Phillip Smith serves as a Principal Consultant with BlueLena Advisory, where he helps nonprofit and independent news organizations develop and execute strategies to grow their audiences, strengthen direct relationships with readers, and build sustainable pathways from audience acquisition to engagement and revenue.
Phillip is the founder of Journalism Growth Lab, a consulting and coaching practice focused on helping publishers accelerate top-of-funnel audience growth. His work combines audience strategy, paid acquisition, experimentation, and hands-on coaching to help publishers identify new audiences, test acquisition channels, improve conversion, and build repeatable systems for turning anonymous visitors into known and engaged readers.
A veteran digital publishing consultant, technology entrepreneur, and journalism coach, Phillip brings more than two decades of experience working at the intersection of journalism, technology, audience development, and business strategy. Earlier in his career, he served as chief technology officer of an award-winning digital newsroom, where he developed audience-supported revenue campaigns from the ground up. He has also worked as a software developer, product manager, data journalism trainer, and digital publishing strategist.
Phillip developed his journalism entrepreneurship training practice while serving as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, where he studied how entrepreneurial frameworks and Lean Startup principles could be adapted for journalists and independent publishers. He is a certified continuous innovation coach and has spent years designing and delivering boot camps, workshops, and intensive coaching programs that help journalists validate business models, understand their audiences, launch new ventures, and establish paths toward long-term sustainability.
His work has included coaching and advising publishers and journalism entrepreneurs through the American Journalism Project, Institute for Nonprofit News, Lenfest Expert Network, Google News Initiative, LION Publishers, and other journalism support organizations. His entrepreneurship programs have emphasized practical, hands-on learning, including customer discovery, business-model validation, experimentation, audience development, and strategies for building loyal communities of readers and supporters.
Phillip brings a particularly strong perspective on the connection between audience growth and financial sustainability. Rather than pursuing traffic for its own sake, his approach helps publishers identify and reach the people most likely to value their journalism, develop direct relationships with those audiences, and create opportunities to convert engaged readers into subscribers, members, donors, or customers.
Through BlueLena Advisory, Phillip works with publishers to bring greater discipline and experimentation to audience growth, helping organizations expand the top of their audience funnel while building the systems, knowledge, and internal capacity necessary to sustain that growth over time.