Events: The Life Blood of New Media
By Xavier Rubira
Events are very versatile frameworks that allow for newsrooms to expand their business in many ways. Events are great ways to generate positive publicity, develop a larger audience, court existing readership, networking, creating fan loyalty, and opening new funding valves.
In Annaliese Griffin’s report on Revenue Opportunities: Events, she talks about her upstart Brooklyn Based, a local food and culture news upstart, where she is the editor-in-chief and co-founder. Since they were a small project, the power of events really magnified the initial growth of their brand and business.
They hosted numerous mixers throughout different neighborhoods for members that were subscribed to their newsletters. Showing appreciation for your audience goes a long way in creating a loyal fan base, and a positive buzz down the block. A business that values their consumer’s time and money, and shows it will see a rise in popularity.
And that is exactly what happened to Brooklyn Based, as Griffin goes on to say, “events now make up roughly a third of our total revenue, and they've been absolutely invaluable in spreading the word about Brooklyn Based” (Pg.2–3).
Events are valuable opportunities to get your name out there and make good impressions with marketers, investors, potential patrons and subscribers. These are all potential valves to sustaining a business and events can gather all of these people together in one room.
POLITICO is a news outlet that uses events to expand their influence. Today, March 6th, 2019 they will be hosting a networking conference for women and have multiple guest speakers.
They include Congresswoman Jahana Hayes (D-Conn) Congresswoman Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.) and the host of the talk, Anna Palmar. Much like Brooklyn Based they have multiple sponsors for this event such as Google and the Tory Burch Foundation. This event does many things for POLITICO. It’s great publicity to be promoting fresh journalists to the field and it matches the theme of March, Women’s Appreciation Month. And that is good publicity because it shows their support for women journalists in the industry. Moreover, it shows advertisers and sponsors they have a positive image, which persuades marketers to approach POLITICO for ad deals.
Their events seem to be successful because they have multiple events lined up for this year with backing from big sponsors like Google. Also, POLITICO has been growing their staff over the last few years and that is indicative of growth and needing more hands to fulfill an increasing demand.
A new media example would be the Youtube new media upstart Philip DeFranco. He uses events to expand his business, show his audience he values their patronage, fosters fan loyalty and funds himself through ticket sales, Patreon subscriptions, and merchandise. He calls these events DeFranco Does. For his, Patreon subscribers he hosts live meetups with Q&As and live interactive town halls. And they have access to a separate chat feed for his live broadcasts that are open to everyone.
This has been a successful model for DeFranco, because patronage and merchandise has been a primary source of funding that has kept him going. In numerous videocasts, he has stated that without Pateron and merchandise sales it would be tough to continue to do what he is doing.
Events have been a great way for all of these media outlets in expanding their business and earning revenue. And it seems to be a trend that is on the rise. It will be interesting to see how events evolve to interact with numerous communities around the world.
