2024 Fellows Wrap Fourth Session at GNI HQ
October 7, 2024
The Media Transformation Challenge Program’s Class of 2024 wrapped up its final full session at Google’s St. John’s Terminal in New York City last week.
Fellows visited ABC News where they caught a live taping from the Good Morning America Control Room, and The Associated Press where they participated in the 177-year-old news organization’s global news meeting, and toured AP’s famed Photo Archives.
MTC Staff Karen Baum Gordon, Lauren Gustus, Danyelle White, Fran Scarlett, Amanda Barrett, Stephane Mayouxa and Charlie Baum led collaborative, hands-on sessions on Personal Leadership, Navigating the Power/Opinion Matrix, Using the Business Model Canvas for one’s career, and The Power of Story.
GNI’s Global Research Lead, Arun Venkataraman, shares insight from GNI’s recent research collaborations on Digital Trends, Emerging Audiences, and News Sustainability, and Independent Digital Media.
Of the Class of 2024’s penultimate round of performance challenge updates, The Examination Managing Editor Ben Hallman said, “There has been remarkable progress in my cohort toward clarifying, and accomplishing, major aspects of our strategic challenges leading to the best presentations of the year, by far.”
Performance challenge updates included:
– A hyper-local, nonprofit online news source with a performance challenge of growing its community of supporters in order to sustain its mission-driven newsroom has balanced its news sources to better reflect its community, and increased page views from search referrals 60%.
– A global, not-for-profit news cooperative drove double digit gains in traffic, ad revenue, search referrals and time spent as outcomes of its challenge to make B2C digital transformation central to its core business.
– A midwest nonprofit is on track to grow its nascent sponsored content program by 200% in 2024.
– A major metro legacy newspaper whose challenge is to convert a loyal print audience to a loyal digital audience exceeded its digital subscription growth goal.
“Integrating MTC tools and frameworks into how I think about not just my work, but also my personal life was one of the key takeaways of my week,” Karen Hawkins, Story Editor for The 19th, said.
“I’ve had the luxury of taking these in-person gatherings and coaching calls for granted, and without those next year, I want to be intentional about holding and using this new knowledge to think about the future in a new way.”
Special thanks to Casey Pallenik and her Google News Initiative colleagues for hosting.
Fellows convene for an abbreviated, final session in at The Poynter Institute For Media Studies Inc in January 2025 to present final updates, greet the incoming class, and receive certificates.
If you’d like to tackle a critical performance challenge using MTC tools and frameworks to drive impact in your organization and beyond, 2025 Applications are currently open.
