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Table Stakes: Poynter’s Local News Innovation Program – Poynter

Date: 2021-09

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It’s hard to find a newsroom that wasn’t transformed out of necessity by the crises of 2020 and 2021. Knowing what we know now, how will your news organization move forward with intention and ambition?

Big challenges include how to reach and engage new and diverse audiences; how to lock in the new, more efficient and effective ways of doing business you’ve developed out of necessity (and not revert back to business as usual); and even how to regroup, lay out a fresh roadmap and drive forward on your sustainability goals.

Poynter’s Local News Innovation Program, part of the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative, can provide the structure, tools, performance focus, coaching support and peer network you need to align your enterprise around your biggest challenge. You don’t have to do it on your own. Each element of this program is designed to deliver high value while respecting and adapting to the time and resource constraints of your organization.

We combine in-person gatherings (pending pandemic restrictions), regular online group seminars, peer group support and personalized coaching sessions to hold you accountable and help your entire organization succeed. You’ll also experience this transformation alongside other news organizations of different sizes and from different regions; they will serve as a sounding board, motivator and source of inspiration.

We viewed this as a reinvention of our entire organization. We see this program, and Poynter in general, as a way to stay on top of what’s cutting-edge and make sure we’re not an organization that looks back. We want to stay forward-looking, and Poynter helps with that.

— Mitch Pugh, former executive editor at The Post and Courier (now executive editor at the Chicago Tribune)

Program goals

Poynter’s Table Stakes project brings together leadership teams from eight to 10 diverse news organizations to:

Provide a pathway, based on the seven Tables Stakes , for transforming your news organization into an audience-focused, digital-first, market-leading, sustainable enterprise.

Define specific performance initiatives that will significantly advance your digital transformation and successfully achieve your objectives over the course of the year.

Identify and address the underlying skill, role, workflow, technology and culture changes required to achieve the objectives of the performance initiatives you take on.

Develop the individual skills and organizational capabilities you’ll need to continue the work beyond the project, using the tools and methodologies of performance-driven change.

Develop a peer network of news organizations that you can draw on to share and gain approaches, tools, technology and other resources in your mutual efforts to transform your organizations.

READ MORE: Anchorage Daily News went bankrupt in 2017. Now they’re making money.

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