The Perch: First year in flight draws national interest

Jodi Schwan

January 31, 2022

I like to think I’m a fairly effective storyteller – but I rarely tell the story of my own business.

I am confident I can market effectively for a variety of organizations – but I rarely market my own business.

And I’m pretty good at media strategy too – but I can’t recall ever pitching my business as a story.

The builder’s house always gets finished last, right?

So while I knew a year ago that I had created something unique in local journalism with Pigeon605, I never said much about it. In part, it was so different that I knew it would take time to build, and I still had to prove the concept.

Last week marked one year “in flight” for Pigeon605, and by a little twist of serendipity, one of the journalism organizations I most respect reached out and asked to tell the story.

Nieman Lab is part of the Nieman Foundation based at Harvard University. I consider it a sort of think tank for our industry – where I go to learn who’s innovating, how the industry is evolving, what the experts are projecting and how news consumers are responding.

So when an email popped up from a Nieman reporter, Sarah Scire, a couple of weeks ago, I had to reread it to make sure it actually was meant for me.

She had discovered Pigeon605 and thought it would make an interesting feature for Nieman Lab’s site. Here’s the story she wrote about it, which appears to me to have been widely distributed in our industry, including through the American Press Institute.

My favorite part is how Scire, who has never been to South Dakota, is now learning more about us because she so enjoys the visits from her personal “pigeon.”

As I told her for her story, my hope when I launched Pigeon605 was that it would be taking flight in the year we exited the pandemic. Instead, it became our home for nonbusiness-related COVID-19 content, along with wide mix of other stories.

I’ve experimented with a lot of topics and approaches in the past year, and through your readership we’ve learned what you most enjoy your pigeon delivering. We’ll continue to do that and always welcome your feedback and ideas at info@pigeon605.com.

As we grow the “flock,” your pigeon will be able to deliver information that is even more tailored to your interests. So as you’re sharing with co-workers, clients, neighbors, friends and family how you stay informed about your community, encourage them to “adopt” as well. My commitment to you is that our pigeon deliveries remain free, supported by a growing group of business and organization sponsors who share our belief that this kind of news and this kind of approach are needed in this moment in time.

We are blessed to work with dozens of businesses and nonprofit organizations every month between Pigeon605 and SiouxFalls.Business, and it’s important to me that those be deep, strategic relationships. So we don’t have a lot of capacity to add more sponsors at this time. There are a few industries I’d still like to see represented, though, so if your business has interest, please email me at jodi@siouxfalls.business.

When I think back on the first year in business as the owner of pigeon Alpha – the first adopted and a female, of course – I look to various metrics in measuring success.

I’m thrilled we’ve grown to more than 4,000 pigeon “owners,” with minimal marketing of the site and much broader reach thanks to leveraging social media and our other platforms.

I’m happy with the financial performance, which resulted in first-year profitability at a healthy margin.

But I’m most proud of the people we’ve been able to work with as contributors to Pigeon605. In many cases, these are people I worked with and watched walk out the door of the news industry earlier than they might have wanted. Thanks to my willingness to try something different and this community’s willingness to once again back it, these incredibly talented people are telling stories again. And anyone who reads them is left better for it.

It’s not easy running two news products plus a marketing organization. There’s so much business activity and news happening, I definitely could have been busy enough with just SiouxFalls.Business. But attempting to figure out the future of news is worth the investment, and I truly think that’s what Pigeon605 can represent. It’s about making news personal, relatable, customizable, accessible and compelling, wrapped around a data-driven approach to marketing that reflects the same values as the news product.

Thank you to everyone who helped us “take flight” this year. Now that the birds have left the nest, it’s time to see what adventures lie ahead.

Jodi Schwan is the owner of Align Content Studio, publisher of Pigeon605 and SiouxFalls.Business.

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