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[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show, where each week I talk to builders of media businesses. I'm Brian Morrissey.

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This week I spoke to Chris Creusen, who in addition to being a fan of the Super Bowl-bound Philadelphia Eagles, is executive director of the local independent online news publishers group, representing the interests of a swath of independent local news publishers.

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I've wanted to have on Chris to unpack what's known as the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, an effort that's in the sausage-making process that is our legislative approach in the U.S.

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Now, the proponents of this bill claim that it's going to be a quote unquote "lifeline" to local publishers by sweeping aside antitrust restrictions to allow them to collectively negotiate terms with the big tech platforms to license their content.

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That means it's going after basically Google and Facebook parent company, Meta. Now, detractors see this as a cash grab by local news chains that are often themselves run by deep-pocketed private equity firms.

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And count Chris in that second group.

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The bill is modeled on a controversial piece of legislation in Australia, which, depending on who you ask, has either led to a more sustainable news ecosystem there or had no impact whatsoever.

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The more thorny question about the unintended consequences of government picking winners, particularly in the news ecosystem, you can imagine where that ends up going.

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Usually, these kind of things benefit incumbents and legacy players, and that is a definite concern of Chris. We also take a temperature check on the overall effort in order to build sustainable local news publications.

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I wanna thank Outbrain for making this conversation possible as part of a series I'm doing here at the end of the year on sustainable local news businesses.

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Stay tuned after this discussion with Chris for an interview I did with Yaron Galai, the co-CEO of Outbrain, about the path to sustainable publishing and why paywalls are not the be-all and end-all.

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There's a simple fact that for most publishers, the overwhelming majority of their audiences are never going to directly pay them for access to their content.

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So the best model, of course, is to make money in many different ways, as I've said, um, many times, and Yaron luckily agrees with me.

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Anyway, Yaron has a very interesting perspective to share here, so do stick around to check it out.

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And finally, if you're going to CES in Las Vegas in January, please consider joining me and Outbrain at an event we are putting on on Thursday, January fifth at eleven thirty AM at the ARIA Hotel restaurant, which is called CATCH, by the way.

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I'm gonna be discussing the advertiser role in supporting sustainable news at a time when budgets are being squeezed.

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Speaking to a variety of industry leaders, including Group M Chief Innovation Officer, Crystal Olivieri. Would love to have you join us there. If you wanna come, you know, the easiest way is just to email me.

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Uh, my email is bmorrissey@gmail.com, and I will make sure you're on the list. That is bmorrissey, M-O-R-R-I-S-S-E-Y, @gmail.com.

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[upbeat music] Chris, welcome to the podcast. Really appreciate you being part of it. Happy to be here.

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We were supposed to do one in my old podcast, but then I either left or I was moving or something, and I didn't end up... I, I invited you. I did a little bit of... I was partially involved, I guess.

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So I wanted to have you on, you know, because of your perch running Lion Publishers.

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You know, you see the sorta state of, of local and, and building these sustainable businesses, and I wanna specifically zero in on something that I think is not getting as much attention probably as it should, and that is a, a bill that's making its way through [chuckles] the abattoir that is Congress that is modeled off of an Australian law that went into effect that we can talk about.

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But explain what is going on right now with this new bill. Sure. The, the U.S.

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version of this, which is, uh, titled the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, is modeled after something that was codified, as you mentioned, in Australia in, I think, twenty twenty-one. Yeah.

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Down there it's known as the News Media Bargaining Code, and it was pitched as a way to save journalism by finally allowing media publishers, those who qualified, which is kind of a big asterisk, to bargain with the platforms for the use of their content, which is an interesting way to describe people sharing news articles on Facebook and having their articles found via search on Google.

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The versions of this that have sort of happened around the world, 'cause there is one in Australia making its way through that system now called CA18 that's very similar, and the JCPA all have that thread in common, and this went through, you know, in, in the U.S.

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version it went through m- uh, markup and committee a few months ago and wound up that in its latest iteration, nearly attached to the defense spending bill. Which makes total sense, you know?

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I, I always thought local journalism was key to national defense. No, but it, it signaled a few things.

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One was a somebody kinda deal, obviously, to get this thing through, and second, that there was skepticism that it could have stood on its own and needed to be attached to a larger measure that was likely to pass.

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That's just straight up inside baseball. You can say the same thing about Joe Manchin's permitting thing- Yeah... which was rumored to be attached and wasn't anyway.

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But I wanna get back to that idea of the qualifying publishers bit. But wait. Let, let's, let's go...

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Like, the strategy itself is, like, look, uh, I think most people will say that they, they want journalism to thrive and be sustainable- Of course...

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and that there are a lot of market failures, particularly in local journalism, and for a bunch of different reasons. And there's a lot of interesting efforts going on right now to make this a reality.

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And the question is, can the government be involved in sort of molding this- Right...

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this reality?Well, what they're trying to do, which is true, is draw a straight line between the lack of loss of advertising amid newspapers, which have seen it, you know, perilously drop- Yeah...

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and the rise and dominance of advertising by the platform. That's pretty incontrovertible, right? That's pretty true. Yeah.

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Um, it is harder to draw a direct line and say, "They took our advertising," which is really the intent of the legislation.

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We're gonna save these organizations by forcing the platforms to share back their advertising revenue with the ones they stole it from. You could probably spot a lot of errors in that thinking.

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Advertising has been sort of fleeing from news for years. Advertisers don't particularly wanna be next to news, and a lot of the advertisers that are on social media are maybe advertising there for the first time ever.

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Small businesses that could never afford a newspaper ad. Mm-hmm.

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A pay by click model or a pay by search model means they only have to put money out if somebody actually views their ad, which is, you know, pretty much famously the opposite of how advertising works on radio or in print.

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And, uh, I don't know, I j- I just saw the initial kind of logic as incredibly flawed. Yeah. But I mean, from a government perspective, there's a, there's a pot of money [laughs]. It's house money, and it's not- Yeah...

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taxpayer money, right? Uh. This is... That's the reason that this is incredibly attractive if you're a politician. Yeah, yeah. It's not... You, you're not raising taxes.

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'Cause there's, like, bipartisan support for this, which is really unusual these days. [laughs] Again, it's, though it's, it's house money, right? Right. It's other people's dollars. Well, that's the thing.

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Like, politicians disagree on a lot of things ideologically, but when it comes to, like, spending money, o- other people's money, they generally are aligned.

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Maybe they don't agree on where to spend it, but, like, this is one where- Well, they definitely don't.

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And, and in this case, I think that's the, the US version, as it wound through the process to become more or less appealing to the factions that were needed to get it across the finish line, and it ultimately didn't cross this time.

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It wound up being sort of increasingly more friendly to legacy media and unfriendly to the parts of the system that I work in and operate on, right? Yeah. And- Well, that's the, that's always the question, right?

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Like, 'cause it's like nobody's gonna cry for basically with the government imposing a tax on th- these massive companies, uh, massive tech companies, and then dispersing that money, hopefully all of it, to quote unquote, "local publishers."

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Like, people are not gonna like, you know, there's not gonna be a lot of people protesting out front for, for that thing. But the question- Well-...

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ends up becoming, and particularly when the government is deciding who gets the money, well, then you're in politics.

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[gentle music] Straight up, yeah.

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And, and the interesting part about the way the, the most recent iteration of this was structured, you know, you have to consider this against the backdrop of what, who owns most legacy media in the US right now.

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And that is more than half by circulation are owned by hedge funds or- Sure... or venture or, or- Yeah... um, private equity or- Yeah... chains which have all... Like, when, when it was good to consolidate, they did.

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In the, you know, up until I think when, frankly, when I started in the business in, in nineteen ninety-eight, right?

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It was on a still a pretty steady upward curve even because they became regional monopolies, and advertising was a hard thing to do locally.

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The internet obviously changed all that, and it's taken this amount of time for the floor to completely fall.

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But in the meantime, there was so much consolidation and, again, more than half the country is owned by somebody whose primary, primary interest is not serving readers, it's profit, dividends, you know, continuing the, um, to maintain even as they've cut staff, right, in almost all these places and, and cut coverage and cut frequency times of the week.

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And so what you wind up with is a situation where the most recent version of the JCPA that was set to be attached to this must pass legislation would have meant no nonprofit newsroom in the country would have qualified.

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Publishers only would have qualified if they earned more than a hundred thousand dollars a year in annual revenue, which between those two things...

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Oh, and al- they also they needed, uh, a serial number like you get for the Library of Congress, which is very handy for print publications and no digital publication would know to have. You need a serial number?

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An ISSN code, yeah- Oh... in order to qualify was in the most recent version of this. And so, like in a state like Pennsylvania, which I know you're familiar with- Yes...

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that would have taken out of consideration Philadelphia Inquirer, which is now owned by a nonprofit, ineligible. Philly pen, the newsroom I started in Philly, ineligible- Yeah... 'cause it's owned by WHYY.

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What would have qualified is the Allentown Morning Call, which I grew up working in, has been hollowed out by a series of terrible decisions by the Tribune Company, Sam Zell, Michael Ferro, on down to the majority Alden ownership.

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They would have qualified as the largest publisher, excuse me, in Allentown.

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And the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which right now is under a labor action striking against its owners, which is why the Communication Workers of America could not get on board with this bill, because how are they gonna support Pittsburgh Post-Gazette collectively bargaining when the Post-Gazette wouldn't bargain with its union?

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Right?

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So you have all these, uh, weird complexities and, and these two sort of actors doing journalism in Pennsylvania, but they're also maybe not doing it in the best interest of their communities because they are profit-seeking corporate enterprises.

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You know, that's the tension that sort of existed.

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Are we really gonna pass legislation in the name of saving journalism that excludes some of the most interesting experiments and potentially fruitful experiments and includes these guys that are sort of sending a lot of money out of town or not bargaining in good faith with their own employees if there's a union newsroom?

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So that's sort of where we landed on this thing. Yeah. So is this a, is this just simply a bad idea, or is it just poorly executed? Well, I'm not sure how to make it a good idea, that's the thing.

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[chuckles] You know, the idea that overall I would have... I would think a lot of things would change if the US sets a precedent that a disrupted industry needs to bargain with the industries it disrupts.

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Think about where that goes for everything from travel to healthcare to, you know, every other thing that existed and came out of Silicon Valley, right?That's the, basically the potential of what we're saying, is that, that the travel agents who back in our view that to Expedia, that they should be remunerated for their loss.

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Well, I mean, just the, my little sort of counter and, and totally think it through, so you'll probably poke holes in it very quickly. Look at what's going on with the CHIPS Act, right?

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We're seeing across the economy, w- we used to be like a free market bastion.

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It's like, I feel like we're all like, uh, dirigiste now, because on both sides of, of the political aisle, there are constituencies for the government to be more involved in, in private enterprise and shaping it to the ends that whatever political persuasion wants.

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If you look at the CHIPS Act, why in the world should Intel, Intel, be getting all of this money to build these, these factories when Intel just fell behind AMD?

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A- and it's being done on national security grounds, and you can say, "Well, that's like China and stuff like this." But why isn't it, uh, maybe it should be part of the defense.

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Shouldn't the government be involved in some way, shape, or form into making sure that that exists in a democracy?

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I'm glad you said that 'cause there is something that is vetted and ready to go that we do support at Lion, which is a five-year payroll tax credit for journalists. Yeah. Which would have an impact on the bottom line.

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So you are talking about, you know, I think, I believe it's twenty-five thousand dollars in year one, and then fifteen thousand from years two to five that would be, you know, would basically incentivize all these places to retain the journalists they have.

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So the other thing that I really had a problem with in the JCPA was that there were more words in this thirty-five page measure about how to bargain for the money than what that money was gonna be spent on.

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So the platforms would hand over a check to these publishers, and there was no guarantee that they had to use it to do anything. Buy Heath Freeman- Yeah... a new beach house somewhere else.

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Or, you know, if you're gonna hire somebody, would you rather hire a high profit columnist or a reporter in a news desert where you withdrew from because it was unprofitable to be there in the first place, right?

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So if, if newspapers are owned by financial instruments, financial instruments are gonna maximize their... Like, that's what they are built to do, return on investment.

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So if you are handed that check, and there's no, like, mandate to spend it on journalism or stop laying people off or stop con- you know, contracting, regionalizing, et cetera, that's a problem.

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A measure that incentivizes hiring, retaining journalists just for the legacy thing would at least theoretically- Yeah... stop the bleeding.

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And from my segment of the industry, it's basically a five y- you have finally have five years of runway that you can look at, especially if you're thinking about launching something, or you maybe have one person- Mm-hmm...

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you could bring on a few more. You'd have five years to get them to sustainability- Yeah... under this measure, right? I'd have to read the language, Chris, but this sounds a lot cleaner.

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Because I was talking to, say, you go to the Australia, I mean, it's not... No offense to my Australian listeners, but, like, it's geographically big, but a small country compared to the United States.

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And I always hate taking lessons from these smaller markets and extrapolating it to the United States.

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I don't think the United States is completely, like, exceptional, unique, but it [chuckles] is a uniquely large, deep, and, like, chaotic country.

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And things that work in places like the Netherlands won't necessarily work in the United States.

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But I was talking to an Australian publisher about this, and this person told me that they got the money and basically keep it, like, separate from their overall money 'cause they look at it as like, you know, fake revenue.

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And that, like, they're like, "Well, we're analyzing the business.

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You know, we're not really looking at the money we got out of the news bargaining code 'cause we think that could go away tomorrow and stuff like this, and we're just managing the business, like, elsewhere."

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So there's an unreality to it that sort of reminds me a little bit of the PPP situation. Mm.

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A lot of companies took PPP loans, and, you know, we've seen the corruption that was rife in that kind of program because there was so mu- You know, you do that kind of thing, it was, you know, it wasn't exactly precision.

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But a lot of companies, you know, used this to do lots of other things than what it was intended for.

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I mean, it might have even been within the letter of the law, but I know personally [chuckles] I saw the companies doing stuff that I'm like, "Well, that's not just keeping people on the payroll."

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So I think that is a, a real risk. But then the, the opposite risk is you don't want governments telling, like, local [chuckles] news companies- Mm-hmm... how to operate their businesses. I, at least I don't.

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I don't trust the government to get that right. [chuckles] Yeah. Well, look, uh, and on the Australia front, I think it's interesting.

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The, the treasury department over there just released a report saying, "This was successful." Yeah. Go, go figure. Well, we, you have to look at- I'd like another source, but, uh, yeah.

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[chuckles] I, I think it's all telling though. If you look at, look at what the report said, what, what, how was it successful? We managed to get nineteen or thirty agreements signed.

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Was the goal to sign agreements between platforms and publishers, or was the goal to save journalism? Yeah. Stop the bleeding. But also, is there more news? Is there better news? Are people more informed?

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I think, I think that's the goal ultimately of this.

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And, and what happened was deals got signed, and at the same time, the Q3 of, of twenty twenty-two, a full year after this measure had passed, was the third worst period in publishing in Australia since COVID started.

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Eleven titles closed altogether. The ones that closed were remote, very local, and didn't get any money from the code, right?

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So if this was intended, if, if local news in Australia was gonna be saved by the bargaining code, it would have saved local news in Australia. There's no evidence that it did that.

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And it, it, I keep kinda coming back to my segment. So my members, right, very small publishers in the US- Yeah... eighty percent have five or fewer employees for their whole company. So wait, just give- Right...

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give us like a typical to, like, give us a typical member. A typical member of Lion Publishers might be- Choose one... choose one. I know it's hard to choose one 'cause- It's hard. Uh, so Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz Local.

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Okay, yeah. Right. So this is Cara Miker-Guzman, leaves her job as a reporter for the, uh, I believe the Press Democrat out there and winds up starting a nonprofit news site. Focuses first on a podcast.

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Uh, goes from, you know, not paying herself to beginning to pay herself a salary to raising enough money to hire a second person, grows from thereNow has a relatively sustainable operation, does good work, but is not trying to do what a typical newspaper would do in an area.

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You're talking about fewer than five people for her whole company covering a metro area of two hundred and seventy thousand.

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And her goal is not-- is ultimately success, but in the meantime, it's just like, how do I know whether this is gonna be a thing- [laughs] -in ten years, right?

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Literally, like the focus, the impetus of our work at Lion is sustainability, which is kind of a low bar. Can we keep this thing alive, right? You're really saying, "Can you keep a-- Can you keep something alive?" Right?

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So our first work over the last couple of years has been, can we define what that even looks like? And then we can turn-- get more people moving towards that goal before we can even talk about success.

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We've got to be able to, to prove the viability of this sector. Yeah.

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If it's true that it's like you can turn a URL on more easily [phone ringing] than ever before, but starting a business and turning on a website are two different things.

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[gentle music] So explain to me, like, your, your members are both for-profit and non-profit models.

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And I think a lot of times- Correct... people get confused about nonprofit news and what that truly means. Yeah. It does not mean you do not earn profits. Yeah. [chuckles] It does not mean you do not worry about money.

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And that's like, look, I mean, I've grown up in some of the biggest newsrooms around, and it's certainly tempting to just wanna do the news and have someone else worry about the money.

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Unfortunately, that's not how these things work. Yeah. Sixty-five percent of our members are, are for-profit, thirty-five percent are some variation of non-profit, whether they're standalone five or C three.

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The challenges they all face are not tied to that tax status, right?

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The, the main, the main functional difference is, you know, once you get past the amount of time it takes to launch something, it's far easier to start a for-profit LLC than it is in a five oh one C three nonprofit entity.

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It's just more paperwork, more, um, more time to organize it. It makes it easier for that entity to receive grants and be tax-advantaged or tax-exempt. A-and it means basically there's no equity in the company, right?

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So if you pass on, your kid doesn't get the newsroom. Uh, there is no value over time because a community owns a nonprofit. No one individual does. That's the functional difference.

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If you talk to somebody though, like Na-Lance Noble, who launched, uh, Berkeleyside back in the day as a for-profit, did something called the direct public offering, sold a million dollars worth of shares in his for-profit company, and then wound up converting it to a nonprofit.

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He'll tell you that he did that 'cause there aren't profits in local journalism really to speak of.

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Um, and it was far easier for him to attract the support of the American Journalism Project and its sort of venture philanthropy outlook and work with major, you know, donors and, and philanthropic entities in California where they're based, which has a huge and thriving nonprofit ecosystem because of all the wealth that exists that is really the underpinning of the nonprofit industry in the US, where also that is far more of a thing here.

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To your point about the US being a different economy than other places, a large part of that is, you know, we have a nonprofit ecosystem in the US- Yeah...

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that exists in order for tax-advantaged and tax-deductible dollars to move around to the benefit of a growing- Yeah... very wealthy class.

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So explain, like, I, I'm interested 'cause I always like think about it kinda like healthcare, like here. Mm-hmm. Like, our healthcare industry is, is super screwed up.

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I don't think anyone would, like, you don't need to, like, be a McKinsey person to, like, look at it and be like, "Hmm, I wouldn't organize it this way." Right.

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But it, it's how, it's how we're gonna roll, and we're not gonna, we're not gonna have a single-payer system anytime soon.

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And so it's gonna be a patchwork to try to get the, you know, coverage to as many people, and Obamacare was like a typical patchwork thing.

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It seems like in local we're not gonna have, like, a single solution to this problem. No. And it's gonna be a patchwork. Correct. Explain to you what you see as that patchwork. I mean, 'cause there are- Yeah...

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there's, there's benevolent billionaires. Let's hope they're benevolent. There's, there's the not-for-profit, like, ecosystem that is real. There's, you know, profit-seeking enterprises. Go figure.

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But explain to me what you see. There's even some chains owned by hedge funds. Look, I, I wanna sort of draw a distinction between the sort of legacy stuff, which is, I think- Yeah... a short-term, you know, thing.

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I don't see a, a, a path for success for any of those places and sort of focus on- So wait, you don't see a path for success for like, any of the like, you know, the Gannetts and the chains?

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Explain to me how they, they do anything more than continue s-- like shrinking, whether it's... I think success for them is just shrinking a little bit.

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I mean, Gannett borrowed a hundred million dollars this past year to buy back its own crappy stock. A-and, and is still in the middle of layoffs. There's their media CEO just left.

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Their, their chief data officer posted a Jerry Maguire thing on LinkedIn and then was gone the next day. I mean, it's, it's- Oh, I gotta look at that one...

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and I don't wanna s-- 'cause I feel like I'm gonna run through the hospice yelling, "You're gonna die"- Oh boy... at these places, right? But I don't, I don't necessarily wanna focus on...

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I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that the difference between newspaper revenue and roller coasters is roller coasters go up sometimes. There's not been an up quarter for this sector.

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So if we leave all that aside and just focus on what the future's gonna look like from the point of view of these, these places that exist, like, I don't think The Philadelphia Inquirer's gonna go away because the Lenfest Institute has a lot in the bank and will able to, to put something together that's called The Philadelphia Inquirer that maybe doesn't print anymore and retains a lot of journalists and does a lot of investigations and is structured as a big nonprofit newsroom.

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Because if that model can work in Texas, it can work in Philadelphia, right? They sort of compare themselves to the Texas Tribune, even though there's some pretty key differences there. There will be those things.

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I don't think the, the ownership in Boston is going anywhere.

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I don't think the ownership in making The Salt Lake Tribune go or The Minneapolis StarTribune, you know, sort of these larger ones that are sort of privately held or, or sort of connected to nonprofits are, are likely to be anchorsAnd then there are these nonprofit versions, the Texas Tribune being one of them.

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They're a Lion member. Vermont Digger is another. From one laid-off newspaper reporter to the largest newsroom in Vermont. CalMatters in California. Mm-hmm.

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You have these sort of large statewide investigative/policy-driven organizations maybe acting as anchors. You have regional clusters of digital pure plays.

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You have a lot of the individual Lion members that are husband-and-wife teams or, uh, one person using their newspaper buyout to get something started in their town.

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Our work at Lion is really focused kind of on the smaller publishers and helping them sort of stabilize, because we think- Mm-hmm...

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that that low overhead distributed approach is much more likely to succeed only because the stakes are so much. But part of the reason I don't work in legacy media anymore is 'cause I don't know that I'm gonna...

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Like, I don't wanna spend my time trying to solve what feels unsolvable to me, which is a newsroom of a few hundred, try to keep all that overhead and move all that forward in the ways that those places will need.

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They just, they just need a lot of... They need a lot, right? Yeah. And it seems pretty clear, I mean, you need a very lean model to, for most local to make work.

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And, and, you know, look, the cuts keep coming at these, like, large metro chains and stuff like this, but they keep coming for a reason, you know. Their, their business models don't match up with their cost bases.

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And I saw it, like, when I lived in Miami, and the Herald has a long, storied history, and they still do some great work, but- Sure...

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it's been completely hollowed out and, you know, there's a lot of, like, just, like, clickbait and SES stuff that it's not the essential work o-of local that everyone talks about.

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Look, I mean, you can compare it to Broadway. Broadway is, is still around, but it ain't what it used to be. Live theater isn't the dominant form of entertainment anymore, and that's okay.

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You know, in a way it feels to me like we're talking about how to save the telegraph. Yeah. Really.

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But, but how do you, how do you end up doing the kind of work that, like, people end up thinking is the essential work of local with these super lean models?

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Like, I think when everyone goes back to with local news is they're like, "Who's gonna be at the school board? Who's gonna do the accountability work?"

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And, like, can you do that with a one and two person newsletter operation? Well, there are some interesting places that are trying to solve the problem of journalism without necessarily creating newsrooms.

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There's the Documenters program in Chicago and Cleveland, which actually pays just citizens to go to meetings, residents to go to meetings, and then that content is sort of funneled back out into, into publishers' hands.

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And so in bigger places, obviously, that's easier. But that model, modified, could sure work a lot of places.

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I mean, look, I think part of the reason we talk at Lion about news entrepreneurship and investing in news entrepreneurship is because we need to start creating ecosystems that these organizations are within.

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And, like, in the same way that, you know, I used to work at the Altoona Morning Call, we had people who came in every Friday who worked for a separate company who handled the high school sports, 'cause there were too many schools in our coverage area for us to do all that work ourselves of answering the phone and taking down which football team won or lost and spread that out over all the schools in the academic calendar in the, in the coverage area.

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And we just outsourced that, right? That was a separate company, sort of like a, you know, one of those little fish that swim along the sharks, right- Yeah... and sort of clean up after them.

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That existed for every newspaper of that size. And the Morning Call was a bigger newspaper, but it wasn't huge, right? There was a bigger version of that at the Philadelphia Inquirer when I was there.

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There were also people that, that still to this day go in major cities to crime scenes, take photos, take video, and then share them out with all the networks.

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So all those ecosystems sort of have existed, but they don't necessarily exist at the very local level.

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And so if we can help encourage more people to start more businesses around those things, that's kind of the, that entrepreneurship anchor that we're trying to make in order to widen the pool and redefine really what it means.

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We run an, an annual journalism awards program that sort of spotlights important work that happens.

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Even in our micro-revenue tier of two to three people, they investigate things, they change laws, they, you know, expose malfeasance that there was a guy from a small newsroom in West Virginia who just, who, who'd been laid off, and then he launched a nonprofit newsroom with his wife, and they wound up investigating, like, a sexual abuse scandal at their local church and wound up having huge impact in their community.

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You can still do that work in a small newsroom. And in some ways, in fact, it's easier when you stop trying to worry about being everything for that town and just focus on what's gonna work.

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The other part of the, the stuff that we try to teach and our theory of change is that a lot of people who jump into the business of publishing don't have a great history of measuring the impact of their work, which when you're starting with a, a base of, you know, you really can only do the hits.

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And so if something isn't- Yeah... resonating with your audience, you absolutely need to stop doing it and start doing something that is. Now, I'm not talking about chasing clicks.

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[upbeat music] I am talking about maximizing the effort you put in. And almost nobody who starts these publications, or at least has in the past, comes equipped with that on day one.

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Explain that a little bit more, because, I mean, impact is always difficult to measure, right? Well- And that's why you go to- To some degree, yeah...

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what, what, what's easiest to measure ends up getting, getting measured, and that's why clicks get measured and engagement.

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And at the same time, it's easy to try to step in and, like, you know, and, especially my first year, I used to say a lot of the members of Lion saw a need in their community and filled it with a publication and then started attempting to cover every city council meeting as well as run investigations, cover high school- Yeah...

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sports, cover the local chamber of commerce, and ultimately they're spread a mile wide and an inch deep. And so at some point, a lot of the work that we do to them is sort of teaching them how to measure things.

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Analytics, when you're at a big place, how I used to talk about the members of Lion is that they're people who see a hole in their community, and they fill it with a publication.

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And they tend to then over-cover a lot of different things and spread themselves a mile wide but an inch deep. Yeah. And they maintain that pace for what can be years.

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Giving a column to, let's say, a local weather caster because he used to be great on television that no one looks at, but three years later, the guy's still writing a weather column that you have to spend time editing every week.And so instead of focusing on things that you know are resonating with your audience that you can send fundraising appeals about, or that you could go develop a, a separate, you know, ad product for your local chamber of commerce, you're still editing the web.

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Yeah. So those are real tangible examples of stuff we have seen with publishers we have- Yeah... worked with who just don't know how to track and measure what they do.

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It's also, I used to call it the burden of comprehensiveness. Correct.

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It's like you always think you have to be comprehensive, and I, I understand it is because you kinda wanna fool yourself that you're gonna be the, you know, the only source that people are gonna use.

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But the reality, as we all know, we, we get, uh, information from a whole variety of sources these days. And- Right... and the o- and I think to, to...

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in some ways what you're describing sounds a lot like the old newspaper model, where you had to, you had to be comprehensive.

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You know, The Inquirer had to cover all of every single issue in Philadelphia, and, like, the Daily News had their own.

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I mean, geez, I barely knew the Bulletin, but, like, [laughs] you know, Philadelphia had three papers, uh, daily papers, which is insane to think about.

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Newspapers used to be regional monopolies, and regional monopolies are very good business. Yeah.

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[laughs] When I started in the industry in 1998, there were newspaper next, you know, programs where Clayton Christensen was helping the American Press Institute try to figure out how to disrupt itself, and then spent a very long time trying to not disrupt themselves.

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H- and I've, you know, worked in digital efforts in those newsrooms for, for 15 years, and finally when I saw Ben Smith, you know, build BuzzFeed, I got really excited because I always felt like a small team dedicated to just doing that thing would ultimately have just as much of an impact of, uh, in the digital world at least, as a legacy newspaper that was splitting its attention between print and online.

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Ultimately, print would always win those battles. I used to say, "I work at a newspaper, but I work in the news, not the paper." But ultimately, as they've condensed, it's become impossible to separate. Yeah.

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Are, are you seeing more success in convincing people to directly support the creation of local news? Uh, and, and that, by that I mean it can be subscriptions, it can be memberships, it can be, like, one-off donations.

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But it seems to me that a pure ad model is nearly impossible to work at, at a local level at this point. Well, Brian, I quote you a lot- Oh, boy... to talk about this, which is the best way to make money is many ways.

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Yeah [laughs], that's true. That's one of your, that's one of your lines, and I think it's true. Although I, although I think you can have too many ways. That's the, uh [laughs]- Well, yeah...

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that's the second part of that. That's a good corollary of Brian's laws, yeah. [laughs] COVID acted, in many ways, a- as clarity, as an accelerant to decline that was already happening.

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Places that were struggling before COVID struggled mightily through it, especially the alt weeklies where, you know, for a brief period of time, if your focus was where to go and what to do but you couldn't go anywhere or do anything, you're pretty screwed, right?

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And so that, that, um, absolutely flattened out some of those publications. And really to the degree that there is a hopeful future for local news, I think our members are making the strongest argument.

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Not enough of them have diversified their revenue streams.

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Advertising is still an over-reliance for many, many of them, but the kind of advertising is they're always gonna be dry cleaners, they're always gonna be, you know, the kind of places that advertise in, in Little League parks and on diner menus are the same advertisers for many Lion publishers.

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Used car lots, funeral homes, right? They all are the sort of backbone of the local small business economy, and a lot of them are the publishers' main source of advertising, direct sold.

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Fastest-growing category of revenue is based on readers, is membership or donations or subscriptions or, you know, a major donor strategy, or for those that are nonprofits, philanthropic grants.

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I think combinations of those with a smart event strategy and maybe some, like, in- interesting forays into, I don't know, affiliate marketing, if we can figure that out at the local level, might be a, a fascinating thing to add at some point.

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But it's embryonic yet. And still, I gotta say, if you're talking about, like, the, the, the median revenue of a Lion member last year was $125,000, which is, I grant you, not a lot.

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If your newsroom is, or your whole company is only two people, and the salary for a reporter somewhere in middle America is $60,000, well, why wouldn't you start one of these things and just keep all that yourself rather than worrying about a pay freeze or, you know, a furlough at the end of the year or, or what have you, working for a chain publisher.

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Or helping Heath Freeman again, you know, put another story on his beach house on Long Island if you're working for Alton, right? Why not? It sounds like a good rallying call for the newsroom. "Let's go get him."

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[laughs] Gotta get a new beach house in the Hamptons for the owner. O- one of the things that I, I wanna talk about is, 'cause Richard Tofel wrote this thing. I wanna give you a shot.

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I know you're like, you're like, you're doing your inhale. But I, I, I think it was, it was kinda interesting because, like, he talked about journalism inter- intermediaries, and Lion is, is one of them, right?

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It's, it's an association, right?

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And, and he was saying, "Well, look, the lot- a lot of money is, is flowing through these intermediaries," and any sort of, you know, any situation with an intermediary there's always gonna be the, the take that, well, if you, if it goes directly to, you know, the recipient, then y- you're, you know, you're saving money.

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It's getting to where it's supposed to go. It's the same with, like, you know, charities in some ways. Uh, what, what was your reaction to that?

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I mean, did you think it was, like, an unfair misunderstanding or some valid points, but that's just how it is? Well, it's interesting because the... I don't think the question was asked of us really.

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I mean, we're sort of the focus of the column, but his supposition is should the Knight Foundation... And specifically he's talking about foundations.

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He's explained this on a couple of other podcast interviews that he did. Yeah.

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Should the Knight Foundation be supporting places like INN and Lion, or should it just directly fund a small number of nonprofits, even that mean, if that means hard choices? And so that was his, his phrasing.

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Yeah, 'cause the Knight Foundation has a, a pile of money dedicated to- To journalism... to journalism. Your, your former partner Billy Penn is running that- Jim Brady is the vice president- Yeah, yeah... of journalism.

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Yeah. Okay, there. So, so look, and, and the part, like, what brought me to Lion was a million dollar Knight grant that existed before Jim got there. Obviously, he was actually still running- Yeah...

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Spirited at the time. And I came here because of that grant, because I saw that it was a chance to help build Lion into what I thought the sector needed.

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And to a degree that's what we've done, and grown from me-- I was the only full-time employee when I started in 2019Today we have eleven employees, three years later.

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Largely because of our, our work with the tech platforms. Like, I should be really clear about this through all my conversations about JCPA.

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You know, a great deal of our funding at Lion comes from the Google News Initiative and the Meta Journalism Project, although no more dollars is coming from the latter, and, and that's fine.

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Our grant with Knight, like, we just tripled it. The, the million dollars that, that came to us then, we just renewed at two point eight five for the next three years, and that's really the root of Dick's question.

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Should they have done that, or should they have given that two point eight five million to other places? Well, I think Knight answered that question with the grant, to be honest with you.

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When I didn't really say anything about that column, it was because I think Knight kind of answered already. I think the answer to should Knight give money to one or the other is more of a yes and than an or. Mm-hmm.

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Yes, like, yes, of course, I want my members to ask Knight for money, and yes, of course, some of my members have already received money from Knight.

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The Texas Tribune's gotten, you know, various infusions of Knight capital over the years.

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Last year, the Daily Memphian, which is that big newsroom, uh, Eric Barnes launched a few years ago down in Memphis, got two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the Knight Foundation just six months ago.

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So that's already happening to some degree. And I will say that sort of the last thing I, I thought about that actually came from our new senior manager of coaching who's based in your old stomping grounds of Miami.

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Her name's Elaine Diaz, and she's a former investigative journalist in Cuba, who talked about the kind of work that we teach through our programs in eight weeks.

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It took her as an independent publisher with no intermediaries in Cuba, seven years to learn by herself.

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We teach it to publishers that go through a program in eight weeks in a structured way, groups them with a cohort so they're all-- they all have colleagues to talk to, and when they're-when they run into problems, have sounding boards.

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And isn't it better, I would argue, to do it en masse and teach people rather than make them fish for themselves in the dark for seven years? I think that's a pretty clear indication of, of why. Right.

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And the other sort of thing is, honestly, he asked us what our budget was and, and I said three point seven million for last year. But what I didn't answer was one point... Sorry, three point four million.

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One point seven of that went right back out to members in the form of grants and stipends. Right. So almost half of what we do goes back to our members anyway, which is a pretty good deal for an intermediary.

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[upbeat music] You know, with this, with this bill, you know, and who knows, it's like bargaining, and, and Meta said, "Well, we're just gonna take all the news off."

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And like, you know, Google has done some similar stuff. You know, in Australia with the push and pull, there, there was a lot of this talk, and, and sometimes I, I see it as negotiating, and that's fine.

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But what is the role you see these companies continuing to play in this ecosystem? Because let, let's be real here. They, they were under a tremendous amount of pressure on the regulatory front.

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And for a skeptical person, a skeptical person might say that this was a little bit of like a PR fig leaf.

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I don't say PR, but it was a it was a way to, like, fend off regulation that is gonna really threaten their core business.

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These local journalism initiatives, and, and Google's done a t- a ton of work and, and really Facebook too, you know, are, have been really helpful in stuff like this.

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I've always wondered if they're gonna continue them, and I think we've seen Meta pull back because, you know, they have a history of doing this, and I don't necessarily see this as really core to their, their business at all.

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I mean, I think that's right. I think we've gotten pretty clear signals that the Meta stuff is done.

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At the same time, I'm talking about an industry here where we're, we're saying the level of success is just existence, and Meta has poured tens of millions of dollars into that sector with the...

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'Cause there's no rational reason to do that at this point, and it's too early. Venture capital's not gonna touch it. It's not a good enough business. And- Well, there's a rational reason.

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It's to fend off, like, regulatory- Well, sure, sure. Yeah. Regulation. There's, but there's no business besides the PR focus. Yeah. There's no other reason why you would- Okay... you would do that. Right.

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That's what I mean. [chuckles] These, these publishers, even some of the best resourced ones, can't find and pay for and solidify the experts that would come.

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You know, the best email newsletter person, the best payment person, the best technology person aren't gonna deal with individual publishers by themselves.

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But Meta made all of that happen through their accelerator program. And at the same time, the COVID relief grant. I mean, I helped with the COVID relief grants.

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Like, like Lion was, uh, helped do that, and plenty of legacy media companies had no problem putting their hand out and cashing a check from Meta at the time.

255
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In the very early part of the pandemic, I think we all pushed out, I don't know, like fifteen million dollars in like three months. Philanthropy wasn't doing that. That, that didn't exist if, if not for Meta.

256
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So like, let's, let's give that its due. Mm-hmm.

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And also at the same time, Meta's penetration, Facebook's penetration, whether it was Instagram or, or the original Facebook app or WhatsApp, something like eighty percent or ninety percent of people with a smartphone use those.

258
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No newspaper I've ever worked for had eighty percent penetration. Yeah. Ever. Lucky to get thirty percent of people in an area reading, even if with mysterious pass along figures that ma- never made any sense.

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[chuckles] It was almost always, right, even through the years of the wild algorithm swings and the, the huge blocks of traffic from the platforms, that was always Facebook's audience doing Facebook audience things.

260
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It was never our audience. We, we, we contorted ourselves. Yeah.

261
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And in some cases, the, the dear departed Mike would tweak stories again and again, the headlines of stories again and again just to get the hit on the algorithm, right? Is, is that journalism?

262
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That's just gaming the algo, right? Which- Yeah... which in and of itself changed so much over time. So when news was valuable to Facebook, Facebook was valuable for news. That has obviously changed as Facebook's...

263
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Like Face- it's treating the original Facebook app, which is still used by nearly all people of a certain demographic, as a legacy product, which is what they're doing, right?

264
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The, like, it's, it's wild to me that the life cycle of this thing, uh, has, is already on the downside for them.

265
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Taking Google's words at face value and, and their core mission of organizing the internet and advertising based on search and, and sort of YouTube is the odd thing out 'cause it is the algorithmic driven content kind of play.

266
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It is a lot tighter. Local news is good for the internet. They should invest in quality local news.

267
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I can make that argument as a nonprofit person and feel like there's more there there at this rate in time than Facebook, which for many other reasons, disinvested in a lot of, a lot of their things- Yeah...

268
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and sort of put all... And, and what the hell is news in the Metaverse? And news became like a- Let alone local news...

269
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it, it became, like, such a liability for Facebook because of the two thousand sixteen election and stuff.

270
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So you could, you could see like, you know, sitting there and just like, "Oh my God, can we just like get out of this?"

271
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[chuckles] Right.And, and at the same time, you know, I will say I-- look, we, we have benefited from working with both partners. Working with Facebook and grants from Facebook were entirely different than...

272
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You know, we're essentially a vendor for the Google News Initiative. We put on a program for them. We're paid as a vendor- Yeah... via contracts every quarter.

273
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Uh, Google has more humans doing this stuff, more people involved in it, more-- They've hired more full-time coaches and have a lot more, like the GNI as an organization is sort of bigger.

274
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So they've already made a significant investment there. I, I definitely think had JCPA passed here's, and as versions of it wind their way through the legislatures, will that have an impact on what they do this way?

275
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I think so. But I do think they're also talking about, uh-- Look, I can't, I can't, I can't say for sure what's gonna happen, whether that's a long-term play for us.

276
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It's, it's grown every year in terms of the piece of our revenue pie that that makes up. Our work with them, you know, has been tangibly valuable for the people that we help through those programs.

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And, and whatever the motivations are, if the money is helping my members, and it's not coming from other places, I'd be an idiot not to take advantage of it. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know.

278
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I mean, you get while the getting is good. I just think, you know, planning for it, it's kind of like going back to- Oh, yeah... the, um, the, the person I was talking to from Australia. Uh- Treating it as a side thing.

279
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That's definitely- Yeah. They were like, "Listen, let's just put this-" Yeah... "like, uh, to the side because, like, I, I do not plan on this existing in two years. I have no idea how long it'll last."

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One, one point of clarification, Mic is still with us. I don't wanna alarm any listeners. Mic is still with us. It's still alive. Um, it's mostly an SEO site now- Oh, right...

281
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under Bustle, but, like, do not worry, you can still go to Mic. We gotta, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta make sure we're not alarming- Appreciate that clarification... alarming people. [laughs] Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

282
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Although, Dave, look, it's, it's, it's two-point-oh, right? It is. It came back. It, it did go defunct for a while. Nothing dies on the internet. Nothing dies because- Very true... there's still SEO.

283
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Until ChatGPT, like, blows up SEO- And it can still re-... no site that had a lot of traffic is ever gonna go away because it'll still have, it'll still have some Google juice.

284
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Um, and there's just- Zombie, Zombie Newsweek's still doing stories, right? Yeah, no. There's- Yeah... nothing dies on the internet. All right. I wanna wrap it up with just, like, just a, a maybe a note of optimism.

285
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Like, give me, like, an, an example of, like, either a member or someone you think that is proving that you can build, like, a, at least a getting to the baseline of a sustainable, very local news operation that's independent.

286
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So there's a couple. One is a nonprofit, and one I think is a for-profit. The first is the Kansas City Defender, which you may have seen. It is- Mm-hmm...

287
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is sort of Gen Z, uh, African Americans in Kansas City who, you know, told a very...

288
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Actually, at our, at our Lion Awards in Austin, Ryan Sorrell stood up and sort of gave a speech about why it's called the Kansas City Defender, and it's because of a case where, uh, an African American was killed at a, a convenience store.

289
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And, you know, I think the initial claim was something like the police said that he shot at them, and so they shot him. And, and security footage actually showed that they just shot him unprovoked in the back.

290
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And the way the town found out about it was when a local clergy released it. Like, like the, the convenience store owner released it to clergy, and then eventually word got out in the community about what happened.

291
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They launched their publication because they knew nobody else was gonna defend them, which is incredibly powerful and incredibly inspiring.

292
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And they sort of launched first on social media, then built a website, started by reaching the rappers, then moved to the DJs, then moved to the mayor's office, which is an incredibly cool way to start thinking about information propagating in areas like Kansas City, which is not your most sort of like, it's, it's just straight up Middle America, right?

293
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It's urban, but it's straight up Middle America. Mm-hmm. Another is the Excelsior Citizen, which actually started as a Facebook page, providing information about, like, lost pets.

294
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And then they saw such a need that existed in their community that they launched a newsroom. And it's a, a husband and a wife and their kid, and the kid does the TikToks.

295
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And it is absolutely, you know, solving problems for Excelsior, Missouri, in a real small area that is, you know, real tangible. And they're organizing.

296
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You know, when a, a tornado went through town, they organized a relief effort and a mutual aid effort in that community.

297
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So it's kind of local news doing what the best local news does, in addition to not sort of ignoring the, the technology that allows all of that to happen in the first place. Yeah.

298
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So those kinds of stories are incredibly inspiring, incredibly heartening, and good signs that there's hope. I have to find out more about this Excelsior story. I love it.

299
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[laughs] I talk about, like, the unbundling of news. I think about the unbundling of, like, the local news broadcast, which would always have, like, a missing pets thing.

300
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I wouldn't-- I don't think you would naturally start there, but talk about organic, like, to start with the missing pets. Awesome, Chris. Really appreciate it. Uh, it was a great conversation. Yeah. Happy to be here.

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Thanks for having me. [upbeat music] Thanks so much for listening.

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Uh, next up is a conversation that I had with, uh, Yaron Galai, co-CEO of Outbrain, about the risks of paywalls turning credible journalism into a luxury good. None of us want that.

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Publishers would do well to consider more well-rounded models. Here's a discussion with Yaron. [upbeat music] Yaron, one of the things that I...

304
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And I totally agree with you on this, is sort of I have a few candidates for the sort of original sin of, like, internet publishing, but I, but the, the, my top candidate is the fact that content was meant to be all free, right?

305
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And I think for a whole bunch of different reasons, like, one, I think it, like, set up a situation w-what, uh, where, you know, users were going to be the product, and I think that led to a set of bad decisions that flowed from there.

306
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But also, I think that it led to, you know, business models that were really just all about advertising.

307
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And, and like, you know, I always say, like, the best way to make money is multiple ways, and, like, that hasn't changed.

308
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And I think that, you know, nowadays that publishers, and I think it's a good thing, it-they're much more diversified in how they're making money. Yeah, that's, that's right.

309
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I think it's absolutely crucial for their, for the future of many of them to be, to be able to diverse, uh-Diversify their revenues. Uh, it's gonna be different.

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The mix is gonna be different for each one of the publishers.

311
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Thing that we looked at with, uh, coming up with, uh, Keystone is, so Keystone is a platform to take those diverse business goals, uh, or objectives, maximize them, while, uh, providing a great user experience for each user- Mm-hmm...

312
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which means personalized, uh, user experience. Uh, I think that's the intersection that's so difficult for publishers to, to, to find. Now, when you look at the advertising pixels on a publisher, those have been...

313
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You know, they went through, again, the ad- advertising industrial complex of optimization and algorithms and Googles and Outbrains and, and all of that.

314
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Those pixels are highly optimized and, and supposedly personalized. Then if you look at everything else the publisher does outside of advertising- [laughs]... uh, it's like the 1950s.

315
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It's like, uh, offset printing where, uh... And this is the only job I've had, was actually with, with a print newspaper.

316
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And every evening at around 11:00 PM, you'd have the, uh, the division heads coming in and, and basically fighting for real estate and saying, "You know, we need this, uh, this box to be carved out and this box."

317
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And that's how publishers operate, many of them operate today. Yeah. It's like video person was very vocal, so we need to cut out a video, uh, section. Oh, yeah.

318
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And the subscription person, "We need, we need the pop-up so everyone gets a pop-up."

319
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What we do with Keystone is, is give them the technology finally to say, "These are all the diverse, uh, business goals or objectives that we have," and find that intersection with personalizing the experience for each individual user.

320
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Yeah. I always say, like, if, if, if, like, you can tell, like, how screwed up internally, like, uh, an organization is by their, like, nav bar. You know? [laughs] If there's like- Yeah. War...

321
00:50:29.258 --> 00:50:41.168
four different sub-navs, it's like, oh, someone... There's a lot of infighting here, because, like, everybody's just fighting for real estate. [laughs] Yeah. If y- if your homepage is looking sort of like your org chart,

322
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uh, you're screwed with, uh, user-driven KPIs. Yeah. It was- Users aren't gonna care about your org chart.

323
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Yeah, the carousel was always the, like, imperfect sort of compromise, where you clearly three different departments were try, were laying claim on the same piece of real estate, and you're like, "All right, we could do a carousel.

324
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Everyone gets it for a few seconds."

325
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So the idea is, I mean, 'cause it's interesting because, you know, I think everyone, like, has thought, I've always thought, like, of Outbrain from the beginning about, you know, the modules on the bottom of the page, right?

326
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And to monetize users, and I think it was like you guys started this, and I think it was a, a, a really fascinating, I don't wanna say trick or something like this, but I think about, like, search results pages.

327
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When I first started covering this stuff, search results pages were, like, literally the least valuable, like, not...

328
00:51:27.868 --> 00:51:36.248
maybe not the least, but they were one of the le- thought of the least valuable, like, bases on the internet. And, like, the bottom of the page was often, like, thought, you know, the same.

329
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'Cause it's like, oh, you wanna be top of the page and stuff. But the bottom of the page is when people make decisions. I think that was, like [laughs] a critical insight, right? [laughs] Exactly.

330
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I, I was looking at the, at the whole publishing, uh, landscape and I, I was saying, "Why is the most valuable real estate kind of, uh, ignored by everyone?"

331
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No one wants to be there, and it's the most valuable place because that's where people finish their, you know, reading or watching the content and now they need... They're, they have their what's next, uh, moment. Yes.

332
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And we call it Outbrain. We'll power that what's next, and that's the best real estate possible. Yeah.

333
00:52:11.868 --> 00:52:18.288
But now, like, fast-forwarding 15 plus years, like, you know, publishers have a, are, are, are very different right now.

334
00:52:18.388 --> 00:52:31.628
And so, you know, they have, you know, their businesses are more diversified, which is great, right? But that also means, like, the businesses themselves are more complicated. Yeah. They're more complicated.

335
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You need to take in more KPIs. And so you have, again, more stakeholders around the table that are vocal and, and want their piece of real estate. And

336
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what I said before of, uh, the importance of having the user, uh, in that discussion, in that real estate decision is so much more important.

337
00:52:50.848 --> 00:53:04.588
And those, those are decisions, the, the making sure that you take diverse business KPIs and making sure you serve, uh, each user with, uh, the right things is even, uh, more important to do with, uh, with technology.

338
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You can't do it manually. 'Cause by definition, if you're making a CMS decision manually, you've decided somewhat something for everyone. So each one of the users is gonna come to- Right...

339
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to the page and look at it and say, "This isn't for me. I, I'm not interested in that." Yeah. And the right decision generally aligns with the person who's highest in the org chart's [laughs] opinion.

340
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Weird how that works out. [laughs] Weird. Weird. But, but in my mind, the, the number one person sitting at the very top of, uh, the org chart of the publisher is actually the user- Yeah...

341
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in the street or the elevator that's, that's doing this.

342
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This is, uh, you know, we, we can do any business decisions we want, but ultimately it boils down to, you know, the person with their thumb basically deciding the fate of the publishers and the entire industry. Yeah.

343
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And if we're not doing well, we're not getting that scrolled thumb. Right.

344
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So one of the things that has put, like, the user, like, you know, moved, moved the user from, like, the, being, like, the product to the customer is, is around subscriptions, right?

345
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And I think, you know, look, I remember when The New York Times started the paywall. You know, people were doubting the future of The New York Times at that time, right? It was, you know, around the financial crisis.

346
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And, and the paywall changed, you know, The New York Times, and it changed the industry because I think the industry, you know, The New York Times is, they used to call Yahoo a bellwether, but The New York Times is, like, the bellwether I feel like for at least the news part of the industry.

347
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And so of course, like, you know, to me, uh, uh, you know, the publishing industry is a lot like a, a children's soccer game. At least in America.

348
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I'm sure in other countries ch-Child soccer players are much more adept, but, um, my experience with American children's soccer games is they're not, they're not that sophisticated. And generally they're just like clu-

349
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My girls are soccer players, and they're great. Okay. I have some. Very. Well, it's been a while since, like, I've been in a children's soccer game, but it used to just be clumps of kids around the ball, right?

350
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And a- at least in publishing industry, there's usually still just clumps of kids around the ball. And so when subscriptions go to one part of the field, like, they all clump around that ball. But- Right...

351
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you know, paywalls themselves, and there's lots of different types of subscriptions, they can be some-somewhat problematic, and I don't think that they're, you know, this...

352
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A lot of times people, like, paint things as, like, silver bullets and, like, they're an answer, but they're not the answer, at least in my view. Yeah. They're definitely not gonna be the answer for, for all publishing.

353
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I think the humanity has proven pretty cl-clearly that, uh, the, the majority of, uh, content news, journalism is gonna be consumed, uh, for free.

354
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That's, that's not likely gonna change, especially as we're in a world of, uh, so much abundance of, uh, of content, so the majority is gonna be, is gonna be free. Uh, but I do think it...

355
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You know, there, there are probably those, uh, naysayers that are saying if we put everything behind a paywall, then journalism becomes invisible to most of humanity, and it becomes an elitist, uh, thing.

356
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Uh, I, I think the world is so far from that, where I just see the, the benefits of being able to, uh, create a subscription where possible, uh, to me, funds and encourages publishing and journalism that is user-driven.

357
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It-it's the ultimate, uh, kind of signal that you get if someone is willing to register and put their credit card in today, month after month.

358
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And even if it's not gonna be a hundred percent of the users, again, even if it's gonna be like the old, uh, uh, the old, uh, newsstand days, if it's gonna be two percent- Yeah...

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of a publisher's audience, it funds the, uh, the journalism, and it, it just creates a mindset of those subscribers. We better serve them and those users in general. Yeah.

360
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And we need to understand users and engagements and all that. It's so important. Yeah. But also it can, like, work really well with, with advertising models. I mean, we're seeing this like, you know... It's not like...

361
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I, I... For some reason, like, everything is painted as an either/or when it usually is an and. Yeah.

362
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And, you know, people who run ads, like, you know, people who have subscription businesses, like, it works really well with, with advertising. It can make the advertising actually better and more valuable.

363
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Oh, absolutely. I think it works together. I, I, I think probably the best, uh, examples of this, the most extreme are, are in trade publications where...

364
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I, I love the example of, uh, Skift and what Rafat Ali is, uh, is doing there over the years, so focused.

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But the, uh, the more focused they are on their subscribers and, and getting people that are so engaged and, and paying for the, uh, content, the more advertisers want to be associated with those, uh, audiences.

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So I think those two things really- Yeah... work well together. I mean, it gives you more data about them, but I think, like... And it, and, like, you know, you can go to advertisers and be like, you know,

367
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uh, like, I have an engaged audience. I can sh-show you because they, they pay money in order to have, like, access to the content and stuff like this, and I think it's good for a sales perspective.

368
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But I really think the biggest benefit i-it ends up being more, like, internally orienting around the, the user as, like, the customer. [laughs] Stop calling them users even. [laughs] Yeah.

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Users, like, I, like, internally here at Outbrain, I, I- Can you imagine a restaurant and be like the user? We got a user at table. [laughs] People, people I think is best.

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But, uh, you know, publishers and advertisers are also people, so- That's true. It gets complex...

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for whatever I've sort of given it- I- I tried to purge user for a little bit, but then I was like, "Oh, it's impossible." [upbeat music] Thank you all for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode.

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And please, if you do have a chance, leave this podcast a, a rating and review. It does help people find this podcast. It does give me a little bit of confidence that, you know, people are listening and digging on it.

373
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So go to Apple, or I believe you can still leave, uh, you can leave reviews on Spotify. I can't be totally sure on that, and, uh, would love to have that.

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[upbeat music]