[upbeat music] This week's episode is presented by Outbrain, which is underwriting this end of the year series focused on building sustainable local journalism businesses.
Each week for the next four weeks, I'll be talking to an operator who's doing just this. In addition, the Rebooting has partnered with Outbrain to bring an important conversation to CES, which is coming up in January.
If you're going to Vegas for CES, I hope you will join us for this.
I'll be recording a live podcast on Thursday, January fifth, focused on a very critical issue, which is how brands can support independent news, even in an economy that appears headed for a rough patch.
I'm gonna be joined by Group M Chief Innovation Officer Crystal Olivieri for this conversation, and we'll also be adding other industry leaders.
We're gonna be getting the inside view on how the biggest brands are thinking about how to manage their ad spending to support important initiatives while still driving results. This is always the push and the pull.
The event takes place on Thursday, January fifth, at Catch Restaurant, and that is at the Aria, if you're unfamiliar with it.
It kicks off at eleven thirty AM with a lunch, followed by a view from the top segment with David Kostman, who is Outbrain's co-chief executive.
And then I will have my conversation with Crystal and other industry leaders. So please do consider joining us. To RSVP, please go to outbrainces2023.splashhat.com.
I will leave that in the show notes, and it is in the email newsletter, so I hope you do join us.
Directly following my conversation with Yashi, I have a conversation with Outbrain co-founder and co-CEO Yaron Galai on the path forward for sustainable independent media. Please do stick around and listen.
[upbeat music] The Rebooting show is a podcast about how to build sustainable media businesses.
I'm Brian Morrissey, and each week I speak to those who are doing the hard work to build these businesses.
This week I'm kicking off a series that is underwritten by my friends at Outbrain, in which I s- focus on the local news business. To kick it off, I spoke to Yashi Herman.
Yashi is the founder of The Mill, a newsletter focused on Manchester, England, that's not New Hampshire, that has attracted sixteen hundred paying subscribers since its launch in June twenty-twenty one.
In addition to The Mill, Yashi has launched a sister publication for Sheffield and Nor- and Liverpool, also in the North of England.
Uh, Yashi and I spoke about aligning the needs of a local audience with the publication, what drives people to support local news, and the importance of building lean infrastructure to keep a local news business sustainable in the long term.
I hope you enjoy the conversation, and thanks again to Outbrain for supporting this series. [upbeat music] Yashi, welcome to the podcast. Thank you.
I- I've said, uh, his name incorrectly now three times, but w-we're off to a good start. Yeah, here we go.
But we actually knew each other in, in New York, obviously [chuckles] not well in person, when, when you were doing babe dot net and stuff. How did you... First of all, how did you come upon going into local?
Because I wanna get into it, but, like, also just, like, my God, like, this is a really difficult market to go into. Yeah. It's, it is a difficult market.
I can't remember exactly when I got interested in it, but when I was living in New York, I was invited to a lo- a journalism conference in, in Arizona. It was in the... It was in Arizona. It was...
I, I, I can't remember exactly where it was. Uh, what's the, what's the big city in Arizona? Phoenix. It was in Pho- it was in Phoenix. Phoenix. Uh, terrible place. I actually quite liked it.
But the conference wasn't great because all of these people- [chuckles]... were... Well, there was a lot of, there was a lot of chin scratching about the problems in local journalism. And- Oh, yeah... there was a,
there was a lot of feeling that effectively we had to throw our arms in the air.
There were some people who had solutions, but all of those solutions had to do with getting millions of dollars off a, a wealthy, you know, person to, to, to, to, to be a philanthropist and, and that kind of model.
And I think there's a lot of, uh, mileage in that model.
But I felt like the consensus at this kind of conference, and, you know, I hope I'm not mischaracterizing it, was the consensus in the sessions I went to seemed to be, "God, like, this is, this is just a...
Th-th-this is a problem that's gonna be really, really difficult to solve, or, or at least, like, this isn't gonna be solved by the market."
And when I hear stuff like that, I think what that means is this isn't gonna be solved by getting the revenue from the readers. It's gonna have to be...
Like, the money's gonna have to come from, from billionaires or something who just happen to love th-this project. And I, I...
Ever since I went to that conference, I always thought, "Bet there is a just, like, a much cheaper and much more nimble way of doing this local news thing, but with much lower cost, no print, um, no huge operation, but a very, very low volume of very, very high quality content."
Like, I kind of had that in the back of my head, and then it must have been five or six different influences kind of made me think eventually I wanna give that, I wanna give that model a go.
Very low volumes of very high quality, differentiated storytelling in a local area. I think that could work if you do it with subscriptions. So that's kind of how I got to, to this model. Yeah.
And you had, you'd worked in local news previously. Yeah. So my, the first four years of my career were at the London Evening Standard, which is the big city newspaper- Yeah... in the UK.
And so I had learned journalism from a sort of city perspective, but I'd also learned it from writing features and, you know, long form or sort of medium form.
In American terms, probably not long form, but, you know, for us, you know, two thousand words, four thousand words. And I think learning- Wait, are we, are, are we like, uh... Do we- I think you guys don't-...
discuss this? I think, I think long form journalists in your neck of the woods don't get out of bed for less than ten thousand words. But, uh [laughs]
But it, uh- Well, if they're still getting paid by the word, that's, uh- Yeah.
But, but, but we, we don't have so much of a culture of that here, and I felt if I did a feature-based publication, if I based it around, like, this sort of narrative storytelling that I really like reading and, and that I've done in my career, that that might make it differentiated enough.
'Cause as you know, the problem with a lot of journalism online now is if you're not heavily differentiated, you're gonna struggle with subscriptions. Yeah. Yeah.
And just to, like, circle back really quickly on the benevolent billionaire's point, because it, it is...
went through this period where the answer was always either nonprofit model or it was we're gonna find a benevolent billionaire, and it was always pining for that local benevolent billionaire.
And the problem is, not all billionaires, but just sometimes the billionaires are not benevolent and, and they do things for, for interests.
And, and I always thought that just giving up on coming up with a sustainable model was always a mistake. And the only way to get to sustainability in most of these markets is by fixing the cost structure. Yeah.
I think, I think that sounds right. Yeah. I think the other thing about the benevolent billionaires is they may be benevolent for two years, but then if you piss off- Yeah...
their best friend and they've got all these rich friends, they might not be benevolent anymore. And, and, and so for me, the big thing was sustainability.
Can you get revenue to a point where it actually sustains your operation and you're not reliant on, you're not reliant on philanthropy or, or, or investors or whatever?
But I think that, um, yeah, I think the cost structure is a big thing.
If you think about print, like, the, the, the monopolies that were created in print were created by the fact that some people could afford to have printing presses and most people couldn't.
So the people who had the printing presses- Mm... had the monopoly. And that was, that meant that there was this massive cost involved in getting some news, but if you had...
if you could sustain that cost, you could be the only newspaper in Chicago or one of the two. Yeah. And I- It's a moat, and it was a good time. It was, it was a tot- it was totally a moat.
[laughs] And, and I think the realization in the past 10 years that that has totally fallen away in local as well as in sort of global and, and national news is big because it means people who don't have a huge amount of money and who can't afford to staff up, up an entire newsroom with, like, 10 education reporters and five sports reporters, whatever, they can also play at this game, that they can also try and create good quality local news.
Right. And so when you were thinking about this idea, it was also during the, the rise of Substack, I guess the, in the beginning, right?
And, and I think what Substack did, and I'm on the Substack platform, but I've got my differences with them, but I think what they did really smart was enable a system that allowed for a lot of the infrastructure costs to get sucked out of the business because you weren't out there hustling up ads, doing an ad server, bringing on, like, a data platform and all the stuff that just adds to the infrastructure costs beyond the printing press.
There's limitations to, to the model, but it definitely cuts the cost down quite a bit. Explain why... But, but at the same time, it, it is often built around solo creators.
Explain how y- you got started on Substack and what you saw in newsletters in general.
Well, I think, to be honest, I, I came up with the idea of doing this kind of local journalism because I realized that one of the big assumptions underlying subscription media was not quite right or wasn't right anymore.
You generally, when you spoke to people in the media about doing subscriptions, there was this very strong orthodoxy that everyone told you about, which is that you have to have a critical mass of content in terms of volume to charge a subscription.
So it's like if you're- Mm-hmm... gonna charge a subscription to people, you're gonna need to be publishing 20 stories a day or 50 stories a day or whatever the, the, the, the number was, but it was always a lot.
And therefore, y- you build from that piece of logic. The next bit is, okay, I'm gonna need to have a team of 25 people minimum. All right. Okay, fine. So that's gonna cost me $5 million a year. Right. Okay.
That gets me out the game. That gets 99% of people who wanna do any type of media company out of the game straight from the beginning.
What I realized when I was reading Substack was, I was paying five bucks a month for a few different Substackers, and they were giving me almost no content.
Like, they were giving me two extra stories per month or, like, four extra stories per month. They were giving me l- fewer words
for my five bucks a month than you could find on the front page of The New York Times sometimes. So it was like- Yeah...
huh, if I'm willing to pay these guys basically because, and women, sorry, because they are giving me a, a highly differentiated type of story, but they're giving it in very low volumes, that's like a...
that's a big break in the logical chain of, that the people have been thinking about, right? The orthodoxy, you have to have loads and loads of content to charge subscriptions, is gone.
You can charge subscriptions, but you just have to make them as, what you're doing as differentiated and as interesting and as, as, as, as kind of you couldn't get this anywhere else as possible.
And, and, and I think as soon as I realized that, I was like, well, this kind of media company that I've been thinking about for local, that could actually work because via these, via these paid newsletters, because look at all these other people doing it with other formats.
Yeah. How'd you choose Manchester? I assume you're [chuckles] have a personal tie there, but still. I actually don't. You have to, like, think about the business. No, you don't.
I, I have no tie to it other than I support the football team, the, the only football team, the red football team here. And- I thought there was two. Well, yeah, allegedly. I'm just kidding. I'm kidding.
I'm, I'm sophisticated. Allegedly, there are two. [laughs] I actually live much closer to the Man City stadium than the, than Old Trafford. But yeah, I, look, I've, I've been here a lot for work, a bit for work.
I'd come here a lot for football.
I had, you know, I had a desire after I left university a long time ago to live in the North at some point 'cause I felt it was an interesting part of the country, and it just kind of coincided.
I was like, well, this is the kind of city that c- requires this kind of thing. Previously, I've lived in l- places like London and New York. They don't
so urgently require, like, innovation in local media because they've got a lot of journalists there. Whether they're doing good local journalism or not, I don't know, but there are just- Yeah...
hundreds, if notProbably thousands of like very high quality journalists in London from international outlets and local outlets- Yeah...
and, and, and, and I don't know, BuzzFeed and Vice and, you know, all the rest of it. Whereas you don't have that in Manchester. You have very, very few journalists operating here compared to London.
So I thought it was a good place to do it. It was a fun challenge for me. It was pandemic. It was a few months into the pandemic, so I really had nothing to do at home. I was, I was living, I was living at my mom's.
I was helping out a lot with my sister in her garden sort of patch, and, and it was just like a... It was, it was a challenge more than anything. This is an unusual entrepreneurial journey that we're on. Yeah, it is.
[gentle music] You're in the garden, and then, and then you're into Manchester.
What I love about it is that, you know, and I, I always go back with this with people who create businesses from the sort of, quote-unquote, content side, and it's totally different [chuckles] from the operator side in that, like, it wasn't like a deep like econometric an- analysis like, well, there's so many like, you know, college graduates in the Greater Manchester area, and this many like businesses, and this...
Like, at some point it's like, yeah, this is... Like I get a feel for it. 'Cause I mean, you, that's what you develop as, like, a journalist. You have instincts and, and you have sensibility and- Yeah. I, I- Yeah...
and as a, as a journalist in the past decade, you... There is a frustration that the kind of journalism you want is being done less and less. It's being commissioned less and less. Yeah. There are fewer, fewer...
Like, when I was on the London Evening Standard, we had eight feature writers. I asked one of my old colleagues there how many they have now, and it's one.
Like, the, the big newspapers here used to have big features desk. Now, it's all kind of freelance.
So the bit of journalism that I really care about had been particularly cut away, this kind of feature writing side of it, this more in-depth journalism.
So there was the kind of like, I wanna create the kind of journalism that I wanna see in the world or I wanna see in British society. There was that. Yeah. There was a... Look, there was a spreadsheet.
I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna take the, take the hit from you- No... that there was no, no econometric petrol planning. I'm not against spreadsheets. [laughs] I am not against spreadsheets.
I have several spreadsheets open on my- But, uh, yeah... browser right now... look, there was a, there was a little bit of looking at, looking at the demographics and stuff.
But no, it's much more, like you said, editing and running an, a media organization is so much about gut and instinct, and like trying to understand what you think people will want. Yeah.
And, and I, I think starting The Mill was kind of just like a, a version of publishing a story where you're like, "I think people want this, and I've spoken to some people, and they claim that they want it," but you just never know until you hit publish.
Yeah. Okay. So you started with the... When, when did the newsletter start? Started in June 2020. Okay.
And so from the start you were like, "Okay, the business model, we're gonna keep the, the costs real low, and the business model is gonna be subs." You started with subs out of the gate?
I mean, it, it was only me, so the cost was kind of the work- Yeah... that I wasn't doing. I was still doing a little bit of freelancing for the, for the newspapers here. Yeah. So the costs were unbelievably low.
It was always gonna be subs. I, I, I, I specifically wanted to create a media company that was about high quality stuff that I really would like to read and that's sub spaced.
Because I had been through some of the, the ad-funded media gold rush, or we, I think we, you know, we, we could say we were both involved in that in New York. So I, I, I had seen the- Yeah... the limitations there.
Yeah. What were the limitations that, that you saw? You know, I think you've only got a small amount of time to get my answer to this, but- [laughs] I know. I was gonna say that. There were...
Look, you know better than me, but, but clearly there was a moment in, in, in, in media- I just wanna make sure the limitations that I see are the same. [laughs] No, for sure.
There was a, there was a, there was a moment in media in my, from my perspective, where people really believed that if you had 10 million people reading you every month, or 100 million, or 200 million, that meant something like having 10 million subscribers on your newspaper in the '80s, or 100 million or whatever.
And, and there was this kind of false- Yeah... equivalence between unique users who might literally spend 30 seconds on your website per month, and like, like old metrics that really meant something.
And I think the big realization, the big tide going out moment, was when people realized that those uniques, that traffic which mainly came from Facebook in the era that I was involved, did not convert into anything else that was valuable.
It didn't convert really well into selling stuff. Yeah. It didn't convert really well into subscriptions. It didn't even convert really well into joining an email list or listening to a podcast.
And I, I think as soon as that realization came, came about, the, the VCs who were backing this kind of massive gold rush suddenly thought, "Hang on. This is not worth a 10th of what we thought it was."
I think I saw the other day that BuzzFeed's current valuation is roughly, I think it was 10% of the, of the, of the peak valuation they got in one of their fundraisers. I mean, that's- Yeah...
that's a remarkable destruction of value, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's totally... And, and it's, it's funny 'cause it's, a lot of it is like, on the face of it, it never made sense, right?
[laughs] Like, I mean, uh, but like w- I don't know whether it's mass delusion or something, or just we don't wanna like sort of think too deeply about it, but like it never made sense, like, uh, uh, the massive numbers that people...
And then obviously were not translating into business results, and there was a lot of finger pointing and, and et cetera. What I re- But, but I think that- What I remember about that era, one of the iconic- Yeah...
memories that I have of that era is listening to your podcast and hearing the executives of all of the companies, mainly the bigger ones than, that I was involved in- Oh, shit... say- Before they went bye.
[laughs] Well, they would, well, they would talk about, they would talk about the relationship. I remember it was always about, "We have a deep relationship. We have..."
I, I think one, one of them said appointment- Yeah... appointment reading or appointment viewing. There was a lot of very clever marketing about what this relationship was.
And now we know, and I think we probably knew at the time, but like, you know, as you say, we were all involved in this, in this huge boom.
You know, we, I think we all knew that that relationship was like, it was the equivalent of me, you know, dr- walking past someone in the street in Manchester.
That's the level of relationship that, that most media companies had with, let's say, 95% of their readers. Yeah. I tried to, I tried to be skeptical. No, you were. You...
There were, there were moments of, yeah- [laughs] There were, there were moments of that. I mean, I was like, seriously, come on. Like, these numbers are ridiculous. Right. Right. Right.
But anyway, let's get back to this. Uh, so you're gonna start with a s- a subscription model. Like, how are you deciding?
Like, because like I think one of the problems always with subscriptions is sampling.I mean, did you...
But I mean, I think with Substack that, and maybe it changed o-or maybe they evolved or something, but yeah, I think what they found is you don't have, a-and you shouldn't put most of the content behind a paywall. Yeah.
It's a, it's a funny one that. Like, my instinct at the beginning was I want four-fifths or s- or nine-tenths or something- Yeah... to be paywalled. I want people to have to come and find my stuff.
But there's just this huge discovery problem. How the hell are people gonna know what's behind the paywall? You can tell them, you can trail it in your one free email a week, but they're not gonna know.
So I've, I've settled on a cadence, which is we do roughly half our stuff is free and half our stuff is paid, and we don't have a fancy paywall like The Wall Street Journal, where we can d- put the paywall up if we think this particular user is likely to pay.
You know, it's just a, it's just a simple thing of some... Like, well, like with your Substack, some things are paid, some things are free. Yeah. And that kind of works for us.
Like we, we, we've built a lot of our growth just on that.
And I, and I think that I would love there to be a little bit more paid, but it's just like, it's funny, whenever you move in that direction, you're like, "Hmm, but I just want a bit more exposure to those free people because I want to..."
Every, every free thing you send is like your shop window. So that's the, that's the cadence I've settled on.
But I think about this question quite a bit, and I've, I've, I've never landed on exactly what, what we should be doing. Yeah.
And it's, it's, it shifts for every single audience 'cause like you said, the, the impetus for paying for a subscription a, a lot of times is not like purely transactional.
It's, it's almost a form of, I don't wanna say patronage, but like, it's I want this to exist in the world.
And I think if you have a community-based model, and I think Local is by its nature literally community-based, you get a shot at, at getting people to contribute to something existing because they want it to exist.
You know, Hamish McKenzie from Substack said this to, to me the other day when I was talk-talking to him on his podcast, he was like, "Where do you think The Mill fits on that sort of continuum from really transactional stuff to really kind of we wanna support this ongoing?"
But I think the thing you've just said, which actually I've never thought of, is Local is particularly, I think you're saying, suited- Mm-hmm...
to a model where people feel like they're not just paying for content, like you pay for a loaf of bread, they're paying for the continued existence of the organization. Oh, for sure.
And I've never thought about it that way, but like when you l- what, read comments and, and emails from our, our super fans, you know, our paying subscribers, th- 1,650 of them or whatever there are now. Mm.
They really talk about it like they want this thing to exist in Manchester in perpetuity. Like they, they want Manchester to have this thing. They see The Mill as an asset, like a quite...
Almost a civic asset for the city, and they want it to be there in five years, 10 years because they think it enriches it.
And, and so it's very well-suited to a model where, where, where you've got this thing of this mix of motivations. I think that's, I think that's completely bang on. In fact, I'm gonna, I'm gonna- Yeah...
use that, that, that line. Yeah. Go ahead. Put it in the sales kit. Yeah.
But I think like particularly with, with local and, um, and communities is you can, you can, you can tap into that like desire for something to exist and, you know, ultimately you have to provide value for people.
It's not like, you know, standing out like with a [chuckles] you know, with a tip jar or something like that.
But there's no doubt that, you know, we're seeing that people will support things that they want to exist- Yeah... in the world.
And I think the key though, I think, and that's why the newsletter is interesting, is you have a level of engagement with a newsletter that, at least for now in my view and my experience, is very different than if you had set up like a regular like website.
It's unbelievable. I mean, it's, it's, it's like we say, like it's like apples and pears, you know? Like the- Yeah...
the relationship that you have when you're running an online, you know, an online media publisher and you've got 10 million, you...
I mean, the, the, the amount of engagement we get per head, or just like the total amount of engagement I get now is much, much higher than I ever had when I was running websites online that did millions and tens of millions of, of views.
And it's much higher than I had when I was working on the Evening Standard, which is a, a print publication that went out to like, you know, a million people in London and, and, and they...
Like, you could literally see them reading your stories on the tube on the way home when you were going home. You didn't get the kind of e- you didn't email them the stuff.
The fact that these emails now, our journalism is arriving in people's inboxes and it like... And, and we always say like, "Get in touch if you know more about this. Get in touch."
Sometimes we'll just do a little news item in our newsletters, which we don't even think it's that great, but we've just stuffed it in because we just wanna see if we can get p- people to come out of the woodwork to become a source for a proper story, you know?
And so- Mm... we'll do a little item on some school 'cause we want the governors of that school to come out of the woodwork among our readers and get in touch. So it's absolutely phenomenal for that.
I mean, one of the things about this job is responding to all the emails. It... I've, I've never had- Yeah... so many tips and emails and, and also just nice things encouraging us and saying, "I like this, I like that."
So that's such a big part of- Yeah... that's such a nice part of doing newsletters. Yeah. You get nicer feedback. It's better than the comments section. [chuckles] Exactly. It's 10 times nicer.
I would always avoid the comments section. I was like, "There's nothing good down there." [gentle music] Right. Nobody is gonna be like, "You know, I think you did a nice job, Brian."
[laughs] It's like, no. That was not like sort of the feedback you generally get, which is fine. Like, honest feedback, everyone email me, good, bad, whatever. But, uh, okay, so you've got 1,600.
Now you have a couple of, of, of spinoff newsletters, right? Yeah. I think spinoff makes it sound too corporate, Brian. That's not the language that we use. I don't know. We, we've- Very cool...
we've got sister, we've got sister newsletters in Liverpool and, and Sheffield- Sister newsletters...
which I think our American listeners will, you know, hopefully know are, are, are also reasonably large northern cities in the UK. And- Yeah. My grandmother is from Liverpool. Oh. Was from Liverpool.
She- Well, that should mean that you're paying me £5 a month for the, for the, for the Post. Well, I don't... I think she last lived there in like 1910. That's fine. I mean, she's-
That's not- She passed away probably- That's fine. You should still be-... in her 90s, 80s...
you should still be subscribing, right?No, yeah, we've got, we've got these two other cities, and effectively that came about because Substack had this program called Substack Local, and they were willing to back people who were...
who had ideas in local. And because The Mill was already doing well in Manchester, they gave us a good amount of money that allowed me to effectively back two other journalists in these other cities.
I mean, I'm involved in the editing, and I'm involved in the commissioning, but really there were journalists in these two cities who we were able to back and pay a salary until the thing broke even, or like almost broke even, you know, sort of thing.
I'm still putting a bit of money in. Yeah. So that was really transformative for us. Okay. So that, that was the Substack program that allowed you to sort of- Yeah... you know, get into other cities. Yeah.
But it's going to be... The business model right now is, is purely subscriptions. You're... What about ads? Yeah, we're doing a tiny little bit.
So we're just starting ads, because there comes a point where you're like, "I've been doing this for two years.
I've got twenty-seven thousand people on this email list in Manchester alone, forty-five thousand in total across the three cities." And, you know, it's, it's...
I think it's great that we've converted seven percent or seven and a half percent to paying, but like the other ninety-three percent, I... That has to be monetized. Like, we've got a really valuable audience. Yeah.
They're getting great stuff from us twice a week and, you know, that's a revenue opportunity. So it's not something I've moved fast on, and it's not something that Substack really pushes, but like it's...
It would be mad- Yeah... for me not to, not to take that opportunity. So at the moment, I've... We're, we're starting to kind of do a few partnerships. We've done it... Well, done one test run and that kind of thing.
Yeah. I don't wanna make it a Substack podcast, but [laughs] this is like always, like, a thing, like, 'cause you just...
No business is going to treat ninety-three percent of the, like, product consumption as, like, marketing. Like, it just does not... It doesn't compute to me.
You're gonna have to figure out other ways to make money off that because you're creating value, and it... to me, it's just, it's just common sense, right?
And so I would expect Substack or like come up with some kind of micro payment scheme, something that allows that, or just to give in and be like, "Hey, we're gonna figure out an ad network," because it doesn't make sense to only make money off seven percent of your users.
I don't care how many of these thousand true fans essays you, you publish, it just doesn't make sense to me. I think, yeah. I think- It's funny.
I, I always think the commercial reality of that will eventually hit, and not just for that reason, by the way, not just because, like, in theory, there's loads of value there to be had, but also because everyone who's trying to do this is putting their, you know, blood, sweat and tears into growing little media companies on Substack, whether it's one person or like me, a, a little team.
And who on earth is gonna leave the opportunity to grow on the table? It's like, "Oh, I could hire another reporter in Liverpool.
I could hire a, I could hire a photographer in Manchester," but I'm not gonna do that because, because, you know, these brands who really, really wanna reach my audience, they're not able to.
So yeah, I just think, like, the logic of, like- Yeah... every- we're, we're all trying to grow something here and, and that logic will kick in. Having said that, I always want subscriptions to be my main revenue model.
Yeah. So, so, I- So ex- so explain that because it does...
it forces you to be audience-focused and, you know, as, as someone who is, is not obviously in the UK market, but has found himself on some local UK newspaper site- [laughs]...
I can say with a fair bit of confidence that they are not very user-centric [laughs] organizations. Yeah. I mean, it's... The...
I'm glad you've been- Any time I do a slide, if I do a slide about, like, a- adversarial business models for some presentation, I'm like, "Oh, I need to put some horrific website up here," I just go down a list of, like, UK city newspaper websites and find some atrocity to take a screenshot.
Yeah. It's, it is literally an atrocity, the way, the way that they treat their users.
I mean, for, for listeners who have not spent the time, any time on the Manchester Evening News website or the Liverpool Echo website, you are talking about some of the worst user experiences on Earth in terms of ad load and videos that are stopping you from reading this and- Yeah...
constantly- They really go for it... constantly trying to get you to sign up to this and sign up to that and join this. It is just, it is absolutely... It's almost a parody.
I think what that tells you- What do they call those things? Wallpaper ads. Right. There's a lot of wallpaper ads. You know the, you know the te- you know the terminology. I just know how...
I know, I just know the experience.
It's funny, actually, in Manchester, there is a regular almost meme on the local Reddit page, which is someone will go on there, and they will screenshot the Manchester Evening News homepage, and they will say, "What on earth is going on here?"
Yeah. "What has happened to the Manchester Evening News?" Which is like this, you know, beloved newspaper until relatively recently. And then everyone will pile in and say, "I just can't believe it."
And my biggest ever sign up day was not when I, like, went on Radio 4. It was not when, like, you know, anything like that.
It was when someone did a Reddit thread about that, and s- the first comment was like, "You've got to check out The Mill." I got four hundred and fifty people on my email list that afternoon- Oh, great...
because that was the top of the Manchester Reddit. So it's, it is unbelievable, and just, like, to get into the kind of rationale behind that or, like, where we got there, if you think about online ads,
there has always been a problem that there was a misaligned incentive, that the publishers wanted to reach as many people as possible, right? For the advertiser.
But actually, for readers, you wanna read a bunch of content that's not necessarily written for as many people as possible. It's not viral content. It's not about celebrities. It's not about TV.
It's about really niche stuff that you care about. So there was a mismatch between incentives of the reader and, and, and of the advertiser.
I think when it comes to local, you get a really, really egregious example of that, because effectively, online ads are antithetical to local journalism.
Because if you really wanna make as much money from online advertising, you have to write stories that are gonna reach may- let's say five million people or ten million people. They could be read in Timbuktu.
They could be read in London, even if you're in Manchester. They could be about Ronaldo or Man United or... You get local newspaper websites in the UK who write about Xbox releases, and they won't write once.
They'll write like ten different stories about Xbox. Yeah. So they're doing classic SEOClickbait stuff or just, you know, classic SEO content, and it's totally antithetical to local journalism.
Good local journalism should be stuff that might only appeal to five thousand people, or it might only appeal to five hundred people in a particular neighborhood. But you're never ever gonna do that on a, on a...
Well, you're never gonna prioritize that over all this other stuff on a, i-in a business model where you make more money if you reach millions.
And so I think it's that mismatch, which we're all aware of in this industry, has been particularly ruinous in local news. It has totally ruined a lot of these newspaper brands.
Yeah, because it pulls, it kinda pulls their focus away from actually being essential to a local population, which is literally their, their, their one job.
And- It, it's, it's, it's like if an organization set out to do one thing, and then their business m-model pulled them in diametrically the opposite direction. It's like we will make more money- Yeah...
if we write about something that Piers Morgan said on the CV this morning, if we write about something that some celebrity said on Instagram this afternoon.
We will make a ton more money from that than if we report on local issues. And therefore, you know, obviously, loads of the stuff on their sites is about those things.
Someone sent me, there's some sort of anonymous reporter in London who sent me a list of the most-read stories on a, on a website called My London, which is, uh, you know, owned by- Mm-hmm... Reach PLC.
It's one of these things that's just like tons and tons of this kind of content. And the vast majority of their stories, their most-read stories, had nothing to do with London. They were to do with celebrities.
They were to do with TV shows. It was really, really, like, eye-opening. They sent me the, the October stuff and the November stuff, and both of them had very, very...
Basically, there was nothing in the top tens from what I can remember that was actually journalism either. It was rewriting internet stuff. It was really like, wow, that's, that's where we've got to now. Yeah.
So what does this allow? What, what is the... Like, how do you describe the focus then? Let-let's just stick with The Mill. Like, what do you guys do, but more importantly, what do you don't do? Yeah. I mean,
we don't do rewriting press releases and, and sticking them out as if they're news. We don't write about stuff that celebrities have said on social media. We don't write about stuff that's coming out on TV.
We don't write about stuff that's like the, the, what, you know, 10 different stories about the new Xbox and, like, when to get it. Obviously, we don't do those things.
The stuff that we do is stuff that we think we can do better than anyone else.
It's like stuff that we can confidently say at the end of the week, "If people wanted to read this kind of stuff, if they're interested in this, then they had to come to The Mill to get it.
And if they wanted all of it, they had to pay The Mill to get it." That's like our big thing. It's like, do we believe in these stories? Do we really like them?
And are they stories that, like, people couldn't get anywhere else? And, and that's, like, our big guiding light. And a- and actually, you don't have to explicitly explain that to your reporters every day, because
a lot of stuff now is just not being provided by, by, by these, these other companies that, that run local news in the country.
I mean, there are three or four companies that control about 80% of local news out-outlets in the country, and they have all pretty much chosen the business strategy that you've just been outlining.
And the, and, and, and therefore, there are just tons of interesting stories that my team can go and find in Manchester, Liverpool, and Sheffield that are not being provided. It's not like I have to say, "Hang on.
Would that ever appear on the Manchester Evening News?" That, that, that question doesn't really come up. It's just like the field has been left open.
Coming back to that conference, it just feels like the field has been left open in this absolutely critical bit of the media ecosystem.
The field has been left open to, you know, to mix metaphors a bit, for, for, for basically for, for anyone. It's, it's been emptied. You know, people have, people have gone off and, and done a completely different thing.
Yeah. But I mean, you guys are doing, like, like reporting, right?
So I think one of the knocks on a lot of these, like, very lean models is, well, they're, they're gonna end up just being, like, commentary or aggregation, and they're not, quote unquote, like, real journalism.
I, I hear this said a lot about, like, particular new- particularly newsletters, as if there's only one form of journalism, but leave that aside. Yeah.
I think, yeah, obviously, I think there's a lot of value in, in lots of different forms of journalism, even if it doesn't require investigation and digging.
A, a typical story for us, like a, like a big story for us, something that would, that, that, that people would associate us with, would be a story like the one we're publishing tomorrow.
So there's a school near Manchester, which is very, very well known and very prestigious, and it's been... got this terrible report from the inspectors, right?
So we've spent a month and a half speaking to 16 different sources, kids who go there, teachers who work there, governors, parents, about what's really going on. What's really going on inside this school?
Why has it been described as a complete disaster by these inspectors? And we've written a three and a half thousand word story, and we've given the school two weeks to respond.
You know, we've harassed them to try and get on the phone with us to give us a fuller account. We've got a statement off them. So it's like, you know, I don't think it's what you'd call investigative journalism.
It's not like going through, you know, you know, millions of documents, but it's just old-fashioned, good, good, you know, magazine journalism. Yeah. But it's accountability, right?
[upbeat music] Like, I think a lot of times when people go to, you know, at least here, like, with, with the different, like, newsletter-based local- Mm...
efforts, I think a, a criticism that is usually leveled at them is they don't do the accountability stuff. Mm. Right?
Like, there's, there's always gonna be a market for what's on this weekend, you know, what are the good, you know, bars to, to hit, what are the festivals, where do you go peep leaves or whatever. Yeah.
But, you know, I think where people always go to is who's gonna hold the corrupt city council accountable. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the argument for doing these kind of summaries of what's going on type things would be- Mm-hmm...
the first thing is we need to get people reconnected to high quality information that's been checked by professionals. So actually- Yeah...
if you can do a newsletter that, that all it does is it tells you 10 stories you need to know about today, but actually two trained journalists have checked over it, at least you can say, "Well, that's a hell of a lot better than the whole city being informed just by Facebook groups or just by, you know, stuff online."
So I think that's a- Yeah...
that's a, that's a legitimate thing to wanna do.I think, as you say, the thing that really desperately needs to be built on top of that is journalism where there are questions asked and documents consulted, and weeks spent trying to really put together a fair and robust picture of what's going on.
And it's not just about the council. I, I get a little bit frustrated that people always default to thinking about local government when they think about local journalism. At these conferences- Yeah...
it's always about local government. Local government is one part of it. We do big stories.
I s- I wrote a, you know, 5,000-word profile of the outgoing leader of Manchester City Council 'cause he was a legitimate public figure.
I spoke to national figures about him, local figures about him, off the record stuff, y- yada, yada, yada. But I don't think that that... I don't... Local government
requires more scrutiny, but so what about local schools? What about local cultural organizations?
What about local businesses who are, who are screwing, you know, screwing over small independents or, you know, we recently did a- Yeah... story about that kind of thing.
I think there's just like, there are so many bits of our local life where there is not enough scrutiny, and I totally agree that, like, if there's gonna be- Yeah...
a real renaissance in local journalism, it needs to get to that point for sure. But it also, it needs to be like audience centric.
And I think, like, there's been a lot of, like, local, like, capital J journalism stuff that liter- uh, it's not audience centric, it's journalism, journalist centric, honestly.
'Cause there's a, a particular flavor of reporting that is popular at, at the conference you were at in Arizona.
A- and it's, it acts, uh, in my view, as if, like, all the other stuff doesn't matter or is just, like, fluff. Yeah. I mean- That's my- I mean, that's- Take...
that's basically what I was trying to get at with the whole local government thing. There is this idea- Yeah...
that I think comes out of journalism schools, which is that there is this, as you say, legitimate range of, of public interest journalism. It's always called public interest or whatever. And I think that- Yeah...
stuff really matters. Like,
but ultimately if you can't build a business model whereby people are y- whereby people like your stuff enough, they wanna read it enough that they're gonna give you money, there's no point in having all these different categories about lo- public interest, whatever.
You have to do journalism that people are gonna be really inspired by, they're gonna read, they're gonna wanna pay for.
The way I look at it is, if you just do a council story about something happening in local government, but you make it super dry and w- and, and, and you just present the sort- Yeah...
of latof- la-latest facts, often people are not gonna wanna pay for that. They're not gonna find that interesting. They're not gonna find it exciting, or a lot of people aren't.
If you can work it into a really great long form feature that really has the drama and it goes behind the curtain and has the human stuff.
The big thing that I think is so missing from the way we look at journalism these days is like the human component of it.
I think we've stripped the humanity out of so much of what we're doing, and it means that, like, it's not exciting to read. It's kind of just fact, fact, fact, fact, fact.
I think journalism is partly about giving people information, but it's also partly about showing people in their full humanity, showing people the flaws and, and, and, and, and the other stuff about them.
Showing the, the, the people who've been affected by a story.
I think one of the things I try to do with The Mill is do a brand of journalism that is both exciting and interesting and dramatic to read and, and, and, and takes you into a human story, but it also provides robust accountability for the people we're writing about.
I think if you can get that balance, you're more likely to build something sustainable. I, I think you're right that there are a lot of... Well, there are certainly some projects where you look at them and you think,
"That is great if your funder is a, you know, a university or, or whatever." But ultimately, if you... People are not gonna pay for that stuff. And, and, and, and, and also, like, why would they?
Like, why, why are we trying to bore people's pants off all the time? Like, that... We have to give people variety. We have to give people eclectic stuff. I, I'm a big believer in that. Yeah.
You guys have a few, like, uh, accent related coverage- [laughs]... I've noticed. Yeah. We did a piece this week about, yeah. I like that. Yeah. We did a thing about, uh, about accents across Greater Manchester earlier.
The, the, the knock- Yes... on me is that my accent is very Southern and I'm, I'm running a local media company in the North. No, I think you have to, you have to...
You should have gone to, like, an, an accent class and- [laughs] I should have... you know, blend in a little. All right. So what is next for, like, expansion? I mean, 'cause I think y- you know,
you've obvious- I mean, you've proven out the model like as that, that it c- it can work and now th- you know, I think the question is how do you... Or maybe you don't want to, like, grow it. Yeah.
I, I, I do wanna grow it, and I think the realization I had a few months ago was when a couple of my long-term readers k- kind of suggested to me, "Well,
now you've got this working in Manchester, and now you've got these people doing it in, in two other cities, like, you know, are you gonna make this the solution to British local journalism's problems or are you not?"
Like, you know, a- and it was a bit like, "Well, yeah, actually, I think I can d- I think I can do that, but I don't have the cash to do it." And these are kind of people who do have a bit of money.
So I am, I mean, a bit of an exclusive on the, on the Brian Morrissey pod- pod- podcast. Oh, yeah. But I am just in the process of raising a little bit of funding. You know, not a huge- Oh, nice...
seed funding or whatever because basic- From a benevolent billionaire or- From, from, well, from benevolent long-term readers, to be fair. They're not, they're not billionaires. I wish they were.
But the, the people who are putting in bits of money because they think the next time I get a call from someone in Leeds or in Birmingham, which happens quite a bit,
that, that I, I'll actually be able to say, "I can back you. Like, we can back you. We've got the team here, but we've also got the money to back you."
It's almost like having a bit of a war chest bec- n-not for defensive reasons, but for, but for like reasons of there are journalists across this country who are really, really hating their jobs and who don't believe in what they're- Yeah...
doing anymore, and we've actually got a model that a lot of journalists really like. So it's like I'm gonna have a little bit of money in the bank to do that, but also I've got a tiny team.
Like, I've got like two full-time reporters in Manchester plus freelance stuff and, and a bit of part-time. I've got one in Sheffield, one in Liverpool.
Like, we are at the minimum viable product, to use a kind of boring startup term. Yeah. And like- Yeah, yeah, yeah...
we need to have a more sustainable team because the, the, the amount of stories we get sent now is incredible and, and we have to cut...
We, we have to be so ruthless about what we cover, and it, it would be great to have a, a bigger team in all these three cities so that we could really take on the stories that we want to. Okay.
So somewhere like Leeds, I just looked it up, I don't know this off the top of my head, population of eight hundred thousand. Can you have much of an impact there with one person? Like, what is the playbook?
Like, how many people do you end up needing or, or how do you think about that?
But the crazy thing is in Sheffield, which is a, you know, it's about seven hundred and fifty thousand people, but in the wider South Yorkshire area though, you know, there's more than a million and a half.
But-You know, we've built up nine hundred and fifty pay-paying subscribers with one guy, Dan, doing a lot of the reporting. Now, sure, I do a bit of the stuff and- Good job, Dan, if you're listening...
yeah, Dan's like, yeah, I mean, he's, he's an, he's an incredible guy, such a, such a, such a talented guy, but also, like, working so, so hard. He used to work for the local paper there.
[laughs] He worked for the local Sheffield Star, and he came and did this when I got the money from Sub Stack. He's got nine hundred and fifty people paying. He's the main reporter and editor.
Sure, we get some people from Manchester to go over to help out with writing. He's got great freelancers. We've got, like, an intern there who's helping out. But, like, it's a tiny, tiny operation. And yet people...
You look at the comments under his stuff. Like, if anyone's listening to this, go and look at the tweets about the Sheffield Tribune and look at the comments.
People regard that outlet as, like, their quality outlet in the city. It's got twelve thousand people on the email list. It's got nine hundred and fifty paying. It's a phenomenon.
Like, it's, it's doing fantastic journalism. Yeah. Which is partly 'cause Dan's brilliant, but it's also because this model works.
If you give people high-quality stuff on a regular basis, hey, you know, what a surprise, they, they will be willing to pay for that. Yeah. Uh, that's great. So the goal is then to expand to a bunch of cities in England?
It's funny, I, I think that- And, I don't know, beyond? Yeah, I mean, one big goal is to, is to make the ones we've already got better and better- Yeah...
so that, so that they can become the kind of quality news source in these places. And I think, yeah, the... And, and then to have enough money so that we can back people in more.
And I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna rush that because this thing works if someone in a city really, really wants to do it, and that city really, really needs it. And if those preconditions are in place.
I mean, I only started in Sheffield because Dan got in touch with me two months after I started The Mill and said, "Hey, I love what you're doing," you know, whatever. So- I love that...
yeah, so, so that was totally, totally organic. And the, and the money, the fundraising is gonna come in, in also in an organic way. I mean, I'm not gonna...
I'm, I'm also reaching out to other people 'cause I wanna fill in an actual fundraising round. But, but I think that, um, yeah, I...
The, the, the thing, I suppose the way I think about the ambition is not, like, more cities or more size or whatever. It's like I want, o-once I'm finished with this,
I want people to recognize what we've done as a genuine contribution to journalism in this country, a genuine game changer where people were like, "Wow, we didn't really believe that this kind of thing could happen, and this has totally changed things."
Like, maybe that's too much of a, maybe that's too much of a... That, maybe that's a lofty goal, but I really want it to be like, "Oh, that was a, that was a real thing." No, that's a good goal. That was a... Yeah, yeah.
That's, that's, that's sort of how I think about it. Don't be too English about this kind of thing. [laughs] It's good to have that. All right, let's leave it there, Yashi. That was, uh, awesome.
I really appreciate you, uh, taking the time, and it's really impressive what you and your team have built. Thank you very much, Brian. [gentle music] Thanks a lot for listening.
Please stay tuned for my conversation with Yaron, in which we talk about the way to succeed with sustainable business models is actually for publishers to return to thinking first and foremost about the audience.
Go figure. Too often the audience isn't central to these models, and I think a lot of what I like to call adversarial business models spring from this mistake. Let's get into the conversation with Yaron.
[upbeat music] Okay, Yaron, welcome to the podcast. Thanks. It's a totally different era from two thousand six when we talk about sustainable independent media, right?
Like, a lot of the things that I think all of us assumed from back at that time, some of them didn't come true, right?
Like, I think if we were looking back in two thousand six, that was sort of the year of the Mary Meeker slide was still being bandied about. Remember that one? It was like time- Yep, yep... time spent.
Every single presentation- Yep... had it. Time spent is here, and, um, budget spent on the internet is here. Those lines are gonna, like, collapse. All this money's gonna flow because that's where the attention is.
And it, it really did happen, I think. So that assumption was right.
The assumption that was wrong was that money would then go to the publishers [laughs] that were creating the content because the money went, um, to the platforms, [laughs] uh, not the publishers for the lar- uh, to a large degree.
Um, so let's talk about, like, how, um...
And I feel like a lot of things are going on right now to, I don't wanna say put the genie back in the bottle, but to sort of right that because, um, it's obviously a been a difficult period for, um, sustainable publishing models, um, and I think in large part, um, for this r-reason.
Um, what are the sort of three big, um, challenges you think that publishers need to tackle when it comes to building these kind of sustainable models? Yeah.
So I, I think the first thing is probably, uh, kinda, uh, contrary to what you said, I think as long as, as an industry we're kinda blaming the tech platforms, the Facebooks, uh, the solution is not gonna, is not gonna happen.
It's not the Facebook's, uh, fault. It's, it's really how we as, as, uh, the publishing industry thinks about the business.
So I'd say the number one by far in everything publishers should do is making sure the, the user is coming, uh, first.
And I think that's probably the biggest lost opportunity that we've had in these, this transition to digital, is, uh, that we haven't necessarily put the user first. Uh, we as, as publishers, uh,
uh, tend, especially in the past twenty years, put the advertiser first. And I, I'll just give one example, which I think is the, uh, probably the most meaningful, is, uh, is that focus on maximizing RPMs.
Uh, the old business model forever, for the past hundred years or so, has been, for publishers, has been to get higher and higher RPMs. Now, that's, that's important. It's good, but users don't, don't care about RPM.
There's not a single user, at least not that- [laughs]... that I've ever met in the past twenty-five years- No... that is saying, you know, "This, this RPM is so delightful, I'm gonna come back to you tomorrow." Yeah.
I was really- If only, if only there was greater yield on this site. That's what I... [laughs] Yeah. Dollar twenty-seven was delightful for me. I'm, I'm gonna be back tomorrow.
And, uh, you know, I think if we can take inspiration and learnings from the big tech platforms on one thing, it would be exactly this.
They're very good at RPMBut they're even better at making sure that their user-driven KPIs, the engagement, the people coming back is the, is the top KPI, and RPMs are a result that has to be secondary. Okay.
So think beyond the RPM is, is the big... And, and I think this has been an essential challenge because it, it ends up coming down to short-term thinking versus long-term thinking, right? And everyone wants to
think long term, at least they think of themselves in long term. [laughs] And then the pressures come, right?
And, um, and I've seen this over the years many times covering the industries where, and, and it's a point well taken, where there's been a lot of, like, blame.
There's a lot of finger-pointing and, like, "Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Look, we have no choice," and s- and all of the stuff where I don't know if that really flies with operating a business because you have to-- you're responsible for how you operate the business, and you make- [laughs]...
you make a set of choices. Um, so I think taking control, publishers taking control of their future is absolutely critical. Yeah. And it's not [sighs]
i- in that short-term versus long-term, uh, trade-off, it feels to me like some, some publishers think about this as, um, oh, you know, we'll, we'll make a trade-off of less revenue versus more revenue, and it's not the right trade-off.
Uh, I think it's not the right mentality at least. Uh, the, the approach I'm proposing, I think, is much more financially greedy. It's just a different way of looking at things.
So again, to go back to the, uh, to that RPM example of, and if, uh, I had to just abstract it, you know, it-- I know that a dollar RPM is higher than 80 cents. Uh, that-- I'm not a big mathematician- [laughs]...
but I do understand that math.
But i- if we put user KPIs first, we might see that that dollar RPM experience is, is a crappy user experience, and the users don't come back, whereas with that 80, uh, cent RPM experience, users do find value, and they come back.
And so the right math is 80 cents plus 80 cents plus 80 cents plus 80 cents, which again, mathematically, is much greedier than that dollar. Yeah.
Uh, I just think it's the whole kind of advertising industrial complex is not, is not constructed to be able to, uh, to materialize on that. Yeah.
I remember, like, um, back when I was at Digiday, like Dotdash, uh, Neil, uh, Vogel doing a presentation showing about, you know, and going through how taking ads off the page ended up- Oh, yep...
ended up m- meaning more revenue. So, like, fewer ads, fewer but better ads mean that, like, you're going to end up making more money, um, because people are going to come back.
You're gonna develop trust, and over time, it's, it's an investment.
A- and so, you know, I think that's the sort of short-termism is, is like, just like wanting to, I guess, get all the revenue all at once, um, and not thinking- Mm-hmm... about that long-term relationship. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I agree with that, and I think Neil Vogel's, uh, approach is very smart in that focuses on, you know, if you do less ads, there's more scarcity, and you can actually charge a premium for the better experience.
Very smart as well, but I think even just the simple, let's make sure we're engaging users, getting them to come back tomorrow, valuing those ads of a second visit, valuing those much more than a first visit, kind of random, anonymous, uh, uh, visit ads, uh, I think those are the way to rethink, uh, for susta- a sustainable future.
Yeah. Thank you for listening this week. We will be back next week with a new episode. The Rebooting show is produced by Podhelpus. Podcasts are a great way to expand your client base.
Podhelpus lets you focus on having engaging conversations, giving your brand the full stack of services needed for a professional look and sound. Start your podcast today at podhelp.us.
[outro music]