How Local News Now built its loyal audience

Probably the chief worry right now in the media industry is how publishers will survive as large platforms like Google and Facebook continue to send less and less traffic, but Scott Brodbeck doesn’t lose much sleep wondering where his audience will come from. In 2010, he launched Arlington Now, and he’s grown the company into a network of news websites operating in the DC metro area. Not only is the network’s homepage traffic well above the industry average, but Scott is confident that his approach of producing differentiated content will protect him from platform disruption.

In a recent interview, Scott walked through every aspect of his audience engagement process, including how he automates his social media distribution, why he never shut down his website comments section, how he gets 40% of his audience to come to the homepage, and why he doesn’t bother with organizing live, in-person events:

So, you know, in my view, I do think that the traffic has declined. I haven't looked at the latest numbers, but my sense is it has declined. But we also see a bit of an effect where it's become more of a hits business. It used to be we'd publish an article and we'd see an immediate traffic spike once we put it out on social. And we very rarely see that now. It's only certain stories that do that.And then the effect over time is it becomes a hits business where there are days where we'll have one article that'll do 10 times the readership of any other article and stuff that used to reliably do a few thousand views in a day are like doing a thousand, but that that one over there is doing like 10,000 or more. We don’t want to go overboard optimizing for readership, but we do want people to come to our site and consume our content. That's kind of the point of the whole thing we're doing here is we want people reading us, so I'd say it hasn't resulted in us adjusting our editorial strategy. It's just a recognition that whereas we might publish three things and they'd all do pretty well, we're going to publish three things, and one's going to do really well and the rest are going to do okay. That's kind of our expectation at this point.

Watch our interview in the video embedded below: