This week was the big news of the Press Forward project, an investment of $500 million to support the growth, expansion and sustainability of local news organizations across the country. Among the anchor funders of this extraordinary initiative is the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which has pledged $150 million toward the collaborative effort. You can learn more about Press Forward at this site.

Yesterday LION Publishers’ announced the Maintaining Affordable Local News Ecosystem (MANE) initiative, also funded by the Knight Foundation. We are thrilled to share that as part of this, BlueLena is receiving critical investment to expand affordable access to our solutions for independent media. The investment recognizes BlueLena’s role as essential infrastructure contributing to sustainability in the local media industry.

 The program aims to stimulate the marketplace of technology services, like those delivered by BlueLena to our clients. Here’s how the investment will allow us to better serve new and existing customers in the near-term:

  • Capacity expansion: In addition to our new VP of Operations, Sam Bennet, BlueLena will soon add two new Solutions & Strategy Consultants this fall. The additions will allow our team to give more time and attention to each client and provide more consultative services, and execute quickly on our recommendations. Additional support resources will be added in the coming months as we continue to expand our solutions and services.
  • BlueLena Academy: a new one-year revenue development training program that delivers technology and blends accelerator-style coaching with hands-on execution support in a peer-based learning environment. This program’s mission is to help publishers develop, implement and execute strategies to achieve long-term sustainability with reader revenues.
  • Training, support and upskilling for clients: We do a lot for publishers, but giving the tools necessary to pilot their own success is our ultimate goal. To that end, we’ll begin rolling out new workshops and training modules available to all of our clients’ team members. Workshops will include live trainings on how to use our tools more effectively, as well as webinars on topics that include audience and revenue growth tactics, SEO, reader funnel strategy, A/B testing methods and many more best practices.
  • CRM and major gift development: BlueLena has introduced a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management solution that is built into our audience management and email marketing platform, enabling publishers to maintain all reader and donor relationships in one unified environment. This option is available beginning in Q4, 2023.
  • Strategy playbook development: New clients to BlueLena now receive a strategy playbook at the end of their onboarding that defines their goals, messaging and monetization approach, and their longer-term plans with our team. We will be working to bring this benefit to our long-term clients, and use it to chart a new era of success.

From our modest beginnings in March 2020, we have committed to creating a sustainable future for independent local media through building strategies to grow audiences, developing solutions to overcome business challenges, and delivering best-in-class tools to support journalism funding models for long-term success. 

Our 200+ publishing community represents a diverse mix of nonprofit and for profit newsrooms, print and digital publications, as well as established and new media brands. Our clients represent membership with Local Media Association, LION Publishers, the Institute for Nonprofit News, the Black Press Association, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and the National Association of Hispanic Press. Among the industry initiatives we’ve supported include Knight x LMA BloomLab, Word In Black, News Is Out, along with community newsroom launches of the American Journalism Project and the National Trust for Local News.

We are grateful for every organization that has placed their trust with our team to serve its needs, and we are incredibly excited about what this new investment will allow us to do in support of the independent news community. 

We will be sharing more details on these programs in our upcoming newsletters and our client Roundtable that is scheduled for Sept. 21. To learn more about BlueLena or to sign up for our newsletter, visit us at bluelena.io.