[upbeat music] This week's episode is presented by Beehiiv, the platform trusted by enterprise publishers like Newsweek and Time.
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And you can meet with Beehiiv's team of growth and newsletter experts today. Thanks so much, Beehiiv, for your support and partnership. Welcome to the Rebooting show. I am Brian Morrissey.
I find as I keep getting older, fellow older people keep trying to figure out what young people want from news.
This landed home yet again with results from a new report from the News Literacy Project that detailed how teens appraise the news profession. Spoiler alert, it's not good.
Almost half of teens said journalists do more harm to democracy than what they do to protect it. That's bad.
Only a little over half teens, fifty-six percent, believe that journalists and news organizations take journalism standards such as accuracy and fairness seriously in their work. Also not good.
Eighty percent of teens said that journalists fail to produce information that is more impartial than other content creators online. That is really disturbing.
And then sixty-nine percent of teens thought news organizations intentionally add bias to coverage to advance a specific perspective. This one is kind of expected. Overall, in a word, yikes.
And this isn't a Gen Z problem, of course, as trust in news has greatly diminished over the last couple of decades.
Ramin Beheshti is the former CTO at Dow Jones, and he believes that the way to get young people invested in news is to rebuild the product around how young people actually consume information now.
That is not by lecturing at them, not by expecting them to come back to homepages, but by meeting them on the platforms where they already live and building formats that fit how they consume information.
I mean, this is a, one of those simple but hard problems to solve.
In Ramin's view, this industry's mistake has been assuming that audiences will adapt to news providers when it's obvious that the reverse needs to take place.
News providers have to adapt to how their audiences want the information, and that is the simple premise behind Caliber, where Ramin is the CEO. Caliber holds the News Movement, The Recount, Capsule, and now SaySo.
They are all attempts to capture the next generation with news that fits into their lives.
We get into how he thinks about product, platforms, the erosion of institutional trust, and of course, my favorite topic, why microtransactions might be a better bet than yet another recurring subscription.
I hope you enjoy this conversation, I know I did, with Ramin. Let me know what kind of conversations that you wanna hear more of. Love to hear from listeners. My email is brian@therebooting.com.
And I should add, if you can and you enjoy this podcast, leave it a rating and review.
Everything I read, or at least when I go back and forth with ChatGPT about this, says that actually ratings and reviews do play some role in the mysterious algorithms that surface podcasts to other people.
It is some kind of social proof, so it's important, and also, by the way, I like reading the reviews, particularly nice ones. So if you get a chance, please leave one. Now here's my conversation with Ramin.
[upbeat music] Ramin, welcome to the podcast. Hi, Brian. How you doing? Good. Let's get into...
First of all, for, for people who don't know, I mean, I have explained it u-up top, but Caliber encompasses, like, a few brands, and I think they're, they're really all getting at what is...
what's the news product of the future, and particularly for the next generation of news consumers, right? You said it perfectly, Brian. Yeah, we actually rebranded to Caliber, uh, a couple of...
well, in September, and it was to reflect the fact that we've got a stable of, of brands now that are coming at it from various different angles and on various different platforms, which I'm sure we'll get into, in order to be able to reach an audience that, when I was at The Journal, we just didn't seem to consume news content.
And so how can we engage that audience in what you and I know to be news? Well, let's go, let's go through them, and then we can circle back to, to The Journal. So there's the News Movement, right?
Which I feel like in the US is, is less well known as in the UK. Yeah. I think given our background, definitely the newsroom was led out of the UK for the first couple of years.
Actually, interestingly, the audience now is kind of seventy percent in the USThirty percent- Yeah... in, in, in the UK.
So the growth we've definitely seen here, and despite my inflection in my voice, I'm actually based in New York, probably not too far away from you. Yeah, like maybe like a mile.
So for those who don't know, like explain, explain the origins of the News Movement and, and what it, it was and is trying to accomplish. Yeah.
So we started the News Move room back in, uh, we were kind of a bit covert in '21. We built a very small newsroom in London.
I had a couple of co-founders, people who'd been in the industry a long time, people I'd known a long time.
And we started it to, to reach people who were not going to consume traditional media, and that happened to be a, the younger generation. And so we, we created this thing. We started putting out content on TikTok.
And I remember actually at the time, a lot of people, you'd tell were like, "We can't do hard news on TikTok. No one's gonna watch." Yeah. "No one's gonna watch that. No one's gonna engage with it.
Also, it's not proper journalism. You can't tell the Ukraine-Russian war inside sixty seconds." So we got, you know, everyone jumping, like, "Why are you doing this? And why are you not doing news on-" Yeah.
Well, this is also, I mean, TikTok was more known, I feel like even just then. Maybe it, it was-- But it was, it was known as lip syncing and like skits and like, you know, performing. Not...
I mean, now it's like I think much more, you know, well known- Invasive, yeah... and for everything, but.
Yeah, so that, that was the start of origin, and we, we started to realize that, you know, the way the, the algorithm works, that even though we didn't really have a real brand or any kind of following, that we were able to connect this content with audiences.
And so out of that, we, we built the, the News Movement.
And, and the idea was to meet people where they were and where are they spending their time, what knowledge do they have about these subjects, and then how do we deliver content to them in a way that helps them understand what's going on in the world o-on their terms.
I think that's the genesis of, of CNN and the News Movement. And like this, while a lot of that is on social platforms, it's because the audiences that we're going after spend a lot of time on social platforms.
And so what we tried to do is create content that felt native to those platforms. Okay. And, and then y-you acquired the Recount. And Recount sort of I guess had a, had a somewhat similar.
I mean, they were very active in packaging news for, for Twitter and for, for other platforms. Yeah. I, I met Jon Battelle. I was introduced to Jon Battelle, John Hide on the...
And it, the courting process was quite a quick one.
I think, you know, they'd got to the end of their journey with the Recount and were kind of thinking about what, where it was gonna go, and they were on kind of a timescale. And for us, it was a great opportunity.
As you said, CNN were seen slightly more on the UK side- Yeah... at that point, and it was great to be able to bring in a brand that was kind of firmly US-focused, and that's what the Recount does.
It's, it's moved slightly away from repackaging news to being able to kind of tell stories directly to its audience, but it's firmly focused in, in US followers. Right.
And, and so the other parts of the business, expl-explain those, 'cause I mean, you have like a creator network, and you've got a, a trends and, and lifestyle- Yeah, so-... arm too.
I, I'm sure we'll talk about the kind of idea generation that happens at, at Caliber, but, you know, one of our young hires was like, "I'd really like to do this fashion, lifestyle, internet trends newsletter."
She created it. It's called Capsule. It's got... It, it's a, it's a newsletter product on, on Beehiiv. She's been doing it.
It's almost like a passion project, but now has kind of quite a substantial following, a huge open rate, and is starting to bring in kind of commercial revenue. We just did our partnership with Schuh.
We're new, the Schuh provider, um, in the UK. So that's another one of our brands. We're about to, which I'm sure we'll go into, is, is launch this new product called SaySo,
um, which is this kind of app that brings together creators that we think try and meet the bar of journalism, and we created pro- we've created a product for them to be able to monetize their content and for audiences to be able to get the information they need on their terms.
That's another thing that we're just about to launch.
And then the commercial arm, we built a, for want of a better word, social media agency that, that rather s- that takes all of the learning, all of the data, all of the techniques that we do on the news side, on social, and then helps brands create content for their audiences on, on social media, and that's called The Caliber Collective.
So we are now a range of different products, and there's more to come in twenty twenty-six in terms of different brands that are going to add to the stable, which is our. So talk to me about that strategy, right?
I mean, building one brand is, is really hard, right? [chuckles] Like, so- Yeah... talk to me about what, why.
Obviously, there was acquisitions there, but why, why, why, why have a stable of brands rather than a singular one? I think maybe it's to do with my background, right?
I grew up in News Corp, and News Corp is nothing if not relentless at finding different ways of reaching audiences with different content. So maybe it was the environment that I planned, that we grew up in.
But, but also, actually, if you look at modern media today, it allows you to create-Different content which people are interest, which different groups of people are interested in, rather than trying to be this kind of all-encompassing, all-serving product, uh, for different ages, different genders, different types of content.
So that's, that's really the thinking behind Caliber actually, is, is the ability to create different content for different audiences depending on where they're spending their time, what level of understanding they're in, and also who they are as well.
Yeah. So what-- explain to me your sort of theory of the case when it comes to news and Gen Z.
I mean, before we got started, I, like, prepared you by saying, like, "I remember talking to all the people who were telling me news were, was broken for millennials."
[laughs] And most of that, like, ended up not really coming to fruition.
The people who said they were gonna remake news for millennial tastes, you know, it ended up being that the ones who did survive, you know, were just regular news providers, like The New York Times was, was the one.
So tell me about, like, how there's obviously a ton of changes going on right now in the media ecosystem.
Like, I call it, like, the information space because the, the media industry and the news industry is just a small part, right? And they're, in many cases, if not most cases, losing, right?
Like, personalities are beating sort of institutional brands out there. Video is beating text, et cetera.
Give me your sort of theory of the case about how news as a product needs to change in order to continue to be relevant with the next generation of news consumers.
Because I'm not even sure if it's still as relevant with the sort of current generations [laughs], you know, like, if you look at the statistics. Yeah.
And I, I think you're seeing, just to go back to the, the start of that, we had all of this thrown at us. You're trying to be the next Vice, you're trying to be this, you're trying to be that.
I think there are lessons to be learned from some of those brands that they... What they did do was they created content that connected with those audiences. That's undeniable.
Whether they were able to sustain is a different story, but they, they were disruptors. They just didn't, they didn't kind of have that long tail or that, that legacy.
You know, part of that is some of the lessons that, that we're trying to incorporate. You grow old with your audience, right?
We started this business four years ago when Gen Z were at, you know, at college, finishing high school. They're now in the world of work.
We had a decision to make, and, and Gen Z is the focus of, of CNN, which is one of our brands. Does CNN grow older? Does it try and kind of stay young?
And I know that's been, you know, in the, in the gravestones of media companies that have tried to do this in the past, that's been part of the, the challenge.
Can you, can, can you continue to stay cool in here or do you kind of age up with your audience?
So again, it's, it's something that we're gonna be talking about more publicly with just with a bit of a rebrand with, with, with CNN. And the idea is we're gonna grow with Gen Zs.
What Gen Z were doing four years ago is very different to what Gen Z are thinking about and growing with, with now, and so that affects the content. It affects how we deliver that content.
I'd say that's a lesson that, that we've learned from, from some of our predecessors. You know, I- Mm-hmm.... I have grown up in news, right? I've been doing it, I sometimes kind of pinch myself, for 15 years.
It wasn't an industry I ever thought I'd be in, but it's one that I, I, I've been on the other side. But nothing more so now than at any point in the past, there is a fragmentation. We touched upon it, right? The...
You are seeing more and more personalities go to the platforms and create content directly reaching audiences that previously would have subscribed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall, the Wall Street Journal.
But that there is an erosion of, of trust for the institution, which, you know, personally, I think is kind of misguided, but that's the way the audiences are, are going, and the, the trust is in the individual.
And so there is a huge opportunity to help facilitate that, that shift and that transition. Right. But w- like, talk to me about the product itself, right?
So I mean, I think there's, I think there's a product challenge, right? Like, I mean, a lot of what... And I think this is, is beyond just Gen Z. You know, a lot of the news industry is shipping irrelevant product.
You know, like, I mean, it... The idea of the webpage as the atomic unit is gonna seem kinda crazy in a few years, it seems pretty clear, right?
You, you have the broadcast TV networks that almost look like parodies now when you, like, turn on the TV if you do, right? Because, like, the, the culture has seemingly m- moved on, right? And, and, and on and on.
Obviously, I'm not getting into, like, the analog.
And it's pretty clear that, you know, whether it's, it's TikTok or whether it's video podcasts, that there are, there's different news formats and products that are winning in the m- in the marketplace.
They might not come from capital J journalists, but it doesn't really matter because you gotta compete [laughs]. You know? That is one cardinal rule of the information space.
You better like competing, because you're gonna compete, and everyone is competing for attention out there. Journalism is not a credentialed profession, for, for good or for ill, and so, you know, good luck.
You've got to battle with all of TikTok. How do you go... H- how do you need to change the n- the product that you're shipping? Yeah. I mean, it's a fascinating challenge, RJ, and I...
If I, if I reflect on-Traditional media, and you said the webpage and the website that is pretty moved into digital. Like, there, there's not a lot of transformation that has really happened.
If you strip it all back, it's, it's still editors deciding what you read and which order you read it predominantly. And I think there has been a reluctance as an industry to, to change.
And you said it really, really well, and it's because this is something that you study and do, that it's already happened.
Like, audiences have already moved away from receiving news in the way the news organizations would like them to go to kind of consume news.
One of the things that I always say to the team is one of the most slightly arrogant things that the news industry did, like, I don't want to separate me from it.
I was i- in a traditional news organization, and we implemented this feature, was the amount of time it takes to read an article. Yeah.
Because what you're really saying is, if you don't have nine minutes or six minutes or five minutes, you can't consume this piece of information.
In a world where everything is tailor-made for you as a consumer, the fact that that's what you move to from a news perspective rather than actually how do I fit news in with the amount of time that somebody actually has to give me or the level of understanding that they have, that is where I think the news or news industry as a whole doesn't serve its audience.
And it's allowed or enabled, I would say, kind of non-capital J journalists or creators to come in and fill that space. I also think part of the challenge is people aren't as interested in the news as journalists are.
And so the amount of content that's kind of created about a particular subject, people aren't that interested. They kind of want to know the, the, the rough facts, the, the rough set of information.
They don't need five or six articles on a particular subject on a particular day, and it is overwhelming as well as, given the environment that we operate in kind of, uh, across the world, it's quite depressing.
People want to know enough that they don't feel stupid, but they don't, they don't need to be, they don't need to be kind of over consumed- Yeah... about what's going on, uh, in Syria or...
So it's, it's a level at which, and also I'll tell you one other final thing- I mean, how many shutdown articles do you need to read? I mean, honestly, like, I just, I feel like I, I, you're, uh, I don't know.
I might have to like, you know, turn in my journalism card officially, like, with this. But, like, I mean, the reality is that people's lives should not be built around the news. Like, it shouldn't be.
Like, I mean, I like, you know, reading like 10 stories a day about, like, wars that will never actually impact you, I don't think, I think that's like a mental health problem.
Like, I [laughs] like, I, why would anyone do that to themselves?
Like I, I'm in too deep, but, like, I understand news avoidance because the product is really depressing, and it, it is because of the algorithmic recommendation systems, and it moves towards, like, food fights and polarization.
And so I wonder about whether news needs to be a feature, not a product. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. No, I, I couldn't agree more. For most people. It's- Like- For most people...
like for most people- There, there is a, there is a, an oversupply, I would say now, of content for what I would call news junkies, people who can't get enough of this stuff, who want to read 10 articles about...
There's lots of different publications who now- Yeah... service that audience. Over here, there's lots of people who, they, they wanna know enough, but it isn't all-consuming for them. I mean, is it?
Dare I say their job. They're not going over the maps in Donetsk. I mean, it, I, I don't mean to trivialize what's going on, but, like, I don't...
I think that is a very niche behavior, and it should be a very niche behavior. And, and but, but I will say people care, right?
Like, some of the things that have gone big for us was like where we did a piece a couple of years ago about the coup in Gabon on TikTok. I didn't think anyone would care about the coup in Gabon.
They do, but they don't want- Sounds interesting to me. I didn't even know about it.
[laughs] But they don't want six videos about it, and they want 30 seconds of information, so they're better informed than they were 100 seconds ago.
But it's not their be all and end all, and I think recognizing, recognizing that is, is quite a hard thing for, you know, newsrooms, traditional newsrooms to, to, to understand.
And then I think the other thing is, and again, this is, this has been a long-standing factor, this generation, the, the kind of, the younger generation, including Gen Z's, the, the, the millennials as well, they don't wanna be talked down to.
They don't wanna be told or made to feel stupid, and actually news does do that.
It's kind of like we did this piece really early on, but it's been a feature of how we cover the, the news about Ukraine and Russia, and it's assumed that you know
the history of, you know, the Soviet Union, the, the separation, the, the annex- annexing of Crimea. Actually, most people don't know where Ukraine was on a map. Like, this is, uh, talking three years ago. Yeah.
And you have to start there and take people on, on, on a journey. And, and I think like, again, people don't wanna consume news sometimes because it makes them feel stupid.
They're like, "Well, I don't really know what the, the history of the Middle East is." Yeah. "I don't understand what, what's actually happening.
How can I understand it in a way that where someone is alongside me informing me of this rather than talking down to me like a, like a teacher-student relationship?" Well, yeah.
I mean, it's like, it's a t- it's a double-edged sword, right? Like, I mean, you can't assume prior knowledge. I mean, this is always the problem, right, of, of news, but I think it's more acute now.
But at the same time-Like I go back to the Skimm, right? I mean, the Skimm was going to make a digestible news product for millennial women.
Now, as like a Gen X man, I felt like I was like, "Okay, this isn't for me," so maybe I can't like pass judgments on it, but I was like, "I don't-- I can't imagine this is the way [chuckles] people want to..."
I don't know if anyone wants to go back and like the sort of Skimm like archives about how they, they package the, the news. It was, to me, it was...
It, it went a little bit like too far in, in trying to be, you know, it had a little bit of that Steve Buscemi meme- Yes... like, "How do you do, fellow kids?"
The thing about the things like the Skimm, Vice, it did connect with the audience. Like that fact is actually undeniable.
The businesses that you can build around it is where I think for various reasons, be it timing, be it patience of investors, be it valuations that were set based on audience numbers and then have to be lifted up to, that's where those businesses you would, you could argue lost, lost their ways.
But they created content that held the attention of millennial women- Yeah... and millennial generation in, in, in the case of- Mm-hmm... in the case of Vice.
And, um, I think it's what you do with it next that, that is the, the learning, especially that I've taken away. So are you gonna... Uh, do you try to avoid ideological...
I mean, the recount was pretty, was pretty left, at least in an American context. I don't know if it, if it had changed- No, it is. It is... since then. It's pretty left.
Like, and I, [chuckles] you know, there's no monolith of like, you know, younger people that were, they're apparent- about to elect the Democratic socialist in, in New York City and younger people have, have powered that.
How do you think about that? 'Cause I, I do feel, you know, it's a fraught area in some ways because, again, no generation is like monolithic, right?
But I kinda feel like the news organizations studiously saying that they are not going to... That they're completely, quote unquote, "unbiased" just doesn't...
Those kind of like niceties I think like are, are finished with a, a younger generation. I could be wrong. No, I think you're right. I think we, we... CNN in particular started that, right?
We were talking about, you know, trying to be unbiased, trying to show both sides of the story.
That is the kind of ideology, but I would imagine that people can construe us any way that they, they want to, depending on which content they consume from us. But that certainly is at the core of CNN.
The recount, again, the recount is, you know, if you, you had to pick a side, it's definitely more left-leaning. But within that, we tried to create other products.
The, the core of actually CNN as well is trying not to tell you what to think. So we might take stories that you would argue is this, this side leaning or that side leaning, but we're not trying to talk down to you.
So if you look at the way that we approach drugs in society, we're not saying taking drugs is bad. We're saying, "Here's how to take drugs safely."
I know that's not politics per se, but it's, it's not taking a view as to this is right, this is wrong, that's okay, that's not okay.
We're kinda saying like, "If you're gonna do it all, this is what you need to be aware of. These are some of the more rare things that are going on in, in the, in this, in the culture."
With the recount, we've just launched actually a new product under the recount umbrella called Who Broke It, which is a newsletter product that assumes that a lot of people are not consuming politics from mainstream media anymore, and the, the, the old way that the recount does is it brings together what people are saying from the left and the right, but instead of news outlets, it's creators.
So there's a fantastic journalist who works for us, Grace Winsted, who was doing this anyway, and she came back and she said, "Look, we turn this into a product."
It's like, "This is what the left is saying about what Trump did today, creators- Yeah... and this is what the right was saying that, that Trump did today," and slightly taking the telling you what to think out of it.
It's kind of like actually, if you wanna know what the next generation are reading, saying, or thinking, here's what the left and the right are doing.
So I guess what we're trying to do is find elements of balance in other parts of what, what we do.
It's incredibly hard to, to do it in politics, and also when you've got brands that have got preconceptions like the recount, for example. Yeah. So how do you think about the platform question, right?
Like I mean, they're... You're gonna wanna reach young people where they are, and they're on TikTok, they're on Instagram, et cetera.
And obviously, the previous generation of, [chuckles] of news did not do great with the platforms.
We used to have a, a GIF in my last job of, of Charlie Brown getting the football snatched out from him and him going flying, and put that on stories where it applied.
Pretty much every story that dealt with publishers dealing with technology [chuckles] platforms got that GIF. We had to stop using it at some point. H-How do you think about that?
Because I mean, you have to, again, you have to like follow, you know, user behaviors, and I, I, I find it really difficult to believe that Gen Z is gonna be like typing www.usatoday.com in a browser, [chuckles] so you're like,
"Sorry, our friends at Gadget, but Robin was the one who laughed at that."I assume that's not your strategy [laughs] No. No.
But I-- look, and really they're not gonna type anything into the browser, be it CNET, be it the, the, the Journal. Now that was the...
I think that was the revelation, revelation that we had four years ago, was that these audiences are not coming to the web, and they're certainly not coming to the web directly.
Fast-forward four years and you've got the whole disruption, which is probably another... Well, you've done it already, podcasting around AI and how people are even- Yeah... getting information.
I mean, it, it's definitely not coming back to the, the website. So no disrespect to CNET, bro. It, it's happened to all, all publishers.
But, but the, the, the thing around the social platforms, and again, you know, past experience and probably most of the gray in my beard is, you know, remember when you wrote the Journal is we recognized a lot that these are never going to be your friends.
They have their own business objectives, their own outcomes. They're a great distribution platform and channel to reach the audiences that, that we want.
But it goes back to what else are we building for some parts of our audience to engage and, and, and, and entice them to go deeper, and how we're building products that that audience actually want to, to consume rather than the products that I wanna consume, which is not, is not the same thing.
And so that's, that's really the focus of, of Caliber going forward. We have built audiences now. We reach 100 million, 100...
I think 120 million people a month consume either Recount or C&EN content, kind of 60 to 70%, depending on the publication or under 35. It's brilliant. Mm-hmm.
As you said in the previous podcast, that is a rented audience. That is not my audience. Right.
That is an audience that I'm getting via someone else's distribution, and that is fine as long as you go into it knowing that that is, this can't be your business model forever. But we have
built that audience, and now for us, it's kind of what products do we have? There's several niches, groups, parts of our audience are going to be interested in being able to kind of go deeper and being able to engage.
Who Broke It is a great example of there will be a subset of that recount audience that will want to subscribe to a newsletter to understand what all those creators are saying, because they're time poor, and this is a great way of understanding what the left and the right think.
Say/Say is a big, big bet for us, which is that how do we remove the noise from social media and have news on your terms as an audience member with people that you trust that are not brands people- Mm-hmm...
can we create a product that, that, that delivers that?
So that's, that's really where Caliber's going, is, is building these products that we've got this scale of audience, what can we now engage them with where that is on their terms? Okay.
So talk to me about the business model. I mean, how do you make this, this work?
I mean, I think about Now This, and I think Now This in many ways got a lot of things right, you know, as, as far as, like, the product and, and what it...
and how they approached, you know, taking news and reaching a younger demographic. I mean, they went all in on platforms, and they amassed massive numbers.
You know, Ben Lair would, would come on my podcast and talk, you know, the millions became billions of video views and, and it didn't work. How do you build a business? Again, you don't rely...
Again, we're very lu- We're lucky in the sense that we can see what happened with some of these businesses and learn from it. Yes.
You don't rely on platform revenues, because the moment the algorithm shifts, the moment that they s- change the splits between how much you get from the ad revenue and, and they, they shut down this product to launch a different product, your business models are, are jeopardized.
So what, what we've done, what was the News Movement of now Caliber, is, first of all, we found that we can build a business.
Again, news industry, news companies do this today, but they do it for, for digital and they do it for the web, but not so much for social. We built a business which is helping brands create content on social.
More and more brands are trying to cut through and talk directly to their consumers, engage with consumers, and create o-original content.
And, and so actually we've said, "Well, if we're doing this every single day for ourselves, what's the learnings? What's the data that we've got that we can help brands reach audiences?" Again, it's not just Gen Z.
We're, we're working with several brands that are reaching kind of older audiences.
We did a piece with a, a large Big Four consultancy where we created social content for their AI report, and it's the first time we're creating social content talking about a headed subject like AI and the effect it's going to have, and this is reaching kind of working professionals that are 35 and up.
But the, but the principles are still exactly the same. So we have built a social media agency. That's been the first half of the, of the business model, and it's making good, good money, right?
I'd like it to make more, but we've grown... It sounds like I'm showing off, but I am. But we've grown. Last year we did, we did in the low seven figures.
We-- Well, the reason I'm showing off is that this is a question that always gets asked. Mm-hmm. "Well, how are you making money?" And it's like we did low seven- Well, it's a relevant question. Of course it is. Yeah.
So I can probably love this. So we did low seven figures last year.
This year we're gonna do kind of high seven figures and, you know, that is a huge growth for a company that's only been doing business in this space for two years, and we've got huge brands.
We've just launched a new tube channel for Movember. Movember being the guys, the charity for men's health-The, the most famous thing is growing the most mustache during Movember to raise money for prostate cancer.
We just had a new YouTube series around men's mental health, and it's widely labeled as Movember. Again, appropriate division between- Okay, so agency, agency services are a big part of the business right now.
Big part of the business. Yeah. Okay. And that's, that's been our, I guess, our lifeblood.
It-- Where we're now going is what products do we build that are direct to consumer that are going to take the hundred and twenty-two million.
We're never gonna move a hundred and twenty-two million people a month from social into one of our products, but we can take half a million, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand and have direct, uh, products, be it the subscription product that's Who Broke It, be it Cap- Capsule, which is, uh, which is the newsletter that I talked about early, be it Say So, where actually we're rounding up all of these creators and creating a news product for this generation.
But again, not everybody is going to want a news product on their phones from this generation, but there will be a subset, and those will become monetizable relationships that, that, that we have.
Combine that with the agency, and you've got what I think will be... well, I know will be a robust business model. Again, the other challenge with traditional news is not having to scale fixed, fixed costs, right?
Mm-hmm. If I look at any news organization that I've worked for, they never had trouble bringing in money. What they had was the cost to service that money was incredibly high. The fixed cost part of it.
Well, you, you know it, right? Like- Yeah...
you can very quickly keep adding journalists, keep adding people to the newsroom, and then all of a sudden, you now need to make twice as much money just to, to, to, to, to kind of stand still.
And I think we're being really thoughtful around how we work with creators inside of our newsrooms, inside TNN, inside The Recap, so that we don't have to keep adding more and more fixed costs- Yeah...
to the, to the business. But I think the challenge is... Look, I, I think about it, like, as, like, added value, right? Like, actually digging, digging the sort of nuggets out of the ground is very time-consuming.
It's very expensive.
And there's a lot of people, I'm one of them, honestly, who [chuckles] make a sensible decision and are like, "Yeah, I'm gonna skip the raw materials part, and I'm going to actually do the value add on top of, of the raw materials," and that's the packaging.
That's the sort of the commentary. I mean, that's why podcasting is such a good business if you get to the other side of that po- if you're on the right side of the power wall, because th- there's minimal costs, right?
Like, I mean, Scott Galloway is very open with, you know, his, what he, what he makes. It's, like, a really good business, right? And you're actually unearthing, digging the things out of the earth.
That's, that's expensive, time-consuming, makes people hate you. Advertisers run away from you, and all, [chuckles] and so on and so forth. So, I mean, is this like a bet that, like, you just skip the reporting part? No.
Actually, we just, we just hired a, a senior correspondent who is being brought in to do the capital J journalism stuff and help us get stories that make people sit up and pay attention.
Like, our, our tagline is, "Journalism that moves at the speed of culture." Capital J journalism is a core part- Yeah... of what we do.
My challenge back to you would be, like, how much of the cost of a newsroom is actually going into unearthing those gems or raw- Oh, fair. Look, I know it's not- Completely fair. Yes. Yeah. Yes, those things take quite-
That's, that's, that's- Like, they take quite a lot of time to see fruition. Yeah. Hundred percent. You're paying a lot, but it is not the majority of the cost. The majority of the cost is the regurgitation.
It's- It's the, it's the infrastructure. It's the infrastructure around. I don't mean infrastructure, just technology infrastructure.
It's, it's, it's the human infrastructure that is, you know, p- the, the publishing function.
And I th- look, I think a lot of the creators have just sort of done a way with that infrastructure and come up with models where they don't need to support that. And, and, you know, that I think... Look,
I-- God bless Bari Weiss and whoever they wanna bring into Paramount, but, like, that is a compression story. They're going to have to compress.
You know, CBS News is going to be smaller, and the numbers just simply don't work in these organizations. And I think that's, that's what I'm- Mm-hmm... you know, we talked a lot
today about, like, the people who've come with us from, uh, so come before us in the past and what I can take away, and it's kind of like when they got mine, they grew the, the, the newsrooms and we've, we, we, you know, have been reported, we've just had a, an investment and we will make strategic hire.
But the idea isn't just, you know, to scale to crazy numbers because we can't sustain it in a, in a meaningful way. And so a lot of the work that we've done, I'll give you an example.
One of our entertainment correspondents, a fantastic woman, decided to leave. She's written for Freya.
And instead of replacing her, the editor was like, "Actually, we found a creator who does this, and so we can partner with them and jointly create content that's on their channel and that's on our channel."
And I was like, "Exactly." So we don't have to go and hire somebody and pay them all of the fixed costs that are involved in hiring people, but we can work with a creator who's got their audience.
They can leverage our audience. We give them some of the, quote unquote, "infrastructure" that they need to be able to do their job better.
And it's just, it's a different way of being able to scale out and, and one that I think is slightly more cost effective. Yeah. So tell me about, I mean, you, you mentioned the funding. I saw it at ten million dollars.
You can either confirm or not there with that. But you, you took fundingAnd, you know, I mean, this is another one where [laughs] I go back to it.
Unfortunately, I've gone through a lot of these cycles, and like, so when I hear like news and I hear venture funding, I, I think, uh-oh. I would say it's a good amount of money. They're not new in-investors.
They've been with us on the journey for the first few years. They're not venture in the way that I think, again, some of our predecessors raised money, and the demands were very different.
They're very patient, very hands-off, which is really important when you think about how you run a newsroom and how we run several different newsrooms.
I wouldn't be so arrogant to say they're the perfect investor, but it's, it's not somebody who's come in last month and gone, "Ooh, there's a new shiny thing here."
They've been with us pretty much since the beginning, and they see value in what we're doing and what we're building, and then stay out of the things that I think are important for them to stay out of.
So but, and, and, and we need that patience, right? Like this is, this is, this is a reality. It, it is very difficult to do what we were doing and not have some patient investors.
We wouldn't be sitting here if we didn't have, um- Okay. So they understand. I mean, this is, this is, this is a UK-based fund, Forte, I, I believe it's called.
I don't know them, but there's some Qatari investors involved, et cetera.
And, you know, I, I, I, I was just having a conversation with Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, and they're, they're now twenty-five years old.
They're like a survivor from the blog era, you know, the [chuckles] news blog era.
And, you know, they had all of these articles for the twenty-fifth anniversary, and for Josh's, he chose to claim that the, the, the original sin was treating media like technology. So this is...
Th-th-this fund understands that, you know, n-the news business and media in general do not scale like technology. Yeah. I mean, you'd have to ask them [chuckles] that. That's their- Well, you, you pitched them.
I assume. [laughs] That's true, but I, I would say that they, they know what we... They know who we are, and they know what we're doing because they've been with us- Okay... for four years, right?
So they're not suddenly expecting us to make a hard pivot and become a tech and deliver tech company multiples, but they see the value in being able to reach a younger- Okay... audience with Politan.
Um, the, the bit I find a bit like, a bit difficult in answering that is I'm a technologist at heart, right? Like I was a CTO in a previous life. The guy, my co-founder, who, Dion, who's with us as a CT.
We all absolutely all interested in tech, but I would never profess to claim that we're going to become a tech company or become a platform- Yeah. But it's not like a SaaS business, right?
Like, I mean, like it's not- We're not focus- That, that news is a- We're not... Again, our straddle line, our core is journalism that moves at the speed of culture. Right.
And a human being, you know, that is a quite a hard thing. Like capital J journalism, as we just discussed, is something that takes investment, is something that takes time if- Yeah. Well, that's-... to see fruition.
That's, that's the tension, right? I mean, you mentioned that... I mean, you couple, you mentioned Vice and you mentioned the, The Skimm as having created interesting products that resonated with their audiences.
I would... I could very easily make the argument that in both instances, their real errors l- were, were really on the cap table and, and just the financial part of those businesses.
They raised massive sums of money in, in the case of Vice, and really for an email newsletter, at the end of the day, you know, The Skimm raised a ton of money for an email newsletter. It's like... Tell me about SaySo.
What, what are you trying to accomplish there? Is that... Are you gonna get Gen Z to pay for news? 'Cause there are s-signs, by the way, that they will pay for, for news. It's not like all grim on that front.
I don't think it's all grim. I think y-you... We talked about the, the, the Beehives, the Substacks, the Patreons. They're all great examples of people pay for things that add value to their, to their lives.
And look, SaySo's a couple of things. One is this long-standing belief I've had, that Dion, my co-founder, has had, that news needs to fit in with people's lives, not the other way around.
News has always been appointment viewing on news's terms. The paper was delivered at such a time in the morning. The news is on at eight o'clock at night, right?
Obviously, that has changed, but still some of those principles are there.
And so the first thing that SaySo's trying to do is say, "If you've only got 30 seconds, we'll give you 30 seconds worth of information that will help you get on with your day.
If you've got a minute, we'll give you a minute. If you've got more, we'll give you more, and we will fit in, and we will learn your habits rather than making you fit in with ours."
So that's one of the core tenets of SaySo. The second core tenet um, is there are a bunch of brilliant, and we've got to know over the past couple of years, creators who are doing news as a, as a hobby.
And we can sit here and we can say, "That's not journalism. You know, they're not the credentialed journalism."
But audiences are taking it much more at face value than they are what the capital J journalists are, are doing. Yeah. And the, the problem those creators have got is they've got these huge followings, huge audiences.
They're struggling to monetize it 'cause often they're not writing, right? So Beehive might not be an option. Substack might not be an option for them.
Um, they're creating video-based content, and it's really hard to monetize it, uh, on the platforms.
And so what we thought about actually was we were gonna build a product for ourselves, like with our content, and we were like, "Well, that's what every other news organization has done. Here's more TNM.
Here's more recap. You know, this is how we see the world."
I mean, actually, when we've got all these relationships with these fasta- fantastic creators, what about if we could actually help them make money from their content?More directly, but also service to the audience, a whole bunch of different viewpoints in one place without all of the noise that you get from social media.
Yeah. Right? Social media is, you get one story, well, these are more so now, there's AI smart, one story, th- one video, sorry, that's funny, o- one... And, and it's this hodgepodge.
So having a creator space that doesn't have a lot of that noise, has creators that we feel or we think are trying to do things in the right way, doesn't mean they agree with us, we're not editing them, but they are trying to do things in a trustworthy way for all parts of the, the spectrum- Yeah...
and put them in one place, and then add a layer of technology that makes it easy for you, the consumer, to, to consume.
The thing that I wanna be painstakingly clear is, I've worked in sub- I, I've built subscription businesses at "The Journal" at the "Times" of London, charging people for a monthly fee that you struggle sometimes to figure out how you're going to cancel, and you don't get necessarily feel you're getting value from.
It isn't a business that we're going to be trying to replicate. We're much more about kind of micro transaction, micro payments, and also less about paywalling of content.
If you think about paywalling of content, what you do is paywall your curiosity. Interesting. So the moment I get curious about something, it's like, here's a paywall. And you're paywalling curiosity. Exactly.
And so I... What we, what we're trying to do is provide a utility and then charge people based on how often they use that utility. We'll cap it, right?
So it's not a never-ending thing, but the idea is you pay as you, as you go, and at some point, if you use it enough, you won't pay anymore.
And that's, that's the payment model, and the idea is you're getting your information on your terms from people who you trust. So explain this to me.
I know this is, this is really interesting because, you know, I, I always go back to micro, micro payments as, like, one of those [chuckles] ideas that's, like, failed a thousand times, but has to work. It has to work.
That's my theory. And people can explain to me a mil- like, all the reasons it didn't work. I understand that. I understand that. However,
I think if you're going to be aligned with your audience, and that is what everyone says, then you need to have these models that are not adversarial.
Because we think about adversarial business models, and think about the ad industrial complex. Subscriptions have just as many, if not more, adversarial dark patterns to them, [chuckles] you know? It is a truism.
You make it hard to cancel, you add a little friction, and you gotta call between 9:00 and 5:00. [chuckles] Like, there's a reason the AOL, News Corp, come on. Anyone from "The Wall Street Journal"- What? What?...
I'm not canceling my subscription, but I'd have to set my alarm to do it. That's really interesting. How is this, how is this gonna, how is this gonna work? Give us a little detour. How is this gonna work?
The, the way it's going to work is, there's a lot that we still need to learn, but the, the, the principles around it are, people pay for utility. Like, they... You know, I, I...
This is probably not the best example, and, you know, no one's, no one has told the CEO that it's not a great example, so I'll keep using it.
But, like, people use the subway in New York to get to and from work, and they pay per journey. They're paying for that, they're paying for that utility, and they- Yeah... they will pay for it.
And at some point, after the 30th journey, it's capped, and they don't pay any more.
And so what I wanna find is, I don't know whether it's after seven uses or eight uses, but, like, the more that you use it, the smarter the, the, the technology gets.
It learns when you're coming to it, how long you're spending with it- Yeah... so next time it's got your news ready for it. Yeah. My bet, my bet is that it doesn't matter that...
If you think about news organizing, the way news models work is like, we need to keep you for longer so that you feel like you're getting even more value out of your subscription, so you won't wake up or set your alarm at, to 12 o'clock to call the call center to cancel.
What we're trying to say is, if you only spend 30 seconds- They send me emails for every single thing, not before my subscription [chuckles] expires. I know this is coming up for renewal.
I would also say it's not just loyalty. It's not just loyalty to our renewal time. I nudge it, set my alarm to cancel- Oh, no, no, no. This is, this is, these, these are well-known, these are well-known things out there.
But, but, but I think what we, what we're trying to figure out is, if you get 60 seconds of value from us a day, or 30 seconds of value from us, that's something that we think is worth paying a small amount for.
And the other part of this is that a lot of that will be redistributed back to creators, both creators who bring their audiences- Yeah...
to the, to the plat- to the product, but also as they come and consume content from, from those creators. So that's, that's our bet.
And we also are going to experiment and try, you know, are there certain features that people would pay, pay more for?
But one of the things I wanna get, that I keep pushing the team to do, and they're being receptive to it, is the content itself doesn't necessarily have to be the thing that you, you, you pay for. Yeah.
Because actually that content is available in lots of different places, and I don't wanna kill the curiosity of someone who's like, "Actually, I wanna learn a little bit more. Oh, I've gotta sign up now.
Gotta pay more money." Yeah. That's fascinating. I mean, I, I hope you make it work, honestly, because, like, there needs to be more...
When people talk about trust issues, they sort of skip over the fact that there are still a lot of practices in the business, and I know the reasons for it, et cetera, that don't exactly engender trust.
If your business modelis to dangle some dollar a month before jacking it up five hundred percent, and by the way, staying super quiet before that happens, then that's not exactly a way to engender trust, I don't think.
I mean, I get it.
Like, Amazon gets away with all kinds of dark patterns, and that is sort of the coin of the realm in this, in, in this, you know, in this world where everyone is trying to hook you into sub- a subscription and make it really difficult to, to cancel.
I mean, I s- I'm still in some, like, wine of the month club. I stopped drinking like ten months ago. Like, I don't... [laughs] Still. Anyone wants wine, let me know.
I have a- You've got crates and crates stacking up at home. I have to start drinking again just to get rid of this wine.
But also, like, since I was-- since we do some of those funnels, everything has become a subscription. I mean, like subscriptions for socks- Right... for razors, for like- You go on Amazon- Everything you do...
you can't, you can't buy anything without- Without subscribing something... trying to get you into a subscription.
It-- And I think there are different, there are different ways of delivering content that doesn't involve... Those subscriptions are lovely as well because it's nice recurring revenue.
You know you're gonna get it every month. Yes. But, but it does- Everyone should join TRB Pro, by the way. Absolutely. Because I don't like starting the year from zero with revenue. [laughs] We will.
We, we have, I think, the ability to experiment and learn and, and trial different ways of being able to monetize this safe zone product. And, and that's the, the, the thing that I'm really planning to try. Okay. Cool.
When, when, when, when, when am I gonna get my hands on this? If you're one of the lucky few in the next couple of months in the beta, which you might be because you've been a gracious host. Yeah. Please do.
The beta goes live in the next couple of weeks, but we're probably... Again, we wanna learn, so we're gonna use a couple of months- Yeah...
to test out what works and what doesn't, and then make a song and a dance about it in the new year, in twenty twenty-six. Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much, Robin. This was really great. Lovely, Brian. Thank you.
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