The media has learned to keep its balance in the face of constant market turbulence — so much so that it has finally begun to plan seriously, and not just for the week ahead during Monday's staff meetings. 77% of respondents said that they carry out strategic planning, which sets priorities for the year ahead. 51.4% have defined KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for their work, and 31.4% have medium-term planning.


At the same time with the beginning of the active practice of strategizing, the editors realized that simply inviting everyone to a meeting and calling it a "strategic session" was not enough. It is not possible to set priorities for the year or even several years ahead without auditing the organization, analyzing performance, helding in-depth interviews with the team, and understanding how to build a strategic session effectively. The strategy should be a working tool, not a boring pdf-file that is left behind somewhere on the hard drive. Hence there is a growing media demand for assistance in strategic planning. 71.4% said they needed a strategic planning session. This request comes from both media managers and journalists.

However, after an inspiring strategy session, humdrum reality breaks in. How to embed a distant and desirable goal into daily tasks, identify those who will be responsible for implementation, evaluate efficiency and achieve results at the operational level? 82.9% of respondents indicated that they use various tools to plan team work. Among the favorite tools are Google Sheets, Docs, Calendar (used by 42.9%) and Trello (25.7%). Other tools (Asana, Slack, Bitrix24, KindReminderBot) — used by 8.6%.

Effectively distributing responsibilities among team members is one of the biggest challenges for regional media today. On the one hand, the media understand that in order to survive, they need to diversify content formats, mediums, distribution platforms, and sources of income. But, as always, there is a lack of key resources — staff and funds.

For example, in many outlets, the duties of an editor-in-chief and a CEO are usually performed by the same person. In some cases, this person is also responsible for the commercial activity of the media outlet. This combination often leads to the fact that those who have to deal with important responsibilities — strategic development of the organization, are forced to spend time on small urgent tasks.

At the same time, it is not so easy to find qualified specialists, but it is even harder to make them stay. For example, experienced sales managers are very difficult to find and hire not only in the regions of Ukraine, but also in large cities. Therefore, as expected, the teams are looking for hybrid solutions: either to teach the journalist sales skills, or to teach commercial managers from other fields the basics of media business. Both paths seem cheaper and faster at first glance, but longer in the long run, because the training of such an employee requires a lot of resources.

And media outlets are making efforts. Or they are looking for educational opportunities for their employees. Absolutely all respondents indicated that they educate their team or encourage its members to participate in educational initiatives.

The study covers 35 independent regional media outlets from all regions of Ukraine.The responses to questions regarding monetization models demonstrate that the main sources of funding for the surveyed media outlets are advertising and donor funding. The peculiarity of the situation is that donor grants are an important investment for the launch and development of independent media in the regions. However, the grant market cannot and should not support all of the independent regional media.

In order to compete, have high quality content and retain leading journalists, independent media need to develop a wide range of services and products that can bring them income (events, programmatic, native advertising, services, etc.). Focusing on just one model, unfortunately, is now an unwarranted risk. The Ukrainian media market pushes the media to actually build a system of media businesses, where profits are achieved through the synergy of several different business processes.

A minority of surveyed media outlets plan their workflow through Excel, calculating in detail the cost of all their products, without taking into account forecast, seasonal and situational market changes.

About 40% have financial planning and make management decisions based on this. Compared to the previous year, there was an increase — from 33% to 40%. This is obvious progress, given that almost all media plans have been thwarted by the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, for the successful functioning of media organizations and the media market in general, it is necessary that financial planning be carried out not only by the strongest outlets, but by all media organizations. At present, we see a situation when 60% — the majority — do not use financial planning tools, but actually build their organizations blindly.

Another one of the biggest problems of regional media is the absence of a separate commercial team or a designated person who would be solely responsible for the commercial component. In some outlets, one employee can combine several functions: 50% of the time working as a journalist and another 50% — a sales manager. Sometimes the editor-in-chief combines the functions of a sales manager with his work.

One of the main shifts that occurred during the pandemic was the transition of businesses from offline to online, and the increasingly active use of digital marketing. Half of the surveyed media saw and took advantage of this opportunity. They have expanded their list of tools for providing advertising services and working within partnerships.

77% of newsrooms have a press kit, which is a positive trend, which means that media organizations have an understanding of their commercial services and their value. However, the press kit is not always a document that is used and updated on a regular basis.

There are many links between press kits, service costs, salaries, and discount systems for customers. These are four factors that strongly influence each other. Media organizations that have a well-designed press kit and a clear understanding of the price of the services it provides are less likely to make discounts than those that do not have a press kit. If the organization underestimates the price for its services, it undermines the market in which it operates.

Commercial media directors complain about donor-funded projects for failing to stay within the market boundaries: "They (donor-funded media) try to work with the commercial model, but distort the market by setting high salaries, while dumping prices for advertising products. This also affects the work of commercial media, as they have to lower the prices of their services, at the same time they suffer financially and cannot raise wages for employees to the same level as the grant funded media. Then, when media outlets launch systems of large discounts on their products and services, they do not take into account that they begin to affect the market in the long run. In the short term, the money that was earned is coming in handy here and now. In the long run, the media will not be able to raise prices for these services and products to make money on it. "

Depreciation of products and the provision of significant discounts (up to 50%) is due to a lack of understanding of the pricing of products sold by the commercial department.

The way out of the situation is the implementation of financial planning, calculation of the cost of work of all employees, cost of products at each stage of production, and establishing real value.

Establishing these processes requires appropriate qualifications. Therefore, finding a good specialist requires a market-level salary for this team member. Quite often one of the team members combines his or her main functions and takes on additional ones: for example, writing stories and tracking Google Analytics data, generating marketing reports.

Social networks remain an important source of traffic for Ukrainian regional media. At the same time, newsrooms often publish fairly standard posts, which consist of a link to the story and a short introduction text. The media lacks a systematic approach to setting up distribution through social media — they prefer to rely on simply sharing content, but not on building their own community.

And if the basics of SMM are more or less mastered by the newsrooms, the situation with knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) could be better. There is a request to deepen this knowledge among editors: they have learned to read basic information from analytics and adjust the work of the newsrooms accordingly. But at the same time, this is not enough to attract not only the usual loyal audience, but also a new one. For example, 54% of newsrooms do not know how to attract people under the age of 25. The main problem is that young people are not interested in news sites, and that the media outlets cannot effectively embed themselves into platforms where young people consume content (for example, in TikTok).

Most of the media surveyed take into consideration the size of their audience and want to increase it. 97% of respondents said they understand who their readers are. In particular, they also understand who is the core of their audience. But only 14.3% indicated that they have 2 or more portraits of the audience — its analysis and segmentation still needs to be done to better understand who consumes media's content and how to interact with these people.

The main communication of the media with its readers is carried out through public profiles and groups on social networks (97%), 31% — through comments on the site, 27% — through email, 23% — through offline events, 20% — through online streams, 14 % — through subscription services. Also, 82.9% of respondents said that their newsrooms do not have a specialist who would promote the media.

It is rather surprising that in 2021 regional newsrooms are still relying on distribution via Facebook. Despite the fact that this platform has a large share of Ukrainian audience (16-18 million active users), obtaining significant organic traffic from there requires both quantitative and qualitative efforts. In conclusion, the media do not have a systematic strategy for working with the audience, so they can focus their efforts and resources on the use of those tools or approaches that give poor results.

Also, a significant proportion of surveyed media indicated that they did not have a person in charge of marketing and a budget for paid content promotion (as well as a development budget). However, almost all of them indicated they were working to promote their content. Accordingly, "promotion" in this case means simply placing links on the social media profile of the outlet. As follows, the growth strategy through Facebook is based solely on the organic growth of the page.

Audience

A very similar situation has developed with the usage of SEO techniques and tools. Most participants note an increase in search traffic, but this growth is mostly organic (sites accumulate content, the use of some keywords gives a positive result, a certain amount of traffic is generated). A significant proportion of respondents conducted an SEO audit of their media outlets and even implemented the proposed changes, but in the face of ever-changing algorithms, this must be done constantly, as well as implementing an operational capability to respond quickly to these changes.

None of the respondents has an employee in the team who is responsible for working with the data. Despite the fact that the wave of interest towards data analysis has faded a long time ago, the Ukrainian media has not yet established a systematic work with it. That is, the collection, processing and analysis of data is either not performed at all, or is performed by anyone other than people specifically appointed for this process. This is rather surprising, given the fact that the amount of data generated by the media is usually much larger than the average business.

Regional media need to understand that working with data helps to understand the state of affairs and determine the direction for further development. Any planning, calculations and strategic sessions will not make sense until the results of each department's work are monitored on a regular basis by a person who understands the specifics of these tasks.

Ukrainian regional media managers are still learning to understand the landscape of media technologies and still do not perceive the opportunities offered by large platforms as opportunities.

Only 26% of all respondents use Google's AMP to distribute content, none of the respondents use Facebook IA, not to mention other platforms.

Given the fact that AMP is one of the key factors that Google uses to sort pages in search results, not using this tool for one reason or another is a rather confusing trend. Although it is believed that AMP may have a negative impact on advertising revenue, the increase in search traffic compensates for this shortfall in the long run.

Despite the fact that the media as a product platform is not developing very fast, outlets have become very active in the direction of expanding the types of content they produce.

Video is beginning to attract more and more attention from regional media managers, which is a good case in terms of knowledge of distribution and communication. However, this is a very complex format in terms of attracting attention. Ukrainian media managers have not yet learned to actively capture attention with the help of texts. At the same time, they already plan to do so with the help of video content. Only a few media businesses know how to use video effectively to disseminate the information. Therefore, media outlets should evaluate their strengths and resources — whether they can really invest a significant amount of resources in video production.

Intentions of Ukrainian media to develop can be seen with the unaided eye, however, the media is too focused on current editorial processes, which has a very negative impact on the quality of business growth and revenue.

The main advice you can give is: "As long as you focus on the operational processes, your product stays in place, and if you keep moving at the same pace — there will simply be nothing to offer for selling."

On average, the media that participated in the survey published about 24 articles a day, including 22 news items. In addition, newsrooms publish an average of about 17.5 non-news items per week.

On average, 5-6 full-time journalists work in the respondents' outlets. At the same time, 94.3% noted that they are not staffed with all the necessary team members. Among those who are most lacking, the newsrooms pointed out advertising managers (54.3%), SMM specialists (40%), journalists (25.7%), photographers and videographers (25.7%).

Staff shortages have a powerful impact on how and what media outlets produce. If the media outlet sets a clear KPI on the amount of material to be produced by the newsroom during the selected period, this may prompt journalists and editors to evaluate the work done in terms of quantity rather than quality. At the same time, if the newsroom lacks manpower, this could further push the editors to technically easy-to-create materials. However, media analysts confirm that informing the local community is not the only role that regional media play as such. They are also important for the involvement of local communities in the political life of the region, participation in elections, and keeping the local authorities accountable. It is important for the media to follow what their community, city and region live on. From this point of view, it is important to maintain the interest of regional newsrooms in creating content in new formats that they could not try due to lack of knowledge or resources.

48.6% of respondents indicated that they lack resources to work with video content, 14.3% — to conduct investigative journalism, another 14.3% — to create multimedia longreads, 11.4% — to create podcasts.

Overall, 77.8% of media outlets publish journalistic investigations. In half of the cases, the investigation is conducted by a journalist who is working on other materials as well.

Respondents also indicated that they wanted to improve their storytelling skills while creating materials and producing investigative journalism stories. Among the thematic areas of the media, business, economics, and finance are of interest — 62.9% of the surveyed newsrooms indicated this.

Diversification of formats and thematic areas in the content is also important to ensure greater sustainability of the media. In this way, the media can reach a larger audience and offer potential partners a wider choice of tools and options for joint projects.

97.1% of the surveyed newsrooms work with video format, while the newsrooms also stated that they need additional training in this area. Journalists also need additional knowledge of the following formats: games, infographics, explainers. A little less - on podcasts and tests.

Diversification in content in the media is present when it comes to working with social networks. 60% make traditional publications for social networks, combining a link to the material and text introduction, 46% add to this type of posts infographics, videos and memes.

63.9% of the surveyed media outlets have developed a stylebook or editorial guidelines for journalists. 75% of the media have a prescribed policy. At the same time, 41.7% would like assistance or advice on the development of these documents.

Regional outlets understand that content alone is not enough, so they work with SMM, marketing, branding and distribution strategies. They also pay attention to data collection and analysis, which allows for better organization of work in the newsroom.