A TOUR OF COURIER NEWSROOM OPERATIONS
EACH OF 8 STATE COURIER NEWSROOMS PRODUCES CONTENT
Created in 2019, COURIER’s current newsrooms (in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin) will soon be joined by newsrooms in Nevada and New Hampshire.
COURIER employs over 40 bona fide reporters and content creators who produce 900+ pieces of high quality, original content weekly.
All COURIER reporters and their coverage are rooted in their communities, featuring lifestyle, human interest and political stories. Political coverage is not partisan but does hold elected officials firmly accountable.
↓ See how The ‘Gander, COURIER’s Michigan newsroom, localized and contextualized the reproductive rights issue—which proved to be a deciding factor in the state’s 2022 midterm elections.
Social Media
COURIER’s news content is posted on the newsrooms’ websites, as well as in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat.
Each newsroom has a core targeted audience, specific and unique to the state it covers, who:
- Live in the newsroom’s state
- Have aligned values
- Are passive news consumers
- Vote infrequently
The COURIER teams continuously monitor the news cycle and their audiences’ engagement to ensure they are producing quality, local and hyper-local stories that resonate with target audiences.
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Using external funding, COURIER can “boost” content – increasing the intensity and/or reach of postings during key persuasion windows or before critical periods for voter registration or voting. COURIER’S editorial control over content is never ceded by this boosting.
STATE-SPECIFIC NEWSLETTERS
COURIER aims to recruit social media readers to become newsletter subscribers. Each newsroom emails 1-5 newsletters weekly, with an average open rate of 36%.
Engagement through social media posts generates about 74% of subscribers, with the rest coming through google searches, website articles, online quizzes, social chatbot, and word of mouth.
COURIER currently has ~500K newsletter subscribers, a 141% growth in subscribers over 2022, and a number on track to double in 2023.
↓ View a graphic showing how subscriptions for newsletters and social platforms have grown since 2021.
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The greater the growth in the number of subscribers, the greater the impact COURIER anticipates its content can have on their voting behavior.
Within the newsletter format, COURIER can use its reading of priority news topics and data on reader engagement to intensify coverage.
↓ See how coverage of cannabis issues by The ‘Gander, COURIER’s Michigan newsroom, became so extensive it deserved its own title: Michiganja
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Broader Media
COURIER newsrooms have won awards from local and state press clubs.Stories are increasingly picked up by other outlets, local to international, as well as by Democratic campaigns and elected officials.
↓ Find out more about how news spread when the Copper Courier, Arizona’s COURIER newsroom broke the story of a 2022 Republican state legislative candidate who wore blackface.
