Google will still be in the business of ranking highly verifiable information and returning it quickly for the user,” said Michael Hastings, senior product manager at Gannett. “Bylines matter. Google is going to surface the highest EEAT answers they can possibly provide.”

• Dedicate an internal role to monitor and analyze SEO traffic and benchmarks. If that’s not possible, convince leadership to bring someone in, even part-time or “short term.”

• Breaking news will be extremely important to language models and AI, this will fuel the future, Hastings said. Examples include stories with unique and exclusive quotes and images from local sources.

• Stay original and high quality. Lacy said investigative work is a great example of “AI resistant journalism” because can’t be easily summarized or duplicated.

• Local opinion and commentary. “AI lacks the ability to provide expert insights based on years of experience or nuanced understanding of complex issues,” Lacy said.

• Bypass search traffic and invest in direct relationships through newsletters.

The video replay is available for free until December 14.

One Trending thing: Animal Houses 💰💰💰

Americans spent $137B on their pets in 2022, a 10 percent increase from the year before, despite fewer households with pets. Analysts predict the increase to continue next year, with older Americans outspending millennials on things like pet health and wellness, toys and gifts.

Barkitechture has emerged as one trend affecting an entire industry. (Remember catered pet parties?) Barkitecture is interior design that treats pets as family, keeping their needs as much a priority as their humans’. (Check out this story from our friends at the Star Tribune)

With all this money being spent on fur babies, does it make sense to consider a pet newsletter or section? Perhaps, if you can offer pet owners enough quality content or, as this one does, target veterinarians and related professions.

Per Paved, the top pet newsletters are currently either feel-good general offerings (much like your Reels or TikTok feed), adoption sites or highly specialized like vet and pet jobs marketplace.

This gives local newsrooms a huge advantage because who knows the best local dog parks, off-leash trails and dog-friendly restaurants better than you? This site ranks the top states for pet safety based on pet friendly rental availability, shelter policies and animal cruelty protection laws.

Upcoming:   

• Final 2023 Branded Content Bootcamp Boost your sales skills with this free, two day workshop December 5-6.

• FIMS Group calls: Today, Nov. 28 we’ll talk about benefits benchmarking. Dec. 12, Branded Content success stories.

• Recording from our last group call with Village Media. Passcode: Vq3z0&$X

Help shape phase two of the FIMS Lab 💕