Audience and revenue coaching for newsrooms
Grow your audience. Build your business.
I'm Phillip Smith, and I coach the people running independent newsrooms on the practical side of growth: finding the readers who should know about you, keeping them coming back, and asking the right ones to pay.
What I do
Most of my week is spent inside newsrooms, working on the numbers that keep them going.
Coaching with me is hands-on and specific to your newsroom. We pick the growth problem that matters most right now, design a small experiment around it, and look at what happened together. The work usually focuses on:
- Reaching the people in your community who don't know you exist yet, through paid campaigns, partnerships and search.
- Turning casual visitors into newsletter subscribers, and making sure the welcome series earns their attention.
- Asking for money often and at the right time, whether that's membership, donations or a year-end campaign.
- Getting your analytics configured properly so you can tell which experiments actually worked.
Programs
I also coach inside the programs that newsrooms already know and trust.
American Journalism Project
Coach, Audience & Sustainability program (2026). Ran the AJP Audience Growth Lab (2025).
Institute for Nonprofit News
Coach, Field Lab
The Lenfest Institute
Expert, Lenfest Expert Networks
BlueLena
Principal Consultant, BlueLena Advisory
Before this, I directed the Google News Initiative Pre-launch Lab from 2020 to 2025, which graduated more than 100 news founders, and in 2024 I designed and delivered the pilot of the GNI Journalistic Creators Lab for news creators working in video.
Clients
News efforts I've supported
Through direct coaching, the American Journalism Project, INN Field Lab, Lenfest Expert Network and the GNI Journalistic Creators Lab.
- Anchorage Daily News
- Barn Raiser
- BenitoLink
- Bianca Graulau
- Block Club Chicago
- Brooklyn Daily Eagle
- Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
- City Bureau
- The Colorado Sun
- Documented
- Earth Island Journal
- EdNC
- First Stop News
- Fort Worth Report
- Grist
- Honolulu Civil Beat
- ICT
- inewsource
- KAXE
- Lisa Remillard (The News Girl)
- Mat-Su Sentinel
- Mission Local
- Mississippi Today
- Mountain State Spotlight
- Nashville Banner
- New York Focus
- The News & Observer
- News Letter Journal
- The News Movement
- The 19th
- No Lab Coat Required
- Open Campus
- Oxford Free Press
- The River
- Santa Cruz Local
- Scientific American
- Shasta Scout
- The Sick Times
- Spotlight Delaware
- SupChina
- TAPinto
- The Texas Tribune
- URL Media
- VTDigger
- Wisconsin Watch
- WyoFile
- YES! Magazine
Paid growth
Let's figure out together what works for your newsroom.
Paid campaigns on digital platforms help publishers find the larger, often untapped, audience they deserve, keep those readers coming back, and guide them toward becoming paying supporters.
My approach is based on experimentation and research on paid acquisition for newsrooms. Nothing is cookie cutter: campaigns run across several platforms at once and work at the top, middle and bottom of the funnel, from first contact through to a paid subscription or donation.
- Google Ads
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Spotify
- Quora
- X (Twitter)
Newsletter growth for a small publisher
775%
more newsletter signups, from website fixes alone
- Simple improvements to the publisher's website increased email newsletter signups by 775%.
- Paid digital advertising then drove new traffic to the site, and within seven months signups grew by another 400%, at a cost per subscriber below the industry average.
Customer growth for a mid-sized publisher
2,500
casual readers converted into paying subscribers in four months
- Lead generation and website traffic campaigns brought in 10,000 new email newsletter subscribers.
- Targeting and retargeting campaigns then drove paid subscriptions at a cost low enough to deliver short-term ROI, with extra revenue from a voluntary donation option at checkout.
Work with me
A coaching retainer built around your newsroom's next growth problem.
We meet on a regular rhythm, monthly or every other week, with you and whoever owns audience and revenue on your team.
If you've been through one of the programs above, a retainer is a good way to keep the momentum going once the program wraps up. And if I'm not the right person for your problem, I'll tell you, and I'll usually know who is.
- Monthly or biweekly sessions with your team
- Experiments designed around your goals and your data
- A running record of what we tried and what it taught us
About
I've spent more than two decades on the business side of independent journalism.
I was the CTO of The Tyee, where I worked with the executive team on fundraising that raised more than $1M for its investigative reporting. I was later Mozilla's Senior Fellow for Media & Trust, and a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, where I piloted the entrepreneurship training that became the GNI Pre-launch Lab.
These days I spend most of my time coaching newsroom leaders, and I live and work in Napa, California.