WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.940 --> 00:00:18.500 [upbeat music] Welcome back to the Rebooted show. 2 00:00:18.560 --> 00:00:22.820 I'm Brian Morrissey. Appreciate all the feedback and the sharing of the podcast. I had to look this up. 3 00:00:22.860 --> 00:00:31.240 There's something like eight hundred and fifty thousand podcasts, so [laughs] audience growth in two thousand twenty-two for a new podcast is quite a challenge. And there's even more podcasts coming. 4 00:00:31.300 --> 00:00:42.460 I read something else that ten percent of British people, presumably mostly men, are deciding to start a podcast [laughs] in two thousand twenty-two. So I got all these British people coming for me, too. 5 00:00:42.600 --> 00:00:53.250 Wanna thank Kelly Smith. Kelly Smith shared this endorsement on LinkedIn. [laughs] "I'm an idiot for not listening sooner. Brian Morrissey cuts straight through the BS. He's not here for the smoke and mirrors." 6 00:00:53.260 --> 00:01:04.500 Brad, you hear that? Canned answers. He keeps it real. He knows the media, PR, marketing, and tech space, and his questions get to the heart of what you want to know as a listener. Put this on your list. 7 00:01:04.599 --> 00:01:14.400 Kelly, my God, you're not an idiot. You're amazing. It's only been a couple months. Don't worry. But thank you very much. And so thank you. If you can, leave a review rating on Apple. It helps people find the podcast. 8 00:01:14.560 --> 00:01:24.720 The other week I, I wrote about how I think this is gonna be something of a roaring '20s for digital media, in that we're finally seeing a new wave of brands being formed at, at this time. 9 00:01:24.900 --> 00:01:33.600 And to me it's very reminiscent of what happened in the mid-2000 and early two thousand tens. And one of the new brands that just launched is Grid. 10 00:01:33.880 --> 00:01:47.220 And joining me this week is Brad Bosserman, who's formerly head of brand partnerships, corporate and brand partnerships at Politico, and Brad is now CRO for Grid. Brad, welcome. Thanks, Brian, great to be here. 11 00:01:47.820 --> 00:01:57.840 All right, so we got all these new publications. Yeah. And weirdly, like, Washington, DC has become the hotbed for, like, media innovation and entrepreneurialism. First of all, why, why is that, do you think? 12 00:01:58.260 --> 00:02:06.870 Uh, the easy answer is that I think that the, the business models in media that have come out of the DC model have been particularly successful, is the short way. 13 00:02:06.980 --> 00:02:16.989 But I think that more broadly, I think your point is absolutely right. And I think that what I see when I look out at the landscape is that media companies tend to be born in generations. 14 00:02:17.540 --> 00:02:30.860 And to your point about the mid-aughts, that's what I think about too when you look at that two thousand five, six, seven period when you had everything from Politico, HuffPost, Vox, Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, all sorts of companies that were born in that same window. 15 00:02:31.420 --> 00:02:37.920 And now 15 years later, I think that you're seeing another one of those generations where a new breed of companies is being born. 16 00:02:38.480 --> 00:02:53.100 And I think that's because a lot of times media companies are in conversation with and downstream of larger changes in the culture, in consumer behaviors, in business models, in technology platforms. 17 00:02:53.160 --> 00:02:57.580 And as those things change, I think media companies react to those. 18 00:02:57.600 --> 00:03:16.140 And so I think we're in a place where we're starting to see a whole generation of new businesses that are standing on the shoulders of what was born in the mid-aughts, now seeing new opportunities around innovation across the whole landscape of, of product and content and audience development and business models are, are now all learning from that and, and being born now anew. 19 00:03:16.640 --> 00:03:20.700 Yeah. So you were at Politico for seven years? Yeah? Yeah. Or longer. Okay. 20 00:03:21.100 --> 00:03:30.480 So you said Politico was one of those companies really, a little earlier, but I think it was, it was one of the most successful companies of that era, too. 21 00:03:30.620 --> 00:03:39.420 Maybe others got a little bit more attention from people at Digiday and whatnot, but... Although we liked Politico. Every time we wrote about Politico, by the way, I would get an email from Jimmy Finkelstein. 22 00:03:40.720 --> 00:03:48.820 [laughs] And he would tell me, he goes, "The Hill is all that much better." If anyone knows Jimmy Finkelstein, they'll know my impersonation is broadly accurate. 23 00:03:48.880 --> 00:03:55.650 But every single time he would send me, he would send me an email. That's how I knew. [laughs] More, more G-rated perhaps than the real deal, but. 24 00:03:55.660 --> 00:04:08.859 [laughs] But, so explain to me how th- you think this era of, of brands that are coming out are gonna be different from that era. I know it's, like, generalizing 'cause everyone's coming at things differently. 25 00:04:08.940 --> 00:04:15.960 But as you said, there are macro things in the environment that, that a lot of people are seeing that are, that are causing them to start these new brands. 26 00:04:16.700 --> 00:04:25.940 So I think there's a few macro trends that are manifest in lots of different ways. And, and to your point, every company is doing things differently and trying to do and accomplish something a little bit distinct. 27 00:04:25.960 --> 00:04:38.500 But I think that there's a lot more skepticism around the, the platforms when you look at the idea that you could get a lot of audience quickly from Facebook, from other places, that I, I think a lot of folks are, are a lot more skeptical of that. 28 00:04:38.540 --> 00:04:46.400 And there's a, a big push toward owning audiences in a much more authentic way now, and I think that's at the core of basically everything that, that's being launched. 29 00:04:46.440 --> 00:04:56.060 And that's articulated differently, but the idea that you really need to own your audience, I think is, is different, and having that be something that is table stakes from the, the start. 30 00:04:56.080 --> 00:05:05.380 And I think that's because of all the experiences that folks have had over the last 10, 15 years. Yeah. Right? [laughs] Like, I think that that's a big one. Painful ones often. Yeah, I mean, both. 31 00:05:05.440 --> 00:05:12.400 It runs the gamut, right? Yeah. It did allow for a lot of companies to acquire large audiences at various points, but they found that they were renting them and not owning them, right? 32 00:05:12.460 --> 00:05:20.780 And so I think that's a lot of the push toward subscription model, the push toward first party. Obviously, there's a whole broader dynamic around the ad landscape that, that informs that too. 33 00:05:20.860 --> 00:05:31.520 But I do think that owning audiences is something that, that is really important for a lot of organizations. And I think that one of the other things is that we're seeing the ability to experiment more with formats. 34 00:05:31.600 --> 00:05:39.840 And one of the things with those publications that came out in the early aughts, I think that the core innovation that they were responding to, uh, was the internet itself, right? 35 00:05:39.900 --> 00:05:43.780 And the mass adoption of broadly accessible internet access among the population, right? 36 00:05:43.900 --> 00:06:02.176 So you could take a traditional more or less newsroom process and t- uh, produce aMore or less traditional newspaper article and then put it online for people to access and that in and of itself was a huge innovation as far as access and monetization and all of those things. 37 00:06:02.216 --> 00:06:05.396 Well now, fifteen years later, there's nothing unique about the internet anymore. 38 00:06:05.496 --> 00:06:22.196 Now I think a lot of these companies are saying, "Okay, what can we actually do to understand, super serve some of these audiences, create communities around our content, really look for different ways that we can produce this journalism in a way that goes beyond just an old-fashioned newspaper article that's displayed on a screen?" 39 00:06:22.596 --> 00:06:29.136 And so all of just trying to innovate acros- across all of those spaces, I think is, is what we're seeing now. Yeah. 40 00:06:29.176 --> 00:06:36.496 And I think what was interesting is I, I think maybe a lot of the, the publications started with that in mind, but they ended up writing to algorithms and creating for algorithms, right? 41 00:06:36.556 --> 00:06:47.536 So I always say media's a messed up business because you gotta not just keep your audience happy, but you have to keep advertisers, their frequently or customers happy, but then you also have to keep algorithms happy. 42 00:06:47.576 --> 00:07:00.466 It's ve- it's very complicated, at least it has been. But it seems like this new crop, at least in theory, th- they're all claiming to be very audience-focused. Which I think is super healthy, right? Yeah. 43 00:07:00.516 --> 00:07:08.176 That's what we want. I think that's what we want as media operators, that's what audiences want, that's what people who just want a healthy media ecosystem want, right? 44 00:07:08.256 --> 00:07:18.456 Is publications that are there to serve audiences in, in authentic ways. Okay, I'd like to talk about origin stories. Give me the origin story for Grid, and what is the, what's the opportunity? 45 00:07:18.896 --> 00:07:25.916 Why does the world need Grid? Sure. So I'll start with the first. And so our, our co-founders are Mark Bowman and Laura McGann. 46 00:07:26.196 --> 00:07:41.076 And Mark had a illustrious career in when he was, uh, earlier in his career as a, a foreign correspondent. He was living in war zones, and then he, uh, came back to Washington and was running some media companies. 47 00:07:41.096 --> 00:07:44.236 He ran all the media at Smithsonian and other places. 48 00:07:44.416 --> 00:08:02.456 And when he, he left there, he started thinking about what he and his friends and colleagues and folks were really facing this kind of endless stream of headlines and this overwhelming fire hose of news content. 49 00:08:02.956 --> 00:08:17.396 And, and he and, and his friends and colleagues were saying, "I really wish there was a way for us to understand the news better, to have a layer of context that was placed over it to help me prioritize what's important, not just what's new." 50 00:08:17.456 --> 00:08:22.236 And so he started thinking through how he could create a newsroom that did that. 51 00:08:22.856 --> 00:08:43.356 Simultaneously and separately, Laura McGann had been at Vox for about seven years overseeing their policy coverage, and she was looking for some place to go and do something else animated by the idea that she felt, and I won't put words in, in her mouth, but this is what she's described to me and others, that she felt- She's not here. 52 00:08:43.396 --> 00:08:51.246 You're gonna have to. [laughs] Exactly. Exactly. You can have her on later. Laura, come on. All right. Have your gracious guest come and sit. She's like, "I'm here now." 53 00:08:51.276 --> 00:09:12.196 [laughs] And so Laura felt like a lot of the very best, most impactful journalism that she oversaw at Vox was when she took different reporters who had diverse sets of expertise, and she sat them next to each other and had them working collaboratively on stories so that they could leverage different perspectives and be able to bring that to bear on a story in, in different ways. 54 00:09:12.226 --> 00:09:19.716 And she thought that when she could do that, those were things that really broke through and created differentiated value, and that no one e- else was doing that. 55 00:09:19.756 --> 00:09:31.456 And so she was looking around and saying, "How could I create a newsroom for where that is the animating idea from the ground up? Where that isn't the exception, but rather it's the rule. 56 00:09:31.516 --> 00:09:58.176 To have a collaborative newsroom where you have incredibly smart people who are out working outside of traditional verticalized beats, but are actually dispatched onto these big stories where you can have a science expert, you can have sitting alongside a, a public health expert, sitting alongside a politics expert and a data expert who can all work together on a story and bring that to life for our audience a more sophisticated way." 57 00:09:58.616 --> 00:10:07.536 And so they had mutual friends who put them in touch and said, "You two seem to be orbiting the same type of planet and, and your ideas seem to be consistent." 58 00:10:07.576 --> 00:10:20.456 And so they, uh, got together and they realized that there, there was a vision that made sense, and that they could create a publication that was collaborative from the core at the newsroom, and that the product was gonna be innovative. 59 00:10:20.496 --> 00:10:25.856 We were going to create new types of formats to present that type of collaborative journalism. 60 00:10:26.416 --> 00:10:47.076 And all with the idea of being able to serve an audience of people who are already very high-volume news consumers, and be able to apply that layer of context over the news to help them make sense of the unending sets of, of headlines they're getting every day. 61 00:10:47.106 --> 00:10:56.656 And so- Yeah... that is how Grid was born and what we're trying to do fundamentally. So that's like the how and the what to me. So but, like, for the who's it for? That's what I'm getting at. 62 00:10:56.736 --> 00:11:08.436 I wanna get back to the format stuff because some other people tried the format thing and it didn't work so hot the last time. But it doesn't mean it can't work. But who is it for exactly? Yeah. 63 00:11:08.496 --> 00:11:16.756 So I think that at a high level, the Grid audience is anybody who seeks to understand the news in a more meaningful and complete way. 64 00:11:16.816 --> 00:11:37.016 So we believe there are tens of millions of people who fit that category, but we're responding in particular to a need of high-volume n- news consumers, people who are already reading four, five, six-plus news sources regularly, whether it's, you know, newsletters, things they read on Twitter, different websites they're going to, et cetera. 65 00:11:37.396 --> 00:11:48.788 And they're really trying to make f- sense of all of those headlines, right? Tho- those people that I just described. And so-We're trying to reach those people, serve them with a product that they find super valuable. 66 00:11:48.968 --> 00:12:00.908 And now, when you think about what do those people look like, yes, they tend to be professionals, they tend to be folks who value high-quality information because they need that information oftentimes to do their jobs. 67 00:12:00.948 --> 00:12:08.687 If their job involves making decisions, it's predicated on understanding issues with a level of depth and sophistication. Right? But it's not exclusively those people. 68 00:12:08.908 --> 00:12:19.728 We think it's, it's broader than that, but, but it's... There's a particular need among people who are consuming a lot of information and place a high value on high quality news coverage. Okay. 69 00:12:19.848 --> 00:12:28.638 I wanna flip back to the format thing, 'cause I... We actually did see a wave of startups that were, w- that were talking about the format. Remember Circa? No. [laughs] Remember when they started? 70 00:12:28.668 --> 00:12:29.888 They, they were doing... 71 00:12:29.928 --> 00:12:42.188 They were gonna tell the stories, it was all mobile first, and they were gonna tell all the stories using a card format, and, and that was, like, literally a product differentiation, technical differentiation, but it was a storytelling device. 72 00:12:42.848 --> 00:12:46.188 And then there was that one, the Israeli one, that was using, like... 73 00:12:46.208 --> 00:12:55.558 They're- they supposedly were gonna use some kind of AI to, like, source out, and everyone who worked in the newsroom was like, "Yeah, we just report it like normal." [laughs] I, I have to go back and get that thing. 74 00:12:55.648 --> 00:13:00.868 But it has a little bit of a checkered history, right? So, like [laughs] it's like Vox, it was like, "Oh, we're gonna explain the news." 75 00:13:00.908 --> 00:13:10.288 It's like, pretty soon explaining the news became just part of what The New York Times and everyone else does. Yeah, so I'm of the school that innovation is good, and that people should try- [laughs]... 76 00:13:10.368 --> 00:13:14.448 and do more of it, which- That's my innovation, Brad. [laughs] Well, I feel like if- I've had enough. I've had enough. 77 00:13:14.688 --> 00:13:26.338 [laughs] I, I feel like there can be, in the media business in particular, folks tend to look back on this golden past of, like, the- [laughs]... 1970s or something broadsheet- Oh... 78 00:13:26.368 --> 00:13:35.428 when there were three channels that everybody trusted, everybody loved Walter Cronkite- Yeah... and, and got the, the local newspaper delivered on their door every day- Yeah... as like the gold standard or something. 79 00:13:35.608 --> 00:13:42.868 In a way, that's just, like, different if- [laughs] This is, this is, this is my childhood. Yeah. This is what you're talking to me, man. Exactly. You with? So [laughs] I- We had three channels, it was fine. 80 00:13:42.947 --> 00:13:49.688 [laughs] So I'm slightly less nostalgic, not for, for any particular, uh, reason. But I think that innovation is good. 81 00:13:49.748 --> 00:13:57.708 I think if you look at what's happened in the, the American economy and, and the tech industry- Yeah... and, and the, the growth that it's presented over the last several decades, it's been enormous, right? 82 00:13:57.788 --> 00:14:05.948 Not without some costs, but, like, in general- Yeah... I think innovation is good, and, like, people should try new things. And not everything is gonna work, um, but there should be more of it. 83 00:14:05.968 --> 00:14:13.388 And the fact that there was, like, some format experimentation that didn't work once, I don't think is indicative of there... That other things won't work. [laughs] No. 84 00:14:13.468 --> 00:14:22.968 The point I was trying to make was that differentiating mostly on format is really difficult because all formats, if they work, are copied. Uh, yeah, that's just the only sort of thing. 85 00:14:23.088 --> 00:14:28.188 So the differentiation, that's all I was trying to get at, like, w- where the differentiation was going to be. 86 00:14:28.348 --> 00:14:37.368 And I get the criticism of a lot of these new brands because if I were to be like, "Well, why is the Financial Times different from The Wall Street Journal?" And you're like, "Well, it's geographic." 87 00:14:37.448 --> 00:14:47.148 Well, just read them. They're obviously very different. But if you were just starting one of these publications, people would say, "Well, that just sounds a lot like The Wall Street Journal, but for..." Yeah. Yeah. 88 00:14:47.288 --> 00:14:58.368 And I totally get your point. That's specifically a- around people being able to just copy formats, and the formats are not sufficient, right, to, to bring incremental and differentiated value, right? 89 00:14:58.388 --> 00:15:11.378 And that's why I think one of the things that is so interesting for me about Grid is that the format innovations are all downstream of that more fundamental newsroom and journalistic innovation that I described at the top. 90 00:15:11.728 --> 00:15:11.878 Right? 91 00:15:11.878 --> 00:15:26.088 That idea that our newsroom actually works differently, is structured from the bottom up, the fundamental innovation, and then there's lots of other things that, that we can do from a, a format and a product perspective that really showcase that. 92 00:15:26.288 --> 00:15:34.588 But that is the moat. The, the Times could decide to develop a product like our 360s, right, like tomorrow. 93 00:15:34.648 --> 00:15:44.987 But at the end of the day, they're not gonna restructure their newsrooms so that they don't have verticalized beats and reporters who aren't working together on these stories day in, day out, in the way that we are. 94 00:15:45.268 --> 00:15:45.468 Yeah. 95 00:15:45.568 --> 00:15:59.628 So one of the things that, on the format front, that's interesting, and I think people could adopt, a- actually, quite quickly, is it seems like most stories have a little audio explainer about how they came about from the journalists. 96 00:16:00.248 --> 00:16:08.508 They do. So that was something that, that our audio producer started doing and noodling around on early, and they became super popular. 97 00:16:08.608 --> 00:16:19.908 I think that one of the things that, that our audience already, even though it's very early days, already comes to, to really like about our content is the ability to, uh... 98 00:16:20.408 --> 00:16:25.688 That, that it goes a little bit deeper and, and examines issues in, in ways that they don't necessarily get elsewhere. 99 00:16:25.698 --> 00:16:44.748 And taking that extra layer to actually play a, a two-minute clip that's pretty casual with the, the reporters behind that piece actually talking about how that article came together, maybe some tidbits that didn't make it in the piece, but giving some additional context, really personalizes the piece and just gives that added context in a way that's been really fun. 100 00:16:44.808 --> 00:16:56.018 So yeah, so that... Those are features in pretty much all of our articles now, those little listen mores. Yeah. And I think, to me, it speaks to this shift from institutions to individuals I always talk about. 101 00:16:56.118 --> 00:17:03.168 'Cause you're seeing a lot of the new brands trying to, trying to have the best of both worlds in some ways because I think the unbun... 102 00:17:03.448 --> 00:17:09.447 The, uh, [laughs] the bundling is followed by the unbundling, is then it becomes the rebundling, and, and next thing, you're almost 50 years old. 103 00:17:09.688 --> 00:17:20.068 But, you know, I think we're probably gonna be in a, a bit of a, a rebundling. This Substack stuff's gotten a little crazy for everyone. Not for mine. Everyone should [laughs] subscribe to mine. It's free. But the... 104 00:17:20.118 --> 00:17:31.018 People are trying to have... Obviously, people... There's a few things. There's, trust is very low in news. We always see the stats and stuff like this. And people tend to trust other people, I feel like, more. And, and 105 00:17:32.048 --> 00:17:42.908 I feel like the news industry is trying to do so much to reestablish trust, and personal trust is usually greater than some faceless... 'Cause whenever one, anyone talks about the media, it's never positive. 106 00:17:43.188 --> 00:17:47.128 [laughs] Something positive is not gonna come after they talk about the media. 107 00:17:47.328 --> 00:17:56.507 But how do you guys see squaring that, of having the, I don't wanna call it, like, influencer journalists other peoples have, and again, that's not, that's usually pejorative. 108 00:17:56.568 --> 00:18:03.576 But there's clearly, like, more of a focus on the individuals versus just the institution.Yeah. 109 00:18:03.586 --> 00:18:15.376 So we have an interesting approach to that, I think, which is Laura made a pretty concerted effort from the beginning, and, and I think that that's at the core of what we're doing around taking the collaborative spirit pretty seriously. 110 00:18:15.416 --> 00:18:32.996 And so we think that what creates unique and differentiated value for our content and for our audience is the idea that any given piece of content that our readers are consuming from Grid, in the vast majority of cases, is going to be the result of a collaboration between multiple people. 111 00:18:33.016 --> 00:18:42.156 That it's not kind of a house of brands, of, of certain celebrity authors that people are reading. That's a model that works for some folks, but that's very much not what we're actually trying to do. 112 00:18:42.176 --> 00:18:45.776 We're trying to create our brand around the idea that we can create 113 00:18:46.956 --> 00:18:58.496 additive value, where one plus one equals four, by putting different really smart people together with brilliant editors and deploying them against these stories in a way that is um, able, able to uncover 114 00:18:59.596 --> 00:19:05.716 nuance, detail, depth, context that you wouldn't just get from one person tackling any given story. 115 00:19:05.916 --> 00:19:13.996 So by its nature, it's going away from that because it's more of a collaborative approach than the Puck approach of following Dylan Byers and stuff like this. Yeah, for sure. 116 00:19:14.056 --> 00:19:23.596 I think that we want people to understand that the Grid brand is what they have confidence in and they trust in, and that, that they can count on that to get, uh, the type of, of content that they're looking for. 117 00:19:23.716 --> 00:19:33.866 Obviously, we have amazing reporters who've all had illustrious careers elsewhere, and many of them bring really dedicated followings with them, which is indicative of the work that they do, and that's wonderful. 118 00:19:34.036 --> 00:19:46.296 But at the end of the day, our plan is to build the brand on what we can do collectively and collaboratively versus creating just a, a, a big tent with a lot of stars under it. Okay, let's talk about the money stuff. 119 00:19:46.596 --> 00:19:53.506 How are you gonna make money? Hand over fist, Brian. We initially are gonna have a, a sponsorship and advertising supported business model. 120 00:19:54.016 --> 00:20:06.676 We believe that like any modern media company, we should be diversified in our revenue streams in order to be healthy, and that's very much our intention. We have a sponsorship supported model that's digital advertising. 121 00:20:06.716 --> 00:20:11.896 We have a flagship newsletter that has sponsors. We'll be doing live events and, and all of those things. 122 00:20:11.936 --> 00:20:34.276 We've, we've acquired a, an audience that's valuable to sponsors in that we are a, a neighborhood that is valuable to sponsors, and there's a lot of brands, organizations who themselves are trying to explain complex issues and break through a very busy and noisy media ecosystem, and that we're a brand dedicated to doing that. 123 00:20:34.336 --> 00:20:40.836 So that's a place that's been very interesting to a lot of the partners that we talk to about them wanting to show up. So that's the foundation. 124 00:20:41.756 --> 00:20:57.976 And then as we look out, uh, further into the future, one of the things that was so exciting for me about joining Grid in the early days was that because we're actually doing things that are unique, we are creating different types of products. 125 00:20:58.076 --> 00:21:15.116 We are creating a different type of, of journalism that creates different types of value that there's a lot of other commercial opportunities down the road, I think, that open up across a whole range of, of things, whether that looks like specialized subscriptions for particular types of, of content or tools. 126 00:21:15.136 --> 00:21:35.586 We think there's lots of things that we can create down the road once we can prove that we can provide this layer of context and make sense of complex issues for sophisticated audiences, that there will be lots of products and services that we can create that really double down on specific aspects of that, that organizations, enterprises, potentially individuals will be excited- Mm-hmm... 127 00:21:35.586 --> 00:21:47.156 about paying for. When the business does mature to this, do you expect the model to look a lot like Politico's? I think it will look different than Politico. Like, I don't foresee us setting up, like, 128 00:21:48.156 --> 00:21:59.376 a Grid Pro, where we're gonna, you know, create a, a, a super high touch- It's pretty expensive... service. You might want to. I'd like to set up the, the Rebooting Pro. [laughs] If I could charge, like, 30K. 129 00:21:59.836 --> 00:22:07.976 It's a good service. I, I, I no longer have access to it. I did for seven years- [laughs]... but it's a good service. I will say, I think there's a whole range of things that could be interesting. 130 00:22:08.056 --> 00:22:11.616 I think it'll be more piecemeal around looking at specific product and service offerings. 131 00:22:11.676 --> 00:22:23.316 I think that there are niche types of, of value that we could provide that's a little bit more atomized than a whole wholesale service, but I do think it's gonna be primarily enterprise more than- Mm-hmm... 132 00:22:23.345 --> 00:22:26.896 consumer based. So who do you see as the typical advertiser? 133 00:22:27.076 --> 00:22:34.896 So I think there are a few categories that really make a lot of sense for, for our type of audience and our business, and I think that one is, as you described, brand marketing budgets. 134 00:22:34.956 --> 00:22:56.976 It's folks who we've seen a big change over the last kind of five plus years, where brands have had to articulate themselves, their values, who they are as an enterprise to particularly policymakers, regulators, executives, their different stakeholder communities, investors, et cetera, in order to understand and communicate who they are as a business and what they're investing in, what that means. 135 00:22:57.076 --> 00:23:06.096 And so folks who are interested in, in bolstering their brand in that way is a natural market for us. There's also advocacy advertising. I think that we're, we are based in Washington. 136 00:23:06.156 --> 00:23:21.756 We do have an audience that over-indexes against policymakers and, and folks who are decision-makers in federal, local, state government, et cetera, and there's gonna be folks who want to reach those individuals, whether it's trade associations, et cetera, who wanna talk about issues that are meaningful for them. 137 00:23:21.936 --> 00:23:29.916 And then I think those are the, the, the big categories. We're, we're not so much at this point super interested in the B2C dynamic. 138 00:23:29.976 --> 00:23:40.995 That's just kind of not the primary focus right now, so more around brand marketing and, and advocacy dollars. So you're gonna be competing with Politico, Axios, Punchbowl, and all the others. 139 00:23:41.196 --> 00:23:50.776 There's a lot of this money. I always say I lived in Washington in the late '90s and going back there now, it's a totally different place. The houses are way more expensive and bigger, and it's like, why is that? 140 00:23:50.796 --> 00:24:00.416 It's because a ton of money has gone into trying to influence our government as our government has grown larger, and it keeps growing larger. So I don't think that's gonna stop. Is that fair? 141 00:24:00.836 --> 00:24:08.669 That's consistent with the trends that we've seen, and, uh, I think that the pie keeps getting bigger. TheFact is that the government isn't going away. 142 00:24:08.800 --> 00:24:19.640 It's not gonna become less important to all sorts of parts of our society and economy. That's just not changing anytime soon. The stakes are only increasing. They're not getting smaller. 143 00:24:19.650 --> 00:24:22.880 And I think that there's plenty to go around for, for everyone. 144 00:24:23.020 --> 00:24:40.080 People said I'm old enough to remember when the folks who went on to found Axios left Politico and when the folks who left Politico to found Punchbowl and other things, and people were saying five, six, seven-plus years ago, "Oh, it's all gonna be zero sum." 145 00:24:40.120 --> 00:24:50.220 Yeah. "You're gonna take one from column A and go into column B." But everybody grew, right? You look over the last five years. So The Hill grew, Politico grew, Axios grew. Like, everybody grew. 146 00:24:50.320 --> 00:24:51.400 I don't think it's zero sum. Yeah. 147 00:24:51.520 --> 00:25:04.570 Each of those organizations is providing differentiated value to sometimes overlapping audiences, sure, but, like, the media diet, particularly for sophisticated professionals, isn't a monoculture, right? 148 00:25:04.580 --> 00:25:14.520 We know for a fact that those people are consuming an entire diverse diet of different publications, and that's healthy, and there's room for that. So I, I think it's positive sum. Yeah. 149 00:25:14.940 --> 00:25:24.440 And this is one of those lucrative ad categories that I think a lot of people with broad brush of digital advertising, Google and Facebook took it all. No, they didn't take it all. 150 00:25:24.740 --> 00:25:35.740 It's a very big category, and this particular area, I, I don't know if anyone truly tracks it well. I don't know if you've seen any tracking, but it's grown tremendously. You can just tell it has. It has. 151 00:25:35.820 --> 00:25:46.460 I had a, a, a bunch of roles at, at Politico and was eventually overseeing all of the corporate advertising and sponsorship business for the last several years, and so I certainly tracked it, and, and it was going up and to the right. 152 00:25:46.480 --> 00:25:55.960 It's a big opportunity. Yeah. So subscriptions are down the road, not... You're gonna build the top of the funnel first, I assume. This is a big enough- Yes... ad category that it can, it can 153 00:25:57.100 --> 00:26:08.220 support the, uh, the company, I would guess. Yes, yes. That is absolutely the plan. We th- we wanna build a solid foundation of... based on advertising and sponsorship-supported business. Okay. One of the... 154 00:26:08.240 --> 00:26:20.680 Something I wrote about today was, and I wonder 'cause I think it's... And again, it's not zero sum, but so many of these new publications are seemingly targeting the same influential elite people. 155 00:26:21.240 --> 00:26:28.220 I was joking a little bit, but the flight to niche has mostly been a f- a flight to rich people at the end of the day, rich and powerful people. 156 00:26:28.290 --> 00:26:40.780 And rich and powerful people have always been very popular, but at the same time, like, I think it's very positive and it's great, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of people trying to attack the broader populace of the world. 157 00:26:40.800 --> 00:26:47.120 [laughs] You know what I mean? Everyone's trying to get the, the, at, at the same relatively small in number group of people. 158 00:26:47.140 --> 00:26:56.480 They wanna get a bunch of other people, too, but, like, they're going to market a- and they're saying, "This is where you find the influencers and decision-makers." Yeah, so 159 00:26:57.400 --> 00:27:00.309 I actually think there's a lot going in all directions. 160 00:27:00.420 --> 00:27:19.160 I, I think that people like to focus in particularly media criticism, and folks who work in the media of media like to focus on the publications like Grid and others who are focused on that niche of highly educated consumers, but there's actually a lot of things going on that are pretty diverse. 161 00:27:19.320 --> 00:27:28.940 Just within the last 24 hours, I think that Arnold Ventures said they were putting up $20 million to, to launch a whole nonprofit newsroom in Greater Houston. 162 00:27:29.200 --> 00:27:33.839 WBEZ announced that they were buying The Chicago Sun-Times and turning it into a nonprofit, right? 163 00:27:33.880 --> 00:27:47.680 There's a lot of things going on as, as money is flowing into these other types of models around journalism, and some of them are local in nature and, and more organic to serve broader audiences, right? 164 00:27:47.800 --> 00:27:53.559 A, a lot of them are also serving more tailored audiences, as you, as you said, but I don't think that's the whole story. 165 00:27:53.600 --> 00:28:09.560 And so I think that insomuch as there's, like, a broader issue or problem that people are diagnosing around non-elite audiences, whatever that means, being underserved, I, I don't really know what to do about that or what any given media company can do about it. 166 00:28:09.800 --> 00:28:17.900 If, if... When I look at the top Comscore listing for digital news sites, right, there's a lot of free content on there, right? 167 00:28:18.000 --> 00:28:26.080 There, there's a lot of free f- fairly straight-ahead news content that is widely available on the internet right now. 168 00:28:26.140 --> 00:28:36.960 There's a lot of garbage, too, for sure, but insomuch as there's people who are choosing to consume what people who write about media think is trash versus the vegetables, right? 169 00:28:37.020 --> 00:28:42.200 If they're, you know, what, too much OAN, not enough NPR, whatever it is that folks think, right? 170 00:28:42.260 --> 00:28:50.800 Like, I think part of that is demand side versus supply side, and, and there's not really much that any given media operator or media company can do about the demand side. 171 00:28:50.860 --> 00:29:06.290 I think that it's emblematic of larger changes to media habits and, and polarization, uh, and tribalism that we're seeing across a whole range of, of things that, that are far beyond media, but the way that different types of people are, are migrating toward different media sources. 172 00:29:06.480 --> 00:29:13.530 If you look at The New York Times, you have a third of the country that thinks that's a, a left-wing biased news outlet, whether that's true or not, right? 173 00:29:13.560 --> 00:29:22.100 I don't think that's true, but you have a huge swath of the country that thinks that. If The New York Times dropped their paywall tomorrow, those people aren't gonna suddenly start reading The Times, right? 174 00:29:22.140 --> 00:29:35.790 And so I, I, I think that there, there's, there, there's probably some kind of broader issue around the way that different swaths of the country are electing to consume different types of media, but that's frankly beyond my pay grade. 175 00:29:35.940 --> 00:29:44.580 So that's not something that Grid is trying to tackle. You'll get placed on one of those charts, right? What sector do you aim to be in? 176 00:29:44.780 --> 00:29:58.820 We're absolutely dedicated to producing journalism that is nonpartisan, that is straight ahead, that is respected by anyone across the, the political spectrum who values true, accurate insights and fact-based reporting. 177 00:29:58.880 --> 00:30:07.520 That's absolutely the lane that we are operating in and intend to continue operating in. And we don't have a paywall, right? We don't intend to have the core product behind the paywall. 178 00:30:07.560 --> 00:30:17.760 That's not in the, the roadmap at any point at this point. And so anyone who's interested in high-quality information that we provide is welcome to go to grid.news and, and, and read it. 179 00:30:17.840 --> 00:30:30.870 They can sign up for our free newsletter. I would encourage them to do so. So insofar as news companies can address, uh,That inequity, if one exists, like we're, we're free to the public. Yeah. 180 00:30:30.950 --> 00:30:39.830 I, I meant like getting pulled into the politicization of everything, right? Everyone claims that they're unbiased, but they get put somewhere on that chart by people. 181 00:30:39.870 --> 00:30:47.310 As you said, people just, they do what they wanna do. And take Fox. They end up on the, the center, but the left of center of those charts. 182 00:30:47.470 --> 00:30:55.930 I'm sure if you talked with people at Fox, they would be like, "No, that's ridiculous," but that's the reality. Jimmy Fickelstein kept telling me The Hill was the only unbiased, uh, news source in the world, so... 183 00:30:56.090 --> 00:31:02.610 But they ended up on the right of center. I don't know. [laughs] I, I'm, I'm sure that he did think that. Look, all we can control is what we're doing, right? 184 00:31:02.790 --> 00:31:13.050 We, our editorial guidelines are, are freely posted on our website, and I hope that people hold us to them and evaluate based on the content that they're seeing. 185 00:31:13.430 --> 00:31:25.670 It is absolutely our intention to provide content that is unbiased, non-political, fact-based, and at the end of the day, people, uh, can think that sits wherever they want. 186 00:31:25.830 --> 00:31:35.350 We're not in the business of creating ideology charts, but that's what we're committed to doing. Yeah. It's a big remit, so how big will the newsroom be in, in, say, three years? 187 00:31:35.490 --> 00:31:41.330 We don't have an exact number of what the newsroom is gonna look like. I think that it'll expand as we continue to see growth organically. 188 00:31:41.370 --> 00:31:51.510 Right now, we have over 30 journalists who are working in the newsroom across about half a dozen different topic areas, and I, I expect that will continue to grow. 189 00:31:51.590 --> 00:32:04.920 I don't think we're gonna be rivaling Justin and Ben Smith's, uh, massive global operation, whatever that turns out to be, but I think we're gonna continue to grow in order to produce the high quality content that our hopefully growing audience expects. 190 00:32:05.250 --> 00:32:11.660 Yeah. So a- after the first year, where would you be happy if people described your peer group? Who would be in your peer group? 191 00:32:12.210 --> 00:32:19.470 So I always think of peers, I think, a little bit differently than a lot of people do because it really depends on what you're thinking about, particularly like a media company, right? 192 00:32:19.570 --> 00:32:25.430 You can think about the peers as far as what type of content are you producing. You can think about peers as far as the size of your business. 193 00:32:25.470 --> 00:32:32.370 You can think about peers as who are you competing against for business, and I think that each of those is gonna be slightly different. 194 00:32:32.470 --> 00:32:44.900 I think that I want people to think of us as a trusted, credible news organization, someone they rely on in, in whatever that means for them. For some people, that's gonna be The Washington Post and New York Times. 195 00:32:45.010 --> 00:32:48.400 Some people, it's gonna be The Atlantic. Some people will think that's Axios. 196 00:32:48.490 --> 00:33:01.470 I think that our goal is to be an, an essential part of the media diet for sophisticated news consumers, and for everyone, that's gonna mean something a little bit different. Got it. Okay, cool. Gonna leave it there. 197 00:33:01.510 --> 00:33:11.030 Brad, thank you so much. Appreciate you coming on and talking to me. Awesome. Thanks for me, Brian. It's been fun. Yeah. And thank you all for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode. 198 00:33:12.789 --> 00:33:21.909 [outro music]