LMA Creates Local News Resource Center

A local news resource center is being launched by the Local Media Association to assist publishers with their social media strategies. The center is being funded by the Facebook Journalism Project and will focus on training, case studies, best practices and more.

Emilie Lutostanski has been hired as the center’s director. Lutostanski worked for Community Impact Newspapers for the past six years as digital product manager and managing editor/digital. In 2017, she won numerous LMA awards including best social media strategy for her work at Community Impact.

Lutostanski will run a support desk dedicated to one-on-one meetings with publishers.  She will also host a social media manager’s club, modeled after LMA’s highly successful Chief Digital Club, free of charge for the first 30 that sign up. The resource center will receive real time updates on new products, updates and test results coming out of Facebook, Instagram and CrowdTangle. These will be communicated via webinars, conference presentations, white papers and more. Another top priority will be to follow the publishers that participated in Facebook’s local news subscription accelerator and report regularly on their progress and lessons learned.

“We are grateful to the Facebook Journalism Project for funding this important work,” said Nancy Lane, President, LMA, “We’re also pleased to announce that the Local Media Consortium will be a strategic partner in this endeavor. The resources of the center will be available to all LMA and LMC members. Finally, we are excited to welcome Emilie Lutostanski to the LMA team. She is a perfect fit for this role and we can’t wait to see her work in progress.”

“We are thrilled to invest in providing more resources to LMA and LMC members and ensure that they have a direct line to regular updates from us,” said Josh Mabry, Local News Partnerships Lead, Facebook. “This is a natural extension of our partnership with the Local Media Association and I look forward to seeing the kind of results that come from this additional support.”

Lutostanski will start on Oct. 17.