Situation
The News Sustainability Project is an industry research initiative - led by the Google News Initiative (GNI) & FT Strategies, and in partnership with industry associations like INMA - to understand, measure and enable the drivers of sustainability for publishers globally. The objectives of the study were to:
- define and measure sustainability;
- identify industry examples of success; and
- help enable sustainability through recommendations and resources
Engagement
FT Strategies worked with Google over an 18-month engagement (which is still ongoing), which involved:
- Establishing a leading advisory board of 30 experts
- Collecting data on 450 publishers across the globe of various size and digital maturities
- Developing a robust sustainability framework that could assess and score participating publishers through the creation of a bespoke index
- Creating a recommendations playbook that would be bespoke for each publisher
Results
- Creation of the News Sustainability Website - featured by multiple world leading press associations and publishers
- Developed a uniform, industry-wide way of defining and measuring sustainability - the Publisher Sustainability Diagnostic - and use this measurement to diagnose the industry on a global and regional scale
- Created a set of industry leading Sustainability Studies - that provide data-led insights on the health of the news industry and an examination of different publishing archetypes who represent the potential pathways to success.
“The News Sustainability project and diagnostic tool was a true reflection of where we thought our business was. I love it!”
Publisher and President of Post & Courier
