Teaching journalists to sell sponsorships

If you noticed the inbox was quiet last week, you're not wrong. The July 9 edition never left the dock because I was deep in redesign land. Both the Project C website and this newsletter got a MAJOR glow up. I would love any feedback on either if you have thoughts. 📧 The upside: this one's a double issue ‼ , with two weeks of links and community wins and some great news for the Project C Community.

Without the creator economy, the scores of journalists who are making the shift to independence would not be able to keep doing what they're doing. For many, especially newsletter writers, consumer revenue (aka subscriptions) has been the most reliable way to ensure a steady income. But that income can be limiting, and if your primary medium is video, subscriber revenue is way harder to operationalize.

Which means, for many, whether newsletter or video creator, it's time to think about sponsorships.

Journalists are trained to believe that selling is somebody else's job, which serves an important purpose in news organizations with separate editorial and business sides, but has also limited journalists’ understanding of the business of news – leaving us unequipped to survive in a world of disappearing newsroom jobs and an exploding creator economy.

What we discover when we go indie is that there was never a wall between journalism and business, but between business and the newsroom. Media companies have dealt with walking that line as long as newsrooms have sold ads. Going indie means we quickly need to metabolize the reality that instead of a sales team walking that line, it’s now up to us.

It’s a tough adjustment that goes through a few typical stages of integrating a new reality: denial (that it’s really on YOU to sell), annoyance (that it’s really on YOU to sell), and finally acceptance – which for journalists looks like learning as much as possible about how to do it right (aka reporting), then diving in full force.

On the “do it right” part, we’ve done a lot of work with partners like Trusting News to help journalism creators make the best decisions about posted ethics policies and transparency in funding, but what Project C hasn’t done yet is go hard at helping them actually land those sponsorship dollars.

That’s changing now.

Project C, in partnership with Emily Dresslar and April Brumley Hinkle – super-smart former colleagues from RevLab and The Texas Tribune (RevLab Director and Chief Revenue Officer, respectively) who are now independent advisors to news organizations everywhere – are setting out to teach indie journalists everything they need to know to understand how to position themselves for sales success.

Over three sessions in June and July, members of the Project C Community went through Step Forward on Sponsorships, a work session series built and taught by Emily and April. I sat in on all of it expecting tactics and a clear process. They delivered all of that, but something psychological happened, too: A Zoom call full of journalists learned how to sell their work ethically and confidently.

The reframes Emily and April taught deserve a wider audience, so here’s a taste:

That last one isn't a negotiating posture. It's the product. Your independence and credibility is the thing the sponsor is buying adjacency to.

Does it work? Becky Bullard (Democrasexy), who recently started working with Emily and Apri, closed her first-ever sponsorship midway through the series – for a podcast that doesn't even launch until September. And just this week, Kaitlyn Arford reported sponsor calls stacking up because, in her words, she'd spent time "pitching my ass off to brands." 🔥

Here's something else to think about: As I alluded to up top, the math says most of us can't live on subscriptions alone. Beehiiv's new paid-newsletter report puts the median free-to-paid conversion at 0.62 percent. Kyle Poyar's Growth Unhinged, on pace for $1.5 million in year one, makes five to six times more from advertising than from subscriptions, as reported by Creator Spotlight.

Which brings me to the news: April and Emily aren't done with us. They've signed on as Project C's sponsorship specialists-in-residence for the next three months, to help members turn new sponsorship skills into sponsorship revenue. That means 30- and 60-day check-ins with the work session group and a dedicated sponsorships channel in the Project C Slack where they’ll offer real-time advising, document review, and office hours. The community is already building its own scaffolding around this, too: a member-led accountability group called #accountabili-buddies held its first meeting this week. Which is exactly what I mean when I say this place runs on mutual aid. 💪

Members: Replays of all three sessions (slides included) with all of Emily and April’s lessons are waiting for you in the new Replay Room, the members-only section of the website:

See you next week, back on regular schedule. And if a sponsor hands you a budget range in the meantime, you know what to do.

– Liz