The NNA Foundation wants to help you build your audience

Mar 1, 2024

The NNA Foundation Board is pleased to announce a new competition to encourage the promotion and sustainability of our communities’ best educators: their newspapers.

In 2024, the Foundation will roll out the Competition for Readership Development promotion.

The promotion will offer prizes in two qualifying divisions for the best promotions for newspaper subscriptions and audience.

The competition will cover 2024 activities and will be awarded in 2025.

The newspaper staffer who designed or managed the promotions — as well as the sponsoring newspaper — will each receive $500 awards. There will be two divisions: circulation under 5,000 and circulation over 5,000.

The competition is financed by a dedicated fund developed in 2023 in recognition of NNA’s retiring former CEO and public policy manager, Tonda Rush. Rush will be among the judges of the competition.

The board recognizes that while newspapers’ lean staffing complements are focused on enhancing the news and information products and on bringing in new revenues from advertising and fundraising, we still must build our audiences, both print and digital.

Part of our mission is to serve readers. To do that, we have to compete against a loud and compelling array of information providers — some reliable and some not so much.

To help our readers understand why we are the trusted local news source, we simply have to do more promotion and marketing. The Foundation wants to help.
Winners of the competition will be asked to provide an educational webinar on their promotion design, techniques and metrics.

On behalf of the NNA Foundation, I’m excited that we are going to do our part to amplify the best practices in our industry. We have a wide national family of people dedicated to creating good newspapers. With this competition, we’ll recognize their hard work.

Please keep an eye out for more details as we launch this new program.

R. Michael Fishman is the publisher of the citizen Tribune in Morristown, Tennessee, and president of the National Newspaper Association Foundation, 2024-2025.