5 Things The Boston Globe Did Right When Launching STAT, a Health & Life-Sciences News Site

On Wednesday, Boston Globe owner John W. Henry announced the official launch of STAT, an online news outlet focusing on health and life-sciences, including

On Wednesday, Boston Globe owner John W. Henry announced the official launch of STAT, an online news outlet focusing on health and life-sciences, including science research and development, medicine, and biotechnology. The site will also feature columnists like Ed Silverman of Pharmalot fame and Carl Zimmer who writes Science Happens!”Over the coming decades, many of the most important stories in the world will come out of life sciences. Our mission is to uncover and the follow the biggest stories rising out of this sector. Major, untold stories will unfold on our site, as we examine issues and questions that affect every human being. There is simply not enough coverage presently of these vital matters. STAT launches now to do this,” said Henry in a statement.

5 Things the Boston Globe Did Right When Launching STAT

        Led by Rick Berke, a former assisting managing editor at the New York Times and executive editor at Politico, Stat has 50 staffers at launch, including staff in Boston where STAT is based, reporters in New York, Washington and San Francisco, and in-house marketing, advertising and audience development teams.Though STAT is just officially launching, the STAT team has published more than 60 stories in the Boston Globe already. In the future, some STAT stories may run in the print edition of the Globe, and Globe stories might also run on STAT.According to the announcement, the goal of STAT is to appeal to a wide range of U.S. readers, including consumers and health and life-sciences professionals. The site will be ad-supported, but plans to add paid products in the future.”STAT will compete with science coverage from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal,” said Berke in a statement. “A news organization can be most nimble when it is built organically for the digital age.”In a NiemanLab article, Stat chief revenue officer Angus Macaulay said the objective is to become profitable quickly, and there are a number of paid models STAT could consider such as subscriptions, paywalls and events.”The objective right now is to let people enjoy all of the content, and even down the road as we look at the paid products, there will always be an element for people to enjoy for free,” Macaulay told NiemanLab. “Obviously, there are brands who are having some success with it, and as a business it’s always better to work through multiple revenue streams. They don’t always need to be equal revenue streams, but it’s always a smarter strategy to have multiple revenue streams and have a product that people would find worthwhile to pay for.”Insider Take:Publisher John W. Henry, who is also the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, has proven his business savvy time and again, and it looks like STAT has the potential to hit a home run for him. Here’s what STAT has done right, which can serve as an example for subscription companies to emulate:

  1. The idea arose out of passion in the summer of 2014, but unlike some ideas that never take off, Henry put a team in place to get things moving.
  2. He hired Berke, a proven entity, to get things started in February.
  3. Berke took 9 months to build his team, create a library of useful content, and begin building an audience through its daily Morning Rounds newsletter.
  4. As the site ramped up, STAT published stories in The Globe to garner interest.
  5. The site launched with an ad-supported model, but is already looking at paid options to diversify revenue streams. We anticipate they will test different options until they come up with the right mix for STAT.

With a solid concept and plan, and with Henry and Berke at the helm, we expect STAT to do well. We’ll be following their progress, and will keep you up-to-date.~ Dana E. Neuts, Subscription Insider   

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