We traversed the New York City media scene during a two-day study tour (one of two INMA organised) prior to the recent INMA World Congress of News Media, getting an inside look at the strategies and thinking at some of the city’s premier news brands.

What I love about study tours is the ability to get behind the scenes and dig deeper to understand what’s working and why.

My bite-sized takeaways from a few of the visits:

1. Advance Local

Last year, Advance rolled out a new user-friendly analytics tool aimed at pinpointing topics with high growth potential. Where this tool excels: It visually shows the topic in three important ways: volume of stories, programmatic revenue (from pageviews), and reader revenue (from subscriptions).

Finding the topics that hit in the sweet spot of both revenue buckets is key. And for Advance, those topics include high school sports. This quadrant is updated monthly and leads to quarterly meetings with editors, where they discuss where to invest more firepower.

2. The Wall Street Journal

They have prioritised the article page with a focus on simplicity over choice. They don’t want readers to have too many things to do because it takes away from the user experience and hasn’t proven successful.

A lot of media organisations could take note of this approach — we often weigh down a story with all kinds of calls to action: Subscribe! Sign up for a newsletter! Follow us on social! Forward this to a friend! Read this next! It all leads to a cluttered and frustrating experience, and the Journal believes keeping it simple gleans better results.

3. The Atlantic

Among the great lessons here was a newsletter prototype of The Drop, which will feature a single story daily and be sent to non-subscribers as an acquisition strategy. Set to launch soon, people will have 24 hours to read the story daily.

Like the Journal, the focus is on the user experience and on keeping it clean and direct. Instead of a ton of links and round-ups, they hope spotlighting one strong story — on any topic — will better hook the audience.

4. Business Insider

We’re all familiar with the move from print to digital, and we’re now in the era of online to AI and personalisation, their leaders said. Among the ways they’re using AI — editing submitted photos instead of using photo editors for that work. By using AI to find efficiencies, they’ve freed up reporter time.

Although this wasn’t discussed in the visit, Business Insider revealed — in a memo about workforce reductions — that over 70% of its employees are already using its enterprise ChatGPT product regularly. 

5. Yahoo News

Yahoo has an interesting business model for its news product: Most of its stories and multimedia come through content partnerships and affiliations.

Yahoo News attracts a massive 190M uniques a month, with the majority logged in since they’re using the mail product, but they have work to do on brand recognition and deepening engagement, its leaders said. Original reporting, such as live blogs, have helped to bolster the brand’s engagement with readers.

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