NEWLOCAL - a laboratory where small newsrooms learn big-city tricks

Small newsrooms know every pothole and council vote in their town, yet they fight on thin margins and antiquated tech. Yet most still depend on fading banner ads and brittle CMS-es.

NEWLOCAL - a two-year Creative Europe Journalism Partnership - was set up to change that. Ten media outlets from Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Slovenia joined forces with AppWorks and three research organisations to test new ways of reaching readers and paying the bills. The project is backed by €392 k of EU funding and runs until December 2025.

What the project is trying to prove

  1. Mobile first or bust - Audiences under 40 open their local news on a phone, not a desktop. Through NEWLOCAL, the goal is to build white-label apps that carry articles, video, audio and liveblogs.
  2. Interactivity drives loyalty - Quizzes, comment, user-generated content and gamification features help occasional visitors cross the line into registered users. The project tracks which features keep people coming back.
  3. Shared tech lowers costs - Instead of ten outlets writing ten cheques for ten vendors, the consortium pools development through AppWorks and then rolls the tools out to every partner at marginal cost.

Our role at AppWorks

We lead the technology work-package. Our job is to supply shared, low-maintenance tools so each newsroom can focus on reporting:

  • White-label apps – a Flutter stack any partner can skin and ship; features include offline reading, liveblogs and audio playback.
  • Quiz engine – a Mapapp spin-off that lets editors publish an interactive module in five minutes and see real-time leaderboards.
  • Analytics panel – live scroll-depth, return-frequency and quiz-to-signup rates in one screen. Early pilots show a 41 % jump in average session length and a 28 % rise in eCPM after outlets joined a pooled ad network.
  • Knowledge sharing - through bi-weekly clinics where reporters learn how to A/B-test headlines or rebuild a newsletter funnel.

Early signals

The project’s first conference - held on 10 May 2024 in Celje, Slovenia put prototypes in journalists’ hands: a white-label news app, an in-article quiz widget and a data dashboard. Eighty reporters, editors and students road-tested features, ranked pain-points and set the development order for the next sprint. The event confirmed two priorities: fast mobile UX and simple ways to capture first-party data. 

  • Average session length in the pilot apps is 3 min 45 s, a 41 % jump over the partners’ mobile websites.
  • The quiz engine converts 17 % of anonymous readers into registered users—enough to double the size of one outlet’s newsletter list in three months.
  • Shared ad brokerage lifted eCPM by 28 % compared with each site’s previous network.

Subsequent workshops have drilled into monetisation: bundling ad networks, introducing one-tap tipping and experimenting with membership tiers. The updated Guidebook on Best Practices (May 2024 edition) distils what works: mobile apps that open in under two seconds; quizzes that convert roughly one in six anonymous visitors into registered users; and gamified streaks that push session length past three-and-a-half minutes. 

Why it matters

NEWLOCAL is, at heart, a shared workshop: fix the tools, test the business models, publish the results. Local journalism can then keep its focus where it belongs - on the street outside its newsroom window.

NEWLOCAL - a laboratory where small newsrooms learn big-city tricks

Small newsrooms know every pothole and council vote in their town, yet they fight on thin margins and antiquated tech. Yet most still depend on fading banner ads and brittle CMS-es.

NEWLOCAL - a two-year Creative Europe Journalism Partnership - was set up to change that. Ten media outlets from Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Slovenia joined forces with AppWorks and three research organisations to test new ways of reaching readers and paying the bills. The project is backed by €392 k of EU funding and runs until December 2025.

What the project is trying to prove

  1. Mobile first or bust - Audiences under 40 open their local news on a phone, not a desktop. Through NEWLOCAL, the goal is to build white-label apps that carry articles, video, audio and liveblogs.
  2. Interactivity drives loyalty - Quizzes, comment, user-generated content and gamification features help occasional visitors cross the line into registered users. The project tracks which features keep people coming back.
  3. Shared tech lowers costs - Instead of ten outlets writing ten cheques for ten vendors, the consortium pools development through AppWorks and then rolls the tools out to every partner at marginal cost.

Our role at AppWorks

We lead the technology work-package. Our job is to supply shared, low-maintenance tools so each newsroom can focus on reporting:

  • White-label apps – a Flutter stack any partner can skin and ship; features include offline reading, liveblogs and audio playback.
  • Quiz engine – a Mapapp spin-off that lets editors publish an interactive module in five minutes and see real-time leaderboards.
  • Analytics panel – live scroll-depth, return-frequency and quiz-to-signup rates in one screen. Early pilots show a 41 % jump in average session length and a 28 % rise in eCPM after outlets joined a pooled ad network.
  • Knowledge sharing - through bi-weekly clinics where reporters learn how to A/B-test headlines or rebuild a newsletter funnel.

Early signals

The project’s first conference - held on 10 May 2024 in Celje, Slovenia put prototypes in journalists’ hands: a white-label news app, an in-article quiz widget and a data dashboard. Eighty reporters, editors and students road-tested features, ranked pain-points and set the development order for the next sprint. The event confirmed two priorities: fast mobile UX and simple ways to capture first-party data. 

  • Average session length in the pilot apps is 3 min 45 s, a 41 % jump over the partners’ mobile websites.
  • The quiz engine converts 17 % of anonymous readers into registered users—enough to double the size of one outlet’s newsletter list in three months.
  • Shared ad brokerage lifted eCPM by 28 % compared with each site’s previous network.

Subsequent workshops have drilled into monetisation: bundling ad networks, introducing one-tap tipping and experimenting with membership tiers. The updated Guidebook on Best Practices (May 2024 edition) distils what works: mobile apps that open in under two seconds; quizzes that convert roughly one in six anonymous visitors into registered users; and gamified streaks that push session length past three-and-a-half minutes. 

Why it matters

NEWLOCAL is, at heart, a shared workshop: fix the tools, test the business models, publish the results. Local journalism can then keep its focus where it belongs - on the street outside its newsroom window.