The Local Media Consortium leverages its members’ collective scale to create economic value for newsrooms and businesses across North America.
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RSSToday on the podcast I’m honored to be joined by Local Media Consortium CEO Fran Wills.
Fran says that local journalism is in her DNA, and she’s not joking! Her great grandfather founded a weekly newspaper in rural Missouri in 1888, and she worked there after school as a child, continuing to become her high school newspaper editor.
After continuing her path on the business side of local media organizations in the early 2000’s, she joined the Local Media Consortium in 2016.
The LMC was founded in 2013 as a way to provide economic benefit to local media companies on the digital side of their business. They take the scale of their collective membership (155 companies representing thousands of local news outlets) and negotiate partnerships with digital technology and service providers that their members would likely not be able to make on their own.
On the podcast we discuss how Fran has seen the local news ecosystem change during her tenure as CEO since 2016, including a fragmentation of distribution channels and the rise of on demand video that consumers have flocked to.
Fran explains what kind of organizations make up their membership as well as their partners, and how the deals they negotiate serve all parties.
We also talk about the growing importance of newsletters in the local news ecosystem, innovative business models, and the need for local media companies to embrace multiple ways of attracting eyeballs in the current media landscape.
Listen to the full episode in your podcast app of choice, or on the player at the top of this page.