Q&A: Ned Berke on how BlueLena supports local publishers with sustainable reader revenue strategies
Ned Berke is the Chief Strategy Officer at BlueLena, an organization that works with local journalism outlets to support audience development growth and reader revenue programs.
BlueLena works with about 250 local publications across the country, all at varying stages in their strategies and capacity. We caught up with Berke to hear about the insights he’s gleaned in helping these publishers create sustainable revenue streams.
WF: How did you get involved in journalism?
NB: I went to journalism school and wanted to be a foreign correspondent. I did that for about a year, and while I was away I actually ran a local outlet back home, thousands of miles away, in Brooklyn. I came back and built it up, I was selling ads, doing all of those things. That was my accidental transition from being a journalist to someone who was paying attention to the sustainability of journalism. I was introduced to some other publishers and we founded LION Publishers, which helped me realize there was a much bigger world of people like me out there, and I really wanted to contribute to that. I grew the publication, sold it, and then went on to stints in and out of startups and newsrooms. I spent a lot of time doing training and independent consulting for publishers. I found myself thinking, ‘Wow, as a publisher, I wish I knew all of these things back then when I was getting started.’
WF: When did you come across BlueLena?
NB: BlueLena got started in March 2020, and I was introduced to Daniel Williams and James Gold, the co-founders. I was the first hire in January 2021. When I got here, BlueLena had 34 publications under management. Today, we’re about 250. It’s been a pretty wild four years.
A lot of publishers wrangle with figuring out the right technology and we wanted to give them tools. We quickly realized there was a gap — they could have tools and knowledge, but they didn’t have the time to do things. We will sit down with you, install all your tools, configure them, review best practices, and also come in and help you figure out your goals and execute a plan. It’s not effortless on the part of the publisher, but we reduce a lot of barriers and help show them what direction to go in. Back when I started, it was a lot of people just getting off the ground. The publications may have been around for a while, but the reader revenue programs were newer. We learned with them. We got a lot more sophisticated, to the point where people who had been doing somewhat successfully on their own started coming to us to kind of level up. Now we’re serving some of the most experienced and ambitious publishers out there, particularly in digital native local news, from CalMatters to Spotlight PA. At the end of the day, we measure ourselves by the success of our publishers and our clients collectively grew their reader revenue by 43% in 2024.
WF: What are some of the common themes you see with publishers, and are there specific recommendations you typically make?
NB: There are often a lot of things that publishers are doing that make it hard on themselves. We rely on automation that moves readers through the funnel, and it is such a time saver and so effective that it’s the first thing we do with every publisher. Also, ‘ask more’ is usually the best fundamental advice I can give publishers. Almost every publisher is very precious about asking for donations or subscriptions and they don’t seem to realize that generally their audience is really open and tolerant to being asked, and they’re not thinking about it until they’re asked. People need to be invited into it. Just having a button on your website is not enough. On your website, you have such a large pool of people who are there for different reasons. Most of those people, 80% to 90% really, barely know who you are — they found you through a side door, they’re looking, and they’re leaving. By and large, email is the most effective way to ask. The people who come back over and over again are people who sign up to newsletters. It’s not that email or newsletters are magical in any way, but they are a channel you can control and push to your audience over and over again. So, you’re building that relationship with your audience.
WF: Are there certain metrics you prioritize when looking at audience development and reader revenue strategies?
NB: For a long time, our industry prioritized page views, to our detriment. The mirage created by social media, the cheap traffic, distracted us. Now that it’s largely gone, we’re back to finding our more loyal audiences and how we can be useful to them. And then, how do we grow that? The key indicator of whether someone is going to support you is if they keep coming back. We focus on that. We’ve built a propensity model that we tailor for each publisher, identifying readers who have a high propensity or likelihood to support an organization. Are they coming often? Are they signing up for the newsletter? Are they responding to surveys? Identifying habit and willingness to participate — that’s it. Find the metrics that speak to that. We also have publishers, like Outlier Media, that have a free membership tier. They know they have people who will demonstrate those signs of engagement but may be unable to donate. Those people have value to your organization, they contribute to your sustainability, and even if the accountant doesn’t directly see it, that’s still very important and I’m interested in exploring that model further.
WF: How do you advise publications to ask their audience for support or donations?
NB: When we work with our publishers around messaging, the focus has to be on the benefit to the reader. It’s never, ‘I need more money so I can do more reporting.’ It’s, ‘I need your money because this journalism impacts your life in this way.’ It can’t be too vague, you need to explain it. I prefer messaging that doesn’t even mention journalism but mentions the outcomes. What’s really hard is that coming to this point, publishers realize they have to ask themselves: Why do I exist? What are the outcomes? What is the impact? Journalists really wrap themselves in this blanket of, we’re the fourth estate, democracy matters — and I say this as a journalist. We have this pivotal role to play in democracy, and we never really explain to anyone, and often can’t articulate why, how, and who cares. That’s actually the challenge for most publishers, is really trying to understand why they exist and articulate that to their audience.
WF: What are some good examples of publishers who have done this well?
NB: One of my favorites is Mirror Indy, which is an American Journalism Project (AJP) launched publisher in Indianapolis. The AJP launch process is really cool, they do a lot of community listening and audience personas. Mirror Indy hired an amazing team that took those personas and still think about them every day. How does this story we’re thinking about speak to this person, or to that person? When they need stories, they look at the personas and think, what story do they need? They know they’re in the business of being useful to their audience. That is really incredible — there is a lot of ‘capital-J journalism’ that doesn’t understand their utility. I come from the community journalism side, so I feel like the most important part is always to be useful. If you don’t think about it that way, your work may never find its way to your audience.
WF: What are some of the biggest challenges you face at BlueLena, and how are you trying to solve them in 2025?
NB: The cost of good technology is really high. Paywall and other tech vendors may start by focusing on independent local media, but they find they don’t make that much money. So they do the math and figure: If I have one Gannett, I don’t need 400 small local outlets. They raise prices, and it becomes really inaccessible and hard for independent media to experiment with different models. There’s a real track record of that for these companies — you move up or you move out, and that leaves emerging media without affordable, quality tools. The other option is you’re basically adopting tools from other industries. Our main platform was not built for local news, but we’ve adapted it for those contexts. We operate just like a lot of our publishers, we are a small business with not a ton of investment. There aren’t huge margins spinning out from local media. That puts everything in a really perilous position.
For services and technology that’s tailored specifically for small, independent media to flourish, there needs to be more access to capital. By which I mean funding that aligns with the mission and expectations of running a small media-oriented business sustainably. The existing pools of funding are basically private investment, loans, and philanthropy. Investors look for returns and loans have terms, so both become a race against time. But building sustainability in a volatile, market-specific, small-margin industry like local news is a game of patience, experimentation, and endurance. So that leaves philanthropy, of which there aren’t a lot of channels for for-profit, mission-driven organizations — but also often comes with strings attached that run counter to market realities, so again serves to disrupt the quiet, stubborn focus required to grow steadily, sustainably, and focused on the real needs of small, independent media.
In 2025, BlueLena is focusing on serving publishers by offering a more expansive, lower-cost service tier that helps them generate reader revenue — capital — that can be invested back into audience development, allowing them to step up when ready and do even more. And we’re hoping to solve this for ourselves through more creative, enterprise-level deals to serve small, independent organizations and some very targeted grant applications that focus only on things that we think will be sustainable when the grant ends. It’s going to be an exciting year.
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Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email him at willfisch15@gmail.com.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a primarily grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism and support an informed society in New Jersey and beyond. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, the Independence Public Media Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.
