What’s better than winning a Pulitzer? Making money off of it.(OK, maybe not. But it’s a nice financial cherry on your editorial sundae.)The dark horse pick and winner of this year’s Pulitzer for national reporting was InsideClimate News, a nonprofit niche publication covering climate and energy news with a completely virtual staff.There’s a lot to be said for the small publication’s editorial coup, but from a business angle, the most interesting fact was that shortly after winning the Pulitzer, InsideClimate News turned its award-winning piece “The Dilbit Disaster” into a Kindle edition eBook.The eBook represents a ways that mission-oriented journalism can make money, as well as a way that subscription sites — whether small niche industry news publications or larger organizations — can turn award-winning or popular content into one-off product sales to non-members. We’ve seen revenue-generating ideas like this before from subscription sites like Foreign Affairs, which capitalizes on timely topics to sell archival content. I’ve always strongly recommended this method for timely topics with favorable search rankings since it’s a great way to drive traffic and allow prospects to sample your goods (see our How-To on Digital Rights Management to learn why digital content is an “experience” good that requires sampling before purchase).But executives should not conclude from InsideClimate’s success that a paywall would exclude their news organization from awards. As Poynter.org points out, the Wall Street Journal has had a paywall since 1996, and has continued to win awards. (Although, an editorial shift shift to shorter-form content may be tied to WSJ’s poor representation among Pulitzer winners in recent years.)
Creating eBooks Out of Pulitzer-Winning Content
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