How Virtual Assistant Tech Can Help Local News and Local Business Thrive

In the current advertising environment, extracting value from a journalism business — especially a niche or local news site — is becoming more difficult than ever.

As a fellow in the 2019 Tow-Knight Entrepreneurial Journalism program, I was interested in making my venture sustainable. Called Livin’ Americana, its goal is to surface the stories of exceptional Latinx people in cities where we don’t expect a growing Latinx population, places like Nashville. The venture I’m planning would include in-depth and engaging multimedia stories as well as real-life events to build our audience. However, it’s clear to me that my business model needs to be more distinctive, compared to others already doing this type of work. In addition, I need to establish a Minimum Viable Product that draws a clearer line to revenue than the broad idea I originally envisioned.

As I conducted my due diligence for Livin’ Americana it also became more clear to me that many of the people who’ve been doing this work for years say that making money has been extremely difficult. Even established and respected independent community journalists often have to work multiple jobs to earn a decent living, which in turn means that even some of our most trusted community voices are in serious trouble. Starting a pure-journalism venture from scratch without massive financial backing was not the best first step for me. However, I haven’t given up on Livin’ Americana, instead, I have decided to focus on developing a business that — while not pure journalism — is in the service of journalism, helping established but financially struggling journalists grow their revenue.

Today I’m introducing LatinXConneX, an advertising and virtual assistant technology studio that allows journalists, especially niche, local, and hyperlocal news sites — who due to their geographic or demographic size can’t grow a large enough audience to sell the advertisements necessary to be sustainable in today’s pay-per-click and pay-per-ad-impression digital advertising market — extract value from the trusted relationships they’ve built with their audiences.

Meanwhile, as local news outlets struggle, local businesses and service providers are also fighting to survive as they compete against online retail and digital goods and services providers. For local businesses, while there may be enough customers living nearby, the entrepreneurs aren’t reaching them effectively. In the past, a local newspaper was a great ad-delivery vehicle, but dwindling circulation has made it more difficult for local businesses to reach local customers and to compete with the targeted and programmatic digital ad-delivery mechanisms that national retail chains and online sellers can leverage. The impact on our local communities is palpable. Main streets and other business districts are often littered with empty storefronts or long walls of security gates, devoid of commerce.

But LatinXConneX believes that there is untapped value in niche and local outlets — especially those that are located in predominantly Latino communities — that goes beyond page views or ad impressions. It’s called trust. Local residents, LatinX audiences, and niche news consumers trust their local and niche news sources for recommendations on goods and services, what’s the best restaurant in town, which retailers have the best deals, and what community events are worth attending.

We believe that the authenticity and trust that niche, LatinX, hyperlocal, and local news sites have established uniquely positions them to satisfy the need of local businesses who have been unable to effectively target nearby customers looking for the goods and services they provide. We believe our virtual assistant technology can help local news sites reach their neighbors and finally extract value from the trust they’ve built after years of authentically serving their communities.

LatinXConneX Three Pillars:

• We help news platforms with a loyal following earn revenue that isn’t dependent on generating millions of ad impressions or massive audience numbers. News platforms leverage the monetary value businesses place on the trust readers give to the recommendations made by news outlets. We expect our virtual assistant technology to help increase a news platform’s ad revenue beyond what traditional web- and newsletter-advertising services can bring.
• We help businesses offer their goods and services to thousands of local customers. Rather than being reliant on capturing a passive audience, who can easily overlook a newspaper ad. Or lose a potential client because their offering was lost in a sea of Google search results, or outranked by fakes, our virtual concierge technology lets local business directly reach customers searching for the goods and services they’re offering right where they live and on their preferred platform (Facebook, web, or text). It also allows businesses to immediately provide their clients with the good or service at the moment they need it, rather than having them wait for days for delivery.
• We help audiences get the local news, community information, and valuable deals they WANT right when they want it. LatinXConneX users should never cringe when their phone vibrates with an incoming message from us. On the contrary, we want our audience to eagerly await the next amazing offer or the next headline that LatinXConneX delivers to them via our media clients. Even better, we expect our audiences will actively engage with our virtual assistants and use them as their trusted community guides for concise, actionable information, rather than going down the Google search rabbit-hole. Or having to wait days or hours for an item. We will never overwhelm, send unvetted info, or spam our users. If they’re ever annoyed by our service, we’ve failed.

The Uptown Collective Case Study

Growing an audience is the most difficult aspect of creating a sustainable media business. That’s why, instead of focusing on building our own audience, we will team up with Uptown Collective, an established hyperlocal site with 50,000 active users on the web, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and its weekly newsletter, which has struggled to monetize its platform. For the next three months, LatinXConneX and Uptown Collective will develop a media kit around our advertising model, develop a virtual assistant technology called the Uptown Collective Concierge, and sign-on advertisers. Furthermore, once we’ve developed those aspects, we will launch our beta version, which will serve as a case study to test our business model. At the conclusion of the case study, we expect to have a proof-of-concept we can then use to attract more advertisers, onboard more media companies, and possibly pitch to investors.

I’m excited by the prospects of LatinXConneX as a business, and as the first step towards building Livin’ Americana Global Media. Stay tuned!