IN THE NEWS

Advance Local Update from Randy Siegel (CEO) & Caroline Harrison (President)

This is our first Advance Local update for the year. We plan to do these more frequently as part of an increased effort to share company news and respond to your questions and concerns.

We’ve made lots of progress in the last few weeks building out Advance Local as one unified company. The enterprise and regional leadership structures are in place along with new communication channels to ensure we respond nimbly to important ideas and opportunities. For Advance Local to achieve a higher level of success, we need to capitalize on the impressive work being done in many parts of the organization and embrace winning strategies faster and more consistently. We also have to establish a stronger culture of innovation and collaboration.

While 2017 ended on a strong note, last year’s results were decidedly mixed. Our talented newsrooms did exceptionally well with tremendous audience growth, an unparalleled run of blockbuster stories and superior coverage of high-profile elections.

Our hard-working sales teams finished 2017 with their best quarter of the year. However, our full-year sales performance in several markets was not as strong as it needed to be to achieve our goals, which is why we continue to focus on new revenue initiatives as well as expense controls. Matt Kraner (Chief Operating Officer, Markets), Pam Siddall (Chief Operating Officer, Enterprise Services), Peter Weinberger (Chief Innovation Officer) and Andy Lobred (Chief Revenue Officer) have been working closely with the regional presidents and local leadership to ensure we operate more effectively and consistently in 2018, particularly in sales. We are the largest and most trusted source of news and information in each of our markets, and we need to hammer that home like never before, extolling the power of our journalism and the value of our highly engaged readers.

As you know, we’re living in challenging, rancorous and sometimes surreal times where credible stories and facts matter more than ever. This makes the journalism we publish on all platforms our prized asset and the cornerstone of current and future successes.

Thanks to our journalists, we averaged more than 52 million monthly unique visitors in 2017 (with 8.7 billion page views for the year), placing our giant audience once again in the top 10 of General News websites measured by comScore.

Video was a key driver of our growth. We topped 930 million views across platforms – more than double the previous year.

We grew impressively on social media and now have 11 million followers. While we’ve focused on core platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, our reporters are doing much more with Snapchat Stories, finding audiences on Reddit and delivering flash briefings on Alexa.

Most importantly, Advance Local journalists are deploying all their tools to do award-winning and innovative local reporting that makes a difference in the communities we serve.

Alabama Media Group’s reporting on deception by Gov. Robert Bentley helped to drive him from office. Their reporting and advocacy surrounding Roy Moore’s contacts with young women fueled the statewide and national debate.

New Jersey Advance Media’s exposé of horrendous problems in medical examiner offices drew a promise of change from Governor-elect Phil Murphy 15 hours after the investigation was posted.

The Chris Christie Beachgate photos taken by NJAM’s Andy Mills were a viral smash that produced site traffic records (and became one of the top memes of the year). Within 24 hours, Gov. Christie caved on the state government shutdown and state beaches reopened for July 4.

NOLA Media Group led the way documenting sexual harassment allegations in the restaurant industry with their investigation of chef John Besh. The ensuing national outcry led to more reporting on inappropriate behavior by celebrity chefs.

Advance Ohio’s campaign to address multigenerational poverty, “A Greater Cleveland,” brought thousands of readers and community leaders together in an unprecedented public advocacy effort.

The PA Media Group did superb work exploring the impact of the opioid crisis in their community.

The MLive Media Group newsroom had another banner year making a difference in the state.

In a major investigation of the nursing home industry, the Oregonian Media Group identified nearly 8,000 complaints that weren’t included in the Oregon Department of Human Services public database. So, the team built its own, accurate database to help people making decisions about senior care.

Advance Media New York focused on government transparency all year, highlighted by reporting that questioned the need for a $15 million gondola.

MassLive.com placed a spotlight on the Springfield Police Department, where the city has paid more than $3.9 million in 10 years to settle misconduct claims and made several questionable promotions.

And the Staten Island Advance / SI Live newsroom did a remarkable job with its Dignity in Danger series.

As we move forward in 2018, here’s a list of major priorities for Advance Local. As one company now, we will push harder than ever to tackle these new initiatives with greater speed and agility.

Working with our market leaders, Matt Kraner is developing a more sophisticated, metrics-driven approach to how we deploy our sales talent and leverage our considerable competitive advantages on behalf of our advertisers.

Peter Weinberger, John Hassell, Matt Jaeger and the Innovation team are putting the finishing touches on an exciting new home page, which will initially be tested on al.com before rolling out to the rest of our websites. Your feedback on this home page project is crucial so please don’t hold back when you see the new design and features. Our content teams will also be getting enhanced tools to provide live coverage of breaking news and events, whether it be live video on Facebook and YouTube or an expansion of our live blogging tool, Minutes, which blends reporting, video and social media to make our game coverage more interactive.

Pam Siddall and Kevin Denny are leading a cross-functional team to develop a consumer revenue strategy so we can generate additional revenue from our readers by offering premium content and more valuable services without hurting our digital audience growth. This project has the potential to change the financial trajectory of Advance Local and ensure our revenue streams are sufficiently diversified in the future. In addition to diversifying revenue, the Enterprise Services team has a number of new initiatives underway to improve critical areas of our operation.

Andy Lobred’s Revenue Strategy team is expanding its full-service national digital agency, Advance 360, which has worked with our local sales teams to win a slew of multi-million dollar automotive contracts. Advance 360, MV Digital and our content marketing experts at Headline Studio continue to prove that we can land large deals inside and outside our current market footprint. Andy’s team has also empowered the advertising operations managers from around the company to overhaul the current system and make it much easier for our sales reps to place ad campaigns and share the compelling results with their clients.

Last but certainly not least, we are working with the regional presidents and our local leaders to do a frank assessment of what we need to build a more vibrant and cohesive culture at Advance Local, based on the excellent feedback we’ve received from many of you. As we said in our year-end note about our new Advance Local structure and company values, there is plenty of room for improvement here and hopefully you will see signs of change very soon. As one company now, we need to communicate better, listen better and perform better while continually strengthening our products and services. And we are confident that 2018 will bring significant progress in these consequential areas.

We hope this update is informative. Please send us your ideas, comments and questions that we can address in future communications. Thanks again for all the excellent work you are doing. It’s making a big difference every day, throughout Advance Local.

Randy & Caroline

 

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