Four Steps to Invest in Your Own Content Channels 

The media continues to contract, leaving fewer journalists to cover the issues you and I care about. You and I must become the architects of our own stories by building our own content channels.  

Here are four ideas to jumpstart your efforts to invest in your own content channels.  

1. Build a Newsletter or Grow the One You Have. If you don’t already have one, it’s time to start a newsletter. If you have one, it’s time to invest in and upgrade your newsletter. This will give you an opportunity to share your message with your audience in a way that is not diluted. It will also give you a way to mobilize your base to action. Remember the people who come to you are interested in your work, so use every opportunity to tell them about it. You can promote your newsletter via social media but be sure to drive all traffic back to your website. Please also remember that your newsletter should include your base as well as journalists and producers who cover your issue area.    
2. Invest in SMS Marketing. If the past few years have taught us anything it is that we do not own social media platforms. While it is nice to amass a large number of followers, true power is having contact information for those followers. You need emails, phone numbers and a way to quickly communicate with your base. Always ask yourself, if this platform were suddenly unavailable to me, how would I reach my audience? One way to do this is to launch an SMS marketing campaign to collect phone numbers and emails and then use that information to send information that your base finds useful. 
3. Promote Your Thought Leadership via Opinion Essays. Even when an issue is noteworthy, communicators face an uphill battle garnering media coverage, especially in today’s landscape. While it’s harder than ever to secure media coverage, it is imperative that we tell our stories on our own terms. That is why publishing opinion essays should be on your radar.  Opinion essays are guest columns usually between 700 and 800 words. They have one or two bylines and represent opinion bolstered by provable facts.   
4. Become Investor Consumers. Few media outlets are awash in cash; not all have angel investors and corporate sponsors. And due to racism, when media outlets owned by Black people have the clicks, they do not always receive the same advertising dollars as their white counterparts. This leaves them scrambling for revenue year after year, and unable to cover stories that are important to our community. It is imperative that advocacy organizations earmark money for public relations as well as investing in media outlets created for and owned by our community. They cannot win without us, and we can’t win without them.    

Continue to build a following to inform and mobilize. But do it on platforms that you control and own (we can amass tons of social media followers, but we do not own any social media platform). Most of all, continue to build your own content channels.