A former Metro Editor at the Chicago Tribune and Sunday Editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, Jacob is chronicling the Local News Initiative’s progress for the project’s website. He is the co-author of six books on history and photography.
Articles by or about Mark Jacob
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As online advertising lags, many local news organizations are shifting their strategy to focus on reader-based revenue models, especially digital subscriptions, as a path to financial sustainability and greater community service. That pivot is redefining the goals for many news outlets. Rather than chasing viral “clicks” to boost ad revenue, they are trying to establish their value to subscribers. New strategies require new insights into local digital audiences. That’s why a major new Northwestern University...
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When Northwestern University researchers analyzed subscriber data from three major metro news outlets, they identified coverage areas and reader behaviors that correlated with customers keeping their subscriptions. Two key ones were a regular reading habit and consumption of unique local content. But two other behaviors jumped out because they showed no correlation with subscriber retention. In a possible paradox, people who read many stories and read them for longer were no more likely to keep...
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A recent meeting of Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative team and its three “learning lab” partners – the Chicago Tribune, Indianapolis Star and San Francisco Chronicle – found heightened interest in news organizations growing their digital subscriptions as a key strategy for financial sustainability. A “click” culture in American newsrooms, in which online page views were the overriding measure of success because they boosted advertising revenue, appears to be giving way as online ad sales continue...
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Three leading U.S. news organizations are serving as “learning labs” for Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative, a project to harness data and other research tools to find ways to make local journalism sustainable. The three outlets – the Chicago Tribune, Indianapolis Star and San Francisco Chronicle – have submitted terabytes of anonymous online reader data to Northwestern’s Spiegel Digital and Database Research Center for analysis. A key goal: to correlate reader behavior with what the...
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Research by a San Diego State University professor is challenging our definitions of what local news is, and could have an impact on the ways journalists tailor their product to their audiences in the future. News organizations today need to move beyond their antiquated definitions of location and dive deeper into the nuances of geographic spaces in this digital and mobile media era, wrote associate professor Amy Schmitz Weiss in a new journal article featured...
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A $100,000 grant from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation will fuel new research by Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications that is intended to provide tools that can improve the financial viability of local journalism, while also seeking to increase Americans' sense of community and making them more informed about their democracy. The grant, announced Nov. 12, will include both data analysis and qualitative research this year and next, conducted as...
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This is the first in a series of articles on America's local news crisis and the work of the newly launched Local News Initiative at Northwestern University's Medill School. It's a jarring contradiction: The public has never had better access to news, yet local journalism is suffering a dramatic decline. Which means there’s plenty to read and view, but it might not tell us very much. On a single day in July, the New York...
Projects Mark Jacob has worked on.