After months of pouring over data and great interviews with newspaper and magazine publishers, Pugpig has published its annual flagship report that looks at the state of media apps. It was my final big project there before I joined WAN-IFRA.

As I worked on these reports for Pugpig over the last three years, we noticed a few things:

• Performance by various measures varied widely across the hundreds of apps Pugpig develops, and this is consistent with other reports such as ones from Airship and RevenueCat. We had reported these ranges, but this year, we started using box and whisker graphs, as RevenueCat did in their report about subscription reports.

• In some ways, no two apps are the same, in terms of features but also in terms of the revenue and engagement strategies that publishers used.

• Based on the report we did earlier this year on push notifications, I found the most valuable insights were found in identifying the positive outliers and speaking with them to find out what tactics drove their success.

In the push report we conducted with the support of prominent push providers including Airship, PushPushGo and Pushly, we found that those publishers who were most successful in terms of open rates but also other in engaging audiences after they opened the push notification used tactics to increase the relevance of those notifications.

• ACCA Student Accountant surveyed their audience to find out which users were taking exams so would be most interested in push notifications about exam content.

• City AM has their newsletter editor manage their push notifications and uses the links that newsletter readers click on most to inform the stories they push to their app users. They had some of the highest open rates of any publisher.

• The Boston Globe added a preference centre that allowed users to choose the push notifications they were most interested in. It increased open rates up to three times, and they had some of the highest performance in terms of the number of stories users read after opening a push notification.

We used this model to identify publishers who had outsized success with various app features such as audio, video and puzzles. Foreign Affairs has driven incredible performance with in-app audio. The Baltimore Banner added a vertical video carousel that improved the in-app video engagement. And Stylist demonstrated how adding puzzles to their app could dramatically improve performance.

Foreign Affairs has a brilliant product team. Tasia Fischer, who manages product operations at Foreign Affairs, has surveyed FA’s audience, and both surveys and data show that their audience cannot get enough of audio. The report outlines how through smart use of technology and simple UX tweaks they increased in-app audio listening by 72% year-over-year in January.

The Baltimore Banner leveraged the work of two video producers on their 55-member editorial team for the vertical video carousel in their app. “The other thing that is encouraging is that (vertical video) engagement numbers are going up every month. People are starting to build habits around video in the app, said Eric Ulken, the vice president of product at The Banner.

Stylist shows how puzzles increase engagement not only with puzzles but with their content. Puzzle users read 31% more articles per session and 69% more articles a week. This higher engagement translates into puzzle users having 85% higher 30-day retention rate versus the average users, according to Emma Peagam, the product lead at Hearst UK.

That’s just some of the insights in the report, and it’s well worth downloading.

What I’m reading: FT uses AI to engage commenters, ‘Mythbusting LLMs’ and preserving pre-AI content

Hannah Sarney, the FT’s editorial product director and executive editor, talked about how they were using AI to encourage readers to comment on the articles at WAN-IFRA’s Congress in April. They have found that commenters are four times more engaged than other readers, but commenters also make up a small part of the audience. To encourage more people to comment, they developed a tool that leverages generative AI to create three questions that editors can choose and embed midway through the article. The results are modest in terms of increased comments, but the real results seems to be better comments. It’s a great application of genAI.

What We Learned by Asking the Right Question

Smarter discussions driven by AI-generated talking points

medium.com/ft-product-technology/what-we-learned-by-asking-the-right-question-c1b08651aa5f

LION Pubs has leaned into data and a focus on sustainability under Chris Krewson’s leadership, and they keep building on that success by increasing the amount of data they are using to support their members assess their businesses.

Double the data leads to big changes for LION’s Maturity Model for digital publishers - LION Publishers

Independent news publishers can use this ​data-informed model to assess their progress as they work to develop more sustainable businesses.

lionpublishers.com/double-the-data-leads-to-big-changes-for-lions-maturity-model-for-digital-publishers/?mc_cid=58703319fa&mc_eid=fc4cc13f4d

This is an incredible resource by Joseph Lochlann Smith, the “tech lead of the Guardian’s fledgling Newsroom AI team”. Parts of it are accessible to a lay person, but he doesn’t shy away from the complex probabilistic calculations involved. Mythbusting is needed right now with LLMs, and he lays out really good arguments that bust common misconceptions about LLMs and generative AI.

MythBusting Large Language Models

Chatbots can be deceptive. How do LLMs really work under the hood?

medium.com/@joelochlannsmith/mythbusting-large-language-models-2f4ef31a7ce1

This was an interesting move. Google isn’t being forced to offload Chrome yet as part of an anti-competition/antitrust ruling, but it might be (although I can’t see this happening under a Trump Department of Justice). Grab some popcorn though because all of this will get very interesting.

AI search firm Perplexity makes $34.5 billion surprise bid for Google Chrome | CNN Business

Artificial intelligence search company Perplexity has made an unsolicited, $34.5 billion offer to purchase Google’s Chrome browser, a surprise move by a Google Search challenger that’s looking to upend how people find information online.

edition.cnn.com/2025/08/12/tech/perplexity-google-chrome-bid?utm_source=business_ribbon

As others have said, Zuck is hungry for success after his metaverse play didn’t catch fire as he hoped it would. With all of the content being posted on Meta’s social networks, they certainly have a lot of content to train their models, but it still stands to be seen if they can win in the AI battle against newcomers and old stalwarts.

Meta's year of bold 'superintelligence' bets unlikely to pump profits

It's crunch time for Mark Zuckerberg as he pulls out all the stops to stay relevant in Silicon Valley's intensifying advanced artificial intelligence race.

www.reuters.com/business/metas-year-bold-superintelligence-bets-unlikely-pump-profits-2025-07-29

A former Cloudflare executive is looking to create an archive of content before AI. The idea is to have a source of content that is guaranteed to have been created by human beings. The article not only explains the rationale behind the initiative but explains concerns about model collapse, a fear that AI models deteriorate if they were trained purely on synthetic content.

Scientists once hoarded pre-nuclear steel; now we’re hoarding pre-AI content

Newly announced catalog collects pre-2022 sources untouched by ChatGPT and AI contamination.

arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/why-one-man-is-archiving-human-made-content-from-before-the-ai-explosion/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dhfacebook&utm_content=null&fbclid=IwY2xjawLzTT9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHl6DDnWsvo97PvmblmAKCpPe5Sj2e1xKM0NpueOiQpfAyMU5qgxg-lBP3Tjk_aem_aCKhrcsAtquz1q_iG87uQA

Apologies for the break in newsletter service, and I won’t bury the lede. I’ve got a new job, and I’ve been in a job transition since May. That’s taken almost all of my time and attention, winding down my work at Pugpig and spinning up my work at WAN-IFRA, which I’ve just joined as the director of their Digital Revenue Network. My new colleagues described my role like this:

I’ll be guiding “WAN-IFRA’s efforts to help publishers worldwide grow sustainable digital revenue and navigate transformational change,” WAN-IFRA CEO Vincent Peyrègne said.

WAN-IFRA’s AI in Media and Innovate Local initiatives are part of the Digital Revenue Network. These issues are ones I’m passionate about and critical ones for the industry.

It’s an incredible opportunity and a daunting challenge. I won’t do this alone, nor would I want to. As the announcement was made, I heard from so many friends in the journalism community around the world, and I know that working together is the only way we’ll seize the opportunities ahead.

Have we reached ‘peak product management’?

This transition has been in the works for more than a year, and it gathered pace in spring of this year. I decided to attend the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, and WAN-IFRA invited me to the World News Congress in Krakow. Journalism product managers and leaders were out in force in Perugia with an entire track dedicated to product management in news.

However, I’ve also started to hear from someone I truly respect that she believes we’ve hit peak product management in news because product managers are seen as too powerful. Product management in journalism always has tensions because the work cuts across major boundaries between editorial, commercial and technical teams. Tensions are bound to arise as product managers manage these tensions. I also think it speaks to tensions about where product management sits in news organisations. Are they rooted outside of the newsroom, or do they sit with technical teams? In larger organisations, this issue is navigated with product managers sitting inside of the teams that are most relevant to their work, editorial, technical and commercial. For smaller organisations, this isn’t an option.

My friend Nick Petrie, the digital director at the iPaper, says that product management is coming home to the newsroom. Hannah Sarney, whom I had the pleasure to meet in Perugia, embodies this shift. In 2023, she moved from her role as head of audience engagement to become an editorial product director. As she told Christiana Sciaudone at A Media Operator:

The entire interview is worth reading and saving to reflect on. She sees her role as facilitating collaborative problem solving.

I’m so excited that I’ll be speaking to leaders across the industry in my new role, and managing the complexity of modern news organisations will be one of the issues that I dig into. What are you hearing? Are you feeling more tension around product management in your news organisation? I’d love to hear from you.

The critical role of data in media

Without good data, organisations are flying blind, and I’m tracking where publishers are investing to drive their data operations. Across news and consumer publications, it’s fascinating to see media companies partner with retailers to start sharing data. Customer data is so valuable, and news organisations are still just scratching the surface in using it.

Retail media meets publishing: News UK, Future and Ocado tap clean room tech for smarter data targeting

For Ocado the partnership provides valuable access to upper and mid-funnel data to inform its existing customer data. 

digiday.com/media/retail-media-meets-publishing-news-uk-future-and-ocado-tap-clean-room-tech-for-smarter-data-targeting

I’ve been working with first-party data, data that media companies have about their users and their users’ activity, for years. But about 18 months ago, I started to hear about zero-party data. This is data that users give to publishers and broadcasters.

Zero-Party Data Can Drive Broadcast Advertisers’ Success. Here’s How

In my research analyzing thousands of client marketing plans for positive business outcomes, I’ve discovered that only one in 10 local business owners ever reviewed their zero-party data (ZPD) for marketing usage. Ninety percent of these business leaders had not ever dug into their own customer records to find useful directional intel. This ZPD, unlike third-party data, which is often aggregated and prone to inaccuracies, is voluntarily provided directly by customers, offering clear insights into their preferences, intentions and behaviors. In short, it’s marketing gold. Business owners today are bombarded with data from countless sources — demographics, behavioral analytics, third-party …

tvnewscheck.com/business/article/zero-party-data-can-drive-broadcast-advertisers-success-heres-how

Here is a post from John Saroff, the CEO of Chartbeat. Media analysts like Brian Morrissey say we have entered the “post-traffic era”, but the reality is more nuanced, John says. Yes, AI overviews are affecting traffic to content, but evergreen content more than news. However, broadly, search traffic is holding up to news sites in the US.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about Charlotte Klein’s well-reported New York Magazine piece on the so-called “traffic apocalypse.” Most of our customers want to know: Is it really that… | John Saroff

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about Charlotte Klein’s well-reported New York Magazine piece on the so-called “traffic apocalypse.” Most of our customers want to know: Is it really that bad? The short answer is: no, not yet. The longer answer is: it could get worse — and now is always the best time to invest in building a direct audience, outside the control of platforms. Our data science team analyzed trends in referred traffic across the U.S., drawing on years of data from thousands of publishers. The topline result? 🅐 Overall referred traffic (Search + Social) is flat year-over-year. 🅑 Since May 2023, Google referrals (from both Search and Discover) have held steady at 24% of page views. 🅒 Facebook, meanwhile, has declined — from ~5% in 2023 to 2.5% now — but it’s been a gradual drop, not a cliff. That said, the aggregate masks real challenges. ● AI summaries are impacting evergreen content far more than real-time coverage like news, sports, or entertainment. ● Google Discover, which now makes up about half of Google referrals, is fickle and a major distraction for audience teams trying to build sustainable strategies. One day it boosts celebrity gossip, the next day, in-depth political analysis. So what should you do? ★ Build a direct relationship with your readers. Deep engagement is the key. One of our earliest insights — from back in 2011 — remains true today: the best predictor of whether a reader will return is how deeply engaged they are during their first visit. To help you understand how you’re doing, we just launched a new product: **Chartbeat Cohorts**. It lets you benchmark your performance against anonymized peer groups across the industry. I’ll be back with data on the rest of the world in short order. If there are other studies you’d like us to run, please leave a comment. We’re here to help.

www.linkedin.com/posts/jsaroff_ive-been-getting-a-lot-of-questions-lately-activity-7353798672075104258-5Koc?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAQlgMBGsFHXfXgtPL6NkzxRaTIufCZMfc

I’m a proud member of the News Product Alliance, and they have just released an excellent study about how news organisations can use first-party data. I had a chat with Ariel Zirulnick about first-party data for her research. In my last role at Ideastream Public Media, we did an internal data census and found we had 33 different sources of data in the organisation. We started work on making sense of them all, integration was quite a task. Managing all of this data and making sense of it is a tall task but a necessary one. Having reflected on this since my conversation with Ariel, I have these additional thoughts:

🤝 Alignment and priorities - Research for my master's degree in innovation management and leadership showed the importance of high-level leadership alignment on priorities. Without this, organisations, for-profit but especially non-profit, struggle to dedicate themselves to a strategic direction. Even with North Star Goal frameworks in place, I've seen and worked for organisations that struggle to translate a North Star goal into actionable activities. Data, especially first-party data, connects priorities to user needs (beyond the formal user needs process).

🔢 👪 Quantitative and Qualitative data - Before my master's, I undervalued qualitative data because most of the data I had as an executive editor and then a product director was quantitative. In news organisations, commercial teams often have qualitative data that doesn't filter into the newsrooms, so the data already exists in many news organisations (although it's usually high-level market data rather than first-party data). Quantitative data tells you what people are doing. Qualitative data can help you understand why they are doing it. Both are needed for effective execution.

❓ 💵 Knowing users is critical to 21st-century journalism business models - At any scale, modern media businesses are built on first-party audience data. Journalism businesses in the second decade of the 21st century cannot be built on advertising to masses of unknown users. This has been proven time and again, whether by the wreckage of platform-dependent digital start-ups over the past five years or the hollowing out of newspaper chains attempting to scale attention and revenue through consolidation. Bloomberg has built a first-party data business that delivers above-market performance in both advertising and reader revenue. The Independent has built a sustainable digital consumer journalism business on its A2K - anonymous to known - strategy.

FT Strategies recently released representative data on the size of anonymous digital audiences versus the value they deliver to media businesses. The size of the anonymous audience, who are completely unknown due to a lack of cookie consent, dwarfs the subscriber audience.

But revenue from subscribers, from advertising and circulation is several times larger than that from anonymous audiences.

The size of your audience doesn't matter if your business can't capture value from that audience. I will go as far as to say first-party data and the revenue models that flow from it are the only way to pay for distinctive, original journalism.

Changing business models and AI

As I wrote in Pugpig’s latest Media Bulletin, news SEO experts are speaking in nearly apocalyptic terms about Google’s introduction of AI Mode, a custom search result for each query. Moreover, while Google’s AI Summaries do not include news, AI Mode will. “News-focused SEO expert Barry Adams wrote on LinkedIn that the impact of AI mode is clear: “In the next few years, many publishers will be unable to survive.”

However, it has been clear for some time that media businesses still focused on content and business strategies dependent on platform-driven traffic are under existential pressure. Case in point, Business Insider. The digital publisher’s CEO announced that it would be cutting more than one in five of its staff. The parts of the business facing cuts are those sensitive to traffic declines, and the publisher expects “extreme traffic drops outside of our control”. Instead, the company is leaning into content that drives subscriptions and events.

Business Insider to Slash 21% of Staff in Shift Toward AI and Live Events; Union Slams Layoffs as ‘Pivot Away From Journalism Toward Greed’

Business Insider laying off 21% of its employees as it pulls back in some areas and beefs up its live events business and the use of AI.

variety.com/2025/digital/news/business-insider-layoffs-shift-toward-ai-live-events-1236412950

Exhibit B is the Press Gazette. It has now shifted to a subscription model to fund growth.

Press Gazette launches paid access to online content

Press Gazette is launching a metered paywall to help it fund the next stage of its expansion.

pressgazette.co.uk/news/press-gazette-paywall-launch

The Poynter Institute says that news leaders at the recent Hacks/Hackers AI event said that search traffic was cratering, and one expert at the event said it was never coming back. What is the answer? Rethink our relationship to audiences. Amen.

Journalism is facing its crisis moment with AI. It might not be a bad thing. - Poynter

AI is taking over, but journalism has weathered technological storms before. That data, however, says now is the time to adapt, not panic.

www.poynter.org/commentary/2025/journalism-crisis-moment-ai

Last week, I attended WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress in Kraków. With streams for media leaders, editors, digital media, and topical deep dives on specific issues often running concurrently, it’s impossible to take it all in, especially when there are so many interesting side conversations to be had. I focused on the digital media track, and it covered many of the current major digital themes in journalism: community (including young audience engagement), reader revenue, and AI. This week and next week, I’ll be highlighting some of the sessions from the Congress that resonated with me.

Community and sparking more participation at the FT

The rising importance of reader revenue and the decline in referrals from social and search have led publishers to deepen their relationships with their audiences. Hannah Sarney, editorial product director and executive editor at the Financial Times, talked of how they were updating their commenting community. Owned spaces result in deeper trust, she said.

While most publishers shut down their comment sections as audiences shifted to social platforms a decade ago, the FT kept theirs. Comment readers are 11x more engaged than active users who don’t read comments, and comment writers are 48x more engaged. “Community isn’t a bolt-on,” she said. The challenge is to get more readers engaged in the community. Only about half of the audience read the comments, and only 4% wrote comments.

“That leaves quite a bit of a gap,” she admitted, but she argues that this isn’t down to apathy or because the audience doesn’t care. “They don’t feel that the door is open or that the door even exists.”

Hannah and I had some great conversations about product management in Perugia and Kraków, and I appreciate two things about her approach. When I was doing my master’s research, I found that successful product management was built on strong cross-functional relationships, and this is Hannah’s superpower, her ability to foster relationships across the business. The other reason why she is such a good product leader is that she is able to translate values and goals into a product. For their community, the FT wanted to:

• spark participation

• protect civility

• foster togetherness.

Based on these goals, they are now testing a few approaches.

1. To support their moderation team, they have brought in an AI moderation tool from Utopia. “ It really has the human in the loop. It retrains off of the choices moderators make,” she said.

2. Their user research has shown that a sizeable chunk of their audience isn’t even aware the comments exist on the site. To overcome this, they have a new AI-powered tool that generates questions from articles to prompt engagement in the comments. Editors are given choices for the question, and they can choose the one that is the most appropriate for the story.

3. They are developing* and redesigning their live reader Q&A feature to drive broader participation and deliver a mobile-first user experience, clearly defined roles and the ability to easily catch up after the event is over.

• Note: I originally said they had launched the live Q&A feature, but at the time of writing, Hannah let me know it is still in development.

How The City Connects with New York City Communities

Publishers have been struggling to reach new audiences with the decline in referrals from search and social media, but these platforms also don’t reach everyone. As I’ve written before, the Platform Era was an aberration, providing free marketing and audience growth. However, the cost was high. The platforms owned the audiences, and publishers only rented them.

I remember when I first came across the story of how The City creatively did audience development by using postal targeting available in the US in a Nieman Lab article. Nic Dawes, the executive director of The City, told the Congress how they used this technique to reach new audiences, especially those most affected by the stories they were covering. For instance, they did a story about landlords who didn’t heat their apartments, literally leaving their tenants in the cold. They used call data to find zip (postal) codes that had the highest density of heating complaints, and then they used the US Postal Service marketing programme to send postcards to people in areas most affected. Brilliant.

When they first started doing this, they tested the postal outreach against Facebook ads. Readers who received the postcards were not only more likely to read the stories, but they also spent more time with the stories. They have used this technique to target audiences near Superfund sites, highly toxic sites that are being cleaned up.

The other thing I love about their approach is that when they survey audiences, they don’t ask readers whether they liked the piece but “what the journalism helped them do”. Steal this idea.

And this was just one of the sessions. Here are a couple of the LinkedIn posts I wrote about others.

How Der Spiegel reworked its puzzles and comments to drive engagement

#wnmc25 | Kevin Anderson, FRSA

One of the major themes of WAN-IFRA's World News Media Congress 2025 is how publishers deepen relationships with audiences through high-engagement products and features.  Dr. Laura Badura, product manager at Der Spiegel, spoke about two products the news publisher has created that have fostered civil civic debates and increased engaged audiences. Their strategy also demonstrates how they use different engagement products across their subscription funnel to engage, convert and retain subscribers. 🧩 Puzzles - With the New York Times and Wordle and even LinkedIn rolling them out, puzzles are a proven engagement product. • Use is high. On average, 900,000 users play Der Spiegel's daily news quiz every month. • Their morning newsletter is one of the major drivers of puzzle use, and the link to puzzles in the newsletter is the most clicked, which explains why mornings are the most popular time to play amongst users. •Der Spiegel's puzzles are free to play, setting it up as a tool to build habits that lead users to buy a subscription. 💬 From comments to debate - Der Spiegel has long had comments on its articles, Dr Badura said. Conversations were fragmented across articles on its previous commenting system. At its peak, they had 1.7 m comments a month, which presented a moderation challenge and led to fragmented conversations for users. • When trying to decide how to make commenting better, they started with audience research. Did the audience want community? Yes. They liked comments, but only 12% wanted to actively participate by posting a comment. However, 65% wanted to passively take part, by reading comments or listening to events. • Der Spiegel wanted to reduce the number of comments to make them more manageable. • When they relaunched the platform a year and a half ago, they had 10,000 registrations in the first seven hours and now have 350,000 registered users. • Instead of comments on all posts, they have 2-5 debates daily. The debates start with a yes or no question that allows users who want to passively engage. Comments are then added to each position, and comments can be upvoted. • They have hosted 1350 debates, which have received 5 million votes. The acceptance rate of comments has increased, and they now receive a more manageable 300,000 comments a month. • Users who use the product have more pageviews, and users who comment have almost 2x the time on site than those who don't. • The platform is connected to their subscription journey. • Unlike puzzles that are free to use, only subscribers can comment. • Use is much higher for audiences under 40, and 64% debate use is on mobile 📰 The comments section is also integrated into the editorial products. • Journalists participate in the comments. • Comments from the platform are added to print stories and social media posts. #WNMC25

www.linkedin.com/posts/kranderson_wnmc25-activity-7325507946719698944-X_YW?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAQlgMBGsFHXfXgtPL6NkzxRaTIufCZMfc

Digital media trends and how publishers are responding

Arun Venkataraman, the global research lead for Google's news partnership… | Kevin Anderson, FRSA

Arun Venkataraman, the global research lead for Google's news partnership programmes, gave attendees at WAN-IFRA, the World Association of News Publishers' World News Congress a whirlwind overview of changing audience behaviour and how publishers are responding. 📉 Social media has surpassed search and direct traffic to publishers for the first time. This is primarily driven by younger users. Publishers are responding by: • Focusing on getting first-party • Refining their newsletters and apps to drive engagement and loyalty with audiences. • Working to engage young news consumers on the social platforms they use and testing ways to incentivise them to come to their owned and operated platforms. 💡 Publishers are working to understand the reasons why news consumers are avoiding news, with some young consumers avoiding news altogether. "They are overwhelmed when they come across information they don’t know what to do with," Arun said. Amongst those who selectively avoid news, they will engage with positive and solutions journalism and explainers. Fundamentally, they want news that gives them agency rather than leaves them feeling powerless. Publishers are responding by: • Including calls-to-action • Publishing more explanatory content • Creating differentiated content that cuts through 📺 Format preference is changing. As the Reuters Institute Digital News Report highlighted last year, audiences of all ages, but especially young ones, are shifting to video, particularly short-form video. Audiences say the format shift is about authenticity and convenience. Publishers are responding by: • Investing more in their audio and video strategy • Investing in formats that meet audiences "where they are at, whether that is standing in line getting lunch or in bed, where they might be watching a long-form video". • Using AI to personalise the format with text-to-speech or text-to-video transformations. 🤝 Adapting to how trust is established - Younger audiences build trust more at an individual and emotional level, and they are building relationships with individual creators, who are more transparent about their motives. Publishers need a new way to "unlock trust", Arun said. Publishers are responding in several ways. • By exploring collaborations with creators. • By elevating reporters on social media platforms. • Increasing transparency. • Humanising reporters to build affinities with audiences.

www.linkedin.com/posts/kranderson_arun-venkataraman-the-global-research-lead-activity-7325091197545312256-WNdR?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAQlgMBGsFHXfXgtPL6NkzxRaTIufCZMfc

Journalism has been under economic pressure for most of my career, and it is under increasing pressure now both in terms of relevance in a broken Attention Economy and in terms of legitimacy from anti-democratic, authoritarian leaders.

The economic pressure has been almost constant through most of my career. In the mid-90s, I was looking for my first full-time journalism job, only to find hiring freezes everywhere because of the lingering effects of the recession in the first part of the decade. But after the turn of the century, things have become much, much worse economically for news organisations, especially newspapers. We all know the situation. More than 3,200 newspapers have closed in the US since 2005. In the UK, the three major newspaper groups - Newsquest, National World and Reach - now employ a third of the journalists they did in 2007.

I went to the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, and as you can expect, there was a full-throated defence of journalism and its role in democracy. And what I’m about to say is in no way to say that journalism, especially local journalism, is not important to democracy.

Josh Stearns of the Democracy Fund makes this case compellingly:

• More local political coverage translates into higher local voter turnout.

• More local newspapers translate into more ‘down-ballot’ voting, voters fill out their ballots more fully.

• Local news boosts young voter turnout.

• Consuming local news correlates

We have lost so much local journalism capacity, but the loss of newspapers and local radio stations has come against a backdrop in the US of a collapse in trust of journalism delivered by newspapers, TV and radio. While this is usually driven by a loss of trust in national outlets, network and cable TV and major national titles like the Washington Post and New Times, it affects trust in local outlets. I know first as during my work in local journalism in the US that people would call me up when I was a local newspaper editor and complain about stories on CNN.

As you can see from data from Gallup, data has been declining for decades, with an acceleration between 2004 and 2016. The collapse is most pronounced amongst Republicans.

Decline in trust in journalism tracks with decline in other institutions since the turn of the century, including a decline in satisfaction with democracy. In the US in 2024, only 31% of voters are satisfied with how democracy is working, down 10 percentage points from 2021, according to the Pew Research Centre. The US is not alone in a decline in satisfaction with democracy. In the UK (the other country where I hold a passport), satisfaction with how democracy is working is down 21 points, from 60% to 39%. And Pew has found declines across all other democracies - France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Greece, the Netherlands, and Canada.

Doing more to explain our values

Trust in journalism is a complex issue, but I am going to focus on one issue that I think is getting in our way of regaining trust and re-engaging audiences. With all of the pressure on journalism, we reflexively restate our professional values and the value of the role that we play in democracy. I get it because they are my professional values too, and I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Jeffersonian, believing in the core values of the Bill of Rights. However, it is wrong to assume that our professional values are universal social values, especially in this era when views are not only polarised but multi-polar.

I could write a book about this, but in the interest of brevity, I agree with Joy Mayer of the Trusting News Project. We need to engage in much more transparency, not only about our process as journalists but the values that inform the process.

A small example of this: I love how the Christian Science Monitor has a box in stories that explains why they did a story. With President Trump’s recent executive orders targeting high-profile law firms, they wrote about how the British had targeted lawyers who represented “causes it didn’t like”. They highlighted the case of the Boston Massacre, when John Adams, who would become the second president of the United States, chose to represent the British soldiers who were accused of killing five colonists.

They had a box explaining why they chose to cover the story in an act of radical transparency.

It’s a small thing, but I think journalists should do it more often. Explain why we are covering something. Connect the story to our professional values but also the wider values of society.

I used to tell journalists who I worked with or who worked with me that in addition to the 5 Ws of classic journalism - who, what, where, when and why - we should include why people should care. We can’t assume background knowledge. We can’t assume that people will intuitively connect the dots that we are connecting about our story choice. And frankly, story choice is one of the most important elements of journalism. The construction of a news agenda, almost more than how stories are written, speaks to the values of a news outlet. And we need to ground that news agenda in the needs of our audiences, not just the user needs framework, but in their needs. These are things that will restore trust and demonstrate the value that we place in the relationship that we have with our communities and the broader audiences we serve.

A closure of a US non-profit newsroom and the sacking of the editor who wrote it

I met Sewell Chan years ago when he was working at the New York Times, and I was the blogs editor at The Guardian. He was writing the City Room blog, and he wanted to talk about audience engagement and blogging. I’ve followed his career since, from the New York Times to leading the newsroom at the Texas Tribune and finally to editing the Columbia Journalism Review.

The piece that he wrote recently about the closing of the non-profit Houston Landing is a good explanation of why the site failed. They failed to find an audience, and it is unclear the leadership was right to address this.

The Houston Landing Is Closing, and Laying Off 43 Employees

The nonprofit startup struggled to identify a business model, an editorial strategy, and a large audience. 

www.cjr.org/news/houston-landing-closing-closure-lay-off-43-employees-texas-tribune-chronicle-morning-news.php

Sewell was just fired from his role as the executive editor at CJR. The New York Times links to a post written by someone who worked as the digital editor at CJR about his experience working with Sewell.

Columbia Journalism Review Fires Its Editor

Sewell Chan, who started as executive editor of the publication in September, said his firing after several staff complaints was “baffling.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/business/media/cjr-sewell-chan-fired.html?searchResultPosition=1

I first found out about it from a lengthy post that he wrote and posted on Facebook and LinkedIn. He said the firing came after “three pointed conversions”, which he detailed.

My statement, part 1: Yesterday I was fired by Columbia University after… | Sewell Chan | 379 comments

My statement, part 1: Yesterday I was fired by Columbia University after eight months as executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. This was the first time in a 25-year career that I've ever been subjected to discipline in a job — much less terminated from one.  I have immense respect for Jelani Cobb as a journalist and educator, but the decision to let me go was hasty, ill-considered and quite frankly baffling. Jelani hired me last year to revive CJR, which had gone nearly a year without a permanent editor and is currently down to two full-time employees and three academic-year fellows. In my brief but eventful tenure — during which I wasn’t able to make a single hire — we broke stories about the cancellations of presidential endorsements by billionaire media owners, threats to press freedom at home and abroad, the ongoing economic and technological disruption the media industry faces, and much more. Just last week, CJR was a finalist in 3 of the 4 categories of Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications Mirror Awards, which honor excellence in media industry reporting. I was dismissed 74 hours after being told on Monday afternoon that staff had complained following pointed interactions in which I provided fair and critical feedback rooted in editorial rigor. While I disagreed with these complaints, I offered to meet with the staff members involved and requested a coach who could help me navigate a charged higher education environment.  Instead I was fired. Given that CJR’s mission is to shed light on the inner workings of journalism, here are the facts: I had three pointed conversations with staff members in recent weeks. One was with a fellow who is passionately devoted to the cause of the Gaza protests at Columbia and had covered the recent detention of a Palestinian graduate for an online publication he had just written about, positively, for CJR. I told him there was a significant ethical problem with writing for an outlet he had just covered. The second was with an editor who has been working for weeks on a sensitive MeToo investigation I launched about sexual harassment by a prominent investigative reporter. Following a legal review of that story, I urged her to share her draft to the dean so that we could move expeditiously toward publication.  She asked for more time, to which I reluctantly acceded.  The story remains unpublished.  The final interaction was with a staffer who declined to come into the office (even though the school requires attendance four days a week) and to write at least one story a week. With the school’s approval this employee was given several months’ paid leave to look for a new job. These are normal workplace interactions and I did exactly what I was hired to do, which was to provide rigorous, fair, careful editorial oversight and raise the metabolism and impact of a publication that’s supposed to monitor the media.  | 379 comments on LinkedIn

www.linkedin.com/posts/sewellchan_my-statement-part-1-yesterday-i-was-fired-activity-7319075974568951809-bS2I?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAQlgMBGsFHXfXgtPL6NkzxRaTIufCZMfc

The AI discussions at the International Journalism Festival

I went to a couple of AI panels at Perugia, but most of them were from product managers and how they were navigating AI decisions in their newsrooms. I heard about some heated presentations about AI. From some of the things I heard, one fault line was not about how AI was applied in journalism organisations, but anger towards AI companies. Journalists were angry at platforms that had led to a loss of income and stability. David Caswell is one of the smartest people working on AI in journalism, and he calls for a truce.

We need to bridge the fault line emerging in debates about AI and the future of news

reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/we-need-bridge-fault-line-emerging-debates-about-ai-and-future-news

A final link for the newsletter on one of my favourite topics - membership. The folks at Media Voices have a great interview with the strategic partnerships manager at Memberful. Membership is a powerful strategy that leverages the relationship you build with your audience, but it takes effort and finesse. At the start, she advises simplicity, but additional tiers can be added later.

What makes membership models successful for publishers? Tips from Memberful

This feature has been written in partnership with Memberful. Hear more in our interview with Jen Matichuk, Strategic Partnerships Manager …

voices.media/what-makes-membership-models-successful-for-publishers-tips-from-memberful

Sorry for the brief interruption in my newsletter. My wife and I are on our second round of antibiotics for a nasty chest infection that won’t quit. I’m hoping that antibiotics will clear things up, and normal service will be restored.

In 2013, I was in Russia consulting with a local newspaper. They planned to launch a social network for the farmers in their region, and they wanted my experience with social media and community projects at the BBC and the Guardian. At our meeting to discuss the project, the publisher asked if I would speak to the local university’s international journalism course, which her daughter was taking. “Absolutely. I love talking to students”, I said.

Midday through the meeting, the publisher took a call. All I heard was a series of low, very disapproving “oh, oh, ohs”. A conversation in Russian with my colleague ensued.

I asked my colleague if there was a problem. “FSB has noticed you are here. They say, ‘Who is this Guardian guy? Why you no tell us?’”

“Is this going to be a problem?” I asked.

“No problem, no problem. Last time, Danish guy only detained for two days,” my colleague responded.

That seemed like a problem to me, but over the next few hours, things were smoothed over enough for me to speak to the students.

I gave a talk about the changes in journalism, not just the practice of the craft during the digital transition but also the challenges to the business of journalism. Then came the Q&A. The first question was about the skills needed for professional opportunities in the industry.

The next question? “If you had to choose between going to jail or writing an article critical about the government, which would you choose?”

I paused, scanning the room for the FSB agent - playing “one of these things does not belong”. I paused because I needed time to think of an answer to the question but stay on the right side of a line which wasn’t entirely clear, probably by design.

“I’m an American, and for most of my career, I have worked for British news organisations. I have never had to make that decision,” I started off by saying.

When I said that, I always thought it would be the case in the US. Now, I’m not so sure.

Declining trust isn’t just a challenge for journalism

I am becoming sure of a few things. I’m a journalist, although not working directly in journalism at the moment. It will always be a part of my identity, and whether for audiences or myself, I need to make sense of things. I recently read two books, The Upswing by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett and Autocracy Inc. by Anne Applebaum.

The Upswing charts the swing of the US from the partisanship, inequality and corruption of the first Gilded Age (late 1870s to the early 1900s), an era of ‘I’, to the ‘we’ era of reform powered by the Progressives from 1900 to 1920 that carried on through two-thirds of the 20th Century. It led to better education, longer lives and greater equality. Bridging social capital - connections between diverse members of society - created growing levels of trust. Economists have also called this civic capital, which they define as “those persistent and shared beliefs and values that help a group overcome the free rider problem in the pursuit of socially valuable activities.”

Beginning in the mid-60s, the ‘we’ curve swung back to back to an ‘I’ focused society. Social connections started to fray and then collapse as fewer Americans joined clubs and groups. It has driven alienation and eroded trust.

Journalists are rightly concerned about the collapse in trust in the work we do and news avoidance, but efforts to address the loss of trust have been too narrowly focused on our industry. In the US, trust has dropped in almost every institution - the government, Congress, public schools, banks, big business, churches, and just about everything, according to Gallup. The US is a society in crisis, but it is not alone in the loss of bridging social capital. This is a global issue.

Over and over again, I hear how people are feeling powerless, and even I feel exhausted by events these days. I have worked in journalism for more than 25 years now, and I have created a focus on my iPhone called News Break, which shuts off the notifications from my news apps. I turn it on over the weekends now.

The world is on fire, and journalists need to zoom out and understand how they can rebuild trust and help people make things better, not just highlight the shortcomings of politicians and institutions. We have to play a role in rebuilding trust amongst people, reconnecting people to each other and helping them to solve problems. Solutions journalism is an important effort, and constructive journalism goes even further, with an emphasis on fostering civic dialogue. Constructive journalism’s three pillars are “solutions, nuance and democratic conversation”.

That resonates so much with me. I think journalism can connect, engage and inspire people. Bob Putnam highlighted the role of muckraking journalists in helping to set in motion the reforms that were central to the Progressive Era at the beginning of the 20th Century. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair “was the final precipitating force behind both a meat inspection law and a comprehensive food and drug law”, the US Food and Drug Administration says on its site. The muckrakers were not just investigative journalists but also reformers who wanted to root out corruption in public and private institutions. They stood in stark contrast to the sensationalist yellow journalists of their day. Ida Tarbell wrote about the corruption of the massive trusts that dominated American business at the time and fought a successful battle to break up John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.

Journalism has continued in this vein with brave reporting in many democracies, but now the challenge is that people have so little trust in the work we do. Autocrats around the world are leading a relentless attack against journalism, and as I wrote in my last newsletter, platforms support creators and influencers much more than they do traditional journalism institutions. The muckrakers were often super freelancers who worked for a wide range of publications. What tied them together was their passion for reform and several like-minded magazines. Similarly, I think we can use the current eco-system of newsletters, digital platforms and traditional publications to create a constellation of community-building, reform-minded journalism that builds trust in journalism and helps to rebuild civil society.

We need alliances to support democracy and battle disinformation

However, we need a clear understanding of the unique challenges of this moment, and Anne Applebaum provides that in Autocracy, Inc. It is one of the best explanations I have seen about how autocratic countries around the world - Russia, China, Iran, Belarus and Venezuela - have developed a playbook to sustain their control and undermine democracy.

Russia’s RT, China’s CGTN, Iran’s Press TV and Venezuela’s Telesur exist to create easily packaged videos to flood social networks with messages that undermine people’s faith in democracy.

She also highlights how this global network of autocrats has exploited Western financial institutions to enrich themselves. They are bound together “not through ideals but deals”. As the New York Times writes in a review of the book: “Thanks in large part to the opacity of global finance, they enjoy a vibrant trade in surveillance technologies, weapons and precious minerals, laundering one another’s dirty money and colluding to evade American sanctions. This venal compact of convenience she calls ‘Autocracy, Inc.’” More specifically:

In the crush of developments in the US, it is easy to lose track, but amidst all of the changes are ones that will benefit Autocracy, Inc. In February, “[The US Justice Department] has disbanded an effort to enforce sanctions against Russian oligarchs and fired veteran public corruption prosecutors who played a role in the department's two criminal cases against Trump during his years out of office,” Reuters reported. The president also signed an executive order instructing the Justice Department to pause enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for US businesses to bribe foreign officials to win contracts. “It's going to mean a lot more business for America,” the president said as he signed the order, according to Reuters.

Donald Trump has spoken glowingly about the Gilded Age. He says that the US was richest from 1870 to 1913, but wealth was concentrated, as it is increasingly now. This was also a period of corruption and government by patronage rather than by a professional civil service. It was a period of fierce partisanship. Change came from reformers outside of the two main political parties. It came from reform movements grounded in local communities and organising, whether that was the settlement houses such as Hull House in Chicago, labour unions or membership groups that gave new immigrants to the US a sense of belonging.

Autocracy, Inc. has crafted a narrative “that described autocracies as safe and secure and stable, and democracies as divided, chaotic, and degenerate”, Applebaum told Radio Free Europe.

They made existing divisions deeper, she added.

It seems like an insurmountable challenge. But at the end of the 19th Century, reformers faced corrupt politicians, powerful media interests and incredibly powerful corporate interests. We won’t reform our democracies, heal our divided societies and build the future we want alone. Journalists will need to build alliances with others who share our democratic values to restore trust in what we do and faith that together we can all deliver the reform our citizens need. That is the power of democracy.

Successes and challenges in local journalism

I have a soft spot for local journalism. I started in local journalism, and my last two roles before my current one were in local journalism. It’s a difficult business, but successful models are beginning to develop. On the difficult side of things: The Wall Street Journal profiled Jeremy Gulban, who used his family IT business to build out a local newspaper group in the US, CherryRoad Media. He owns 92 newspapers; a third are profitable, a third are breaking even, and a third are losing money. Perceptions of bias, tariffs increasing the cost of newsprint and difficulty finding reporters are making business even more difficult.

However, in Scotland, Newsquest is finding success. They are in the midst of a multi-year digital transformation programme. They have switched from focusing on page views to focusing on paying digital subscribers. They are also diversifying their digital products, launching standalone sports sites and newsletters, both on sports and also as local news aggregators.

'Don't worry about page views': Newsquest Scotland tops 40,000 online subscriptions

Newsquest Scotland has hit a milestone of 40,000 digital subscribers including 10,000 across six standalone sports sites.

pressgazette.co.uk/paywalls/newsquest-scotland-subscribers-digital-herald-national-rangers-celtic

Amedia in Norway has also found success in local media by building and refining a product - +Alt - that allows subscribers to buy a single subscription that includes access to their full range of local newspapers plus those of partners and also to a sports streaming service. Their bundline boasts a higher increase in average revenue per user, a larger decrease in churn and a higher increase in lifetime value than the New York Times bundle. Wow!

New York Times, Amedia are important examples of bundling economics

The New York Times and Amedia illustrate different and worthwhile examples making the business case for bundling strategies.

www.inma.org/blogs/reader-revenue/post.cfm/new-york-times-amedia-are-important-examples-of-bundling-economics

AI: Bloomberg’s ‘rocky start’ and a review of Perplexity’s new interface

Bloomberg has been pushing the boundaries of experimentation with AI, including creating its own LLM, but as the New York Times highlights, that experimentation has not been without its rough spots. The challenge for many publishers is where humans should be in the loop and how to guarantee editorial standards.

Bloomberg Has a Rocky Start With A.I. Summaries

The outlet has issued dozens of corrections to A.I.-generated news summaries since it started using the technology to write them this year.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/business/media/bloomberg-ai-summaries.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k4.rrgt.pt3AGFekgpT3&smid=url-share

As AI Takes His Readers, A Leading History Publisher Wonders What’s Next

World History Encyclopedia CEO Jan van der Crabben saw his site show up in Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT. Then traffic dropped 25%.

www.bigtechnology.com/p/as-ai-takes-his-readers-a-leading

Ezra Eeman, of Dutch public broadcaster NPO, has become of Europe’s leading voices on AI. Here he breaks down the new interface of Perplexity’s new UI and how it changes information-seeking behaviours.

The New Anatomy of Information | Ezra Eeman | 19 comments

Some people collect stamps or garden on a Sunday. I enjoy studying digital species in their natural habitat. In the new AI assistant ecosystem, Perplexity… | 19 comments on LinkedIn

www.linkedin.com/posts/ezra-eeman-8a5ba64_the-new-anatomy-of-information-activity-7309555475761487872-XMsX?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAQlgMBGsFHXfXgtPL6NkzxRaTIufCZMfc

Much has been written about the rise of Creators and Influencers, about the new stars and formats and how it is remaking journalism. I’m more interested in the economics and eco-systems.

My assumptions:

• The Creator-Influencer Economy represents a shift in the primary networks in content distribution.

• Young people dream of riches, but most will be disappointed. Once a new network is established in media, power laws quickly take hold. Just as with legacy media, the Creator Economy is a winner-takes-most market.

• The Creator Economy lives by the algorithms and dies by the algorithm as legacy media found.

The latest chapter in the Attention Economy

The theory of change that has been the most durable over the last 20 years of my career has been the Attention Economy. Psychologist, economist, and Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon coined the term in the 1960s, and he believed that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. In our world, we are drowning in information. In a world where media choices are almost unlimited, time and attention are scarce. It radically changes the economics of media, and it has been the constant over my career.

Changes in distribution and new forms of media have been adding to the amount of information available over the centuries. First, it was the penny press, then radio, then TV, then cable and satellite TV and finally the internet and various forms of digital media. All of these changes have created shifts in the Attention Economy. In 2021, Americans spent 3.16 hours a day watching traditional TV and three hours watching digital video, but in 2025, it is estimated that they will watch 2.48 hours of traditional TV but four hours of digital video, according to data from Statista. “In 2022, 89% of UK children habitually consume content on video platforms like YouTube and Tiktok, while fewer than 50% habitually watch live TV”, Chris Rainville and Simon Levene of Mosaic Ventures wrote.

Attention, and with it, revenue shifted to new platforms that aggregate attention globally on a mass scale. YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are massive attention marketplaces, and newsletter platforms like Substack and Beehiiv provide network effects and revenue infrastructure. First, the network effects: YouTube, TikTok and Instagram all have finely watched and tuned algorithms to deliver more of what you want. Beehiiv and Substack both have referral programmes and network functionality that drive free and paid subscriptions. (For a good overview of Substack’s network mechanisms, M.E. Rothwell goes deep into the network science of it all.)

The success of these platforms is the development of mechanisms to increase your consumption of them. It is why direct-to-consumer video platforms are so much more effective than linear TV in driving consumption. Linear TV will show everyone the same ads about the same programmes. The channels are the mechanisms to aggregate attention. Multi-channel television was just an inelegant way of achieving the same thing by cutting up content and audiences into smaller niches. But with Netflix and any D2C video platform after it, discovery is driven by your use and interests not by showing ads for shows to a single, homogenised persona of their assumed audience. The platforms are built to drive habitual consumption.

Time and attention are finite, so all of the time spent watching YouTube and TikTok or reading Substack or Beehiiv newsletters means less time for other things, like consuming traditional media. Money that used to flow to newspapers, radio and traditional television has shifted to these platforms as they have captured a larger share of attention. With the massive audiences these platforms attract, multiple revenue streams have developed to support creators: advertising, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, live events and merch.

It has minted not only stars but also new media entrepreneurs. Audiochuck, the true crime and mystery podcast network founded by Ashley Flowers in 2017, just received a $40 m investment from the Chernin Group that values her business at $450 m. Over half (57%) of Gen Z-aged people want to be influencers, according to a Morning Consult poll of 1000 young people. As I wrote in my last newsletter, Goldman Sachs Research forecasts that the Creator-Influencer Economy will double to $480 bn by 2027. Some of the Gen Z people in the poll said they were seeking money and fame, while others said they wanted connection and community.

Power laws and the creator economy

When a new medium first launches, there is an opportunity for new voices to establish themselves, but as with most digital markets, power law dynamics quickly take hold. As Chris and Simon of Mosaic Ventures wrote in 2022, creator audiences are highly concentrated. They analysed the number of YouTube subscribers, and less than 1% of accounts had more than 100,00 subs. And they highlighted how less than 1% of Twitch streams earned half of all revenue. They believe the same power law curves exist on Substack and OnlyFans. Goldman Sachs Research estimates the global number of creators will increase 10% to 20% by 2028.

This is where traditional economics kicks in. Oversupply depresses prices, or in this case wages. People flock to media for money, fame or mission. With power law driving the Attention Economy, it means that the vast majority of creators will not earn what Goldman Sachs refers to as professional wages.

Almost half (48%) earned $15,000 or less, according to research from NeoReach. That might be a nice source of supplemental income, but it won’t pay the bills. And the income can be quite unpredictable. Clint Bentley was profiled in a Wall Street Journal article. The 29-year-old has 400,000 followers across TikTok, Twitch and YouTube, and earned $58,084, which is in the upper third of earners, but he still lives with his parents because of the volatility of his income.

Live by the algorithm and die by the algorithm

And just like traditional media that has found they need to keep pace with changes in algorithms, the same is true with the Creator Economy. The difference is that platforms are tweaking their algorithms to the benefit creators, while Facebook and X have both tweaked theirs to the detriment of traditional publishers. But it means that for many creators, their businesses are built on the rented audiences of the platforms. Of course, those creators who have built communities and networks of their own and direct supporters through platforms like Patreon have more of a safety net. One of the creator community networks I follow is vintage computing - Sean of Action Retro, Kate of Macintosh Librarian and Steve of Mac84. They have loyal followings and operate in a mutually supportive community, helping create a larger audience and deeper relationships. Traditional media has made a similar pivot to direct relationships with subscribers and members as platforms have sent less traffic to drive ad impressions.

Something else is at play here: Creator-Influencer businesses are leaner than the large legacy media organisations. In the barbell media economy, big legacy players like the New York Times are the winners that take the most of the pivot to reader revenue and multi-market, multi-product businesses. On the opposite end are agile but also very lean creator businesses. Some are solopreneurs, but others have grown to become nascent media companies in their own right.

Axios’ Sara Fischer was on Brian Morrissey’s Rebooting podcast talking about the Creator-Influencer Economy, and she was quite direct. These new players don’t have the overheads, high-cost structures or, yes, unions, that legacy players have, she says.

Taking a step back, the distribution networks have changed, which has shifted power from television, cable and satellite networks. A Media Operator is reporting that VCs and funds are looking for roll-up investments in the Creator Economy that will drive concentration. This is to say that the Creator Economy is looking a lot like the traditional media economy. The thing that has changed is the distribution networks that are aggregating attention and revenue.

News influencers are a slightly different subset of this economy, and that’s on deck for another newsletter about that. If you want to get ahead and read more, Liz Kelly Nelson, who is laser-focused on this, breaks down where news influencers sit in the new news eco-system.

Newsletters: The cockroach of digital media

These are the stories that caught my eye while I thought about the Creator Economy.

The humble newsletter is like the cockroach of digital media—hardy and resilient. It is the MVP of many digital media operations. In fact, Sarah Ebner of the FT says it is the “biggest driver of reader engagement”. I talk about newsletters as part of the post-platform Push Economy of media. Audiences have committed to content that is pushed to them: newsletters in their inboxes, podcasts in their favourite apps or the push notifications of media apps. Continuing the theme above, she says that the personality-driven newsletter is one of the developments she has seen in her decade of work on the format.

FT head of newsletters on how it tripled its newsletter subscriptions in four years

Publisher newsletter strategies: A masterclass interview with Financial Times head of newsletters Sarah Ebner.

pressgazette.co.uk/newsletters/publisher-newsletter-strategies-financial-times

Media builds its own social spaces

I’ve been following how publishers are reviving their own efforts at creating communities to challenge the dominance of the major social media platforms. I was told by a friend in the industry that Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti has talked about launching a social network before, but it looks like he is serious this time. He has a hypothesis that people are craving digital services that don’t feel like they are manipulating them emotionally. I don’t disagree with him, but Buzzfeed played the game of the social networks a long time that I don’t trust it as a brand to bring something authentic to the table.

BuzzFeed Looks to Launch its Own, More Positive Social Media Platform

BuzzFeed's looking to take a different approach to social platform engagement. 

www.socialmediatoday.com/news/buzzfeed-island-social-platform/739889

Jeff Elgie is one of the most interesting leaders in the local journalism market, and his Villiage Media has launched its place-based social network on select sites in its Canada-based news network. Jeff is smart and focused, and this is an experiment to watch both in terms of audience engagement and how it drives KPIs for the business.

Jeff Elgie on LinkedIn: SPACES at SooToday.com

I’ve been unusually quiet here for the last few months… because we’ve been busy building what we believe will be the future of local media. Our in-house dev…

www.linkedin.com/posts/jeff-elgie_spaces-at-sootodaycom-activity-7293005923466256384-coXg?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

With so much doom and gloom in the industry, it is always good to hear about success and learn from it. Le Monde’s successful subs strategy has allowed it to double the size of its newsroom and see a point where its digital subscribers will pay for that enlarged newsroom.

Le Monde CEO: Digital subscriber revenue will pay for entire newsroom within two years

Digital subscriptions revenue is expected to cover the costs of Le Monde's entire editorial staff within the next two years, its CEO said.

pressgazette.co.uk/paywalls/le-monde-subscriptions-digital-ceo-louis-dreyfus

AI roundup: NYTimes newsroom rollout, Thomson Reuters court win and how journalists are using it

AI is proving itself an important tool for publishers to make their operations more efficient and their revenue models to increase conversion and decrease churn more effective. The New York Times might be fighting OpenAI in the courts, but it just announced a major deployment of AI in its newsroom.

If this case holds up on appeal, it would be a major precedent. AI companies have relied on US fair use provisions to justify their scraping of content from their Westlaw service by a company called Ross Intelligence. Key to the ruling was that the judge found the AI company was attempting to create a market substitute by scraping Westlaw’s content.

Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US

The Thomson Reuters decision has big implications for the battle between generative AI companies and rights holders.

www.wired.com/story/thomson-reuters-ai-copyright-lawsuit

AI adoption is industries often outpaces official guidelines. Experiments with the technology both as part of formal programmes or individual efforts are happening across the industry, and Editor & Publisher provides a useful overview.

Beyond the AI hysteria: What journalists are actually using it for - Editor and Publisher

AI in journalism has shifted from a disruptive threat to a practical tool, helping reporters work smarter without replacing them. While early fears of automation taking over newsrooms have faded, AI-powered tools are proving invaluable for tasks like transcription, data analysis, and investigative research. The challenge now is how journalists can harness AI’s potential while ensuring accuracy, credibility, and public trust in their reporting.

www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/ai-in-2025-from-transcription-to-data-analysis-tools-for-journalists,254253

An old friend, Mark Jones shared this, and it’s a good one to bookmark and use. I saved it because I should follow the suggestions more than I do!

The total addressable market of the Creator-Influencer Economy could double by 2027 to $480 bn, according to Goldman Sachs Research. The forecast made in 2023 projected the Creator Economy to roughly double in five years.

I’ve been mulling the Creator-Influencer Economy, and I’m still rolling this over in my head so file this newsletter in the category of me thinking out loud. As I have seen several times over, a lot of the analysis centres on how screwed legacy media is because they are now competing against an army of individual creators and news influencers across a range of platforms including TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, Substack and more. Yes, there is that, but having been to this rodeo before, I want to think about this in two ways:

1. The economics and dynamics of the Creator Economy itself.

2. The business model pivot legacy media would have to make to take advantage of those dynamics and the pros and cons of some of the most obvious approaches.

As I started to think about this present moment of disruption in media, I started to think about previous chapters of digital creators, which created new markets and destroyed old ones. How is the current wave of fragmentation and distribution different from earlier ones? Creators have always been a part of the internet, and casting a look back reminded me of how early pioneers experimented with ideas, including commercial models, that have now become the foundation of the Creator Economy.

The Long History of the Creator Economy - JenniCam and the rise of the bloggers

Digital technology has been challenging and remaking traditional media almost from its inception, and I’ve been covering it and living it in various roles now for more than three decades. Yeah, I’m that old, but this isn’t a shake-my-fist-at-the-sky moment to tell the kids to get off my lawn. (Although, yes, I have those moments.) It is to say, I’ve watched the technology and market evolve through various iterations.

People forget about lifecasting and blogging communities like LiveJournal from the 1990s. Not long after I met my wife in 2006, I remember This American Life rerunning an episode from a decade before, in 1997, talking about experiences they were having on the Internet, which they wondered if they could have anywhere else. It highlighted the story of one of the biggest lifecasters, Jennifer Ringley of JenniCam fame. She started streaming pictures from her dorm room when she was a 19-year-old university student, and at the peak of its popularity, her site received 7m visitors a day. After graduating, she offered a paid service with a higher refresh rate. Voila, a business model that would seem quite familiar in today’s world of camgirls, although I’m hesitant to refer to her as that.

Another chapter in this story was the rise of blogs. In 2024, the US presidential candidates courted influencers who have podcasts, YouTube channels, newsletters and massive TikTok followings. In 2004, with the initial success of Howard Dean, bloggers rose to challenge the establishment media in setting the political agenda. They had a prominent place at the Democrat’s nominating convention that year. Not only did I cover the phenomenon for the BBC, but I ‘blogged’ during the US political conventions and then the final months of the 2004 elections. It was one of the first forays by the BBC into blogging, although the comments had to be taken in via email and then carefully curated. In 2005, I came to the UK to research and write a white paper on how the BBC should respond to revolution in media.

It was a heady time when the lines between traditional media and the audience blurred. I launched a segment on Radio 5 that looked at the news agenda through the lens of blogs and podcasts (and later social media), and then I was on the launch team of the World Service interactive programme World Have Your Say. I often brought bloggers and podcasters, including milbloggers - members of the US military blogging and podcasting from Iraq and Afghanistan - onto the programme.

Much like now with creators, people talked about the democratiisation of media and a force that would “challenge traditional media”. In 2007, Julian Robins wrote a paper as a Reuters Fellow at Oxford University. He wrote:

As I was writing this, I thought that I wouldn’t call the current phase of creators democratisation. It’s a marketplace of attention and commerce. While yes, news and political influencers are part of the mix, it’s also about technology, fashion, food and so much else.

The fall of blogging and the rise of a new kind of social media

But blogging faded, although one might argue that newsletters are the new blogs. But blogs and podcasts faded, although podcasts would enjoy a renaissance. The decline of blogs was down to several factors. One issue was discovery, which still bedevils new podcasts. Technorati was the search engine for blogs, long before Google tried to create a subset of its search. Google launched its blog search in 2005, but shut it down as a standalone product in 2011. However, apart from search, some fundamental technology that connected the distributed network of bloggers broke, and the fediverse was a long way off. Note, I am sceptical that most people will embrace distributed networks. Those who do choose to accept a higher degree of friction for what they perceive as freedom, but that’s a whole other discussion.

However, I think what caused the decline of blogs and explains the rise of everything that came after was network effects. Bloggers used a system called trackbacks to see who had linked to them, and it was often via those links that helped bloggers discover each other. Trackbacks became overwhelmed with spam and ceased to function effectively. Comments were another way that bloggers interacted with each other, but these comments were spread across blogs. It was a highly distributed conversation, but the comments and links helped motivate bloggers to keep on writing. I remember what a thrill it was.

Of course, the social media platforms quickly eclipsed blogs. Why?

• Powerful network effects. It was much easier to find your friends.

• Simpler engagement mechanisms including lightweight likes and easy commenting.

• Algorithms that helped you keep in touch with friends and topics you were interested in. (Although we can debate how effective they are now.)

• Masssive, centralised aggregators for attention.

That last point is key. Grassroots bloggers prided themselves on their distributed nature. It reminds me of the quote from the film Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, “That’s not navy, sir. It’s just…people.” However, the attention was spread across thousands of blogs like stars across the sky. Bloggers revelled in the distributed nature of their conversation, but it wasn’t to last and couldn’t have lasted in the face of what came next.

Social media networks captured that attention and aggregated it. They provided much more efficient markets for advertisers, and that helped support a new generation of creators. Attention shifted to these platforms and so did billions of dollars of revenue globally. It drained attention and revenue from traditional media, particularly journalism. But that’s the next chapter.

The AI imperative for media

The biggest news in AI overall was the release of DeepSeek, a disruptive Chinese distilled AI model. It leveraged other models to beat OpenAI and Anthropic by some measures of AI progress, AI expert Karen Hao told the Reuters Institute. Her analysis is worth reading. She said DeepSeek has triggered a long-standing, but dismissed, challenge to the dogma that AI progress needed more resources rather than a more efficient use of resources. It’s an important read. Of course, with this being a Chinese disruptor of America’s perceived dominance of AI, it has political overtones.

What DeepSeek may mean for the future of journalism and generative AI

reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/what-deepseek-may-mean-future-journalism-and-generative-ai

While creators are part of the current chapter in media, AI also dominates the innovation agenda for journalism organisations. Brian Morrissey is not impressed. “Unlike past new technologies, publishers have taken a far more cautious approach to using AI beyond the basics or for little skunkworks projects that are unlikely to have much impact. The examples of publishers using AI are usually confined to small-scale frippery like AI-enabled internal search.”

I think he’s being a little harsh. I saw a demo of a tool The Economist is developing to scan academic papers for possible story ideas and came away impressed, and the Nursing Times use of AI to power a question-based way to access the intelligence of its archive is smart, especially how it is connected to their subscription model.

Are publishers fumbling AI?

A conversation with The Media Copilot's Pete Pachal on publishers early efforts to harness AI.

www.therebooting.com/are-publishers-fumbling-ai

INMA’s Sonali Verna looks at the strategic frameworks that media companies could use to maximise the impact of their AI efforts. At the end of the day, I think AI should be deployed to do what it is uniquely good at and solve pain points for audiences and editorial teams.

News companies should focus their AI strategy on big impact

News companies should focus on a small number of AI initiatives and use AI to solve high-impact problems.

www.inma.org/blogs/Generative-AI-Initiative/post.cfm/news-companies-should-focus-their-ai-strategy-for-big-impact

The Independent is showing the sophistication in their approach as they grow as a digital English-language news brand. I have been fascinated with their A2K - anonymous to known strategy in the UK. They have 11 different ways to capture first-party data from their audiences. In the US, they are smartly scaling to stake a claim to that market. They have a lot of lessons to teach other media companies on how to survive in this highly competitive, rapidly changing media market.

Inside The Independent’s strategy to build audience, revenue, and trust in a polarized news landscape - Editor and Publisher

The Independent has defied the odds, transforming from a U.K. broadsheet into a thriving digital powerhouse with a growing U.S. audience. While many news organizations struggle with trust, engagement, and revenue, CEO Christian Broughton says The Independent is breaking through by staying true to its core mission: delivering fearless, independent journalism without political bias. With U.S. readership up 85% in 2024 and bold plans to expand its editorial and commercial teams, The Independent is proving that high-quality, agenda-free news still has a place in the digital age.

www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/the-independent-grows-us-audience-newsroom-and-model,253970

Whether you call it as I do - the Platform Era - or what Brian Morrissey calls it the Traffic Era, the era of building a media business on a high volume of referrals from search and social is over. The sooner we come to grips with it and adjust our priorities and business models, the sooner we return to growth and stability - as many publishers already have.

If we need more proof of the precarity of relying on rented traffic, look at the latest Reuters Institute trends and predictions report. Traffic from Facebook to news publishers has plummeted by 67% in the last two years, according to data from Chartbeat

Search has been much more reliable, but algorithm changes routinely cause audience teams to scramble and adjust to the business imperatives of other companies rather than their own.

Smart minds in the industry predict this year will be even more challenging. “Although this is hardly revelatory, my prediction for 2025 is that the big topic on everybody’s mind is going to be traffic,” Lisa MacLeod, Director of FT Strategies, wrote in the consultancy’s 2025 predictions. Thomas Baekdal added to the voices warning about reliance on “other sources” for traffic. “The first thing to talk about is traffic, because in 2025, we have reached the point where the old strategies and tactics around traffic are no more.”

End the reliance on rented audiences

Since the rise of social media, audience development editors have agilely adjusted their tactics to changes in the platforms’ algorithms. They have become expert in using data and experiments to intuit these changes to re-establish traffic. They have been early adopters of new platforms, and they have quickly got up to speed with new formats and understood the community dynamics. The logic was that we went to platforms because that is where “the audience” is. But as my friend Damon Kiesow asks journalists: Is Twitter actually your community? For most news organisations, the answer is no, unless they are focused on politics or sports. Facebook has been deprioritising news for years now. Google can still drive traffic to journalism sites, but it’s quite a dance. We have spent endless amounts of time and energy chasing the trends on platforms.

You can see this in discussions about whether Bluesky would be a good place to shift to after the changes at Facebook and whether to follow other publications in leaving X. Should we shift to TikTok or RedNote or WhatsApp? I agree with Thomas Baekdal that this is the wrong way to look at things.

The conversation shouldn’t be about what platform publishers should focus on for the next source of free traffic. Not only is that era over, but the last decade has shown us the dangers of an over-reliance on rented audiences. Many publishers have already shifted to a focus on converting rented audiences on platforms to known, owned audiences.

Diversify products, revenue and marketing channels

The traffic era was predicated on the idea that digital advertising was a low-margin business, so we needed to attract as many people to our sites as possible to monetise them effectively. This isn’t working, and it hasn’t been working for years. Diversifying revenue and accepting that smaller, paying audiences are a more stable basis for a journalism or media business than trying to rely on platforms for traffic.

The playbook on how to transition is becoming relatively well established, although even with a clearer path, execution is still critical.

1. Develop and execute an A2K strategy - The strategic shift is acknowledging that known audiences are much more valuable than unknown, lightly engaged ones, and the UK’s independent has the data to prove it. Registered users are 11x more engaged and subscribers are 62x more engaged than unknown users. Even if the Indy was only monetising audiences using advertising, that is a huge delta. Even if the registered users don’t subscribe, they still have more data about them, lifting their ad yields, and they can market other products such as events or e-commerce offerings. However, registration is an important step in their conversion journey, and half of new subscribers are registered users.

2. Diversify products and revenue - Expanding the pool of known users offers new revenue opportunities. I have seen publishers like the Baltimore Banner use their email lists for partner marketing. Publishers market events, wine clubs, puzzle apps and recipe offerings. In India, HT Media has even launched an OTT video service aggregator. The more you know about your audience, the more relevant and effective these advertising messages can be and the more revenue they can generate.

   It’s time to stop putting so much energy into staring into the black boxes of platforms and put more energy, effort and money into our marketing our own work.

3. Invest in marketing your own work - It’s time to stop putting so much energy into staring into the black boxes of platforms and put more energy, effort and money into marketing our work. We need to diversify our marketing channels and work to connect with audiences. Some of this will be on platforms, such as marketing our podcasts, newsletters and subscription offerings via social channels. But there are so many other marketing channels.

This doesn’t mean that this is easy. B2C media leaders all talk about the challenging media market. But by seizing our own destiny, at least we can have a sense of agency.

Of course, Mark Zuckerberg has made a raft of changes across Meta’s properties at the start of 2025. He ended fact-checking and took a poke at “legacy media”. Flagging posts with fact-check details isn’t censorship. It’s context. Alexios Mantzarlis is the director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech and was the founding director of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). He provided this fact-check of Zuck, and it’s an important read.

Let’s fact-check Mark Zuckerberg’s fact-checking announcement

Zuckerberg didn’t mention that a big chunk of the content fact-checkers have been flagging is not political speech, but the low-quality spammy clickbait that Meta platforms have commodified.

www.niemanlab.org/2025/01/zuck-chucks-fact-checkers-to-cosplay-as-elon-musk

As Exhibit A of the challenges facing media, Vox Media continued with its layoffs and made changes to its leadership in an effort to right the ship.

Vox Media shakes up leadership and lays off staff for the 2nd time in about a month

Vox Media laid off staff on Thursday for the second time in just over a month, this time at its general-news and politics site, Vox

africa.businessinsider.com/news/vox-media-shakes-up-leadership-and-lays-off-staff-for-the-2nd-time-in-about-a-month/90t2b3g

Well, credit the Washington Post for ambition, but a goal of 200m paying readers seems a little unrealistic. And I’m not sure by trying to appeal to a wider range of the political spectrum and to blue-collar readers that they’ll achieve their “big hairy audacious goal'“. Of course, paying readers doesn’t necessarily mean full-fat subscribers, and it depends on the range of products they develop.

The Washington Post Wants to Sell You Some “Riveting Storytelling”

As Trump prepares to return to office, Jeff Bezos’s paper is embracing corporate buzzwords.

newrepublic.com/article/190394/washington-post-jeff-bezos-journalism

Reuters has been trying to develop its subscription product, and Gannett has been loosening its connection to the Associated Press. They started 2025 by announcing a bundled subscription.

If you want a good example of the type of diversification strategy I’m talking about, you only have to look to Zetland in Denmark. Their deep content model works and deeply engages their audience. Moreover, their mix of text and audio content connects with young audiences. Half of their members are in their 20s and 30s.

Denmark's Zetland targets 40 percent growth in 2025 as it expands into Finland

2025-01-16. Danish start-up Zetland has found success by focusing on journalism as an experience, which includes highly curating stories for its members, making stories more personable and directly engaging with their audience at live events.

wan-ifra.org/2025/01/denmarks-zetland-targets-40-percent-growth-in-2025-as-it-expands

I practiced data journalism for a long time, and in the current industry research and content marketing that I do, I still try to include data visualisations. Here are some tools to start using this year.

Six tools to elevate your data storytelling

Create visually striking charts and graphs that take your data-led reporting to the next level

www.journalism.co.uk/news/six-tools-to-elevate-your-data-storytelling/s2/a1208218

Creators and influencers are one of the major themes this year.

How influencers are impacting journalism

NPR's Eric Deggans speaks to Summer Harlow of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and V Spehar of UnderTheDeskNews about the role of influencers in journalism.

www.npr.org/2025/01/04/nx-s1-5246011/influencer

The commentary and coverage of the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson troubled me. This newsletter isn’t about generic news stories or media commentary, but I decided to take some time to mull over why it had irked me. Ultimately, I realised that it was because it felt like journalists weren’t listening. Most of the coverage felt like journalists were circling the establishment wagons, and a lot of commentators seemed genuinely surprised that Americans were boiling over with rage about the health-industrial complex. Really?

Even outlets I normally admire have tilted toward sensationalist coverage obsessing over suspected killer Luigi Mangione’s rising status as a social media-age folk hero and the all-too-common violent rhetoric on social media. The Financial Times declared Mangione represented a “new era of villainy”. The New York Times had pieces about the social danger when a killer’s looks overshadow a violent crime and revulsion towards the anger at the US healthcare industry on social media. As my wife would say, the coverage is full of “pearl clutching” about people swooning over the “hot assassin”. What society had come to by glorifying a killer?

I know the business and how commissioning works, and I’m sure these stories were popular. However, the establishment media was reflexively defensive about a crime against a successful business leader. Reporters showed surprise that Americans are upset with a healthcare system that is more expensive than any other developed country and has poorer outcomes than other developed countries, largely due to shockingly bad outcomes along racial and socio-economic divides.

Some of the New York Times coverage was particularly surprising because their past coverage of US healthcare has generally been good and clear. The paper has examined why drug prices are nearly twice what they are in other rich countries, and in 2019, they compared the much higher prices for common procedures in the US versus other advanced economies. In the US, an angioplasty costs $32,000, but in other countries, it’s just $6400.

They also did an incredibly hard-hitting piece in 2021 showing the wildly variable costs for procedures based on your insurer.

The Times has done excellent coverage of the issues with the US healthcare system over the years, but it’s almost as if the desks covering the murder didn’t talk to their healthcare reporters.

Morality versus outcomes in media coverage

The media have cast this killing as a morality play with the protagonist being a fallen son of privilege, and they have expressed surprise at this desperate act. The media often engage in moral framing as opposed to consequentialist framing. Hot takes are all about seizing the moral high ground often at the cost of the bigger picture. In the context of Brian Thompson’s murder, the framing has focused on the morality of the killing and social media lionisation of Mangione while superficially engaging with fundamental shortcomings in US healthcare.

In the US, the primacy of market dynamics and the presumption that a business's role is to maximise shareholder returns don’t allow the framing of healthcare as a public good. Public goods are prone to market failure, which means they suffer issues with pricing and distribution. This means that discussions about the morality of access to healthcare are almost absent. It’s baffling to most people who live in other developed countries, I can tell you.

Instead of talking about the poor outcomes of the current healthcare system or the morality of bankrupting people who were unconscious and couldn’t give consent for out-of-network care, Americans get served up superficial coverage of the morality of killing a CEO.

The shock of the new(s) reinforces a sense of helplessness in Americans

On one level, news focuses on what is new, and frustration with US healthcare and insurers isn’t new. Journalism, even generally high-quality outlets, like the FT and the New York Times, can fall into the trap of struggling to cover long-simmering issues, whether those are issues like US healthcare and gun control where powerful interests stymie any change, or complex ones that play out over long-time scales such as climate change (well, there are fairly powerful interests that prevent change with that too).

Brian Thompson’s murder was a shocking new development in a larger story, so it received outsized coverage. But in the rush to fill column inches, the broader context was stripped away and journalists failed to examine or explain the systemic problems in the healthcare system which had led to his killing.

On the face of it, healthcare is like so many issues in the hyper-partisan United States: The two main political parties have fought each other to an impotent stalemate arguing over culture war issues instead of finding solutions to long-simmering problems. Americans had given up hoping that positive change could happen until they got a ripped vigilante to rally behind. The rage felt by people across the political spectrum erupted in a rare moment of national unity. Journalism could have recognised that, listened to it and pushed politicians to engage with the issue.

In one of the more interesting pieces by the New York Times, they interviewed the people who polled Americans about their attitudes towards healthcare.

Michael Perry, a pollster who has run hundreds of healthcare focus groups, said he used to find a gap between how the wealthy talked about their healthcare and everyone else. “I don’t hear that anymore,” he told the Times. “The wealth gap has closed, and there is no amount of money that can buy you good insurance.”

How Constructive Journalism can address these issues

Journalists bemoan news avoidance and a lack of trust in what they do. When political leaders don’t listen to people, journalists must. That didn’t happen with this story. Americans are furious about healthcare, and some of the clueless coverage isn’t helping. Seeming out of touch on this story plays into the hands of the autocratic populists who are attacking journalism.

Fortunately, there is a model of journalism that can help cover the complex stories our societies are grappling with and reinvigorate trust in and engagement with journalism. Constructive journalism goes beyond simply covering solutions, (although that is important), and outlines a process in which positive social and societal outcomes are the goal.

Constructive Journalism grounds its approach in a mission to contribute to democracy, not simply by being watchdogs. It uses a three-pronged approach to provide a new approach to journalism and counteract the results of overly negative, sensationalist cover that has fed the pernicious partisanship and anti-democratic populism.

1. Focus on solutions

2. Cover nuances

3. Promote Democratic Conversation

Constructive journalism focuses on highlighting solutions to societal problems and adds active engagement with audiences. It advocates for creating opportunities for democratic conversations to bring people with differing ideas together to solve these problems.

An example of this is Zeit Online’s My Country Talks project that “matched more than 200,000 political opposites for 1:1 discussions in a bid to bridge social and political divides”. This is an example of how to increase bridging capital that grows trust not only in journalism but also among people. Bridging capital is US political scientist Robert Putnam’s phrase for the social bonds between dissimilar people whether based on age, race, class or education. Putnam is famous for his 1995 essay and subsequent book about the collapse of civic participation in the US, Bowling Alone, which is now seen as prophetic about the pandemic of loneliness in the country.

It’s going to take active engagement to make our societies and democracies better. I used to think that simply providing people with information would empower people to make decisions that would improve our societies, make them more equitable and deliver better outcomes for the many, not just for the few. I have realised over my career as a journalist and a consultant focused on communications and community that it will take more than simply providing good information. It will require active engagement and positive efforts like Constructive Journalism to turn the tide in our societies and restore our sense of community and trust. Between Putnam’s ideas, which are the foundation of the Aspen Institute’s Weave project, and Constructive Journalism, I have hope for 2025 and beyond.

Headlines: A look back at AI and journalism in 2024

And now a few links after that epic newsletter, which has been brewing for a few weeks.

If you talked to me in the early 2000s, I probably fell into the category of techno-utopian. I was so hopeful that technology would create a better society and expand opportunities. I now think we need to return to first purposes: What kind of societies do we want? And does a technology support our societal goals or not? If it doesn’t, then we shouldn’t adopt it.

A new EY survey finds that workers and company leaders are experiencing “AI fatigue”. If we don’t want to feed into the feelings of helplessness that I’ve talked about already, we need to have discussions about how AI works for us not against us.

AI fatigue sets in among workers and company leaders

About half of business leaders report declining company-wide enthusiasm for AI integration and adoption, according to a recent EY pulse survey.

digiday.com/media/ai-fatigue-sets-in-among-workers-and-company-leaders/?utm_campaign=digidaydis&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=general-rss

One of the issues we need to grapple with in terms of technology adoption: Does it lead to greater or less equitable solutions? What I mean by that is that so much of the technology revolution is rooted in neoliberal economic assumptions that have led to rising economic inequality that erodes the foundations of democratic, free societies. Many of the AI deals prejudice large-scale news organisations and add more hurt journalism that serves local communities. Rasmus is right to say that AI isn’t going to be lucrative for many news organisations. adds

Publishers find the AI era not all that lucrative

"Welcome, surely. Lucrative, in a sense. Game changer? Hardly."

www.niemanlab.org/2024/12/publishers-find-the-ai-era-not-all-that-lucrative

A very smart framing from my friend and former colleague at the BBC - Alf Hermida. Again, we are faced with choices. Will AI be a “substituting force or a complementary force”. As I wrote in my last newsletter, it’s really down to the business model.

Divergent paths for journalism’s future with AI

"The theories of AI as a substituting force or complementary force in the labor market provide a way to chart the choices ahead."

www.niemanlab.org/2024/12/divergent-paths-for-journalisms-future-with-ai

A good roundup of all of the research from the Reuter’s Institute and how it can help prepare our thinking to tackle the issues in 2025.

How 2024 shaped journalism: insights from the Reuters Institute’s work

reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/how-2024-shaped-journalism-insights-reuters-institutes-work

I was going to write about how media companies need to focus on clearly identifying and then serving their audience, but Adam Tinworth has already written a brilliant post on that subject with great examples including Sarah Marshall’s Audience Canvas and Dmitry Shishkin’s User Needs framework. (Some readers thought Adam was throwing shade on analytics and revenue so he has responded to those who came away with that impression.) Adam was responding to comments from Isabelle Roughhol, who was “seething” about comments about AI at the latest News Rewired. Her comments highlight the split between media companies still playing the volume game and those shifting towards value.

Media companies addicted to the volume model continue to search for ways to maintain that scale by any means necessary to sustain an ad-sustained business. These large newspaper groups and increasingly consolidated digital businesses cobbled together from the tired remnants of faded Platform Era darlings focus on using AI primarily for the efficient generation of content. I would list them, but the restless distressed asset trading amongst them would only be a snapshot in decline. Audiences are (mostly) anonymous numbers to be aggregated. Hedge-fund-owned newspaper groups in the US discuss growth in the context of their ability to pay off the debt they accrued by buying properties to achieve a scale that has never delivered sustainability.

On the value end of the media continuum are companies focused on valuable niche audiences or broader companies that can generate sufficient income from reader revenue. They focus on distinctive content and excellent user experiences. They know the audiences they serve and leverage analytics, audience research and experimentation to understand the value they can deliver to those audiences. Value publishers can operate at a range of scales, from local to national to international, and they can operate in lucrative verticals such as the Financial Times or City AM or in general news such as the New York Times or South Africa’s Daily Maverick.

And now we come to AI. Adam referred to a tweet by Isabelle Roughhol:

Isabelle Roughol (@isabelleroughol.com)

I'm at a news industry conference rn & I am ANGRY. I've now heard six people talk about the impact of AI and how to adapt. They talk about changing SEO tactics, striking deals with platforms, dialling up the outrage (I swear!)... everything but actually talking to PEOPLE & learning what they need.

bsky.app/profile/did:plc:n7fd3cmvdti4qtwm4piccq75/post/3lbwjbjaenk2p?ref_src=embed&ref_url=https%253A%252F%252Fonemanandhisblog.com%252F2024%252F11%252Faudience-engagement-two-words-both-matter%252F

Isabelle told me after the session that she was “seething” because a panel member had talked about AI non-strategically exhorting publishers to get on board.

For volume publishers, they focus on how to use AI to create more undifferentiated content more efficiently. It might be using AI to repurpose a story across their network, diluting the value of the original story to generate cheap pageviews for low-margin ads. It might be for repurposing a story for a younger audience instead of a smart strategy to include more young subjects in their reporting and create authentic content for those audiences.

This is largely a hangover of what I call the Platform Era and Brian Morrissey calls the Traffic Era. He said in The Rebooting newsletter, he says:

I have worked for and with volume publishers, and I was always impressed with their agility. However, as my understanding of the media business matured, I realised that they were tactically nimble but strategically paralysed. They rolled out new initiatives frequently, but they were always in the service of the same goal, scale. Their AI initiatives are in danger of following the same pattern.

Changes in technology - the internet, social media, the shift to mobile and now AI - all shift journalism’s value chain, where media companies add value. The internet was just the latest technology to change the value chain of media distribution, especially for local news. I used to enjoy looking at the back issues of the newspapers I edited in the US, and I was amazed at how the front pages in the 1960s were dominated by regional and national wire copy. The front pages of major events like the first moon landing were incredible snapshots of history, but I am sure most readers had seen the news elsewhere before they saw in the newspaper. It might have made a nice keepsake, but it was of limited news value.

In London, people used to read newspapers on the Tube - Metro and the Evening Standard, which were sold or then handed out for free to commuters. Even before the Elizabeth Line and increasingly the Tube lines had mobile internet access, commuters spent more time on mobile phones. Commuters were no longer looking to newspapers to read on their commute. The Evening Standard’s daily circulation dropped from 850,000 to 275,000 in the last five years, and the Standard published its final daily edition in September of this year.

With respect to AI, Ezra Eeman, the strategy and innovation director at Dutch public broadcaster NPO, said AI should be used to “create value more efficiently rather than replace humans”. This is the fundamental divide between volume and value publishers. Volume publishers look at technology change through the lens of their current value chain. Value publishers consider the value they create for their audiences, and they consider how new technologies change audience behaviour and expectations, which ultimately change where they can add value.

Some of the larger value publishers, like the New York Times and the Financial Times, already employ data scientists working with editorial so that they can do incredible investigations that would never have been possible without AI. The New York Times used AI to examine 2.1 million posts from thousands of Instagram accounts of young girls managed by their parents. Nearly one in three preteen girls list becoming an influencer as a career goal. “The Times found, encouraging parents to commodify their children’s images. Some of the child influencers earn six-figure incomes, according to interviews.” The Financial Times “compared photographs of the children from an official database of missing Ukrainian children with the public profiles of children up for adoption in Russia using image recognition tools”.

AI is being used for moderation to allow smaller teams to manage comments and other community features to help deepen their relationships with audiences. AI is being used to understand the propensity to register and subscribe to drive better business outcomes. AI will have a huge impact on the business and practice of journalism. Only by thinking about how it will change value chains will we create sustainable businesses. How will AI change where and how journalism adds value for audiences? Those who are asking and answering that question will thrive in the future. Those who simply use AI to eke out efficiencies for a previous era in digital journalism will continue to fade and destroy a lot of economic and civic value. It is this ongoing destruction of value that makes me, like Isabelle, seethe.

And now onto the links for this week. Many of the conversations I am taking part in touch on the best model for publishers to strike deals with AI companies. Smaller publishers are concerned they are being left out.

I wasn’t surprised to see Canadian publishers suing OpenAI. After the disastrous delisting of their content by Facebook, I can see why they want to take a more proactive approach.

Canadian media companies sue OpenAI in case potentially worth billions

Litigants say AI company used their articles to train its popular ChatGPT software without authorization

www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/29/canada-media-companies-sue-openai-chatgpt

One important point made in one of the discussions I took part in is that all of the ad hoc deals are not leading to comprehensive policies to address the IP issues around LLM content scraping. And this example shows how ad hoc these deals are. Dow Jones used lawsuits to protect its own content but then decided to strike AI deals for its Factiva service.

Dow Jones negotiates AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 news publishers

Earlier this year, the WSJ owner sued Perplexity for failing to properly license its content. Now its research tool Factiva has negotiated its own AI licensing deals.

www.niemanlab.org/2024/12/dow-jones-negotiates-ai-usage-agreements-with-nearly-4000-news-publishers

For large-scale value publishers like the New York Times, they are constantly working on how they prove the higher value of their business. While they have one of the most successful subscription businesses in the world, they are looking for an ad measurement model that more closely aligns with their overall business. They want a better way to measure the value of their campaigns.

The New York Times Wants To 'Reshape' The Ad Economy

Rather than measuring clicks and impressions, "Times" plans to find a better way to understand campaign results based on what it calls "the most valuable impressions."

www.mediapost.com/publications/article/401354/the-new-york-times-wants-to-reshape-the-ad-econo.html

In the wake of the US election, the Pew Center released a report showing how many Americans were getting their news from influencers and what kind of information they were getting from them. UNESCO found that most of these influencers didn’t check the information they were circulating.

Online influencers need ‘urgent’ fact-checking training, warns Unesco

Research shows six in 10 social media content creators do not verify the accuracy of information before posting it

www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/26/online-influencers-need-urgent-fact-checking-training-warns-unesco

News and resources to help you navigate the rise of Bluesky

If you’ve shifted to Bluesky, there is now a way to verify your accounts, either through domains you control as well as through your employer’s domains. It’s quite powerful, and it won’t require you to pay a subscription fee every month.

There’s now a way for journalists to verify their Bluesky accounts through their employers (while still keeping control of them)

It may be too late for @edwardrmurrow.cbsnews.com, @huntersthompson.rollingstone.com, or @mikewallace.60minutes.com, but today's reporters have another way to prove who they are on the rapidly growing social network.

www.niemanlab.org/2024/12/theres-now-a-way-for-journalists-to-verify-their-bluesky-accounts-through-their-employers-while-still-keeping-control-of-them

Bluesky is growing rapidly, and on its current trajectory, it could overtake social networks like X. To do that, it’s going to need money.

Can Bluesky Raise Enough Funding to Compete?

Bluesky is on the rise, but it could struggle to compete with better-resourced competitors.

www.socialmediatoday.com/news/can-bluesky-raise-enough-funding-to-compete/734239

This is a fascinating question, but I also wonder about the role that high levels of inequality play in these perceptions.

Are Americans’ perceptions of the economy and crime broken?

This election cycle showed that our evaluations of external reality are increasingly partisan. Can the media bridge the gap?

www.niemanlab.org/2024/11/are-americans-perceptions-of-the-economy-and-crime-broken

This newsletter started years ago when I used Nuzzel to aggregate the links that my network of people in media and journalism shared. It was incredible that I could quickly see the most important links my network was sharing, and it made putting together a newsletter like this much easier. I was happy when Twitter bought it and gutted when the company shut it down. Now, there is a similar service for Bluesky.

Sill's new app rounds up the best links from your Bluesky and Mastodon networks | TechCrunch

Want to keep up with what everyone's talking about on alternative social media sites like Bluesky and Mastodon, but don't have time to constantly scroll

techcrunch.com/2024/11/25/sills-new-app-rounds-up-the-best-links-from-your-bluesky-and-mastodon-network

In December, I will celebrate thirty years of working in journalism (or journalism-related work). Community has been at the centre of my work throughout most of my career—whether in my first journalism job as a regional reporter at the Hays Daily News in Western Kansas, engaged journalism at the BBC, managing community newspapers in Wisconsin, or even my current work at Pugpig. After years of watching the disruption in journalism, here are core beliefs I have about the industry:

• A media outlet's relationships with its audience are highly correlated with its sustainability.

• Product and audience-centric thinking align both the journalism produced and the user experience, which delivers loyalty and habit that is highly correlated with sustainability.

• Membership and engaged journalism are mutually reinforcing strategies for smaller and independent media organisations that deliver better commercial and editorial outcomes.

I just published a case study of South Africa’s Daily Maverick after interviewing its CEO, Styli Charalambous, about the indie publisher’s journey. They launched in 2009 as a for-profit business at a more optimistic time in South Africa and digital media. Despite publishing high-impact investigations, they struggled to become sustainable so they pivoted to non-profit, hoping that they could tap into philanthropy. That didn’t get them to the point of sustainability, even after they broke a story that would lead to the ouster of Jacob Zuma as president.

Styli developed an innovation tour of the US and visited the Washington Post, the New York Times and National Geographic. What stood out for him was that the most successful and optimistic outlets had a firm foundation of reader revenue. However, a paywall seemed antithetical to Daily Maverick’s mission, but he happened upon a research paper about membership.

He plots membership on a continuum of possible reader revenue models with subscriptions on one end and donations on the other. “At the heart of membership is a community of people joining a cause. People being part of something,” he said, and members have become part of their journalism.

After establishing their brand as a hard-hitting indie investigative publisher, they tested the model and had members within minutes. Styli said they used membership as a Trojan horse to introduce engaged journalism to the newsroom. Now, it is fully distributed across all of the editorial teams. The benefits of membership for members and the business include:

1. They developed a database of ‘superpowers’ their members have. They have tapped their members who are drone pilots. “One of the top constitutional lawyers in the country, who is a member, suggested a panel for an event and ended up being the moderator.” One of their first members even became their first community manager and is now their chief growth officer.

2. It leads to high-engagement products. Their “Your Questions Answered” newsletter which does what it says on the tin. Members ask questions, which are grouped by theme, and then they are answered by ministers, experts or other newsmakers. The newsletter goes out to 80,000 to 90,000 members. During this year’s elections, it had an 85%-90% open rate.

3. This high engagement leads to a high customer lifetime value because he said “after three years, 85% of people who start as a member are still there”. Now 40% of their revenue comes from their members.

What I love about this case study is that Daily Maverick is reaping the benefits of being this close to its members. As an audience-centric product leader, my goal is to make sure the editorial, product and business model are working to deliver the best for audiences and deliver returns to sustain the people who create the content. Daily Maverick shows the benefits of membership in creating a value-creating symbiotic relationship between members and journalists. It supports high-quality, high-engagement journalism that creates value for the news organisation, members and the broader society.

Now onto the links for this week.

Chris Stone, who I know from the New Statesman, has elevated their podcast operations. He is incredibly generous in sharing his expertise, and he recently highlighted a way for podcast publishers to drive consumption of their podcasts on YouTube, which was just shown to be the primary way audiences consume podcasts.

This weird YouTube podcast growth hack should be illegal

If you’ve been to any of the big podcast events in the past year or so - or indeed if you’re just generally online and thinking about podcasts - you’ve doubtless heard the hype around video podcasts. “Video podcasts are the future!” “You NEED to have a podcast video strategy!” “What do you mean you

www.linkedin.com/pulse/weird-youtube-podcast-growth-hack-should-illegal-chris-stone-cgdaf

YouTube tops both Spotify and Apple when it comes to podcast distribution now.

YouTube Is Bigger Than Spotify and Apple for Podcasts, Research Finds

YouTube is the go-to destination for podcasts over Spotify and Apple Podcasts, according to new research from Edison Podcast Metrics

www.thewrap.com/youtube-podcasts-bigger-spotify-apple-data

With this huge reach, podcasts have emerged as an influential platform. Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris went on podcasts this year to reach audiences who had tuned out from traditional sources of news and information. Adweek tracks the rise of podcasts.

How Podcasts Emerged as Vehicles of Mass Reach and Influence

Podcasts offered this year’s presidential candidates something no other mass media channel could.

www.adweek.com/media/how-podcasts-emerged-as-vehicles-of-mass-reach-niche-audiences-and-cultural-influence

As if on cue, the Pew Research Center in the US released a report on news influencers. More than one in five Americans get their news and information from these influencers, who are mostly men. Only TikTok has an even gender balance. And slightly more 27% to 21% were Republicans and supporters of Donald Trump. Another interesting data point: Most news influencers are on X. As news organisations decide to de-prioritise X, it is becoming an alternate news source, or at least a home for alternate news sources.

America’s News Influencers

This study explores the makeup of the social media news influencer universe, including who they are, what content they create and who their audiences are.

www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2024/11/18/americas-news-influencers

This is going to be more and more common. LLMs are actually pretty good at summarising existing text, and as long as humans are in the loop, the process works pretty well too.

The Wall Street Journal is testing AI article summaries

Gannett is running AI-powered article summaries, too.

www.theverge.com/2024/11/13/24295838/the-wall-street-journal-ai-article-summaries-key-points

Have you left Twitter or X? I haven’t yet, but I don’t use it much. I am contemplating whether to leave. Most of my feelings about it are nostaligic, and X isn’t Twitter. X is an influence vehicle for its owner.

Media organisations and journalists don’t need to make some grand political display in leaving. Frankly, there is a strong business case posting there is a waste of resources. Social media has moved on, and news organisations’ time is best spent elsewhere. I said this in The Audiencers WhatsApp community.

Journalists - is Twitter actually your community?

It is long past time for journalism to abandon Twitter. We ourselves have torn down the wall between editorial and business interests if as journalists, our calculation here is not values-based. To wit: “But I have a large following and neither BlueSky or Threads does.” That is the rationalization of

kiesow.net/journalists-is-twitter-actually-your-community

Vertical video is something I’m about to dive into for one of my next research projects. The BBC started using vertical video in its app in 2017 and saw dramatic results in terms of the number of videos viewed and the number of users viewing video. The data is there to support that vertical video is a no brainer for engaging mobile audiences.

Nine Metros uses vertical video, habit building to capture Olympics audience

The Nine Metros social team approached the Olympics with a dual focus: increase brand awareness and traffic while also cultivating a strong sense of fandom around the event.

www.inma.org/blogs/digital-strategies/post.cfm/nine-metros-uses-vertical-video-habit-building-to-capture-olympics-audience

A good roundup from INMA about the thinking amongst US newsroom leaders after the election. Misinformation is overwhelming, and a lot of newsrooms are struggling with a lack of resources. This common stood out for me from one editor who wants to focus on “common interests and concerns across the county, across political divisions, and then hopefully start[ing] some conversations around those common areas of concern and interest.” Journalism as a service is a powerful way to re-establish its role in people’s lives.

Fact-checking, AI remain top of mind in post-U.S. election coverage

The U.S. election may be over, but media companies will be addressing many challenges related to it for the foreseeable future.

www.inma.org/blogs/research/post.cfm/fact-checking-ai-remain-top-of-mind-in-post-u-s-election-coverage

Exhibit B on the usefulness of short-form, mostly vertical video. Francesca Barber, Politico’s executive director of global newsroom strategy. hit on themes that resonate with what Styli was talking about, namely listening and building a direct relationship with audiences.

“Trust is important here: it means listening, not just opining. It means having a direct relationship to audiences in the formats they are consuming (e.g. video, audio, shareable direct messages). And it means being clear who your audience is and building expectations and habit throughout the year, so that during an election cycle, they come to you.”

Polls, trust and video shorts: Lessons for news publishers from US election

After the US election, we asked: "What is the biggest thing you think the media needs to learn about connecting with audiences?"

pressgazette.co.uk/north-america/us-election-media-reflections-trump-harris

In the lead-up to the US election, I have been reading Robert Putnam’s The Upswing. He charts major social and political trends from the Gilded Age, a period of inequality and extreme partisanship in the US. People have drawn a lot of parallels between the current period in the US and the years leading up to the Civil War. Putnam draws another parallel, the last years of the 19th Century and 20th Century. It was a period of extreme inequality, racial repression and violence. “The tide of strikes, violence and eventually anarchist terrorism that had been across the industrializing North in the 1870s would not recede until the 1920s.” Institutionalised Jim Crow segregation began during this period, and the Supreme Court upheld those laws in its 1896 ruling Plessy v. Ferguson, one of the great injustices in US history. It would allow "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races”. Putnam says a “wave of black lynchings surged in the 1880s, reaching the appalling rate of an atrocity every other day in 1892”.

Putnam says American politics across the country was “violently riven as it had not been for nearly half a century” during the Civil War. In the Gilded Age, the age of the robber barons in the US:

This sounds and feels very familiar. The Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era, and presidents from Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Eisenhower, LBJ and even Nixon ruled as reformers. A progressive coalition of Republicans and Democrats identified and addressed major new problems. Education, income equality and longevity all increased during this period. His thesis is that the US pivoted from an “I” society during the Gilded Age to a “We” society during the long progressive era in the first two-thirds of the 20th Century. But then it swung back quickly to an “I” society.

By several measures, the US is now in the same situation as the Gilded Age, with declines in educational attainment, a rise in inequality and even a decline in life expectancy, driven by “deaths of despair”. Putnam outlines how the US can return to a “We” society and the kind of positive problem-solving and better outcomes. I’m not to that part of the book yet. But this is all to say: The US has been here before, and journalism played a role in the progressive era with the famous muckrakers’ reporting supporting antitrust, health and safety and labour reforms and helped to raise awareness about housing conditions and the violence of lynching.

What journalists can do to help restore civic society

I can’t wait to get to the part of The Upswing where Putnam talks about how we can restore civic society. Even before getting to that part of the book, I know that journalism could play a role in helping with this necessary work.

I heard from many friends immediately after the election that they were shifting their focus from national politics to their communities, and local journalism can support their communities to identify and solve their problems.

Audience engagement leader and innovator Ariel Zirulnick outlined several tactics to achieve. First and foremost, she called on journalists to see “people as voters beyond the elections”. Ultimately, I think she is calling on journalists to understand people’s concerns about their communities and how the government can address those concerns, and their concerns do not follow election cycles. (She makes a distinction between issues and concerns.)

She gave examples of this in action, such as Atlanta Civic Circle’s 10,000-person regional panel, Atlanta POV. It is like the editorial board common at local newspapers but at a scale made possible with modern survey tools. They hope in the future that this can become a neighbourhood-level story engine. News outlets can also capture highly engaged people they contacted during elections as a source for a panel like this and remain engaged with them, a process outlined by AmyJo Brown in a guide to “using voting districts to structure listening tours”. And lastly, the Milwaukee Journal has decided to continue its Main Street Agenda project past the elections.

She has a lot of great ideas in her piece, and one of my favourites is building an engagement loop around the election and using this to develop new products. If publishers were to create a segment of audiences highly engaged during the elections, they could create newsletters, events and special coverage to continue to serve these readers.

Dan Kennedy recommends people find a local news outlet to support. Research has shown the decline in local news has led “to fewer people running for local office, lower voter turnout, measurable increases in polarization”, Dan Kennedy says. “Rebuilding civic life is a way of lowering temperatures and encouraging cooperation. When people learn they can work with their neighbors to solve local problems even if they hold different views about national politics, that enables them to see those neighbors as fully rounded human beings rather than as partisan Republicans or Democrats.,” he added.

And now onto links for this week.

In the newsletter I write I Pugpig, I looked at how my friend Janne Rygh refocused analytics at two Amedia properties so that they could better target young audiences. It’s a great case study on why changing platforms and formats will only get you so far in terms of engaging youth audiences. You’ll have to have reconsider your content strategy.

And on that note, Amalie Nash outlines how to create a content strategy. Her point about creating KPIs is directly related to the experiment that Janne carried out. She realised that their KPIs were leading them to create content for their core audiences, which skewed older.

3 lessons will help newsrooms shape content strategy

Newsroom leaders should understand audience depth of knowledge, connect content message to readers, and create KPIs for content.

www.inma.org/blogs/newsroom-initiative/post.cfm/3-lessons-will-help-newsrooms-shape-content-strategy

Facebook has de-emphasised news in its feed, and Elon Musk has banned journalists from X who have criticised him. LinkedIn is heading in the opposite direction. The key to engaging LinkedIn audiences is to understand the audience (which is always the case). How will this news impact someone’s business or career?

LinkedIn's new strategy to target news content - The Fix

Microsoft’s powerful platform is increasingly developing a strategy to highlight news and journalistic content. Is it a good thing for the media?

thefix.media/2024/11/8/linkedins-new-strategy-to-target-news-content

I recently co-led a session for the News Product Alliance Summit about audience development in the post-platform era. Many publishing professionals during the session said that Google Discover had become a key, but erratic traffic driver for them. I even heard recently from a publishing leader that Google had told them not even to try to understand how Discover works.

I’m a Discover user. It’s highly sensitive to what I read. If I click on a link, it will start adding that topic into my Discover feed. In Chrome on my iPad, I can also add sites to follow. I am surprised that more publishers aren’t encouraging audiences to do this.

Experience in my day job is that Discover can drive traffic and, more importantly, subscriptions.

Publishers hooked on Google Discover traffic risk race to the bottom

Google Discover tactics for news publishers: Some are playing a risky game, Barry Adams explains how to build sustainable traffic.

pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/digital-journalism/google-discover-publishers

A fascinating project funded by the Knight Foundation to answer reporters’ questions in real-time during the election. “ The nearly 100 election experts on hand to answer voting-related questions include election administrators, nonprofit leaders, cybersecurity experts, public historians, attorneys specializing in election law, nonpartisan voter access advocates, misinformation researchers, public policy professors, and more. “

Votebeat assembles nearly 100 election experts to answer reporters’ questions (now, and in the weeks ahead)

"The problem with voting stories is that the people who make themselves most available don't know what the hell they're talking about."

www.niemanlab.org/2024/11/votebeat-assembles-nearly-100-election-experts-to-answer-reporters-questions-now-and-in-the-weeks-ahead

Earlier this year, I wrote about the demand problem for local news. This is especially true for young audiences, which as the Pew Research Center reported in May 2024 only 9% of Americans 18 to 29 follow local news very closely. People with higher levels of education are less likely to follow local news. It doesn’t matter whether the Americans are Democrats or Republicans, neither groups follow local news particularly well.

Surveys show a disconnect between the value people say they put on local news, their interest in and their propensity to pay. Americans say that local news is important. “Eighty-five percent of U.S. adults say that local news outlets “are at least somewhat important to the well-being of their local community,” including 44% who say they’re “extremely” or “very” important,” a Pew-Knight study found. However, they are reading it less, and only 15% of Americans have paid for it. But, that’s far better than the 8% of people in the UK. The research describes the contradictions, but it doesn’t say why. It doesn’t simply seem to be due to the sources of information that people have. Yes, audiences are getting more of their news from social media but that doesn’t address why people are consuming less local news and why a fundamental contradiction exists between the importance they place on local news and their actual consumption and support of it.

Fortunately, people who are grappling with these issues with news at several levels. I connected with Julia Gitis, a civic tech entrepreneur, through the News Product Alliance. In the summer of 2022, she noticed the old newspaper vending machines had been removed from her neighbourhood. “(She) was even more convinced that having a modern and digital version of the news racks would help people in San Francisco engage with their communities,” she wrote. Her vision is to create a neighbourhood digital bulletin boards “to strengthen democracy and civic engagement”. Julia told me that people were more interested in local events and sharing information about their pets. Other feedback includes a desire for art from local artists, community resources and interactive games.

They recently hosted a listening session with community members to give them a hands-on experience with their first digital prototype and to understand their local news needs. Their findings? "Residents like local news more in theory than in practice." They don’t use the local news section of their prototype that much, and they found some level of news avoidance in their listening session. “One resident told us ‘The news is so troubling lately, I feel like I need to escape,’ a sentiment echoed by many people we spoke to.” They also received feedback about content features they hadn’t tought of including promotions for neighbourhood businesses and local classified ads for things like dog walking and other hyper-local services. It shows that even in San Francisco, the centre of digital disruption, there is still room to make money from marketing local services.

This is great open on-the-ground testing of local news needs, and I love how Julia and her collaborators are co-creating a local news solution, not only in terms of hardware but also in terms of partnering with local businesses, schools and other stakeholders. I also like the honesty about the results. Local news was the original goal, but communities are expressing a broader range of local information needs.

The model that Julia is testing is interesting. It’s not so much a news source as it is a novel model of distribution. (If you’re looking for novel models for news sources, check out LION Publishers’ growing roster.) She has placed importance on the fact that it is in a public place, which again is a different model. It’s also unlike the large screens we have in major rail stations in Europe, which are passive. These screens are interactive and on ground level amongst people.

The kind of on-the-ground research that Julia is doing is fascinating, and it reminds me of the research in Medill Survey of local news consumption in Chicago. Product managers always ask why, and I will keep my eye out for additional research that asks why. And in the market research that I’m responsible for, I’m going to be asking more why questions.

And now onto the links for the week.

Americans go to the polls in person on Tuesday 5 November, although 75m US voters have already cast their ballots, which is 48% of the number of votes cast in the 2020 election. To endorse or not to endorse has been quite a controversy in the US. Both the LA Times and Washington Post opting not to, and both papers have paid dearly for it. The Washington Post has lost a quarter of a million subscribers for owner Jeff Bezos decision, and it has renewed criticisms about CEO Will Lewis which had died down. The Guardian spotted an opportunity to win over American readers looking for a paper to support and took advantage of it. It shows how the age of reader revenue (subscriptions and membership) changes the dynamic between audiences and the publications they pay for.

Guardian endorsement of Harris reaps it near $2m boost after editor's email

How Guardian US editor Betsy Reed secured nearly $2m of reader revenue in three days with email criticising LA Times and Washington Post.

pressgazette.co.uk/north-america/betsy-reed-guardian-us

The UK government is floating ideas similar to Canada and Australia that local news providers should be compensated by the platforms for their content that appears on platforms. Platforms have a mixed record in their response to this legislation. In Canada, it led to local publishers being delisted with punishing results for small, independent publishers.

Culture Secretary Nandy promises 'level playing field for local media online'

Lisa Nandy: Culture secetary tells publishers her government will create a level playing field online for local news.

pressgazette.co.uk/news/lisa-nandy-local-news

With major publishers striking deals with OpenAI and others to licence their content to train AI platforms, there is another player in the space to act as a middleman.

Reddit, Zynga Founders Funding New Platform for Creators to License Content to AI Firms (Exclusive)

The platform, Troveo, launches with $4.5 million in seed funding and says it has "deals in place with prominent AI companies to pay out more than $5 million to content owners and digital rights managers by end of year."

www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/troveo-launch-content-license-ai-reddit-zynga-founders-1236047368

My friend, Janne Rygh, an Editorial Content Developer at Amedia, is leading an initiative to engage younger readers and convert them to subscribers. 87% of pageviews come from registered users, which as Janne says means they know a lot more about their audience and what they are doing. That’s great, but despite this excellent shift from anonymous to known users, their subscribers overall are aging. Nearly half of their subscribers are older than 60. It took some convincing of senior stakeholders, but Janne got the green light to trial efforts at two of Amedia’s 130 newspapers. Some of this isn’t too revolutionary: To engage young readers, you have to write about them. They also uncovered topics they needed to write about including early education (Kindergarten), personal economics issues (wallet issues) as well as health and family life.

Norway's Amedia finds success with bold experiment focusing only on young readers

2024-10-30. Six months ago, Amedia, Norway's largest news publisher, began an experiment to shift the focus of their editorial content away from their loyal, older readers to those younger than 40. While this counter-intuitive move is still in its early days, it has been driving traffic – and subscriptions – among both younger readers and their overall audience.

wan-ifra.org/2024/10/norways-amedia-finds-success-with-bold-experiment-focusing-only-on-young-readers

Interestingly, INMA has new report out that Gen Z might be into print. They want non-digital experiences, and hey, if vinyl and cassettes can make a comeback, I guess print can too.

New INMA report looks at how Gen Z could change the print game

Gen Z readers are into print? Who knew? Researchers and a scattering of news media companies around the world knew, as INMA’s latest strategic report, How Gen Z Could Change the Print Game, shows.

www.inma.org/blogs/main/post.cfm/new-inma-report-looks-at-how-gen-z-could-change-the-print-game

I have just returned from three weeks in the US. It is tense there, and people discussed the election's outcome in very dark terms across the political spectrum. Talking to friends, they expect violence if Trump is elected with one saying, without drama, that she expects civil war. Political scientists from John Hopkins University and the University of Wisconsin Madison found in 2021 that “20 percent of Republicans and 13 percent of Democrats said political violence was warranted these days, while 25 percent of Republicans and 17 percent of Democrats said threats to opposing party officials were defensible”. This is about the same level of support Catholics and Protestants had for violence during the height of “The Troubles”. My fellow Americans, we don’t want to go down this road. Once dehumanisation takes root, it is challenging to reverse.

Journalists have been concerned about restoring trust in their profession. I believe one way to do this is by carrying out projects where people restore trust in one another.

In an era of radical polarisation, tackling dehumanisation helps foster a mutual sense of good faith people have in each other. In 2023, the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service (GU Politics) Battleground Civility Poll has been “tracking attitudes towards polarization since 2019”, and while respondents send mixed messages, 94% believe (with 72% believing so strongly) “Respect for each other is the first step in having a government that works.” And almost the same amount, 89% believe that civility is the language of respect. There is reason for hope.

Throughout my career, I have looked inside, adjacent to and outside of media for solutions to problems. Community and building relationships between media organisations and their audiences have been central to my work, and here are a few initiatives I think can support the restoration of a respectful, civil civic society.

StoryCorps: One Small Step

When I worked at Ideastream Public Media, we took part in a project that was a collaboration between StoryCorps’ One Small Step initiative and Ideastream Public Media to help foster conversations across political divisions.

The Public Spaces Incubator

As a young journalist, a major theme of my early work was using social media and community engagement strategies to engage audiences with public service media. However, digital social spaces also have an increasingly bad reputation. Almost half of Gen Z wish Tiktok had never been invented, and fully half wish the same of X. Instead of abandoning the concept of digital community, as I have written before, publishers and broadcasters have decided to reclaim them.

New Public is working with public service broadcasters including the CBC, Australia’s ABC and European PSBs ARD and RTBF on the Public Spaces Incubator. They want to re-establish direct relationships with their audiences but also experiment with and develop new digital conversational spaces. It’s exciting because they are designing prototypes for nuanced conversations and broader perspectives. For instance, one prototype Representing Perspectives … “explores including a broader spectrum of voices in conversations on different topics and inspires commenters to add their own perspectives”. Public Square View “brings new opportunities for participating in live virtual events and joining conversations to discuss them”.

Good.chat

Can an online chat with someone from the other side of the political divide help alleviate partisanship? Boldium, an innovation agency (for lack of a better description), has kicked off this project. Their team was worried about the same trends I outlined. “The number of Americans with very unfavourable opinions of the opposing party has more than doubled in the past 25 years. And about one-third of Americans believe the opposing party is threatening our nation’s well-being.” (Based on data from the Pew Research Center.)

Disclaimer: I have been so busy over the last month that I haven’t had time to test-drive this, but I’m curious. However, it will take all kinds of experiments to address the issues around polarisation, division and dehumanisation.

Weave: The Social Fabric Project

I first found out about the Weave project from Michael Skiler, the communications director for the project. I’ve known Michael since he founded the Public Insight Network at American Public media. I have long admired his work. Weave is based on the insights from Robert Putnam, who famously wrote Bowling Alone, an essay and then a book about the decline in American participation in civic, religious and political organisations. Weave draws from Putnam’s most recent book: The Upswing: How We Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. To summarise very quickly, the book tracks America’s long track from an “I” society during the Gilded Age of the 19th Century to a “We” society from the 1890s to the 1960s and then a regression back to an “I” society since then. As the Harvard Kennedy School summary says: “He draws inspiring lessons for our time from an earlier era, when a dedicated group of reformers righted the ship, putting us on a path to becoming a society once again based on community.”

The project tries to address “the problem of broken social trust”. It was founded in 2018 by New York Times columnist David Brooks at the Aspen Institute. Brooks started the project on a listening tour “to understand how people in different communities were working to move from a culture of isolation and individualism to one of relationalism”. That produced their founding document The Relationist Manifesto.

It’s an ambitious project looking to support community-minded doers who are working to increase bridging capital where they live to solve problems. You get a sense of the who and what they support through a recently released initiative, TrustMap.

Just writing about these initiatives gives me a little more hope. Now onto to some links I’ve seen this past week.

Major media companies continue to strike AI deals with major tech companies. I highlight this one because Reuters has done a deal with Meta rather than OpenAI, which has had a string of deals with media companies in the US and Europe.

On the audience side of media businesses, there is a new imperative to build direct relationships with readers, listeners and viewers, one that is not mediated through third-party platforms. On the commercial side, this translates into reader revenue through subscriptions and memberships as well as cutting out middlemen. Bloomberg has done this, and DPG Media is yet another example.

DPG Media will pull the plug on selling app ads in the open market

DPG Media will stop selling ads in its apps through open market auctions starting in November 2024. Advertisers must now buy ads directly from DPG Media.

digiday.com/media/dpg-media-will-pull-the-plug-on-selling-app-ads-in-the-open-market

Bluesky use is surging, and as a Bluesky and X user, I feel it and understand it. Musk’s decision-making for X is muddled by politics, which has led to poor financial performance. That drives short-term business decisions that aren’t in line with user experience, satisfaction or safety.

Bluesky surges into the top 5 as X changes blocks, permits AI training on its data | TechCrunch

Social networking startup Bluesky, which just reported a gain of half a million users over the past day, has now soared into the top five apps on the U.S.

techcrunch.com/2024/10/18/bluesky-surges-into-the-top-5-as-x-changes-blocks-permits-ai-training-on-its-data

Data Suggests X Could Post a Significant Loss in 2024

Elon’s X project could be in trouble, but there may be other avenues to consider.

www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-could-post-a-significant-loss-in-2024/730370

Recently, I was asked by a friend who works in a senior editorial position whether product managers should also be project managers. it’s not a simple question, but it’s an important one.

In reality, it is a fuzzy boundary that varies from news organisation to news organisation. In my master’s research, one product manager at a large digital news organisation said: “(I) had to learn quite quickly and on the job what some of these titles even mean and what is the difference between a product manager and the project manager .… And also, what does that mean in every organization, because that can just mean very diffrent things.” This fuzziness - known as role ambiguity in academic circles - has been an issue with product management long before news organisations embraced the role. This is what the fuzziness means to working product managers. Another senior product manager at a large broadcaster told me, “What I find challenging is that inherently I don't think people understand what a product manager does … On any given day I am often referred to as a product manager, product owner (or) project manager.” More than that, on any given day, this product manager also said she might have product management, project management and operational responsibilities.

Some overlap between project management and product development will always exist because it takes some project management skills to deliver the product. After all, a good product roadmap is essentially a project plan. In reality, smaller organisations will need to blend the functions or have a senior manager act as a de facto product manager with project management done by a managing editor.

But clarifying the roles is important. Media managers need to understand the distinction between product and project management and be able to manage the separate functions or activities. Product managers define the product through audience and market data and are responsible for the ROI of the product. Project managers keep the delivery of the product on track. That is an ideal description of the boundary between the roles, and as I said, in reality, it’s a lot messsier. However, it’s one of the seasons, I believe it makes sense to keep these roles separate.

The lack of clarity about the role and managing it leads to several issues. The cross-functional work of product managers relies on their relationships, and I have seen those relationships damaged due to delivery issues. Media managers’ ability to manage product and project functions will mean better products delivered on time. Easier said than done, but understanding product management in media organisations still has a way to go.

More than that, this lack of understanding is also causing issues in retaining product managers. In my research, one of the issues that led to frustration amongst product management is role autonomy - the ability to manage how they get the job done. Not only does this help employees have more satisfaction, but it also helps organisations manage “volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous” (VUCA) environments. If product managers simply as project managers, they do not feel that they have autonomy over defining products. One product manager left a job at a major international media organisation because she felt as if she was working in a “feature factory”. She left and went to work for a succession of tech companies. (Click that link, written by John Cutler. I think a lot of news product managers will appreciate this: “Little appreciation for the health of the whole product as opposed to shiny new objects.” Also worth reading is his update three years later.)

Reading that, I’ll be honest. It makes me realise how much more I have to learn about product management. But in John’s last statement, there is a lot of value in “learning by doing”.

Now, onto the links.

Substack wants to do more than just newsletters, says Max Tani of Semafor. The company still isn’t profitable. Its next move?

But while Substack is attempting another pivot, as Max points out, there are some high profile defections as the economics don’t work out for them.

Mill Media says goodbye to Substack and moves onto competitor Ghost

Mill Media is to leave Substack four years after launching there in 2020, citing costs and a desire for greater tech customisation.

pressgazette.co.uk/newsletters/mill-media-leaves-substack-ghost

How to balance audience growth with public trust? That was the challenge that Sweden’s public broadcaster faced, and The Fix talked to Olle Zachrison, Head of Artificial Intelligence & News Strategy at Sveriges Radio, on how they managed these goals in applying AI to a problem.

What can newsrooms learn from Swedish Radio AI strategy? - The Fix

Interview with Olle Zachrison, Head of Artificial Intelligence & News Strategy at Swedish Radio about their approach to AI.

thefix.media/2024/9/23/what-can-newsrooms-learn-from-swedish-radio-ai-strategy

As data has become more important to publishers, they are working to make sure they get more of it by closing the door on people who don’t accept to get data for advertising.

'Consent or pay': Why UK news websites are getting tough with readers over data

Six of the top 50 news websites in the UK are asking people to "consent or pay" if they don't want to hand over their data for advertising.

pressgazette.co.uk/marketing/consent-or-pay-news-websites-uk

Want to know what it’s like to interact with AI bots? Here’s your chance to interact with lots of them.

New App Lets You Interact With Millions of AI Bot Profiles

SocialAI will feed you social media like responses from a wide range of AI bots.

www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-app-lets-you-interact-with-millions-of-ai-bot-profiles/727451

We are starting to see some green shoots of growth in the local news eco-system around the world, but in many places, local journalism is in crisis. At the News in the Digital Age conference by FT Strategies and the Google News Initiative, Styli Charalambous, Co-founder & CEO of South Africa’s Daily Maverick, asked whether the ongoing crisis is a “Kodak moment” or a market failure. Is the failure based on disruptive innovation in which new products and services will arise that are cheaper and better than what was before? Or are local journalism organisations facing a market failure?

Styli only had a few moments on a panel to outline his thoughts, but he wrote about the question and a solution for Media Makers Meet earlier this year. Ok, let’s break down the questions.

Is journalism simply facing a Kodak moment? Styli put it in terms of Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction in which new technologies, processes and products render previous ones obsolete. Kodak’s film-based cameras have now been replaced by incredible digital cameras cum multimedia communication and commerce devices, the smartphone. (Interestingly, Kodak and its Japanese competitors were fundamentally in the chemical business. Fuji realised this and pivoted into providing chemicals for cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.)

For those of us who have been working in journalism innovation long enough, creative destruction or disruptive innovation is familiar to us. We studied Clay Christensen’s disruption theory and watched as those theories were applied to media specifically by David Skok and Clark Gilbert. Clark not only theorised about responses but created the dual transformation framework that he used to reposition the Deseret News.

Some journalism companies pivoted like this, particularly Schibsted, which saw what happened with Craig’s List and classified advertising in the US and launched digital marketplaces. But leads to its own issues, and Schibsted split the digital marketplace business off from its journalism assets in 2023.

I digress slightly. If the crisis in journalism is creative destruction in which something better arises from the ashes. Styli put it this way:

I think we are seeing new products and services, with newsletters being one, either as an MVP or a sustainable business. However, at the moment, there is no way to make an argument these models have scaled to replace the destruction of so much local and hyperlocal media in the past 15 years.

^{The argument that local media is experiencing a market failure}

However, successful responses to disruptive innovation or creative destruction have been the exceptions, not the rule, especially at the local level. As I have written before, the market conditions, particularly around advertising, have changed dramatically over the last 50 years. Media and advertising have both been nationalised, which has been one of the factors that has led to the “winner takes most” dynamic that is playing out.

Market failures result in an ‘inefficient distribution of goods’, and they happen for a few reasons. Most relevant in terms of local journalism are issues of market control - namely the dominance of digital platforms such as Google and Facebook in the advertising market - and issues related to public goods. Styli focuses on the public good argument but in terms of the market failure concerning journalism, the market control argument is also relevant. Public goods such as education and roads aren’t governed by the same rules of supply and demand as other goods.

However, usually, public goods are seen as goods that the private sector won’t produce due to the lack of returns. News is still quite a lucrative business but not necessarily at the local or hyperlocal level. The Google News Initiative, FT Strategies and INMA researched the issues that contribute to sustainable news organisations, and they found that big news organisations are getting bigger. Smaller, local and hyperlocal news organisations are struggling.

Sustainability Insights from the News Sustainability Project June 2023 report.

It is consistent with the “winner takes most” dynamic that the Reuters Institute has identified in their last few Digital News Reports. However, the challenges aren’t simply about scale. Those local publishers most dependent on print were the least prepared for the future.

For large private and public news organisations like the New York Times, they can approach the challenge as a Kodak moment. They have the resources and more importantly, the scale, to invest in the R&D and products to respond to challenges with disruptive or discontinuous innovation. However, for the smaller local and hyperlocal news organisations, Styli believes that the challenge they face is one of market failure, and he says that whatever challenges news organisations face in North America and Western Europe, news organisations in Africa face seven times the challenge. To meet this challenge, he sees two responses - philanthropy and policy. He gave an example of how the venture capital industry in South Africa was given special tax rules to stimulate investment.

He pointed to efforts in the US. California recently reached a settlement with Google which will provide five years of support for news organisations and set up an AI Accelerator. The settlement has met mixed views (full story also the first link below from Poynter), with some critics saying it is bad for journalism and democracy. As Steven Waldman, the founder of Rebuild Local News said in the piece on Poynter, the legislation in states including California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Washington treats news as a public good, echoing Styli’s market failure view of the issue. “A movement has been growing that treats local news as a “civic good,” essential to the healthy functioning of a community,” he wrote.

I have to agree with one of Steven’s criticisms of some of the new legislation. California’s law excludes public media, which having worked in US public media is a mistake. But I’m not surprised, there has long been a newspaper versus broadcast mentality in the US which ignores a lot of the public interest reporting done by public media. Moreover, non-profit news organisations do not have representation on the board that will govern the programme in California. Legislation in New York excludes funding for non-profits all together as well as “digital only” community news sites. What century are we in?

Ken Doctor was more positive, and he brought an important perspective to this discussion. Not only has Ken written the Newsonomics column for Nieman Lab for years, but he is also the CEO and co-founder of local news start-up Lookout Santa Cruz. He outlined some important questions that policymakers grappled with in developing the legislation. “Who’s a journalist? Which publishers should get priority; should small outfits get more? Should Alden, Gannett, and McClatchy (large legacy chains get any money at all? How do you make sure the government doesn’t pick winners and losers? Should the platforms be forced to pay for their impact on news fortunes?”

But Ken says it is a win. Money will flow to journalists, although he cedes text-based journalists rather than broadcasters. The California plan has some excellent outcomes. Of the settlement, 12% has been reserved for smaller outlets, those with five or fewer journalists. Plus, while the Canadian journalism legislation provided more money for outlets, it also had a horrible unintended consequence when Facebook and Google stopped linking to journalism outlets. “That’s contributed, by one estimate, to a loss of “news engagement” of 58% by local news outlets and 24% for national ones,” Ken said. It was disastrous for local, independent and underserved audiences. Ken estimates tax credits in California’s plan “could amount to 15 to 20% of our expense budgets”. That is not trivial.

I’ve been following the policy debates out of the corner of my eye, but Styli’s comments and analysis and what I have read have led me to understand the importance of a policy response to the crisis in local journalism. I’ll be keeping a closer on this.

The California local news deal with Google is both a model and a cautionary tale - Poynter

The final deal for local news funding doesn't match initial hopes, but Rebuild Local News' founder argues it's still progress.

www.poynter.org/business-work/2024/the-california-local-news-deal-with-google-is-both-a-model-and-a-cautionary-tale

An interesting look at the ‘reboot’ of the newspaper that until recently was known as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Their new strategy has them focusing on the state rather than just the Twin Cities. While they will be focusing on a larger geography, they will be narrowing their coverage to focus on things that they think are distinctive to the state.

Disclosure: Pugpig, where I work, built the new app for the Minnesota Star-Tribune.

Rebooting the Minnesota Star Tribune: A Conversation with Steve Grove

From paper of record to paper of relevancy

open.substack.com/pub/dicktofel/p/rebooting-the-minnesota-star-tribune?r=1u7ee&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Speaking of success stories, the Salt Lake Tribune is building on its shift to a non-profit. Non-profits have a different and wider range of internal and external stakeholders (including their own staff), and this Nieman Lab report talks about a “refreshingly readable and transparent” annual report they have just published.

The Salt Lake Tribune, profitable and growing, seeks to rid itself of that “necessary evil” — the paywall

The first daily newspaper in the U.S. to become a nonprofit has published a refreshingly readable and transparent annual report.

www.niemanlab.org/2024/09/the-salt-lake-tribune-profitable-and-growing-seeks-to-rid-itself-of-that-necessary-evil-the-paywall

Last week at the News in the Digital Age conference, the point was made that generative AI models can’t use AI-generated content to continue to refine their models. After a few generations, the models collapse or are poisoned. Big Think explains the issue. I think it points why OpenAI and other major players are keen to strike deals with content creators. They need a continuous source of new, human-created material.

“Model collapse” threatens to kill progress on generative AIs

Generative AIs start churning out nonsense when trained on synthetic data — a problem that could put a ceiling on their ability to improve.

bigthink.com/the-future/ai-model-collapse

Google’s Search Generative Experience is being rolled out, and I noticed the AI summaries appear in many of the questions that I asked Google. One thing I noticed positively was how Google was linking to the sources that informed the summaries. That’s a good result. Street Fight highlights how local publishers how local businesses and publishers can take advantage of “AI Overviews” and the new Core Update for August. As I keep telling clients with our Consulting practice at Pugpig, Google is rewading “high-quality, useful content while penalizing content designed solely for SEO purposes”. Don’t try to game SEO. Focus on original reporting and high-quality content. Google is aligned with good journalism and good product practices.

AI Overviews , Core Update | Street Fight | Street Fight

In this week’s Streets Ahead update we discuss recent Google changes in AI Overviews as well as the conclusion of Google's August Core Update.

streetfightmag.com/2024/09/05/streets-ahead-ai-overviews-and-organic-search-google-core-update-concludes

And at the other end of the high-quality internet sits Elon Musk’s dumpster file ExTwitter. It shows how ideology can destroy long-term value creation.

Advertiser exodus from X gathers pace with 26% ‘planning to cut spending’

Annual survey highlights growing concern about platform content and trust in information disseminated

www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/sep/05/advertiser-exodus-x-survey-2025-elon-musk

Porto’s Dom Luís Bridge from the Bishop’s Palace.

I am back after a week’s break and an incredible trip to Porto. I promised my wife I would take her there and originally had hinted that I would take her there to propose. We celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary in February so it took me a while. However, this is the quintessential case of better late than never. I first went to Porto almost 20 years ago with my parents, as an anniversary gift to them. I thoroughly enjoyed it then, but my wife and I loved it this time. The city is a foodie and wine lover’s delight with plenty of exceptional food and wine at reasonable prices - case in point, the Mercado do Bolhão. Right, this isn’t a food or travel newsletter so I’ll return to your regularly scheduled programming.

In my last newsletter, I wrote about product managers’ cross-functional superpowers, and that’s true whether they are working in news organisations or other industries. Working across silos is key to managing large complex projects, whether that is editorial or the commercial-technical-editorial work necessary to sustain news organisations in the volatile markets of today. Product managers are naturally inclined to cross-functional work. They explore and cross the internal and external boundaries of their organisations out of natural curiosity. (I am finding that the boundaries I enjoy exploring most are external to the organisation, with customers, partners and suppliers, which is common to market research and partnerships.) Product managers built up expertise, relationships and trust across the organisation before they transitioned into formal product roles.

Transformation projects and product operations are imperilled when that trust is damaged or when frustrations build over delivery, which can be a product or project management issue. When I was at The Guardian, we were in the midst of a massive re-platforming, R2 - re-design and relaunch. It absorbed almost all of our technical and delayed delivery on near-term priorities from the editorial teams. That created a lot of conflict internally between the technical team and the various editorial centres of power, which were legion and fractious.

That is now a long time ago. I was at The Guardian between 2006 and 2010, but these issues still exist, even at large, well-regarded, product-led news organisations. In my research, I thought I would find that large news organisations would be better at cross-functional product operations, and they were in general. However, with the volatile media market right now, several large news organisations are going through major transformation projects - CNN, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. The industry press if full of stories about the challenges and internal tensions involved. If you look at the Washington Post, before its current conflict with its new CEO, it was in crisis with losses and layoffs. For those in the product community, the Post lost several well-regarded technology and product leaders.

Silos that are busted can be rebuilt. Fortunately, there is excellent research on how to work in collaborative, cross-functional teams. Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson outlined how leaders build collaborative teams in the Harvard Business Review. Teams are increasingly “large, virtual, diverse, and composed of highly educated specialists”, but these characteristics “make it hard for teams to get anything done”. To counter these factors and support collaboration, “requires thoughtful, and sometimes significant, investments in the capacity for collaboration across the organization”.

They reviewed 55 organisations that demonstrated highly collaborative working practices and found several common elements, several of which I found in my research as well.

• Executive support - I found that high-level alignment was necessary. This research found that executives also needed to “invest in supporting social relationships, demonstrate collaborative behavior themselves”.

• Invest in signature relationship practices - Collaborative companies invested in “building and maintaining relationships throughout the organisation”. This is critical. Product managers in my research naturally created these relationships. Companies that were able to build collaborative cultures intentionally fostered and nurtured these relationships.

• Modelling collaborative behaviour - The senior leadership in these companies modelled collaborative behaviour. I have seen the inside of a lot of media organisations. Some have collaborative cultures, but I have also worked for and seen many that have high degrees of internal competition amongst fiefdoms.

• Create a “gift culture” - Leaders need to engage in mentoring and coaching behaviour and make sure that it becomes embedded across the organisation.

These are the things that leadership need to do. It goes beyond simply aligning around goals and outlines the continual, intentional process of modelling a collaborative culture that is necessary for complex, cross-functional work, of which product work is an important element. Now onto the links for this week.

Doug McCabe at Enders Analysis looks at ways that publishers can find their next source of growth. He sees a shift from generalist to niche publications, and I would add that those publications need to ensure that their content is distinctive and adds value.

Returning to growth

Where is the growth opportunity for today’s publishers? Douglas McCabe tracks how the commercial model has evolved over the past fifty years and examines whether a better understanding of what online audiences want, will help drive future growth.

www.inpublishing.co.uk/articles/returning-to-growth-24443

This is a great example of how smaller, more engaged audiences are the key to success for modern news organisations. Dennik in central Europe provides a great playbook on how to achieve it.

72k subscribers helping cover 70% costs of Denník N’s 130-journalist newsroom

2024-08-14. Founded by a group of journalists 10 years ago, Denník N has grown into a major player with operations extending into the Czech Republic and Hungary, thanks to its unique subscription model. Tomas Bella, Chief Digital Officer and co-founder of Denník N, describes the news company’s decade-long journey from a start-up to one of the top news organisations in Slovakia.

wan-ifra.org/2024/08/72k-subscribers-helping-cover-70-costs-of-dennik-ns-130-journalist-newsroom

The common theme in the application of AI in journalism is humans in the loop. Ultimately, they assist but do not supplant journalism. I always thought of it this way. I would outsource to machines (or to lower cost labour) tasks that freed up journalists to do more original reporting, a thing that AI cannot do.

How Swedish Radio balances AI and journalism without falling for hype

“These are terrific tools, but they are tools to assist journalism, and doing real human-based journalism has never been more important”, says pioneer Olle Zachrison

reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/how-swedish-radio-balances-ai-and-journalism-without-falling-hype

We’re going through a phase in journalism in which large media organisations have cast off huge numbers of staff, and some of them are creating their own publications and supporting themselves on platforms like Substack or Beehiiv (which I use to publish this newsletter).

Independent journalist era takes off on Substack

A boom in digital publishing tech combined with a slew of media cutbacks prompted a big wave of journalists to go independent during the pandemic.

www.axios.com/2024/08/13/independent-journalists-substack-news

The Boston Globe hired three staffers to create a podcast, but they are now redeploying them because they have found that podcasts do not drive subscriptions.

After hiring new staff, Globe changes its mind on podcast

Linda Henry, the CEO and co-owner of the Globe, said the turnabout on podcasts was driven by the realization that audio journalism may be compelling but does not attract subscribers.

commonwealthbeacon.org/media/after-hiring-new-staff-globe-changes-its-mind-on-podcast

In this year of critical lessons, journalists are working to fact-check candidates. Research has found that journalists gain more trust when confirm claims rather than when they debunk them. That may prove difficult with certain candidates - not naming names.

Readers trust journalists less when they debunk rather than confirm claims

Stein is an associate professor of marketing at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Meyersohn is pursuing an Ed.S. in school psychology California State University, Long Beach. Pointing out that someone else is wrong is a part of life. And journalists need to do this all the time – the...

thefulcrum.us/media-technology/media-fact-check

After I finished my master’s now more than two years ago, I had the honour to present my research to journalism leaders a couple of times. Some of them were doing research of their own. One critique that I have faced is that I had highlighted problems facing product managers at news organisations but that I hadn’t provided solutions.

Academic research is a different beast than industry research, and it is about focus, particularly at the master’s level. In academic research, one paper can identify an issue, and another paper then looks at a solution. I am motivated to continue my research because I have heard positive feedback that I have identified an important issue affecting retention and the effectiveness of product management at news organisations.

However, my master’s studies in innovation management and leadership did give me some great ideas for how to improve product management generally, and in news organisations specifically.

Building cross-functional relationships

To develop managers and to increase innovation capabilities, news organisations should identify possible innovation and product leaders and give them opportunities to work across the organisation, across editorial, commercial and technical teams.

What was interesting is that my research found that product managers did this naturally. They reached across the organisational boundaries in their organisations because they were curious about how everything in publishing or broadcasting worked. For those coming up through the editorial side of their organisations, like me, this was just an extension of the curiosity that had attracted them to journalism in the first place. The relationships that they developed via informal, internal networking positioned them to be successful product managers. One highly successful product manager in a large digital news organisation continued this practice in the role, having informal meetings with colleagues he worked with cross-functionally.

This cross-functional curiosity wasn’t always rewarded my research participants and product management friends in the industry told me (and I have experienced first hand). With editorial being the apex culture in news organisations, any deviation from that career path can be a “career-limiting exercise”, to borrow a phrase from a former manager. Many product managers who left the editorial career path struggled to ever cross that boundary back to senior editorial management. Product-minded editorial managers rise in editorial only if they stay in the newsroom. This is all to say that news organisations have a poor track record of rewarding cross-functional work and leadership.

Outside of journalism, it is much different. Innovative companies formalised this relationship and skill-building. They identified cross-functional curiosity and fostered it in future leaders, either product managers or general managers. It allowed them to build up relationships and domain knowledge across the business.

Supporting cross-functional, boundary-spanning work

I think this doesn’t happen enough in news organisations because of the church-state boundaries between editorial and commercial teams. It’s not just church-state boundaries but the primacy of editorial leadership in news organisations. As Lucy Küng says, editorial is the apex culture in news organisations. Editorial teams need to be more collegial and support cross-functional collaboration.

Working across these boundaries is critical for the future of news businesses, but we struggle to do it. Most journalism leaders call it cross-functional work, but researchers call it boundary-spanning. I came to really appreciate the term boundary-spanning because cross-functional focuses on functions and the org chart. Boundaries are a much richer way to analyse the things that get in our way of functioning more effectively as organisations.

Those boundaries can be physical as well as organisational. At one of the newspapers I edited in Wisconsin for Gannett, the commercial and administrative staff were on the first floor, and the editorial teams were on the second floor. A plaque with the First Amendment hung on the wall of a landing on the stairs. It was a clear boundary marker between the commercial and editorial territory of the newspaper.

Yes, there are team boundaries, but there are boundaries of language. I spoke to a product manager outside of journalism, and he described feeling like a translator at the UN or sometimes feeling like he had to have a passport to reach outside of his team.

In media organisations, boundaries exist around deadlines as well. Print journalists used to talk about the daily miracle of putting out a newspaper, and in the era of 24/7 news, deadlines are continuous and rolling. Digital project deadlines can stretch into months, especially with large projects like re-platforming to a new CMS or CRM. I have seen firsthand how these differing timelines can cause friction. If those conflicts aren’t managed, critical cross-functional relationships are damaged. Product managers rely on these relationships to get things done, and the conflict can lead to unsustainable stress that leads to burnout for product managers.

In my research, many product managers said that their boundary-spanning, cross-functional work wasn’t valued or supported. It might well be that managers don’t understand product management. That was another issue that product managers raised. Of course, it is different for most large organisations like the BBC and the New York Times, and Dean Roper of WAN-IFRA just teased on LinkedIn that news organisations say product management and R&D are their biggest priorities in the annual Press Trends survey.

Managing emotional labour in the workplace

Of course, my research identified another issue: the emotional labour that women in product management experienced. As I pointed out in my newsletter last week. this wasn’t work that the business expected of women, but the women all spoke that they thought supporting their colleagues emotionally was important work. And they didn’t see others stepping up to do it. This was the most unexpected finding of my research, and it made me aware of how this happens in the workplace. It is like something difficult to unsee once seen, and I am very aware of it now.

Another thing that my research sensitised me to is women taking conflict in the workplace personally. As my research unfolded, I began asking the men and women in the research how they interpreted conflict in their cross-functional work. One woman said:

Another woman working at a small digital publisher said she felt a lack of understanding of her role and her team’s role and their contributions. She took this personally particularly when it was directed at her team members.

Taking conflict personally wasn’t universal amongst the women in the research, but it was common amongst those women who left jobs or the industry. But this was almost entirely absent from the men in the research. When men spoke of conflict in their work, I asked them whether they took it personally. One man working at a small broadcaster said he didn’t take it personally and kept in mind they were all part of the same team.

My suggestions to news organisations who want their product function to be more effective and who want to attract and retain product talent:

1. As I wrote as I opened this series on my research, senior management must be aligned on high-level goals and priorities. This will mitigate the conflict around cross-functional work.

2. Managers need to be aware of issues around emotional labour, particularly women in management roles. I don’t think that this impulse is limited to product management roles.

3. Women most often talked about engaging in emotional management when they sensed conflict. Their managers need to be aware of conflict that arises in cross-functional, boundary-spanning work.

On that last point, that is an area that is ripe for additional research. It was one of the shortcomings of my paper that I didn’t leave myself enough space to discuss where to take my findings next. Managing cross-functional team conflict is well-researched, and it’s a way that academic research can support product management in news organisations. I’m going to look into the research a bit more and will add more here.

And now onto the links for this week.

The classic interview question: What do you want to be doing in five years? The Washington Post believes that the job many journalists will be doing in five years currently doesn’t exist. She is the Post’s first senior editor for AI Strategy and Innovation. The profile and interview outline her career journey and the work that she is doing now with teams across the Post to integrate AI into their work.

‘Your job five years from now probably does not yet exist’ – WaPo's AI Editor Phoebe Connelly

The Washington Post’s Senior Editor for AI Strategy and Innovation shares key learnings, inspirations – and why she’s excited about the future of journalism.

wan-ifra.org/2024/08/your-job-five-years-from-now-probably-does-not-yet-exist-wapos-ai-editor-phoebe-connelly

Reach in the UK is seeing some bright spots in their revenue situation as they start to see digital revenue growth for the first time since 2022. The group has seen traffic drop from Facebook, which had been key to its strategy, particularly at their national titles. Programmatic rates have stabilised. It provides insights into how volume publishers are finding some opportunities.

Reach reports first digital revenue growth since 2022

Reach half-year results 2024: Revenue down by 5% year-on-year but digital back in growth in Q2 and data-driven ad revenues up.

pressgazette.co.uk/media_business/reach-half-year-results-2024

El Nacional’s experience with SEO jibes with what I have seen for several publishers: Google Discover is driving a lot of traffic for them. The group’s focus on content makes so much sense with Google’s Helpful Content Algorithm update earlier this year. It benefits distinctive content and will punish ‘spammy, low-quality’ content, Google said, not mincing words.

At El Nacional, they talk about playing offence with their reporters producing original, investigative journalism and defence, journalist producing lifestyle content and their designers, creating great user experience. Their ‘defensive midfielders’ are their SEO staff, working to make sure that their great content is discoverable.

El Nacional takes a whole-company approach to SEO

Using fútbol as the perfect metaphor, Clara Soteras, head of SEO and product at El Nacional, explains how the Spanish news company approaches its SEO strategy.

www.inma.org/blogs/conference/post.cfm/el-nacional-takes-a-whole-company-approach-to-seo

It has been a tense few weeks in the UK after the shocking murder of three girls in Stockport. Communities across the UK have seen anti-immigrant violence with attacks on police and journalists. Another element of this is not only how social media and messaging apps have played a role in fomenting violence but also how EX-Twitter owner Elon Musk has inserted himself into the situation, levelling a charge against the British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer that is common amongst far-right agitators. Across the political spectrum, those who have used the platforms to make threats and stoke violence are facing the full force of the law in the UK. Fighting words aren’t protected speech in the UK or the US.

Journalists facing 'appalling harassment and abuse' amid riots

Journalists facing "appalling harassment and abuse" amid riots across England and Northern Ireland in the past week.

pressgazette.co.uk/news/journalists-increasingly-being-targeted-riots

A cool bit of inside the Olympic games with a look at how Getty is getting those incredible images from the games. Private 5G networks, underwater robots and more.

How Getty beams those incredible Olympic images around the world within seconds

Getty uses private 5G networks and other technology to beam images from the Paris Games instantly.

www.axios.com/2024/08/08/getty-olympics-simoone-biles-rebeca-andrade-photo

Last week, I wrote about how lack of alignment and priorities was causing frustration amongst product managers in news organisations. Without alignment from C-level stakeholders, my research found that pressures built up on the product managers, causing some to burn out, leave jobs or, in extreme cases, leave the industry.

My research found something else that product team managers and other senior stakeholders should take note of. I interviewed 17 product managers, with an even balance of men and women. Five of them had left positions or the industry, and of the five, four were women. What was going on?

Some of it was down to pay differential. “Right before I left, I was promoted ..., but there was no money involved. It was not an actual promotion to reflect the work that I had done for three years,” a product manager at a small digital outlet told me. Moreover, she found that a male colleague who had the same title as she did was given $2000 more in salary when they had both asked for pay raises. “That was pretty devastating for me,” she said.

Women in the survey struggled to find a balance between assertiveness and confidence that was acceptable in their workplace. One product manager who worked for a small print outlet said that she felt as if she was stepping on people’s toes when she did cross-functional work at her publication. She worked to develop her confidence in a leadership development course. But confident, assertive leadership by women in product management was not always rewarded. A woman working at a small digital outlet was told in an evaluation that she was “aggressive … which, as a woman, was just like ‘fuck you’”.

But the research uncovered something else, which managers will need to monitor for women on their team. They spoke about feeling the need to carry out emotional labour. “I don't know how bad this is going to sound, but as a woman, I'm kind of used to doing emotional labour so it doesn't really seem like it's an extra thing that I have to do for my job. It felt like something I always had to do,” a woman working in product management at a major broadcaster said. When I asked her what she meant by emotional labour, she gave the example of feeling the need to make sure everyone was OK after a meeting that hadn’t gone well. Another woman at a large broadcaster described something similar. "(B)eing a female-presenting person in a workplace ... I feel as though I need to be aware of the other person's emotions and (respond) to them accordingly,” she said.

Emotional labour first was researched 40 years ago.

However, when the women in my research talked about emotional labour, the behaviour they described was not due to training or expectations from their employers, but were expectations they had of themselves. I suggested that a new theory was needed to explain what these women were describing.

“To differentiate the participants’ experience from emotional labour, the research suggests a construct that is best framed as gender socialised emotional management. This term captures the emotional caretaking responsibility that women felt for those around them based on gender role socialisation,” I wrote.

I have had some pushback from women in product management because I think they interpreted my research as implying women were acting emotionally. I want to be careful and clear, because that’s not what the women I spoke to were saying. Rather, they were displaying empathy for colleagues whom they felt needed support. Emotional management isn’t acting emotionally, it is when people are doing more than their fair share of managing others’ emotions.

Next week, I’m going to go beyond my research and discuss how managers should respond.

What do I want to do when I grow up?

This is a new section. Let me know how you find it. My work at Pugpig is only the second full-time job that I’ve had that isn’t in media. After I finished my master’s degree at the end of 2021, my wife Suw and I had a plan that I would spend the next year exploring what I wanted to do. Instead, I took the job at Pugpig, and we moved back from the US (where I’m from) to the UK (where Suw’s from). Earlier this year, I decided to return to that plan and do some intentional career planning. I settled on working with both a career coach and a leadership coach. My career coach has been helping me explore different options for the next chapter in life, and my leadership coach is helping me develop my leadership skills and also develop better professional habits.

I’ll be writing a bit more about my process over the coming newsletters, but I wanted to share some excellent resources I think some of you might find useful. My leadership coach, Jo Shaw, suggested that I check out the Anxious Achiever podcast by Morra Aarons-Mele, and I’m glad I did. Episodes I’ve listened to recently cover whether people pleasing is hurting your career and also what to do when anxiety becomes a habit. For those journalists or editors who read this newsletter, the latest episode is about managing your mental health when your job is covering the US election. I’ll be sharing other resources and my career exploration in coming editions of the newsletter.

But for now, the links for this week.

When approaching innovation, it is so often about sequencing. Adam Ryan talks about their intentional and deliberate diversification plan as thy have built their business.

“Diversification too fast is too risky”: Workweek’s Adam Ryan on the importance of baby steps

Workweek is one of the most successful stories in modern publishing and in the space of little over 32 months has turned the traditional B2B model on its

mediamakersmeet.com/diversification-too-fast-is-too-risky-workweeks-adam-ryan-on-the-importance-of-baby-steps

Newsletters have become the goto minimum viable product. For this local news operation in the US, 60% of its ad revenue comes from “high open rate newsletters”. What is a high open rate? An astounding 70%. Their newsletters have five ad slots, and they work with a single local agency to sell the spots.

BoiseDev's winning secret to selling newsletter ads: Only local news, only local ads - LION Publishers

In this spotlight, we take a look at how BoiseDev has built out its successful newsletter advertising program.

www.lionpublishers.com/boisedevs-winning-secret-to-selling-newsletter-ads-only-local-news-only-local-ads

This is a powerful case for audience development. It’s a combination of five lessons from a course that The Fix offered. I’ll highlight just one. “Learning about the audience you don’t have”, from Joy Mayer of Trusting News in the US. It is excellent advice for how to reach those who don’t currently engage with news. In an age of news fatigue and avoidance, Joy has some great advice.

Five lessons I’ve learned about audience building - The Fix

“If you have ten people and one of them resigns, hire an audience person,” recommends Dmitry Shishkin, CEO of Ringier Media International.

thefix.media/2024/07/25/five-lessons-ive-learned-about-audience-building

Successes and challenges in local journalism

Local media has been going through a period of tumultuous transition since the late 1990s. From the early 1990s until the mid-Naughties, large print media groups in the US and UK kept their bottom line healthy by reducing their costs - mostly through cuts. Those cuts have been increasingly deep over the past decade.

But now, we’re seeing green shoots of growth from small, entrepreneurial shops develop new models, like Mill Media in the UK. It is one of those newsletter-led companies, and they have expanded from Manchester to other cities.

Gem in the making? How Mill Media is extracting journalism gold, locally

In mining, milling is the process by which waste rock is extracted from precious metals before smelting – a process Mill Media is following to pave the way for a ‘potential new Golden Age for local journalism’.

wan-ifra.org/2024/07/gem-in-the-making-how-mill-media-is-extracting-journalism-gold-locally

But not all start-ups are thriving. This story from California shows the challenges of a being funded by a benefactor and when that funding wanes without a sustainable business model.

Long Beach looked like it had solved the local news crisis. Then reality set in

An emaciated newspaper and warring websites try to cover Long Beach. Until recently, the Long Beach Post seemed to have the journalistic answers.

www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-24/long-beach-media-coverage

This shows how much pressure the BBC and other public broadcasters are under in the age of streaming. Sitting here watching the US women gymnastics team on the BBC, I still have such deep affection for the Beeb, which gave me my break in international journalism. But they are under tremendous pressure from competitors and after more than a decade of deep cuts.

Half a million households cancelled BBC licence fee last year

Corporation faces stark challenge as it struggles to reach younger audiences who are watching Netflix and YouTube

www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/jul/23/half-million-households-cancelled-bbc-licence-fee-last-year

Google had said that they were going to eliminate third-party cookies, but they have reversed course. They are going to leave the decision up to users.

Why Google's cookie deprecation reversal isn't actually a reprieve for publishers

Publishers are keeping a "business as usual" approach to testing cookieless alternatives despite Google's announcement that it won't be fully deprecating third-party cookies after all.

digiday.com/media/why-googles-cookie-deprecation-reversal-isnt-actually-a-reprieve-for-publishers