Funded by the EU’s Creative Europe programme, the NEWLOCAL Project is a cooperative endeavor that brings together local media companies from Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. The project’s main objective is to develop innovative strategies and technologies to enhance audience engagement and, in turn, increase advertising revenue.
Project summary:
Local media have an advantage in direct access to local users and in serving content that does not compete with big national media. However, the target market is small, and advertisers are frequently not interested in cooperating with small media companies. Through the NEWLOCAL cooperative project, our consortium of local media companies will develop a new approach to the audience, which will also help us develop new products and opportunities for increasing advertising revenue. We will focus on new technology, first in the form of mobile apps for all consortium partners’ media and then on developing tools to improve interactivity with our users. We will focus on polls, quizzes, smart push notifications, gamification, user-generated content and personalization of the content for every user. During the project, we will focus on internal know-how sharing (through conferences, workshops, reports, and work exchange programmes), but we will also make our knowledge public, as our findings will be available through the project’s website for all interested local media to learn about our activities, experiments and what has worked and what hasn’t. We predict that developing these tools and products will help us bring in additional advertising revenue of around 384.000 EUR per year. We also believe we can bring in at least 60.000 EUR from the audience revenues. This will have a significant impact on sustainability, competitiveness and long-term success. The consortium for NEWLOCAL project is composed of 10 local media companies from 4 countries (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro). We come from diverse backgrounds (radio, print, online), but we are all now established digital media, with editorial teams for online production and increasing online revenues.
The NEWLOCAL consortium aims to invest in new technologies such as:
- Mobile applications for all partner media outlets
- Interactive tools like polls, quizzes, and smart push notifications
- Gamification elements to enhance user engagement
- User-generated content platforms
- Personalized content for individual users
In essence, the project aims to forge a new path for local media, one that is both technologically savvy and financially sustainable.
The NEWLOCAL consortium is a diverse group of 10 local media companies from four different countries:
From Croatia (HR)
- Varaždinske vijesti d.d. (Coordinator, contact: Alenka Čović, alenka.covic@gmail.com)
- Sjeverni pol d.o.o.
- RI PORTAL j.d.o.o.
- Pro Media d.o.o.
From Serbia (RS)
- Tim za razvoj i integracije
- doo Radio Magnum-18
- Privredno društvo Boom93 d.o.o.
From Slovenia (SI)
- NT&RC d.o.o.
- RADIO TEDNIK PTUJ, družba za časopisno in radijsko dejavnost, d.o.o.
From Montenegro (ME)
- Digital media factory d.o.o.
Project duration: 01.06.2023. – 31.05.2025.
The project NEWLOCAL is funded by the European Union.
Project’s website: https://newlocal.mpanel.app/
Social media:
– Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/newlocal10
– LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/newlocal/
– Twitter – https://twitter.com/newlocal104
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