Six weeks ago, LINK Media acquired CityBeat. For us, and for many of our readers, that feels like a lifetime ago. I know everyone is eager to hear how things have been going with the acquisition and integration, so I wanted to provide an update and let folks know what’s coming next.
In the past six weeks, we’ve:
- Stripped the junk ads off CityBeat.com. I don’t know about you, but I rage-quit more than one CityBeat story in the past year or so because the ad experience was so bad. To fix that, we’ve pulled a bunch of junk ads off the site. We want everyone who visits CityBeat.com to have a good reading experience, and that means not fighting 15 pop-ups or watching offensive ad videos running on a loop.
- Launched Best of Cincinnati. Normally, Best of Cincinnati starts before the new year, but with no sales team (more about that later) and the previous state of operations, it had not been started yet when we made the purchase. Our first order of business was to get this 30-year-old program back up and running. Nominations are open now!
- Pulled all operations in-house. Under the previous ownership, design was handled in Detroit, newsletters were done in Louisville, digital ads were managed from Phoenix, and printing was wherever there was a press available. All those folks were lovely, but it is very hard to run a cohesive organization when it is distributed that widely. Now, everything is handled right from our offices in Covington.
- Hired two more salespeople. When we acquired CityBeat, there was no sales team. (And no revenue, something we’re still working on.) In order to bring back the robust CityBeat we all knew and loved, we need to sell a LOT more advertising. To that end, we added two salespeople to our team at LINK Media. If you’d like to advertise in CityBeat or LINK nky, reach out!
- Updated design of email newsletters. Along with pulling the email newsletter control back into our local office, we’ve done a light redesign on all the emails we send, making it easier to understand which email you are receiving, and hopefully, encouraging folks to read more of the incredible content the writers are producing every week. If you don’t get CityBeat’s newsletters, sign up now!
- Reinstated pay for freelance writers. For the past six months, there had been no freelance budget for writers at CityBeat. (See above about there being no revenue.) We believe that freelancers are critically important to local news organizations and that people should get paid for their work, so we’ve allocated dollars for contributors again.
- Upgraded the paper for the print edition. About two years ago, we switched to brighter, whiter paper for the LINK print editions. It makes the photos look better, and the paper easier to read. As soon as we bought CityBeat, we upgraded the bi-weekly print edition to that same paper. We want the photos our freelancers take to look as good as possible, and it makes a huge difference.
- Started a print distribution audit. CityBeat is distributed in 27 places currently, and we want to make sure all those locations get enough papers, but not too many. (Paper is expensive!) We’re also adding pickup locations every week, so if you own a business and you’d like to have CityBeat delivered for your customers to pick up, email me.
- Said farewell to Editor-in-Chief Ashley Moor-Mahoney. This one is hard. By the time we signed the papers, Ashley was already well down the path of accepting her new role with the Dayton Daily News. Ashley was truly the glue that held CityBeat together through years of change and it was hard to say goodbye, but we also understood the opportunity she had in Dayton and just tried to make the most of the month we got to work with her.
That list is exhausting, but by no means exhaustive. Our team has been working pretty much nonstop since Dec. 5 to stabilize CityBeat, make the reader experience better and figure out what our path forward looks like.
In the next few weeks, stay tuned for announcements about other events, new editorial staff, and opportunities to share your thoughts about the future of CityBeat. In the meantime, you can always reach me at Lacy@citybeat.com.
Lacy Starling is the president and CEO of LINK Media, LLC. LINK Media publishes LINK nky and CityBeat.