Grow & Strengthen, a program springing from the Center for Cooperative Media, focused on ways to develop New Jersey's news ecosystem. Many helpful, universal themes emerged while the project began to progress. Here are some of the lessons learned via project coach Joe Michaud:

First, a successful news startup needs financial support at the very beginning, especially during the first six months to a year while it works to generate an income. If too much emphasis is placed on sales at the start, the balance of content and audience attention will suffer.

During and after development, successful news projects will find they will need to be of the community and also out in the community. A sustainable news site can identify what a community wants and needs, and has likely sprung up to fulfill those. Being visible in public events and gathering signups provides a necessary, balanced depth to creating a trustworthy relationship between a community publisher and its audience (one of the perks of not being big media).

Professional backgrounds can vary, and while coming from journalism is valuable, it's not everything. In fact, having a news background presents some challenges to engaging the community because of the preconceived role of news a journalist often brings to their work. They may need to overcome this with added community engagement. For those not coming from a newsroom, the important thing is to operate with intention and adhere to ethics. And all staff needs some knowledge of basic business practices, like bookkeeping, incorporation, and tax issues.

Many of the lessons Michaud reviewed on sales could be applied to any business, including the difficulty of finding a salesperson, closing sales, and dealing with people issues (volunteers flaking, writers not following up). When focused on media sales, Michaud emphasizes that local ad buys are mostly emotional, not data-driven. The relationship of the publisher with the local customers is a barometer to gauge whether the community is really using the site. Interviewing local businesses is a smart idea for making this connection and also a good way to break the ice.

The last bit of wisdom Michaud covered was the need to overcome negative ideas of what it means to run a local news site. All participants came in with some barriers to their success, including lack of organizational skills, being unwilling to adopt new modes, and lack of organizational skills. None were a dealbreaker, but still should be checked and modified where possible.