On this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast by Media Voices, we speak to Eric Ulken, Vice President of Product at The Baltimore Banner. The Baltimore Banner is a nonprofit news organisation launched in 2022 which serves the Baltimore region, and the larger Maryland state.
Eric talks about what makes the Banner’s business model unique, why it was so important to get an app up and running early on, what marks success for them with their app audience, and why they’re such a valuable tool for engaging premium audiences. He also explores why publishers should be looking to other apps for inspiration beyond just text-based news delivery.
Here are some highlights from the interview, lightly edited for clarity:
Why an app was important to a news start-up
I had the same question when I joined: why an app? Why so soon? Why not get the web right first? But I think the app play turned out to be really smart, because apps have become table stakes for news organisations, especially subscription-driven news organisations. There’s an expectation among users that we deliver a smooth, streamlined reading experience on a mobile device that really elevates the journalism, puts the user experience front and centre… and the app does that beautifully in a way that mobile web just doesn’t.
It’s not for everybody. And that’s one of the things that we’ve learned over time is that not all our users are going to be app users. But for those who want it, it’s a really powerful tool.
One of the things that we’ve heard is, “I subscribe to the New York Times,” or “I subscribe to the [Wall Street] Journal; they invest in their apps. If I’m going to spend a similar sum of money to subscribe to a local news organisation, I expect a similar experience.”
The app is very sticky. It has deeper usage than the web on a per-user basis, so we feel like the app serves those people really, really well and gives them an opportunity to stay connected to us and go deep when they want.
Doing justice to the web and app experiences
It’s been a really difficult thing to navigate, in part because you can spend a lot of money building a platform to do justice to the app in the same way that we do the web. It’s not a trivial investment. That said, we started with the assumption that the app should not be a second class citizen. A lot of news organisations have said over time, “Well yes, the app is table stakes, so we’re going to od the minimum investment in it and put up an app for those who want it, and maybe it’s going to be a digital replica or something…”
We don’t have a newspaper, for one thing. So when we started talking about an app, the assumption was that it would be a digitally native experience… We’ve always prioritised getting a really good experience on the app, so people don’t look at the app and say, “Well actually, I need to go to the web to see the full thing.”
Is it a perfect one-for-one experience? No, we’re working in that direction, we’ve got a number of things we are actually planning to deploy on web and app at the same time because we want to make sure that we don’t leave the app behind. But it is investing in another platform, which is not a small expense.
Looking around for app inspiration
I don’t know that there are many local players that have really prioritised the app experience and have really invested in a way that we could look at it and say, “These people have really nailed it” in a way that some of the national players have.
We also look at non-news or non-publisher apps for inspiration, whether that is aggregator apps, or social media apps. We’ve talked a lot about vertical video – we produce a fair amount of vertical video – so how do we get that into our app experience in a way that feels not like a bolt-on? So we’re looking at TikTok and apps like that to inspire us a bit.
One thing that we all struggle with is that most news apps are still very text-based, and we know that consumption habits are shifting to video and audio-based, and we’re trying to catch up. So how does that reflect in our core native apps? I don’t think we know yet.
We’ve seen publishers look to integrate podcasts and video more tightly in their apps, but – no disparagement intended – it still feels a little bit like a bolt-on, whereas there are some apps out there that feel more organic, where these video and other multimedia forms feel like they belong in a way that I’m not sure publishers, even some of the largest, have cracked yet.
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