In today’s edition:

• Top developments at NYT Games and The Athletic.

• Viewpoints from operators at Semafor, The Guardian, and The Juggernaut.

• Plus more news from across the media industry.

Let’s get to it. 

A quick programming note: We’ll be off next week and back in the new year. Happy holidays!

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TOP DEVELOPMENTS

NYT Games. Vanity Fair published a long piece exploring The Times’ bet on games. Here are a few of our takeaways:

• Retention driver: Certain games like Wordle have exposed The Times to new audiences, but the paper evaluates games primarily on their ability to retain users. As a result, “People who engage with both news and games on any given week have the best long-term subscriber retention of any product combination in the bundle.”

• Portfolio strategy: Before Wordle, “It was really Spelling Bee, in a lot of ways, that helped the company realize what a much bigger opportunity there was in games,” according to Head of Games Jonathan Knight. “It was driving subscriptions that were stacking on top of what was a pretty healthy and growing Crossword subscription. And so then the vision became: What if we have a portfolio of games?”

• A growing staff: In 2015, there were about 15 people working on games at The Times. By 2020, that number had roughly tripled. Today, there are about 100 dedicated staffers.

The Athletic on Apple News+. Content from the NYT-owned sports site is now available to paying subscribers of Apple News+. 

• Back in 2020, NYT pulled out of its partnership with Apple News, saying at the time that the relationship didn’t align with its strategy to build direct relationships with readers.

• Today, core NYT news content is still not available on the platform, but The Athletic deal represents a shift in thinking. The partnership is designed to get The Athletic “in front of as many people as possible” and, according to The Athletic publisher David Perpich, the hope is “that over time, they sign up for newsletters or find other ways to make it back to our platform."

• From Apple’s perspective, the deal will bolster coverage in a key vertical. According to Apple SVP Eddie Cue, “We started really going after sports in the last two years with favourite teams [features] and other things. So I think the timing of it is actually just perfect, because they’ve now built up, obviously, a global and local presence – and we’ve built all these sports components on Apple News.”

VIEWPOINTS

Semafor CEO Justin Smith on hiring slowly: 

And [our investor] also said, “You just got to get to the point where you … metaphorically have blisters on your feet, because you’ve pushed your existing resources so far. Only at that point, when you’re really feeling that pain, and you’re cutting into the bone, then consider adding incremental resources.” And I think that we’ve, in some areas, we’ve gotten to that point. And so our view towards 2024 headcount is to expand in very selective areas where that sort of intense pressure needs to be relieved with more staff.

Deming Headlight owner Nick Seibel on turning around his small-town New Mexico newspaper:

There are so many voices in those larger markets. TV, radio stations, independent websites. And sure, there’s more money, there’s more business potential. But in small communities, people really identify with their newspaper. And that’s really the key to making this work.

The Guardian’s deputy editor Owen Gibson on building direct relationships with readers: 

[Readers are paying] because they want The Guardian to uncover new things in the world, to have an impact on the world, to cover subjects that maybe other outlets aren’t covering with real gusto, like the environment, like migration, global inequality, and that’s the reason they’re giving their money to us. There is that direct link between, I think, the reader and the journalism that is quite a special thing and hopefully we can build on that as we get more global, get more digital, do more journalism on more platforms. 

The Juggernaut CEO Snigdha Sur on experimenting with short-form video:

Many people, especially young folks, will get their news and analysis from TikTok or Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts — whatever is the quick, easiest, most visual way to condense a nuanced issue. Newsrooms that don’t start testing these short video formats won’t be able to engage an audience hungry for information in an unstable political year. 

Bloomberg Chief Digital Officer Julia Beizer on the declining role of platforms in news:

The search and social era gave us many gifts of audience, but it also robbed us of loyalty. The biggest challenge for the news industry this year and in the years to come is to figure out how to earn that back in a time where consumers are picking up new news consumption patterns and habits that will stick. This will start, of course, with trusted journalism that answers questions for users they didn’t even know they had and helps them navigate their worlds. But it will be bolstered by great user experiences, new useful delivery formats and opportunities to connect deeper with fellow readers. 

Semafor Executive Editor Gina Chua on custom chat bots:

What custom chatbots offer is discovery on steroids; a way to query the collected — or at least published — wisdom of the newsroom, with some confidence the information presented has been verified. To be sure, it’s the sort of capability that Microsoft is rolling out for companies with its Office 365 Copilot program, but news organizations, with very specific needs for speed and accuracy, could use a really focused version of that.

NEWS

Launches:

• Puck is launching a sports vertical and hired John Ourand from Sports Business Journal to lead its coverage.

• Mail Online confirmed that it will put up to 15 articles per day behind a paywall.  

Deals:

• Warner Bros. Discovery is in talks to merge with Paramount Global.

• Allen Media Group offered $3.5 billion to buy BET from Paramount.

• The Robinhood-owned Sherwood Media acquired Chartr Limited, a UK-based, data-driven media company.

• The Copenhagen-based podcast startup Podimo raised €44 million in funding.

• MacArthur Foundation announced $48 million in local news grants as part of the Press Forward initiative.  

• Amazon is in talks to invest in Diamond Sports Group, the biggest RSN that carries the games of more than 40 sports teams.

People:

• The Washington Post met its headcount reduction goal with voluntary buyouts, avoiding layoffs. 

• The FT’s US journalists are demanding an $80k minimum starting salary. 

• The Economist president Bob Cohn is leaving to become CEO of The Baltimore Banner.

• Time promoted Dan Macsai to Chief Events Officer and Kelly Conniff to Deputy Editor.

• Dow Jones appointed Jared DiPalma as CFO.

• Vice named former Miramax CEO Michael Lang as its executive chairman.

• The Independent hired Mail Online’s US editor Louise Thomas to accelerate growth in the US. 

• Fashion industry publication WWD named Eugenia Miranda Richman as its new EIC.

• NowThis hired Sharon Mussali as CEO, its first since being spun out from Vox Media.

Google:

• Google agreed to pay $700 million to settle an antitrust case claiming that the company’s app store operated as an illegal monopoly. Going forward, Google will also allow developers to use an alternate billing system in their app store.

• Ahead of the 2024 US election, Google will limit the types of election-related questions its AI chatbot, Bard, will answer. The company will also require political advertisers to disclose if their content was generated using AI.

• Arkansas-based outlet Helena World Chronicle filed a class-action lawsuit against Google, arguing that the platform is engaging in anticompetitive behavior and “starving the free press.” 

• In Canada, print and digital media will receive about ⅔ of the $100 million Google must distribute to news outlets each year. The remaining ⅓ will go to a mix of public and private broadcasters.

• Google is also planning to restructure a big part of its 30,000-person ad sales unit.

Platforms:

• Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie defended the decision to not remove or demonetize Nazi content from the platform, arguing “we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away.”

• Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared Threads’ plans for integrating with the fediverse.

• Flipboard is also integrating with the fediverse, with plans to shift the app fully to ActivityPub by next spring.

• EU regulators opened an investigation into X around the platform’s content moderation practices, advertising transparency, and other issues.

• TikTok staff were told to avoid tagging or taking down any Amazon-related accounts, in order to protect the commercial partnership between the companies. 

Plus:

• Ozy is suing Ben Smith, BuzzFeed, and Semafor, claiming that Smith “took the entire [Ozy] playbook” to build Semafor.  

• At least 68 journalists and media workers have been killed in the first ten weeks of the Israel-Gaza war.

• The Atlantic analyzed its archives to understand how topics covered by the magazine have changed over time. 

• BuzzFeed released its most viewed content of the year.

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In today’s edition:

• Top developments including James Bennet’s piece, Future plc’s new strategy, and turmoil at The Arena Group.

• Benchmarks on Punchbowl, The Messenger, and the NYT.

• Viewpoints from operators at Defector, the FT, and 1440.

• Plus more news from across the media industry.

Let’s get to it. 

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TOP DEVELOPMENTS

James Bennet’s piece. The article chronicles the events around the Tom Cotton editorial that led to Bennet’s resignation from the New York Times in 2020. Bennet, with whom I worked when he was editor and co-president of The Atlantic, issues a sharp critique of the Times and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger, arguing that the newsroom is prioritizing progressive values at the expense of independent journalism & open-minded debate. It’s worth reading the full piece, and here I’ll focus on the business model considerations underlying the conversation: 

• Bennet’s critique: “The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether.”

• The pull of a subscription-first business model: “As the number of subscribers ballooned, the marketing department tracked their expectations, and came to a nuanced conclusion. More than 95% of Times subscribers described themselves as Democrats or independents, and a vast majority of them believed the Times was also liberal. A similar majority applauded that bias; it had become ‘a selling point’, reported one internal marketing memo,” Bennet writes.

• Sulzberger responded, saying: “James Bennet and I have always agreed on the importance of independent journalism, the challenges it faces in today’s more polarized world, and the mission of The Times to pursue independence even when the path of less resistance might be to give into partisan passions. But I could not disagree more strongly with the false narrative he has constructed about The Times. Our commitment to independence is evident in our report every day.”

• My thought: Subscription-first business models do incentivize catering to a particular tribe, leading publishers to double down on narrower, passionate audiences. This contrasts with ad-centric models since advertisers aim to be unoffensive – which rewards simply reporting the facts. Many publishers that are transitioning between business models will end up facing a tension like the one we’re seeing at the Times. Surely, many publishers will end up appealing to the “tribe” looking to hear different perspectives – we’ll see the degree to which the Times is among them. 

Future’s U.S. Push. Future plc – whose brands include Tom’s Guide, SmartBrief, and Space.com – is planning an expansion in the United States. After organic revenue fell 10% YoY according to full-year results released last week, CEO Jon Steinberg unveiled a new strategy with several pillars: 

• Tiering brands: The company has separated its brands into three categories – Hero brands, which will receive the most investment; Halo brands, which add scale to the hero brands; and Cash Generators, which will receive less attention. 

• U.S. digital advertising: “The US digital advertising market is seven times the size of the UK market. Yet, as it stands today, our US digital revenue is only twice the size of our UK revenue. In the UK our well-established team is able to drive a higher value mix of advertising revenue through a greater share of direct sales, premium programmatic advertising and branded content. We are putting in place the actions to replicate the UK expertise in the U.S.” 

• Social monetization: “Our brands reach 217m users on social platforms. We aim to generate greater revenues from these audiences through branded content and evolving our eCommerce proposition.” 

• My thought: Narrowing the strategic focus to a handful of brands makes a lot of sense. Right now, Future plc is stretched thin with brands across many verticals, including B2B, music, technology, sports, and more. With so many different target audiences and advertiser categories, it’s hard for synergies to meaningfully accrue. 

Turmoil at The Arena Group. Manoj Bhargava, who bought a majority stake in the company earlier this year, fired CEO Ross Levinsohn, after also firing the COO, media president, and corporate counsel last week. 

• The Sport Illustrated AI debacle: This follows the incident where Sports Illustrated, which is published by The Arena Group, featured articles apparently written by AI. 

• A long all-hands: Bhargava held a meandering all-hands, where he told employees to “stop doing dumb stuff.”

• But even before the AI article incident, Bhargava was critical: “Media has gotten nuts… Nobody's working with their customer and they're so enamored of the technology, delivery systems…” 

• Bhargava’s motivation: Bhargava said that he acquired a majority stake in part to promote his various other products, and he wants to integrate advertisers more deeply into programming.

BENCHMARKS

Punchbowl: 

• Valued at over $100 million in its deal to acquire Electo Analytics, a software product that tracks legislation.

• Plans to charge more than $1,000 for a new subscription tier that includes data from Electo Analytics. 

• Expects to increase the price of its existing membership from $300 to $350. 

• Generated $20 million in revenue this year and is profitable. (NYT)

Other publishers:

• Chartbeat released its most engaging stories of the year – read my analysis of the data here. The New Yorker also published their own list of top stories. 

• The Messenger had 77 million pageviews in November, according to Google Analytics. 

• The median salary for New York Times reporters and correspondents is $161,000. 

Market trends: 

• The political ad market in 2024 is expected to be 31% larger than in 2020. 

• The news industry cut 2,681 jobs so far this year, up from 1,808 in all of 2022 and 1,511 in all of 2021, according to a new report. 

Platforms: 

• Netflix released a report showing engagement metrics for individual shows. 

• X is expected to generate $2.5 billion in advertising revenue this year, down from $4.7 billion in its last four quarters as a public company.

VIEWPOINTS

Kelsey McKinney and Aleksander Chan, co-owners of Defector and Discourse Blog respectively, wrote an entertaining piece about running their writer-owned collectives. Here’s what they say about us business folks: 

“After watching a ton of dreary men in gingham shirts and khakis destroy the companies you love, it is easy to believe that businesspeople don’t do anything and aren’t helpful. This idea has a lot of potential, until you begin asking your fellow writers and editors if they know how to look up how much they have in their 401(k), or even if they know how to navigate a spreadsheet… One option is to try and persuade someone who knows anything about money (fundraising, tax codes, business shit) to join your janky pirate ship full-time. This may work, but it may not. It is worth a shot, because one businessperson is worth 82 bloggers. Do not tell them this. They will get a big head.”

The New York Times on the appointment of Zach Seward as Editorial Director of AI Initiatives.

“One reason we’re excited to have Zach in this role is that he shares our firm belief that Times journalism will always be reported, written and edited by our expert journalists. But Zach will also help guide how these new tools can assist our journalists in their work, and help us broaden our reach and expand our report.”

1440 EIC Andrew Steigerwald on audience growth:

“Audience growth is a knife fight. Every single day. Having a fantastic product that people love is table stakes for success. Even with a world-class product, you’re not competing against other people in your industry — you’re competing against your potential reader’s daily habits. Behavior change and breaking into daily habits is incredibly difficult — but once you’re in, you’re in.”

FT head of newsletters & executive editor Sarah Ebner on launching a newsletter: 

“I have two pieces of advice that I would share with anyone thinking of launching a newsletter. One is that it’s an ongoing process. People get really excited about something shiny and new, making sure it looks right and that there are good comms around its launch. But that’s only the beginning. You have to put in the work regularly, however busy you are, to make your newsletter a success. You can’t stop because you’re bored or have too many other things to do.”

NewsGuard CEI Gordon Crovitz predicting that gen-AI will get better at facts. 

“My prediction is that 2024 will be the year when the generative AI models begin to stop confabulating, hallucinating, or, as journalists put it more bluntly, stop making things up… Microsoft has a license to NewsGuard’s reliability ratings of news sources and our Misinformation Fingerprints catalog of the most significant false claims in the news. As a result, prompts on topics in the news on Microsoft Copilot often cite high-quality news sources.”

Colossus CEO Matt Reustle on the challenges of building a podcast business: 

“It’s really hard to build a successful podcast. The discoverability is terrible. There’s not really algorithms that you can hack and that to me is actually great because it means if you do make it, you have a very sticky audience and it’s a barrier to entry.”

Center for Public Integrity CEO Paul Cheung predicting consolidation among news nonprofits: 

“Despite the maturation in journalistic practices, the business side of nonprofit journalism remains underdeveloped. The over-reliance on philanthropy, which is not a panacea for financial sustainability, continues to pose challenges. Many nonprofit news organizations struggle with limited resources, hindering their ability to employ full-time staff dedicated to essential business functions such as marketing, product development, technology integration, human resources, finance, accounting, and revenue generation. This resource constraint perpetuates a reliance on fractional services that, due to their divided attention across multiple clients, are unable to prioritize the unique needs of individual organizations.”

NEWS

Deals:

• Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting, also known as Reveal, will merge. 

• Altice USA is considering a sale of Cheddar News to private equity firm Regent.

• Redbird IMI, Jeff Zucker’s investment firm, is in talks to acquire film production studio All3Media in a deal worth around £1 billion.

• Schibsted is looking to take its news business private and separate it from its other businesses. 

• Decrypt, a 22-person crypto media site, will merge with the 12-person Rug Radio. 

• WTWH Media acquired Engineering.com.  

AI:

• Axel Springer reached an agreement to non-exclusively license its content to OpenAI. The company will also transition its Upday service into an AI-driven news app. 

• Axios is using AI for images in its social media marketing.

• Financial site Investing.com is using AI to rewrite stories of competitors. 

Governance:

• Two open letters on Substack, signed by Substack writers, lay out opposite sides of the argument on whether the platform should restrict certain content, in the wake of the Atlantic piece highlighting Nazi content on Substack. 

Launches: 

• The MailOnline will put a small set of articles behind a paywall. 

• The Boston Globe launched a new vertical on the racial wealth gap. 

• Tucker Carlson is launching a $6-per-month streaming service. 

• WaPo released its Spotify-style, year-in-review feature for readers.

People:

• The Skimm laid off 10% of staff. 

• Jacob Donnelly is stepping down from his role as publisher of Morning Brew to focus on his media trade publication, A Media Operator. 

• The BBC appointed Charl Bassil as chief brand officer. 

• Tiny News Collective hired Amy L. Kovac-Ashley as executive director and announced new funding from a number of foundations. 

• Report for America opened applications for new reporting positions. 

• Fox News promoted five executives into new roles.

• Project Veritas CEO Hannah Giles is stepping down, saying she encountered past illegality.

Plus:

• Dotdash Meredith is aiming to build big event franchises around its core brands. 

• A former WaPo staffer reported that WaPo is ending local columns. 

• The Nation will publish a print magazine monthly, instead of every other week. 

• BBC India staffers quit and formed their own company to comply with rules around foreign direct investment. 

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Chartbeat just released its report on the most engaging stories of 2023 – among those published by media companies that use its analytics platform. The report provides an interesting glimpse into what’s attracting attention on the Internet. 

In today’s edition of Business Side, we’ll examine the list of top stories. In addition to sorting the list by publisher, we also categorized the stories by Type (news, feature, explainer) and by Topic (crime, human interest, politics, etc.). These categorizations are imperfect of course, but they point to interesting high-level insights. If you’d like a copy of our spreadsheet with all the data, just send me a note. 

Let’s dig into it.

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Here is how many of the stories fall into each topic: 

Takeaways: 

• It’s no surprise that tragedy is attracting attention – through stories about crime, memorials or obituaries, the Titan submarine, natural disasters, and war. Crime stories included breaking news about unfolding events, as well as “true crime”-style features. Of the Memorial or Obituary pieces, more than half were about Matthew Perry. And of stories about war, almost all concerned the Israel-Gaza conflict. 

• Human Interest stories, which were categorized as such if they were features about individuals who aren’t public figures, spanned tales of travel, love, and unlikely circumstances. 

Here is how many stories fall into each “type” of piece: 

Takeaways: 

• The results again confirm how news wins attention. Top topics within News were Crime, Memorial, Titan Submarine, and Weather & Natural Disasters. 

• Top topics within Features were Human Interest, Politics, Crime, and Culture & Celebrity.

And here is how many stories each publisher has on the list: 

Takeaways: 

• CNN topped the list, powered by crime news and human interest features. 

• BBC came in second, driven primarily by news stories. 

• Fox News came in third, driven by a mix of news and features.

A Star Performer:

One writer, CNN’s Francesca Street, is responsible for an incredible five of the stories on the list. Street is an expert at telling charming love stories:

• “She broke up with her boyfriend and moved in with a man she’d known for 3 weeks. Here’s what happened” (link)

• “They had a teenage summer romance. Here’s what happened when they reunited years later” (link)

• “They met while hiking and fell in love. Two months later she was diagnosed with cancer” (link)

• “They fell in love backpacking through Europe then they lost each other. Here’s how they’ve ended up married for 24 years” (link)

• “She got the last seat on a flight next to a stranger. They’ve been married for 40 years” (link)

If you’ll forgive a sentimental moment: In a list dominated by tragedy, it’s nice to see love peaking through.

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In today’s edition:

• Top developments at The Information, WaPo, and new nonprofit NOTUS (News of the United States).

• Benchmarks on Future, journalism & philanthropy, and Bustle Digital Group.

• Viewpoints from operators at WSJ, NPR, and The Charlotte Ledger.

• Plus more news from across the media industry.

Let’s get to it. 

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TOP DEVELOPMENTS

The Information turns 10. Vanity Fair published a retrospective on the tech news site, which has found success over the last decade by pairing a subscription business model with original reporting focused on technology & business. 

• By the numbers: The Information has 475k active readers (paid and unpaid); expects 30% YoY revenue growth this year; and counts 65 full-time employees across offices in SF, NYC, and Hong Kong.

• A targeted audience: From the start, The Information differentiated itself by catering to a small audience of tech & business execs. The publication's founder Jessica Lessin argues that the larger audiences of legacy publications like the NYT and WSJ “really limits how indispensable [they] can be, especially to a certain class of reader.”

• A long-term approach: Ten years ago, The Information’s self-funded, subscription-first approach was unconventional, as most buzzy media startups at the time used VC dollars to pursue ad dollars and social traffic. But The Information’s commitment to its original vision has helped it outlast many of these peers. “You need the talent, you need the right business model, and kind of that alignment that we’re not going to go chase the latest fancy revenue thing,” says Lessin.

WaPo’s 24-hour strike. Around 700 Washington Post employees walked off the job yesterday to protest stalled contract negotiations and expected layoffs. It’s the first strike at The Post since the 1970s.

• Contract negotiations: WaPo’s union, Post Guild, said it had been negotiating with company management for the past 18 months, but talks broke down after management “refused to bargain in good faith.” Wages were one sticking point, with The Post reportedly proposing a 2.25% increase that the union deemed insufficient. 

• Expected layoffs: In October, interim CEO Patty Stonesifer told staff that The Post would cut about 240 jobs (just shy of 10% of staff). The plan was to reach this target through voluntary buyouts, but last month Stonesifer said layoffs might be necessary.  

• An early test: Will Lewis took over as CEO last month and appears to have made a strong first impression with staff. But the strike presents Lewis with an early test of leadership, as he tries to chart a new course for the paper. 

NOTUS to launch in January. The new nonprofit newsroom, News of the United States (“NOTUS” for short), will launch next month with a focus on politics and the 2024 election. 

• Funding: The newsroom is run out of the Allbritton Journalism Institute, a nonprofit founded with $20 million in funding from Politico founder Robert Allbritton. 

• A unique mission: In addition to publishing original reporting, the newsroom aims to “train the next generation of aspiring journalists” by bringing in young reporters to learn from the publication’s seasoned staff. Back in May, Albritton said, “Big newspapers where reporters used to get training are kind of gone. There’s got to be a track where we can provide opportunities for bright folks.”

• Staff: Former Politico & Protocol editor Tim Grieve will lead the newsroom as EIC, along with BuzzFeed News alums Matt Berman and Kate Nocera and former WaPo Magazine editor Richard Just. The project has also brought on faculty that includes The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta and reporter Wesley Lowery.

BENCHMARKS

Future’s full-year earnings (Press Gazette):

• Annual revenue was £788.9m (excluding acquisitions), a 10% YoY decline.

• Ad revenue declined by 7% YoY, with US ad revenue down 25%. 

• Affiliate revenue was flat, with US affiliate revenue down 25%.

• The company also announced a £25-30m investment initiative, pledging to hire 150 new editorial staff.

Bustle Digital Group (AdWeek):

• $136m to $144m in expected revenue this year – a 10-15% decline from 2022.

• 85% to 90% of overall revenue comes from advertising, of which 85% is branded content.

• The company is planning layoffs that would impact less than 5% of its staff.

Philanthropy & journalism (Lenfest):

• 59% of the 129 funders surveyed increased their journalism grantmaking in the last five years.

• But journalism is still a small concern for most, representing less than 10% of giving for 70% of funders.

• Within journalism grants, local news is a top priority for many funders, with 71% making grants specifically to increase local journalism production.

• DEI is another top concern for many funders, with 78% considering diversity in the grantmaking process.

Other benchmarks:

• Newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises released Q4 earnings, missing estimates but growing digital-only subscribers 36% YoY to 721k.

• The New European, a pro-Europe weekly newspaper, grew subscribers to 28k, a 62% YoY increase.

• Group M is forecasting that global ad spend will end 2023 with 5.8% YoY growth and then slow slightly next year with 5.3% growth.

• Entertainment employment in LA has contracted by 17% – about 25k jobs – since the writer’s strike began in May.

VIEWPOINTS

NPR’s senior director of brand & marketing Kristin Hume on launching new podcasts:

We used to be able to roll out a podcast, mention it on a few other shows and boom, we’d have like 200,000 downloads a week, easy. Now there’s just so many other options out there that we have been really having to formalize how we roll them out.

MIT Technology Review’s engagement editor Julia Beauchamp on LinkedIn newsletters:

I think of the LinkedIn newsletter as a precursor to an owned and operated newsletter in someone’s engagement/awareness journey. These subscribers are aware of who we are, but not so dedicated that they’re entrenched in the MIT Technology Review universe. So I want to expose them to as much variety as possible, and if they’re really into one beat, they can subscribe to one of our owned and operated beat newsletters.

NYT’s director of off-platform Jake Grovum on the outlet’s approach to Threads: 

As far as we can tell, we see evidence that people are interested in news and engaging with it and clicking through to read and things like that. We’ve seen sufficient return to site, engagement, growth and all those things to continue programming… We see that it has potential and is promising on the platform and is worth us spending our time maintaining day to day.

Dow Jones CEO & WSJ Publisher Almar Latour on competing in uncertain times:

I encourage everybody to look at the companies that have risen, and then have seen a slump, or worse. You see that maximising and taking on more types of content to get the larger audience to a point of dilution, where no one recognises your unique value, and then it’s done. And so that is the thing I would watch the closest, is anything you can do to define your value, to enhance your value and to enhance your identity.

Second Rough Draft’s Dick Tofel on the lack of bold AI experimentation:

But in most newsrooms, one year into what is pretty evidently a revolutionary development, experimentation [with AI] has been stunningly modest, with the bulk of attention going to what are clearly transient problems with accuracy as these products mature and a few desperate efforts by cost-cutters to replace uninteresting content generated by humans on hamster wheels with uninteresting content generated by machines. 

Charlotte Ledger cofounder Tony Mecia on the challenges & opportunities in local news:

What I’m seeing is that it’s not that people aren’t interested in the news — [it’s that] it hasn’t, in the last few years at least, been delivered to them in a way that is relevant to them. When you see people leaving, when you see circulation of newspapers declining, does that mean people don’t want to pay for local news — or that they don’t really like the [product]?

NEWS

Launches:

• Two new nonprofit newsrooms, Mirror Indy and Signal Akron, launched with support from The American Journalism Project.

• The UK digital media startup The Lead is planning to launch ten local newsletters across Northern England after receiving a six-figure investment.

• The BBC relaunched its North American website as part of a broader push into the US. 

• NYT is adding ads in its game Connections.

• Chartbeat launched Recommendation Engine, a tool to help publishers surface related content to readers. 

• Reader's Digest Canada is shutting down after 76 years.

Deals:

• Hearst acquired the puzzle platform, Puzzmo, and plans to roll it out across more than 50 publications.

• Active Interest Media acquired The Taunton Press, which publishes brands that cover woodworking, homebuilding and design, and gardening.

Leadership:

• Hozefa Lokhandwala is stepping down as co-CEO of Vice.

• Two top Sports Illustrated execs are out at the company. 

• The Minneapolis Star-Tribune hired Aron Pilhofer as its new chief product officer.

• NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises appointed Luis Fernández as its new chairman.

Layoffs:

• Spotify is planning to lay off 17% of the company (about 1,500 people). The company also announced that it wouldn’t renew the award-winning, Gimlet-produced podcasts “Heavyweight” and “Stolen.”  

• Wired reportedly laid off an undisclosed number of staffers yesterday. 

• Yahoo News laid off staffers earlier this week and is shutting down its millennial and Gen Z-focused “In The Know” vertical.

• The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio Canada is planning to cut about 10% of its staff.

• The Messenger is considering a “strategic realignment,” with layoffs reportedly on the table. 

Platforms:

• Meta is planning to launch Threads in Europe later this month. The app also recently launched tags (similar to hashtags) and expanded keyword search functionality.

• Separately, Meta is facing a $600 million lawsuit from a group representing 83 Spanish media outlets, who claim the platform benefits from unfair competition in the ad market.

• Gmail upgraded its spam filters to understand “adversarial text manipulations" — junk emails with lots of typos, emojis, and other special characters.   

• X is accelerating plans to court small and mid-size advertisers, after boycotts from several large brands. The company also launched an “anti-woke” chatbot, Grok, which is available to X Premium Plus users.

AI:

• Google introduced its new AI model Gemini, which outperforms OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 on a variety of benchmarks. A version of Gemini is now powering Google’s Bard chatbot. 

• Meta launched Imagine with Meta, an AI-powered image generator. The company also announced Purple Llama, an initiative to promote responsible AI development.

• The G7 agreed on international guidelines for both AI users and developers.

Plus:

• Bloomberg Businessweek will begin publishing monthly after 94 years as a weekly magazine.

• New research indicates that people perceive news labeled as AI-generated as being less trustworthy.

• Nieman Lab has begun rolling out predictions for 2024.

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In today’s edition:

• Top developments at Jezebel, PopSci, and The Telegraph.

• Benchmarks on podcasts, The Free Press, and Bloomberg.

• Viewpoints from operators at WaPo, Industry Dive, and the FT.

• Plus more news from across the media industry.

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TOP DEVELOPMENTS

Jezebel lives! Weeks after it was shut down by G/O Media, Jezebel was acquired by Paste Magazine this week. The defunct political site Splinter was also included in the deal. 

• About Paste: Paste Magazine, founded in 1998, is a digital site with “great writing about Music, Movies, TV, Comedy, Games, Books, Comics, Drinks and Politics.” Its masthead lists 18 editors, along with a slew of contributing writers.  

• Rationale: Paste President and EIC Josh Jackson shared his rationale: “We’ve gone through all the different changes in the media landscape and stayed independent and have survived and thought, ‘Hey, maybe we can do this with other sites as well’... I want them to push the boundaries… I think there are advertisers out there who have the courage to go to where the audience is.”

• Revenue model: Paste is 100% ad-supported, and if you visit the site you’ll see lots of ads, which create a less-than-optimal user experience. The acquisition of Jezebel might be an opportunity to experiment with some paid products, given Jezebel’s passionate following. 

• Ownership: Paste is owned by Wolfgang’s, which sells music memorabilia. Like Jezebel, Wolfgang’s seems to be a company with a strong personality, as displayed on its about page: “Wolfgang’s products represent our nostalgic past when great music supplemented and supported our public discourse. When protest was a good thing and resulted in real change for Black Americans, Women and Gays. When we followed real leaders who spent their time pursuing a vision not the next election. A sentimental bond to an earlier time is at the heart of Wolfgang’s.”

The end of print at PopSci. After 151 years, PopSci will no longer publish a print magazine. 

• A small team: After recent layoffs, PopSci has only five editorial staffers, along with a few people on the commerce team. 

• The model: PopSci, owned by Recurrent Ventures, has a toe in a number of different areas. It runs ads on the site; has a commerce section dedicated to gear; and last year launched a $12 / year paid membership. It also publishes videos on YouTube, as well as a couple podcasts. 

• What would you do? It may be that PopSci is stretched across too many areas. With a small staff, it’s impossible to excel across so many different formats & revenue strategies. In the near-term, I’d love to see PopSci narrow its focus and invest in growing its core audience. After achieving runaway success in one area (whether it’s podcasts, YouTube videos, paid newsletters, or something else), there will be opportunities to return to a more diversified approach.  

• A sale? Recurrent Ventures recently sold its culinary & travel brand Saveur to its editorial director. I think PopSci could be a great acquisition opportunity for a leader with a passion for the magazine and its history. 

The Canada / Google deal. Google agreed to pay Canadian news companies around $100 million annually. 

• Key to the agreement is that Google will negotiate with a single group representing publishers, rather than each company individually. 

• A replicable model? A Canadian official told Reuters the model is likely to serve as an example for other countries. 

• In the United States, debate continues about the proposed Journalism Competition & Preservation Act and the California Journalism Preservation Act, which would also compel tech companies to pay new organizations. 

• A perspective from Ken Doctor, industry analyst and operator: “We can applaud the well-meaning intentions of lawmakers and ask that any legislation focus on one key metric, the one that everyone says they care most about: How much original local news reporting can be added? … we can reward local news newsroom headcount.”

Jeff Zucker, Abu Dhabi, and The Telegraph. It’s been a wild week as the potential deal attracts controversy because of the foreign funding. Here’s the latest: 

• Yesterday, the UK announced that it would open a review of the deal, with a decision expected by late January.

• The deal: Last week Jeff Zucker’s Redbird IMI, a joint venture between private equity firm Redbird and Abu Dhabi-based IMI, announced its intention to acquire control of The Telegraph. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, a member of the Emirati royal family and owner of the Manchester City F.C., would pay off a large portion of the debt. 

• The strategy: Zucker’s “vision for The Telegraph includes a potential expansion into the United States, where Mr. Zucker believes a market has emerged for a center-right news publication,” according to an anonymous source in the NYT. 

• Foreign funding: Jeff Zucker gave an interview to The Telegraph where he tried to address his critics, saying, “I would resign if Abu Dhabi interfered.”

BENCHMARKS

Most popular podcasts of 2023:

Some insight on the rankings from Ariel Shapiro of Hot Pod:

“As you can see, there is surprisingly little overlap between the two lists. Only Crime Junkie and Huberman Lab appear on both. And while Apple has a lot of true crime, news, and old podcast standbys, Spotify’s list is stronger on celebrity chat shows (particularly its own).

“According to a study by Cumulus and Signal Hill, Apple’s podcast listeners tend to be older than Spotify’s (median age of listeners is 41 vs. 37, respectively). And while Spotify has an even split in terms of gender, 61 percent of Apple Podcast users are female. Additionally, longtime podcast listeners prefer Apple to Spotify.”

More benchmarks:

• Bari Weiss’s The Free Press:

  • $5 million in revenue expected this year

  • 20 full-time staffers

  • 520,000 subscribers

  • 75,000 paid subscribers

  • Advertising accounts for one-third of revenue (WSJ)

• At Bloomberg Media, 88% of 500,000 subscribers pay annually.

VIEWPOINTS

Incoming WaPo CEO William Lewis on young audiences: 

“What most people blithely say — that young adults just aren't interested in the news — is absolute garbage. It turns out the reason they weren’t interested in the news is that they were having to suffer listening to old white men like me, behind a table, blathering on about what happened in Congress yesterday. If you actually do it in a way that is by people that look and feel like them in a language that they understand about issues that they understand, they are very, very interested in news.”

Bloomberg Media chief digital officer Julia Beizer on subscriptions and the revenue mix: 

"Diversification is the name of the game. And that was the reason we got into this [subscription] business in 2018. But the subscriptions business has grown faster than we anticipated, and certainly than we modeled. So it's become a really, really significant player. Our three major revenue streams are advertising, subscriptions, and events. So it's one of the big three."

A group representing Dow Jones journalists opposing a proposal that the NewsGuild issue a statement supporting the ceasefire in Gaza:

“Taking public positions on news events we cover damages the confidence our members have earned through decades of impactful reporting in war zones and throughout the world, fueling the misconception that reporters are advocates rather than observers.”

FT editorial product director Hannah Sarney on the FT’s “Next Gen Board,” a group of emerging leaders within the business. 

“It’s a source of rapid, diverse and trusted feedback and ideas to run the business... It also acts sometimes as a shadow board on certain key strategic themes for our FTGroup Management Board, and a lot about silo breaking, and networking.“

Industry Dive managing director & head of content Andy Burt on their audience approach:

“In our business, in the niche B2B vertical, we care about carefully crafted slices of industry. If you reach 100 of these ‘perfectly correct’ people, it is more valuable than a hundred thousand. This is the proposition we believe in and that’s what we try to pursue.”

Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton on legal battles around AI and copyright: 

“I suspect the news industry’s attempts to get money out of the AI business will look a lot like its attempts to get money out of Google and Facebook. The tech companies will largely win in the courts, but to head off reputational damage, they’ll be more than happy to hand out lots of big cardboard checks.”

NEWS

Leadership:

• Bloomberg Media CEO Scott Havens is leaving to become president of business operations for the New York Mets. 

• Karen Rundlet will be the new CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit News. A former journalist, Rundlet has managed journalism grants at the Knight Foundation.  

• NPR appointed Gimlet executive Collin Campbell to lead its podcast division. 

Layoffs:

• Vox is undergoing layoffs, according to an internal email. 

• At WaPo, 120 people have taken voluntary separation packages so far, as a part of plans to reduce staff by 240 people total. 

• BBC News is cutting 127 jobs but adding 147 new digital roles.

• 50 Vanity Fair staffers signed a letter protesting layoffs at the company.

Launches:

• The BBC expanded its subscription podcast offering globally, after a limited rollout in select countries. 

• The NYT is relaunching its nightlife coverage. 

• The Guardian signed a first-look deal with Sony Pictures. 

AI:

• Sports Illustrated severed ties with a third-party content provider that published content from allegedly fake writers with AI-generated photos.  

• A growing list of publishers are blocking Google’s AI models from accessing their sites. 

• Documentary filmmakers called for standards governing the use of generative AI. 

Governance:

• Local publishers are enduring crackdowns by local governments, infringing on press freedoms. 

• The Atlantic published a piece highlighting 16 Substack newsletters with Nazi symbols. Substack’s response: “Substack has a content moderation policy that protects against extremes—like incitements to violence—but we do not subjectively censor writers outside of those policies.”

Plus:

• X may lose up to $75 million in ad revenue after more advertisers halt spending on the platform. WaPo paused advertising on X after Elon Musk amplified a meme about the Pizzagate conspiracy. And advertisers told the NYT they are standing firm after Musk insulted advertisers in a live interview. 

• The WSJ wrote a feature on “ghost newsrooms,” local outlets without any local full-time reporters. 

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In today’s edition:

• Developments at Business Insider and Buzzfeed

• Audience trends on spoken word audio and social media & news

• Benchmarks from Time, The Guardian US, and Workweek

• Viewpoints from operators at Defector, Newsquest, and The Guardian

• News from across the media industry

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TOP DEVELOPMENTS

Back to Business Insider. Henry Blodget is stepping down as CEO as the company changes its name back to Business Insider. The new CEO will be Barbara Peng, who was previously Insider President. 

• Founded as a niche publication serving “Silicon Alley” in New York, the company is headed back towards its niche roots, with a plan to focus on subscribers rather than social traffic. 

• The company already has a nice subscription foundation. It had 350,000 subscribers as of a couple years ago, and its premium offering includes utility-oriented tools such as pitch decks, org charts, a salary database, and a headhunter database. 

• I’d expect to see continued alignment between editorial coverage areas and the company’s Intelligence research unit. Already, they overlap in topic verticals such as finance, tech, advertising, and retail. 

Buzzfeed’s reorg. Buzzfeed is reorganizing its employees & sales team around individual brands, moving away from centralized teams that work across their network of sites, including HuffPost and Complex. The change will make it easier for Buzzfeed to sell Complex Media, an effort well underway.

• There seems to be limited revenue synergy from having a network of sites, unless your scale is truly massive or your audiences are very closely aligned. Many brands currently in portfolios could likely do better stretching their legs as standalone brands.

• I was intrigued when Saveur's editorial director bought the company from Recurrent Ventures so she could run the culinary & travel brand independently. I suspect there are many similar opportunities for brands stuck within struggling portfolios.

AUDIENCE TRENDS

Social media and news (Pew):

• The percentage of US adults who regularly get news on each social platform:

  • Facebook: 30%

  • YouTube: 26%

  • Instagram: 16%

  • TikTok: 14%

  • X: 12%

• The percentage of TikTok users who regularly get news on the platform:

  • 2023: 43%

  • 2020: 22%

Spoken word audio (Edison and NPR):

• Percentage of the U.S. population listening to spoken work audio every day:

  • 2023: 48%

  • 2022: 46%

  • … 

  • 2014: 39%

• Spoken word’s share of time spent listening (vs. music):

  • 2023: 31%

  • 2014: 20%

• Podcasts’ share of spoken word time spent listening: 

  • 2023: 36%

  • 2014: 13%

• Location of listening (2023): 

  • Home: 60%

  • Car: 24%

  • Work: 13%

BENCHMARKS

State of the ad market. While Q3 earnings showed that big tech is recovering, many publishers are still struggling – with the NYT as one exception. Here’s a chart that tells the story: 

Time:

• Time also has a positive advertising story, as it expects direct sold advertising to grow by 7% this year, driven in part by selling around franchises such as TIME100, Person of the Year, and Women of the Year. 

• And event revenue will grow 70% YoY, with “over 23” events this year, up from 10 in 2022. (Time)

The Arena Group:

• Q3 digital advertising grew 29% YoY, a result of a 46% increase in revenue-per-pageview and a 8% drop in traffic. (I’d be curious to learn more about tactics behind the revenue-per-pageview increase.) 

The Guardian US: 

• The company expects to earn $33 million in reader revenue this fiscal year (which ends March 31), and this month it expects to hit 250k monthly recurring supporters. 

• Headcount has grown by 35% to 159 over the past year. 

• Overall U.S. revenue is expected to grow 11%. (Axios)

Defector:

• Annual revenue was $4.5 million, up from $3.8 million last year. Subscriptions accounted for 83% of revenue.

• Operating expenses were $4.4 million. This figure includes roughly $750k of employee compensation distributed based on the company’s financial performance, suggesting the company is in a strong position. 

• The company has just over 40k active subscribers. Subscription churn rates were 13% for annual subscribers, and 4% per month for monthly subscribers. 

• Defector’s Normal Gossip podcast is getting between 450-600k downloads per episode, and it has over 4,000 paying subscribers. (Defector)  

Workweek: 

• Revenue will 3x this year.

• Revenue in October of 2023 was $1.2 million – 40% from audience payments. 

• Their LTV:CAC ratio is 11x, with a payback period that’s less than two months. (X)

Literally Media, the company behind eBaum's World and Know Your Meme: 

• Has 50 staffers and is profitable. 

• Revenue in the low 8-figures – 70% from on-site advertising, 13% from video advertising, and 17% from commerce & events. (Adweek)

Other benchmarks:

• Almost 20,000 media jobs have been cut so far this year, six times more than last year. 

• America has roughly 6,000 newspapers, down from nearly 9,000 in 2005. 

• Google pays Apple 36% of search ad revenue generated via Safari. 

• A new study argues that Google should pay 17.5% of its search revenue to publishers.

VIEWPOINTS

Guardian U.S. managing director Steve Sachs on the extensibility of The Guardian’s reader contributions model: 

“You really need to be through and through mission-driven as an organization… And if [audiences] think it's not exactly that, then they're less likely to support you… And so I think that it would be hard for for-profit media organizations to make this work.” 

Guardian creative director Chris Clarke on the launch of their new print magazine, the Long Read. 

“We know that for many people, myself included, when it comes to long, immersive pieces, reading in print – without the distraction of your phone, or emails and notifications pinging in – is still the most satisfying reading experience, and one that should be cherished in a climate so saturated by disturbance.”

Newsquest CEO Henry Faure on running publications across localities:

“Even though we’re a large company, we’ve always tried to hold true to the fact that we’re a local community media business. And even though the temptation is great to centralise, and you should centralise at the middle and back office because you need those efficiencies, if you start pulling local salespeople out of markets and putting too many editorial folk into large hubs, I think you can lose your attraction.”

Defector shared the results of exploring why their churn increased in late Q1 and Q2. 

“If only because misery loves company, we spoke with peers at other subscription-forward media companies who were also seeing elevated churn. Their hypotheses included: consumers are cutting back on discretionary spending given perceptions of high inflation and uncertain economic conditions; people are unwilling to pay as much for news in non-election years; general subscription fatigue is finally settling in; and new click-to-cancel standards are broadly reminding people to cancel unused subscriptions.”

Defector also shared an interesting & effective tactic for winning back subscribers: 

“As part of the winback campaign, we ran a small experiment where we sent some segments the offer email “From” the specific byline that they had previously read the most frequently, and sent some segments the offer email from a generic Defector email account. We discovered that ex-subscribers who saw a specific blogger’s name in their email inbox converted at twice the rate of those receiving the offer email from the generic Defector Media name.”

NEWS

People:

• Recurrent Ventures implemented another round of layoffs, impacting brands including Popular Science, The Drive, and Domino. 

• Staff unionized at Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries. 

• The Knight Foundation named Maribel Perez Wadsworth as its next CEO. She was previously president of Gannett Media.

• Workweek let go five staffers, and it has parted ways with six creators this year. 

• The former EIC of the Recount was arrested for child pornography.  

AI:

• Reporters without Borders published a “Paris Charter” on AI & journalism, in collaboration with a number of partner organizations. 

• The Telegraph issued a policy prohibiting use of generative AI in editorial work.  

• Google is paying local outlets to test AI-powered tools. 

• YouTube will require creators to disclose when they’re using AI-generated images that appear realistic. 

• Meta is allowing political ads that question the legitimacy of the 2020 election. 

Deals:

• The Block, the crypto media company, sold a majority stake to VC firm Foresight Ventures in a deal valuing the company at $70 million. 

• The Daily Mail is no longer considering using Qatari funds to acquire The Telegraph. 

• Model Karlie Kloss is buying i-D magazine, which had been a part of Vice. 

Plus:

• Two journalists launched the Sick Times, a donor-supported site covering Long Covid. 

• Courier Newsroom, the network of liberal local outlets, is expanding ahead of the 2024 election. 

• UK sites presenting themselves as local news outlets are publishing primarily paid-for press releases.

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In today’s edition:

• Top developments at NYT, WaPo, and Jezebel.

• Benchmarks on publisher earnings, subscriptions, and The Verge’s redesign.

• Viewpoints from operators at BDG, Polygon, and ProPublica.

• News from across the media industry.

Let’s get to it. 

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TOP DEVELOPMENTS

NYT crosses 10 million. As part of its Q3 earnings report, the company announced that it now has more than 10 million subscribers – with 9.41 million digital-only subscribers and 670,000 print subscribers. 

The context:

• Last year, the company crossed 10 million subscriptions, but it’s now tracking toward a goal of 15 million subscribers by 2027. This shift reflects an increased focus on selling a “multiproduct bundle” – with the goal of increasing average revenue per user (ARPU). 

• Currently, about 40% of digital-only subscribers are subscribed to at least two Times offerings, which include News, Games, Cooking, The Athletic, and The Wirecutter. The company hopes to grow this above 50% in the coming years.

• According to CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, the company’s non-news products are “increasingly effective as on-ramps to the bundle.”

WaPo’s new CEO. Last Saturday, we learned that Will Lewis, the former Dow Jones CEO and WSJ publisher, will be the new CEO of The Washington Post.

The context:

• Lewis takes over a paper in transition. WaPo is on track to lose $100 million this year, and digital subscribers have dipped to 2.5 million, down from 3 million.

• At a staff meeting earlier this week, Lewis appears to have made a strong first impression, emphasizing his love of journalism and acknowledging the challenges ahead: “We’re not in a place that we want to be in, and we need to get to that place as fast as we can.”

• It’s a promising start for a leader who has the opportunity to chart a unique strategy for the company. As WaPo owner Jeff Bezos has said before, “differentiation is survival.” 

RIP Jezebel. The site’s parent company G/O Media is suspending the pioneering feminist publication, restructuring several other editorial teams, and laying off a total of 23 staff. 

The context: 

• Several weeks ago, Axios reported that Jezebel was up for sale. But the company couldn’t find a home for the site after talks with “over two dozen potential buyers,” according to CEO Jim Spanfeller.

• Spanfeller cited “economic headwinds” as a factor, adding that “our business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s.” 

• Founding editor Anna Holmes’ recent essay “Jezebel and the Question of Women’s Anger” serves as a fitting coda, examining the site’s influence on journalism and online discourse.

BENCHMARKS

Publisher earnings (NYT, News Corp, IAC, Gannett, BuzzFeed):

• NYT: Overall revenue increased 9.3% YoY, with ad revenue up 6%. The Athletic grew revenue 45.8% YoY, due to a subscriber increase and the introduction of display ads.

• Dow Jones: Overall revenue for the business unit, which includes WSJ and Barron’s, grew 4% YoY – with subscription revenue up 5% and ad revenue down 3%. WSJ subscriptions grew 6%, for an average of 4 million in the quarter.

• DotDash Meredith: Digital revenue declined 4% YoY, driven by a 12% decline in digital ad revenue (though notably affiliate commerce revenue grew by 49%). 

• Gannett: Overall revenue decreased 9.1% YoY, though digital revenue increased by 2.7% and digital-only subscription revenue grew by 15.9%.

• BuzzFeed: Overall revenue declined 29% YoY, with declines in advertising (35%), content (32%), and commerce revenues (3%).

“State of subscriptions” research (The Rebooting & BlueConic):

• 57% of surveyed publishers saw less than 10% growth in their subscriptions revenue this year, with 27% experiencing flat or declining growth.

• 91% expect subscription revenue growth next year, with 53% expecting growth of up to 20%.

• 57% cite “subscriber growth” as their biggest challenge; 32% cite “churn” and 11% cite “revenue growth.”

• Only 38% of publishers were “satisfied” with their subscriptions progress, while 32% were “dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied.”

The Verge’s redesigned website (AdWeek)

• According to EIC Nilay Patel, The Verge’s redesigned site has seen:

  • Loyal users (with at least 5 visits per month) increase by 62%. 

  • Clickthrough rates for homepage content increase by 25% on desktop and 48% on mobile.

  • Total comments increase by 90%. 

• According to Comscore, however, The Verge has seen:

  • YoY traffic decreases in 11 of the last 12 months. 

  • An average of 11 million monthly visitors since the redesign vs. 17.3 million for the year before the redesign. 

Other benchmarks:

• Bloomberg Media topped 500,000 subscribers, with 60% in the US, 20% in Europe & the Middle East, and 20% in Asia.

• The Daily Mail publishes an average of 1,490 articles per day, while The Guardian publishes an average of 373. 

• ChatGPT has 100 million weekly users, and over 2 million developers are building on its API.

• Meta announced that there are now 1 million paid subscriptions to creators on Instagram.

VIEWPOINTS

Jezebel founding editor Anna Holmes on the site’s legacy:

I see Jezebel not as the beginning of the end of the digital-media era but as a moment—a spark—within an ongoing discussion about gender politics. That conversation has led to new realities around sexual assault and harassment, pay inequity, and cultural depictions of women. It also makes some people uncomfortable—in part because it involves women expressing their anger in public and sustained ways.

BDG’s CRO Jason Wagenheim on the company’s push into events as a way to differentiate against platforms:

Traffic is down for everybody [and] anybody that thinks a site’s vitality exists solely with a Comscore number is just wrong in 2023. We’ve made our bets in the right places, and advertisers continue to come to us for things that Google, Facebook, linear [TV] networks and other big platforms out there just don’t do or can’t do.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on WhatsApp’s potential: 

If you’re envisioning what will be the private social platform of the future, starting from scratch, I think it would basically look like WhatsApp… Now that everyone has mobile phones and are basically producing content and messaging all day long, I think you can do something that’s a lot better and more intimate than just a feed of all your friends.

Polygon’s EIC Chris Plante on experimenting with WhatsApp Channels:

With the collapse of Twitter, we’re living in a social media landrush. This is an exciting, albeit chaotic, opportunity for us to experiment with other platforms and gradually discover what makes sense for our audience… Communicating on What’sApp is effectively communicating through text messages, so we try to make the experience akin to getting occasional updates from a friend. The result, somewhat intentionally, feels like micro-blogs — little missives on the stuff we love to watch, play, and read that live alongside news and short grabby notes that would fit comfortably on Twitter/X.

Black Enterprise SVP of digital strategy Justin Barton on how advertisers’ keyword blocklists can affect black-owned publishers:

There are certain terms that aren’t negative in this space. It might be negative if it’s on The New York Times, but it’s not negative when it’s on Black Enterprise. Keywords [need] to be more relevant to the current time.

ProPublica’s former president Dick Tofel on why there are not enough failures in nonprofit news: 

But in far too many cases, I think the fault for the low failure rate traces back to funders who don’t really believe their own rhetoric about taking risks, who are afraid that the failures of what were initially acknowledged as experiments will reflect poorly on them, and who thus throw good money after bad.

T2/Pebble co-founder Gabor Cselle on why his Twitter alternative didn’t take off:

1. There was a glut of alternatives, and we couldn’t clearly articulate a differentiator beyond trust and safety.

2. Being kinder and safer is not enough of a differentiator, because kindness and safety by themselves aren’t interesting enough. There was not enough interesting content on the platform for the experience to become a daily habit.

3. I mistakenly didn’t prioritize building an app, which would have helped with retention, or an API, which would have helped with pumping more content into the platform.

NEWS

Launches:

• Former Kotaku staffers launched Aftermath, a new worker-owned site covering video games and internet culture. 

• Wired is launching a new vertical focused on the intersection of tech & politics, with a staff of one editor and four dedicated writers.

• CBS launched CBS News Confirmed, a new unit focused on investigating misinformation and deepfake videos.

• Cityside is launching a nonprofit newsroom in Richmond, CA.

• Yahoo Finance redesigned its website, now with 40% fewer ads and more advanced charts and tools.

• BuzzFeed launched a weekly culture & entertainment podcast under the HuffPo brand in partnership with Acast.   

Deals:

• Press Forward, the local news initiative with more than half a billion in funding, wants to “raise the next $500 million at the local level.”

• Salon was bought by Find.co, a two-year-old Malta-based media company, for an undisclosed sum. 

• Sports betting group Better Collective has agreed to buy Canadian sports media company Playmaker Capital for $188 million.

• Agentio, an advertising platform for content creators, raised $4.25 million in seed funding.

• Peter Chernin’s North Road acquired a “significant stake” in Two One Five Entertainment, a production company created by the musicians Questlove and Black Thought.

Personnel (pt. 1):

• The actor’s union SAG-AFTRA has reached a tentative deal on a new contract with Hollywood studios after a 118-day strike.

• Vice is restructuring under two business units – Publishing, News, and Creative services & Studios, Television, and Distribution – and plans to reportedly lay off “less than 100 employees.”

• The UK publisher Reach plans to lay off about 450 employees, almost 10% of its staff. 

• More than 750 journalists signed an open letter condemning Israel's killing of journalists in Gaza and criticizing media coverage of the war. 

• Hearst announced a new social media policy, which reportedly warns staffers that “liking” controversial content could result in their termination. In response, the union representing Hearst editorial staff filed a complaint with the NLRB. 

• The Condé Nast Union delivered a letter to CEO Roger Lynch, asking for transparency around proposed layoffs and restructuring. 

Personnel (pt. 2):

• Recurrent Ventures appointed Andrew Perlman as CEO after dismissing former CEO Alex Vargas after one year in the role.

• Time named Dave O’Connor as president of Time Studios.

• BDG’s CRO Jason Wagenheim is leaving the company to become the North American CEO for the soccer-focused media company Footballco.

• The Guardian US appointed Emilie Harkin as SVP, Growth to oversee the publication’s reader revenue strategy.

• Vox Media named Brian Leung as its new general counsel.

Governance:

• Meta is banning political advertisers from using its generative AI advertising tools.

• Microsoft is offering a video authentication tool to US politicians and campaign groups to help combat deepfakes. 

• New EU rules will require tech platforms to clearly label political ads and disclose who paid for them.

• As a result of Twitter/X’s shifting policies, more than 100 research studies focused on the platform have been canceled, suspended, or changed in the past year.

Platforms (pt. 1):

• Google is expanding its AI-powered Search Generative Experience to more than 120 new countries  

• Starting next year, Google AdSense will pay publishers per impression (instead of per click) and will start “splitting the AdSense revenue share into separate rates for the buy-side and sell-side.”

• After YouTube expanded a test to cut down on ad blocking, it appears that a record number of ad blockers were uninstalled – and reinstalled – in October, as users searched for alternatives that don’t violate the platform’s guidelines. 

• Separately, YouTube is testing new generative AI features, including one that summarizes the comments below a video. 

Platforms (pt. 2):

• OpenAI is releasing a no-code platform for making custom versions of ChatGPT.

• Spotify is now offering 15 hours of free audiobook content to paid subscribers in the US after debuting the feature in the UK and Australia last month. 

• Disney is planning to test a new app that combines Disney+ and Hulu into a single streaming platform.

• TikTok is shutting down its $1 billion creator fund.

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In today’s edition:

• Top developments at Forbes, Hearst, and Mill Media Co.

• Benchmarks on platform earnings, media trust, and X/Twitter usage.

• Viewpoints from operators at Condé Nast, Axel Springer, and Bleacher Report.

• News from across the media industry.

Before we dive in, a quick programming note: We’ll be off next Friday, back the following Friday, November 10th.

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TOP DEVELOPMENTS

Forbes’ AI search engine. The new tool, named Adelaide, allows site visitors to ask a question and receive an AI-generated response, along with links to five relevant Forbes articles. 

The backstory:

• The product uses Google’s machine learning tech and was initially trained on 12 months of Forbes’ archives (the plan is to eventually train it on the entire archive). It took about two months to develop. 

• The hope is that the tool will increase site engagement, and the team is tracking success metrics including pages per session, sessions per user, and time spent. 

• It will be interesting to watch if and how Forbes integrates the product into the existing search functionality on its site. Google and Bing are wrestling with that same question.

Hearst’s new puzzles. Last week, the publisher debuted Puzzmo, a collection of daily puzzles formatted like the puzzle page of a print newspaper.

The backstory:

• Puzzmo appears to be drawing inspiration from – and counter positioning against – NYT’s Games offering. Puzzmo creator Zach Gage said, "The New York Times, who basically have the preeminent product in this space, doesn't have a very extensive product. If you look at what they're doing, it's basically links to games."

• The success of NYT Games, however, doesn’t rest on its extensiveness. It succeeds based on its ability to attract and retain users – and ultimately to drive subscriptions, both as a standalone offering and as a key piece of NYT’s All Access subscription.

• If the Puzzmo team can build a retentive product, they’ll have to navigate similar business questions – chiefly, how to integrate the offering into Hearst’s news subscription.

Local news outlet expands. Not a headline you see often, unfortunately. But the UK’s Mill Media Co is bucking the trend. The publisher is expanding to Birmingham next month, after building profitable titles in Manchester, Liverpool, and Sheffield. 

The backstory:

• Mill Media Co began as The Mill, a Substack launched in 2020 by Joshi Herrmann to cover Manchester with a small number of in-depth, local stories each week.

• After The Mill’s success, Herrmann expanded to Liverpool (The Post) and Sheffield (The Tribune). Across its three existing outlets, Mill Media Co counts about 5,500 paying members, who typically pay £7 per month.

• The model’s emphasis on original journalism contrasts with the approach of Axios and 6AM City, who primarily aggregate others’ reporting. 

• Mill Media Co is still small, but it offers a promising formula: 1) A focus on quality journalism, 2) A newsletter-first product & distribution model, 3) A subscription-first business model, and 4) A lean, editorially-focused cost structure. 

BENCHMARKS

Q3 ad platform earnings (NYT, NYT, CNBC, Search Engine Land, Axios, CNBC):

• Google: Search and related revenues increased 11% YoY. YouTube ad revenue was up 12%. 

• Meta: Overall revenue rose 23% YoY.

• Amazon: Ad revenue increased 26% YoY.

• Microsoft: Search and news ad revenue increased 10% YoY.

• Spotify: Ad revenue increased 16% YoY. 

• Snap: Overall revenue increased 5% YoY. 

Industry analyst Brian Weiser’s take: 

Reinforcing my prior view that the global advertising industry is healthy at the present time, each of Alphabet, Microsoft, Snap and Spotify reported calendar third quarter 2023 results on Tuesday, collectively showing very strong, accelerating year-over-year growth for the industry…. Importantly, media companies experiencing declines in their advertising are not suffering from a weak ad market; they are losing shares of ad budgets, usually because of budget shifts from traditional media (including digital extensions) to digital platforms and because the growth in advertising is typically coming from new advertisers.

Americans’ trust in the mass media (Gallup):

• 32% trust the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to report the news fairly and accurately, tying a historical low set in 2016.

• 39% trust the media “none at all” (a record high), while 29% have “not very much” trust.

• 58% of Democrats trust the media, down 12% YoY. Notably, young Democrats trust the media far less than older Dems. 

• Only 11% of Republicans trust the media, down 3% YoY.

X/Twitter usage (Axios):

• App downloads are down 38% globally and 57% in the U.S. between October 2022 and September 2023.

• Monthly active users are down 15% globally and 18% in the U.S. YoY for the month of September.

• User churn increased more than 30% YoY as of September.

• Global first-time downloads were flat this past year vs. the year before Elon Musk bought the company. 

Other benchmarks:

• Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Threads has “just under” 100 million monthly users. Relatedly, recent Sensor Tower data estimates that Threads has 18% user share in the microblogging market (Twitter/X has the other 82%).

• The nonprofit Global Press Journal claimed a variety of exaggerated audience stats, including 20 million monthly readers in one instance and 98 million readers in another.

VIEWPOINTS

Axel Springer’s director of premium Daniel Mussinghoff on growing Bild’s subscription product: 

The core news content has to be strong enough on its own to convert readers to subscribers.… Bundles and partnerships gave us access to new audiences, and accelerated the growth at an early stage.… The key learning was that simplicity works best for us — one straightforward price point converts better than complex options.

Bleacher Report’s GM Bennett Spector on investing in live video:

The one thing that’s still working within the TV ecosystem is live sports and live content in general. You can’t really replicate that. And I think advertisers see that if they can get everyone hyper engaged, leaned in and consuming content at the same time, [they] get their very targeted message out…. I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but the beauty of our distribution is that one alert can bring in tens, or hundreds, or thousands of people at one time to consume our content. And advertisers love that.

Condé Nast CRO Pamela Drucker Mann on investing in live activations:

Performance marketing is no longer really performing. Business outcomes need to be measured on impact and not just on reach. That’s why we’ve been doubling down on live moments—consider the viral immediacy of celebrities on the red carpet as a great example. The Vanity Fair Oscar Party delivered 2.2 billion global social media impressions, September’s Vogue World in London had 93 million global views in the first week across all brands and platforms, and Vogue’s Met Live was No. 1 trending on YouTube. At the end of the day, culture is the new KPI, and it’s critical for marketers to lean in.

NYT music critic Lindsay Zoladz on writing her newsletter, The Amplifier:

In the age of digital streaming platforms, the act of discovering music — which used to happen via word of mouth, passed mixtapes from friends, or even specialized message boards — has become streamlined and anonymized. Even the phrase “music discovery” has become commodified into corporate jargon. So something I was vocal about from the earliest stages of the newsletter was that I wanted to put some of the spontaneity and human connection back into that experience.

Substack writer Lenny Rachitsky on launching his product management Slack community: 

Start very small and curate who you invite because that sets the tone. Is it going to be a thriving, interesting community or is it going to be a bunch of people promoting their stuff?… Also I found it’s very important to be very detail-oriented. It has to feel really high quality, so I made sure everyone had profile photos when they joined. I made sure people don’t self promote…. Make sure people actually reply in threads, so it’s not messy. Make sure people are asking questions in the right channels. A lot of these little things. They sound really minor but that’s the stuff that makes it feel like the signal to noise is really high.

NYT columnist & Vox cofounder Ezra Klein on podcasting analytics: 

I think podcasting would be really harmed by the development of really, really granular analytics. I think the fact that Apple has kind of maintained dominance of the market without ever developing really good analytics tools has been really good for podcasting. And it’s meant that podcasting has stayed pretty weird. 

Independent analyst Benedict Evans on leaving Twitter:

The last year swapped stasis for chaos. Stuff breaks at random and you don’t know if it’s a bug or a decision. The advertisers have fled, and no-one knows what will be broken by accident or on purpose tomorrow. The example that’s closest to home for me was that the in-house newsletter product was shut down - and then links to other newsletters were banned. Pick one! It’s hard to see anyone who depends on having a long-term platform investing in anything that Twitter builds, when it might not be there tomorrow. 

NEWS

Products:

• Condé Nast is expanding its beauty programming through new events, awards, and video series. 

• The independent, tech-focused newsletter Big Technology launched a paid tier.

• National World launched an AI-generated weather anchor on its London site.

• BuzzFeed quietly shut down Complex Media’s audience network, Catalyst, this past summer.

• Vox Media is ending Into It, a podcast hosted by NPR-vet Sam Sanders. 

• Economist & blogger Tyler Cowen published an AI-powered “generative book” on the topic of great economists.

Deals:

• Jezebel is up for sale, with BDG, Factz, and Dear Media among the potential buyers.

• The process to sell the Telegraph newspapers and The Spectator kicked off last Friday, with Rupert Murdoch and Axel Springer among the potential buyers.

• Direqt, a startup that helps build chatbots for media companies, raised $4.5 million. 

• Flying Media Group acquired Bonnier’s marine media titles, including Boating, Yachting, and Sailing World. A price wasn’t disclosed, but the marine portfolio is on track for about $20 million in revenue and $5 million in EBITDA.

• Tucker Carlson’s new media company signed its first ad deal, a partnership with the “conservative-friendly” marketplace app Public Square worth at least $1 million. 

• The rights to a recent true-crime article published by Vanity Fair were bought by Amazon MGM Studios.

Personnel:

• Staffers at Reviewed, a Gannett-owned product review site, alleged that the company posted AI-generated articles to the site without their knowledge. Gannett denied the claim, though it said the posts didn’t "meet our editorial standards."

• Jeff Bezos is reportedly days away from deciding on the new WaPo CEO. He also emailed WaPo staff, writing that, “Long term it’s important that The Post return to profitability – a key signal that we’re serving readers in a way that’s important to them."

• Staffers at The Messenger are pushing to unionize after the outlet’s president suggested that the site is “out of money.” 

• Newly reported stories from female Rolling Stone staffers portray a toxic work culture under the magazine’s cofounder and former EIC Jann Wenner. 

• Vox cofounder Melissa Bell is stepping down as publisher, and current EIC Swati Sharma will take on an expanded role as EIC and publisher.

• Bloomberg is hiring 40 new data journalists and engineers. 

• BuzzFeed’s CFO is leaving and will be replaced by the company’s current EVP of finance. 

Governance:

• D.C. lawmakers are planning to introduce a new bill that would let D.C. city residents donate to local news outlets (excluding local TV stations) via government-funded vouchers.

• The Canadian Association of Broadcasters is lobbying to include Apple, along with Google and Meta, in legislation that would require platforms to share revenue with news publishers.

• Meta was sued by dozens of states over claims that its products “entice, engage and ultimately ensnare” children. 

• The UK’s Online Safety Bill, which aims to regulate tech platforms’ approach to a variety of harmful content, was passed into law.

• Several new AI-focused think tanks have launched in recent months, often with funding from wealthy effective altruists who want to prevent a potential AI apocalypse. 

Platforms:

• Apple is raising prices on several subscription services, including Apple News+ (from $9.99/month to $12.99/month).

• Google appears to be shrinking the footprint of its AI-powered Search Generative Experience on its search result pages. The company also announced a new policy requiring Android apps to allow users to flag offensive AI-generated content in-app starting next year.

• Microsoft announced pubCenter, a new tool similar to Google AdSense that lets publishers run programmatic ads on their site. The company also appointed a new CMO.

• X/Twitter is planning to launch two new premium tiers – one with ads that will be cheaper than the current $8/month plan; the other without ads that will be more expensive. The company is also rolling out audio and video calling.

• TikTok is testing the ability for users to post videos up to 15 minutes long (the current limit is 10 minutes).

• Amazon is testing an AI image generation tool for advertisers.

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And welcome to Business Side’s Weekly Briefing, where we elevate the biggest stories of the week, provide benchmarks from other publishers, and share what other media operators are saying.

Let’s get to it. 

TOP STORIES

Semafor’s first year. The two Smith’s (Ben & Justin) reflected on lessons learned from their startup’s first year.

A few takeaways:

• They’re bullish on coverage that combines “the authority of legacy media with the openness and diversity of sources that has always been the best of the internet.” 

• They believe that a verticalized approach to general-interest news helps reconcile reader demand for dot-connecting journalism with advertiser demand to reach narrow, topic-aligned audiences.

• They’re interested in expanding into more undercovered regions after the success of Semafor Africa, which employs 16 journalists and reaches over 100k newsletter subscribers and nearly 500k monthly web visitors.

The Generalist’s new subscription. Three years ago, Mario Gabriele founded The Generalist, a newsletter that publishes deeply-researched essays on tech and investing. Yesterday, Gabriele introduced Generalist+, a $200/year premium offering “designed to make you a better investor.”  

The backstory:

• The Generalist recently crossed 100k (free) subscribers to its newsletter and, with an affluent audience of investors and technologists, subscriptions is a natural next step.

• In contrast to free Generalist essays, which balance storytelling and analysis, a Generalist+ subscription is “designed to be highly tactical.” 

• The subscription includes four products: 

  • Letters to a Young Investor: A “monthly email correspondence on the craft of investing between [Gabriele] and a legendary investor.”

  • The Braintrust: A series where “high-performance founders answer big questions – and share the tactics and frameworks behind their success.” 

  • The Watchlist: A database of 50 promising startups, curated by Gabriele.

  • Ask Mario: Access to private Q&As with Gabriele. 

The Daily Wire’s new app. The Daily Wire is launching an entertainment app for kids, planning to invest at least $100 million over the next three years. 

The rationale: 

• The company is positioning the service against Disney, which Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing says "pushes all the worst excesses of the woke left." 

• The new service will be available to the over 1 million subscribers of DailyWire+, the general entertainment service. 

• It’s another example of a news company making a big bet in non-news content, building a lifestyle & entertainment bundle alongside news.

BENCHMARKS

Semafor stats, one year after launch (from Semafor): 

• 500,000 engaged newsletter subscriptions

• 3 million monthly readers on and off platform

• Thousands of live event participants

• 40 global marketing partners

Staff sizes: 

• Wirecutter has 120 journalists – about 30 in New York and the rest “scattered about the country.”

• The Daily Mail has 18 social video producers – spanning London, New York, LA, and Sydney. 

Other benchmarks:

• Puck has held “nearly 15” commercial events this year. 

• The portion of publishers who post to Twitter/X every day fell from 75% to 50%, in a Digiday survey. 

• The Epoch Times reached $122 million in revenue in 2021, powered by pro-Trump ad campaigns that attracted criticism from fact-checking groups. 

• The Barclay family has put forward a £1 billion offer for The Telegraph. 

• Of young Latinos, 71% said they feel represented in mainstream U.S. English-speaking outlets, and 44% said mainstream outlets don’t “get” Latino cultural nuances. 

CHATTER

FT chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch tweeted that many traditional publishers aren’t keeping pace with modern reporting techniques critical for covering Gaza/Israel: 

“With the proliferation of photos/footage, satellite imagery and map data, forensic video/image analysis and geolocation (~OSINT) has clearly been a key news gathering technique for several years now. A key news gathering technique *completely absent from most newsrooms*... ‘According to a spokesperson’ just doesn’t really cut it when the primary evidence is right there.”

Ebony CEO Eden Bridgeman Sklenar shared her vision for Ebony in a CJR feature that was critical of the company’s sponsored content policies:

“You’re going to the Ebony experience for creative content that’s making you think and expanding your idea of possibilities of upward mobility—whether it’s career relations, financially, whatever it might be.”

The Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand reflected on his publication, which inspired many tech enthusiasts and recently digitized its archives:

“The idea of the Whole Earth Catalog in the ’70s was to confer agency. So you went from being passively disinterested to becoming actively interested in a lot of things. Every one of those reviews was like a half-open door of something you might well do with your young life. A lot of people went through those doors.”

AJP’s Loretta Chao explained their requirement that a local nonprofit partner with a local foundation before AJP will contribute funding, in a CJR feature about new models for local journalism: 

“What we’re suggesting is that, given that newsrooms are part of the fabric of society, it makes sense that they should be a thing that philanthropists who love their communities also care about.”

Mail Online’s Phil Harvey talked about one successful TikTok format, part of the strategy that has made The Daily Mail a top news brand on TikTok:

"It's very easy to talk about video as one thing, but within video there's tonnes of different ways we can approach a story. A great example of that is the brilliant Tiktok explainers that we're making seven or eight times a day. These are really short form, very highly optimised pieces of content that give the viewers exactly what they want to know.”

Literally Media’s Oren Katzeff on collaborating with creators:

“When I talk about collaborative creators I’m not really talking about the top two percent that do very well. They don’t really need us. There’s not a ton that I can do for them either… But there’s a massive percentage of creators who are not making that much money. And so with them, if I can put the audience and revenue opportunities in their hand again, grow their brand and hand in hand grow ours, the business model makes a lot of sense.” 

Wirecutter EIC Ben Frumin on the product review ecosystem:

“The truth is, most players in this space don’t test products at all. Most players in the online product review and affiliate revenue space are kind of skeezy. They have a certain cynicism for their readers, and they’re like, ‘Here’s some stuff we found on Amazon without ever physically interrogating these products.’”

MORE NEWS

Israel/Gaza

• At least 21 journalists are among those killed, as of October 19. 

• The BBC says it was wrong to speculate who was behind the hospital blast, and an NYT analysis piece examined how reporting evolved as more information emerged. 

• The Guardian parted ways with a long-time cartoonist, reportedly over concerns that a cartoon perpetuated an anti-Semetic trope.  

• The BBC has taken six reporters off air as the company investigates tweets that seemed to support Hamas. 

• Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Samira Nasr apologized for an Instagram post about the conflict. 

• An ITV presenter is facing criticism after asking a British-Palestinian MP if she knew anything about the Hamas terrorist attack in advance. 

Launches: 

• Puck is launching a new event series. 

• Air Mail is launching a style vertical.

• Time is launching a FAST channel on Amazon Freevee. 

• NBC is launching a streaming service with amateur & high school sports, paired with educational content from professionals. Separately, NBC News will host the next Republican debate. 

• Netflix will host a golf tournament, its first live sports event. Separately, it is launching stores & live experiences based on TV shows. 

• The LA Times launched a cooking spice called “California Heat.” 

Personnel: 

• Jeff Bezos is interviewing final candidates for the WaPo CEO job – reportedly Bloomberg L.P. senior adviser Josh Steiner and former Dow Jones CEO Will Lewis. 

• The editor of BBC’s Newsnight departed as the program faces budget cuts. 

• Five NYT journalists from the former sports desk are joining the business desk. 

• Bloomberg News cut fewer than 20 editorial staffers. 

Investments:

• Tucker Carlson’s company received a $15 million seed round led by a new VC firm that invests in conservative-friendly companies. 

• An activist investor is building a stake in News Corp and plans to recommend changes to the company’s conglomerate structure. 

• LADbible acquired Betches for $24 million, with potential for another $30 million based on performance. 

AI & Copyright:

• A group of authors sued Meta, Microsoft, and Bloomberg for allegedly using the Books3 database to train their AI models. 

• YouTube is pursuing the rights to let creators use AI-generated voices of famous musicians. 

Platforms: 

• Google is experimenting with including news headlines on the Google.com desktop homepage. 

• YouTube is launching a new feature that suggests additional news from authoritative sources when someone is watching a news video. 

• Google News cut an estimated 40-50 jobs.

• X will charge $1 per year to post on the platform. Separately, X is now requiring contributors to cite sources in the community notes feature. 

• Apple’s latest iOS update could depress Apple Podcasts’ download numbers. 

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This is the first edition of our new Weekly Briefing, where you get context on the biggest moves of the week, see benchmarks from other publishers, and hear what other operators are saying. All with a new design and logo (thank you, Natalie!!). 

With that, let’s get to it. 

BIGGEST MOVES THIS WEEK

WaPo’s cuts. The company hopes to cut 240 jobs with voluntary buyouts, which were offered to about 700 staff this week (out of about 2,500). According to interim CEO Patty Stonesifer, cuts will be spread evenly across the newsroom and the business side. 

The rationale:

• The company is on track to lose about $100 million this year. 

• In part, this is a revenue problem. Since 2021, print revenue is down 10%, and digital ad revenue is down 30%. Subscriptions are also down 15% to 2.5 million. 

• It also appears to be a cost problem. At a companywide meeting earlier this week, Stonesifer said, “This is a really good business that we overshot on expenses.” Per reporting from Puck, she was also “stunned by the lack of responsible financial management” after taking over four months ago.

WNYC’s pivot. The organization is moving away from podcast-only shows, shifting to a “broadcast to podcast” model. 

The rationale: 

• The audience reach of broadcast radio is still much greater than podcasts. According to WNYC CEO LaFontaine Oliver, “part of what the strategy is about is saying that we are still having material success in reaching people from traditional media broadcasting.”

• WNYC sees its reach across platforms as a key differentiator. “Putting a focus on these multiplatform shows is where we see a competitive advantage in a very crowded, competitive, and disruptive podcast environment,” according to WNYC’s vice president of communications, Jennifer Houlihan Roussel.

News on Threads. In response to a post noting that “Israel-Palestine news has brought lots of people on [Threads] in recent days,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri responded, writing that, “We’re not anti-news. News is clearly already on Threads…. We’re not going to get in the way of any either. But, we’re also not going to amplify news on the platform.”

The backdrop:

• Several months ago, shortly after Thread’s launch, Mosseri explained the app’s position on politics & hard news: “From a platform's perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue [politics & hard news] might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let's be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.” 

• Despite the flood of recent news, Threads is sticking to this original position, staying focused on surfacing conversations around lighter topics like sports, music, and fashion. 

• Meanwhile, LinkedIn is taking the opposite approach. According to LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief Daniel Roth: “News is essential to us. You cannot get ahead in your business or your career without knowing what’s going on in the world…. So you’re just going to see us increasingly find ways to be able to support newsrooms and high-quality news content and journalists, and make sure that they’re being successful on Linkedin.”

BENCHMARKS

Event revenue (Digiday): 

• Axios expects to increase 60% YOY

• Bloomberg is up 48% YoY

• At Semafor, half of its revenue comes from events

1440 newsletter (The Rebooting):

• 3 million subscribers

• 60% average open rate

• $0.75 average monthly revenue per subscriber 

• $3-4 average CAC

North American publisher referral traffic trends, Q3 vs. Q2 (Chartbeat):

• Search rose from 19% to 20%, resilient despite all the AI fears.

• Social fell from 17% to 16%, after starting the year at 18% in Q1. 

• Mobile fell from 71% to 69%, its lowest level in the last year.

US Latino podcast listenership (Edison):

• Listenership has increased by 52% since 2020, nearly 4x faster than the rate among the general US population

• 38% listened in the last month vs. 42% general population

• 31% listened in the last week (23% to English-language, 13% to Spanish-language) 

More benchmarks:

• NPR has seen only a 1% drop in traffic as a result of leaving Twitter six months ago. 

• Texas Monthly expects to bring in around $1 million in entertainment-related revenue next year and has 50 film & TV projects in the works.

• The Boston Globe now has more than 245,000 digital-only subscriptions.

CHATTER

The New York Review of Books Editor Emily Greenhouse on the publication’s mission:

We follow the passions and enthusiasms and sometimes outrages of our writers. That is the project, and that is the job: to reach out to writers whose minds seem acutely alive to the world around us, to ask them to examine, ransack, and record. To find people who understand something that I do not, and then to ask them to explain it, to teach me.

Head of Bloomberg Live Experiences Jessica Webber on doing fewer & larger events: 

We were very bullish going into 2023 because we wanted to anchor around a new strategy, which is a strategic decision actually to reduce the number of events that we do … in order to have each event have its own impact and scale.

WSJ editor-in-chief Emma Tucker on reaching new audiences: 

We need to make our journalism more accessible without in any way diluting the standards or integrity of the reporting. And I think it’s possible to do both.

1440 co-founder Tim Huelskamp on what the newsletter boom means for his business:

When we started five or six years ago, [newsletters were] just getting going. Now you have Substack and beehiiv and ConvertKit and all these new places where the creator economy can write content and then deliver it to the user. But I think at the end of the day that helps us, believe it or not, because in a world where there’s information overload and more sources coming, we believe the user wants one source that has as much information as possible that they can use as a guide to navigate it all. 

MORE NEWS

Publishers:

• The AP announced five new AI-powered products developed in partnership with local newsrooms.

• The BBC outlined generative AI principles and has “taken steps to prevent web crawlers like those from Open AI and Common Crawl from accessing BBC websites.” 

• A new Sunday newspaper, La Tribune Dimanche, launched last weekend in France. The paper’s president Jean-Christophe Tortora explained, “We found there’s a demand for a paper whose tone is calm and not anxiety inducing … and is sincere and independent.”

• Venture capital activity in media decreased significantly in Q3, according to Pitchbook data published by Digiday. 

Staffing moves:

• The president of Condé Nast Entertainment, Agnes Chu, is leaving the company at the end of the month. 

• The Information hired Matthew Resnick, former COO of Morning Brew, as its new COO.

• Crypto news outlet The Block promoted Tim Copeland to EIC.

• Staff at Gannett’s product review site, Reviewed, staged a one-day strike during Amazon Prime’s Big Deals Day on Tuesday.

• WSJ assigned editor Paul Beckett to work full-time on helping release detained reporter Evan Gershkovich from Russian prison. Earlier this week, Gershkovich lost his latest appeal. 

Platforms:

• Google is testing a new version of its Search Generative Experience (SGE), which displays a few lines from an AI-generated answer with the option to expand to see the full result. SGE is also now able to generate images from prompts.

• X updated its public interest policy, which defines which posts are considered newsworthy and therefore exempt from takedowns. The policy now no longer requires that accounts be verified or have more than 100k followers to be considered newsworthy.

• Separately, X appears to have rolled out a new ad format that can’t be blocked, has no “ad” label, and doesn’t identify the advertiser. 

• OpenAI is generating $1.3 billion in annualized revenue, up 30% from the summer. 

More:

• Negotiations between the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, and major Hollywood studios collapsed yesterday, with further discussion suspended.  

• The creator startup Jellysmack acquired the media company Law & Crime for a reported nine figure sum. 

• A group of comic book writers and artists announced Ghost Machine, a new creator-owned media company.  

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Hard to believe that we’ve been publishing Business Side for six months now!

Michael and I have been really enjoying digging into the news every week. And by listening to you, we’ve learned a lot about what makes a useful newsletter. 

Going forward we’re moving to a weekly cadence – hitting your inbox every Friday morning with a Weekly Briefing. You’ll see the “why” behind major moves of the week; get benchmarks to compare yourself to other publishers; and hear what other media operators are saying. 

In the background, we’re doing product development to add more offerings to the Business Side suite. Stay tuned there.

This Friday will be the first Weekly Briefing – with fresh Business Side branding & design to boot.

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As we roll into Q4, it's annual planning season for many publishers — and in particular, a time for evaluating which new products to pursue next year. I’ve been through lots of these new product exercises over the years, and I’ve come to realize that many omit a key component. 

New product exercises often include assessments of things like customer needs, internal capabilities, mission alignment, market size, and the competitive landscape. All these are important, but I find that they don’t always narrow down the options enough.

Here’s the extra element that many omit: What you want to do. And by extension, what your team wants to do. Often it’s explicitly omitted, as we try to objectively analyze options without letting our personal preferences get in the way. 

But “objective analysis” can be a crutch. The truth is that most publishers could succeed in many different areas, with sustained focus. 

New products are built by people, and people have preferences. With media products in particular, passion & personality can be key to success. If a team is absolutely jazzed to build a particular product, there’s a good chance that they’ll do it well. If a team receives an assignment solely because of a cool-headed top-down “process,” they won’t bring the same energy. Real-talk about preferences also builds trust, as everyone removes the guise of objectivity and learns what energizes each other.

So as you think about potential new products in 2024, what do you want to build? 

And here’s the latest news in media:

Investments:

• The NYT plans to grow its “Well” desk by 50%.

• The Guardian US announced its first-ever investigative unit. 

• Dirt Media acquired the design newsletter, Sitting Pretty, and expressed openness to other acquisitions: “Someone has to take the first step toward becoming the Condé Nast of newsletters and we believe it should be us.”

• Jeff Zucker invested in Front Office Sports, which is valued at $40 million. 

Local news subscriptions:

• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, owned by Cox, will invest $100 million in an ambitious plan to reach 500,000 digital subscribers (from 60,000 today) and develop a strong presence across the South. 

• The Philadelphia Inquirer, which expects to have 90,000 subscriptions by the end of the year, is launching a multi-year ad campaign aimed at millennials. 

Streaming & TV: 

• DirectTV pushed back on CNN’s decision to include its marquee shows in its streaming service via Max. 

• Clix, a discovery platform for streaming video, hired a number of senior executives.  

Platforms: 

• Meta’s head of media partnerships, Campbell Brown, is leaving the company. Separately, Meta has a plan to give European users a choice between a paid ad-free tier and a free tier with personalized ads.  

• TikTok is testing an ad-free subscription tier. 

• Google will require those sending emails to more than 5,000 Gmail users to have one-click unsubscribe buttons. 

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified in the US v. Google case. 

AI: 

• News executives went to Washington to meet with lawmakers about AI, in an effort organized by the News/Media Alliance. 

• A UK association of publishers is urging members to block ChatGPT and Google AI crawlers. 

• Deepfake AI ads are featuring celebrities such as Tom Hanks and Mr. Beast. 

• Spotify may be working on AI playlists.

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Last week, David and I spent time brainstorming and honing our view of this newsletter. One idea that resonated: We want to help operators build enduring media organizations. We liked the word “enduring” because it captures an ambition to leave a mark beyond next quarter’s (or year’s) profits. By understanding how leading media organizations have endured, might we help more media orgs succeed today?

So in this newsletter, I’ll talk a bit about The Washington Post’s mission statement. Consider it an experiment in unpacking one element of what makes a media company endure. 

–

Last week, the former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron published an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Collision of Power. The excerpt includes the story behind how The Post created its now-famous mission statement: “Democracy dies in darkness.” What surprised me most was how involved the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, was in the process. 

In early 2015, Bezos asked Post staff to create a mission statement that should capture “an idea I want to belong to,” rather than “a paper I want to subscribe to.” And he told Post staff at the time, “On this topic, I’d like to see all the sausage-making. Don’t worry about whether it’s a good use of my time.”

The resulting process was, in Baron’s words, both “tortuous and torturous.” Task forces were assembled; external consultants were retained; a long list of ideas was created and maintained. Finally, after the better part of two years, Bezos made the call: “Democracy dies in darkness.”

But Bezos’ involvement shouldn’t have been surprising. At Amazon, Bezos has long thought carefully about mission and vision. In 1995, he launched the company with the goal “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company.” In 1997, he reinforced this customer obsession in Amazon’s first shareholder letter, which he republished each year as CEO. And you may have seen this interview from 1999, where Bezos articulates this customer-centric approach with memorable passion. It’s been a similarly consistent message ever since.

For Bezos, consistent messaging about goals and values is so critical because it enables long-term thinking. With a shared sense of purpose and history, it becomes possible to project much further into the future – and use a longer time horizon to your advantage. In that first shareholder letter, Bezos extolled this approach as a way to distinguish Amazon from its peers: “Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies.” 

Today, as we’ve written, The Post is in transition. The paper is on track to lose $100 million this year, new leadership has entered the picture, and Bezos has reportedly become more involved. The organization appears to be searching for a new strategy, one that will help it succeed in a post-Trump media landscape. 

But the Post’s mission helps put this uncertainty into context. Democracy dies in darkness. Four words that represent the long-term commitment of an organization to its readership – and country. According to Baron, “[Bezos] often spoke of what the business or the landscape might look like in ‘20 years.’” Perhaps that’s a more fitting time horizon to judge The Post’s success.  

And here’s the latest news in digital media:

Bloomberg restructured its sales & marketing teams. Going forward, the teams will be organized around industry verticals (vs. geographies) in an effort to establish clearer internal ownership and boost events revenue. As part of the move, the company is also launching the Bloomberg Client Council aimed at strengthening relationships with top advertisers. 

More on publishers:

• Podcast studio Pushkin Industries is laying off 17 of its 54-person staff. 

• The Daily Beast’s TV & film-focused vertical, Obsessed, brought in over $1 million in ad revenue during its first year.

• Gannett received nearly 1,000 applications for its Beyonce and Taylor Swift reporter job postings. 

• Former MLB star Alex Rodriguez will host a new podcast and video series for Bloomberg.

• The Marshall Project launched its second local news operation, in Jackson, MI.

• The 19th’s publisher, Amanda Zamora, is leaving at the end of the year.

More on platforms & AI:

• Google launched a new tool publishers can use to ensure their content isn’t used as AI training data by Google. 

• Medium is blocking all AI companies from using its content as training data. 

• Meta unveiled 28 new AI chatbots, based on celebrities.

• Artifact is adding the ability for users to post directly in the app (previously the app had only supported links).

• Reddit is removing the ability for users to opt out of targeted ads.

• Twitter has paid out almost $20 million to creators, according to the company’s CEO.

Interesting reads:

• New York Magazine reviewed The Times, a forthcoming book that chronicles the history of The New York Times from 1977 to 2016.

• Slate profiled Kelsey Russell, a 23-year-old grad student who “created a TikTok series chronicling what she learns each day from reading the New York Times’ physical newspaper.”

• NYT explored the state of fact-checking, noting that “the number of fact-checking operations at news organizations and elsewhere has stagnated, and perhaps even fallen.”

• In Nieman Lab, two academics argued that the news industry must address the threat generative AI poses to press freedom. 

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I spoke with the organization’s founder & executive director, Ben Hallman, and the conversation left me quite optimistic about how for-profit publishers can partner with nonprofit news outlets to expand their investigative impact (and brand equity) without breaking the bank.

Here are some of The Examination’s collaborative investigations:

• An investigation into China’s state cigarette monopoly, in partnership with USA Today, Der Spiegel, Paper Trail Media, and the Chinese-language organization Initium Media. 

• An investigation into how registered dietitians share industry-friendly messages, in partnership with The Washington Post. 

• An investigation into health risks of chemicals on the market, in partnership with The Guardian US. 

The Examination’s partners will generally fall into two categories: 

1. National & global outlets, who offer distribution to large & influential audiences, as well as investigative expertise.

2. Local outlets, who bring localized expertise and access. 

In exchange, The Examination provides story leads, reporting bandwidth, and subject-matter expertise. Through a partnership, larger outlets can expand their coverage without additional costs, and local outlets can expand a scoop into a broader investigation. 

Oftentimes, partnerships originate between two reporters. “A lot of the best stories happen because two reporters get to talking, and they have a shared idea,” Ben told me. “And then you have a reporter at each organization pushing the idea through each individual place at the same time.”  

The Examination cements partnerships with a memorandum of understanding, which outlines expectations from each side. No money changes hands, Ben said, and ultimately a partnership is a trust exercise. “What's really helpful,” Ben told me, “is to have an interlocutor… who themselves has experience with partnering [and] can help marshal resources for you inside that newsroom.”

When it comes time to write & publish, Ben said, there are a number of different approaches, including: 

1. Co-writing & publishing on each partner’s site

2. Co-reporting and then separately writing different versions for each site

3. Republishing the story on the partner site after it’s published on The Examination

4. The Examination writing a special version for the partner’s site, in addition to publishing its own version

Over the years, as the news industry has gotten squeezed, investigative collaborations have become increasingly appealing. “I think the first partnership I ever worked on was probably more than ten years ago,” Ben said. “At that time, we would go to major news publishers, and they didn't even know what we were talking about… and [now] the practice has become normalized… I think that's an amazing transformation.”

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And here’s the latest media news:

Launches:

• Punchbowl launched a revamped website and expects to bring in $20 million in revenue this year.

• The LA Times launched a section called Climate California. 

• Estate Media, a publisher covering real estate, raised $1.65 million. 

Departures:

• Morning Brew has parted ways with two top executives.

• New York Public Radio plans to cut staff by 12%. 

• Mike Bloomberg plans to step down in 3 to 5 years and eventually give the company to his foundation.

Platforms:

• Spotify will enable podcasters to convert their episodes into a foreign languages, via a partnership with OpenAI. 

• Google will shut down Google Podcasts in 2024 and move listeners to YouTube Music. 

• Apple Podcasts added original shows from Apple Music and Apple News+. 

• Newsletter platform Beehiv acquired Swapstack, a newsletter ad network. 

AI:

• Getty launched a generative AI tool based on its archive of images.  

• A search tool from The Atlantic shows which books have been used in a particular dataset to train AI models. 

• Hollywood studios will reportedly be able to use AI models trained on writers’ work, as a part of the tentative labor agreement. 

TV & Streaming:

• Top entertainment companies launched a trade group called the Streaming Innovation Alliance.  

• Trump said if elected he would investigate Comcast for “vicious coverage” by NBC News and MSNBC. 

• CollegeHumor rebranded to Dropout, the name of its ad-free subscription streaming service. 

More on publishers:

• A story in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, amplified by Elon Musk, has led to threats directed to the reporter and the Review-Journal. 

• 63% of Black adults say news about Black people is more negative than for other groups.

Interesting: 

Artifact’s Kevin Systrom gave a Q&A where he hinted toward large ambitions:

 “It seems like what a lot of people don't realize is that the best companies in the world always start fairly narrow and figure out how to expand over time. You know, Amazon sold books. YouTube was a dating site. Facebook was for Harvard.”

The Independent’s Blair Tapper talked about ways to use big moments to convince advertisers to stop blocking keywords: 

“Coco [Gauff] won and we had advertisers blocking [articles containing the word] ‘shot.’ But it’s a tennis shot, not a bullet shot, so I think you have to have those conversations and say, ‘hey, we know this event was important to you – are you willing to open up that keyword targeting?’”

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The hype (and anxiety) around AI has died down a bit in recent months, and now many publishers are figuring out how to actually put the technology to use. 

Last week, the research initiative JournalismAI published a report with new data on this question, drawing from a survey of 105 publishers from 46 countries. 

Here’s what stood out to me:

85% of newsrooms are already experimenting with AI. The most popular use cases fall under the “news production” bucket, e.g. using AI to fact-check & proofread stories or suggest headlines & summaries. Beyond “news production,” a majority of newsrooms are also using AI to help gather and distribute news. Looking ahead, around 80% of respondents said they expect AI to play a bigger role in their newsrooms.

But the impact isn’t evenly distributed. A lack of financial and technical resources are the main factors preventing newsrooms (often smaller ones) from implementing AI. In fact, about 40% of publishers said their AI strategy hasn’t changed in the past few years, typically because of limited resources. These challenges are often more acute for newsrooms in the “Global South,” where language and political challenges can also complicate the use of AI. 

Ethical & cultural challenges are also top of mind. Ethical concerns like algorithmic bias and reader transparency were the number two issue limiting AI usage, with 25% of respondents citing that as their most pressing challenge. Cultural challenges were number three (22% of respondents), followed by managerial challenges (12%). 

There’s no consensus on who should lead publishers’ AI strategy. Digital/innovation teams are leading at 29% of outlets, followed by a dedicated cross-functional team (26%), other (26%), tech teams (11%), and data teams (9%). Many organizations also don’t have a formal approach to AI, with one respondent writing: “We rely on the initiative and enthusiasm of some of our colleagues who are interested in AI.”

One high-level observation is the gap between experimentation and implementation. While most everyone is experimenting with AI tools, many organizations are struggling to marshall the resources to develop a fully-baked strategy. 

One approach here is for these outlets to learn from publishers that are further along. As the study’s co-author Charlie Beckett said: “The best organisations have set up structures to investigate gen AI and processes to include all their staff in its adoption. They have written new guidelines and started to experiment with caution.” Publishers with more limited resources can borrow from these processes and guidelines, tailoring them for their specific needs.

To go deeper:

• The full Journalism AI report

• Former WSJ executive Louise Story on AI use cases for news orgs

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And here’s the latest news in digital media:

Publishers:

• NYT is rolling out “enhanced bios” for its reporters.

• Vice’s COO expects a “12- to 18-month build-back process” for the company to become profitable. 

• The FT launched an app featuring a digital edition of its print newspaper.

• The Guardian launched a Europe edition of its website.

• New 538 articles will publish to abcnews.com/538, while old articles will live on at fivethirtyeight.com.      

• The City, a New York-focused nonprofit news site, cut working hours by 20% for its staff.

• The News Movement is launching its first podcast next month, as part of a bigger move into audio.  

• The top editor at Harper’s Magazine resigned, and senior editor Christopher Carroll will assume the role.

Platforms:

• Substack redesigned its app, placing a bigger emphasis on discovery in its Home tab.

• OpenAI added the ability for ChatGPT to generate images, in addition to text.

• YouTube introduced several new products & features at its annual Made on YouTube event, including a new YouTube Create app for editing videos.  

• TikTok is testing the ability for users to search on Google in its core app.

• Microsoft is launching its AI assistant Copilot to certain Microsoft 365 customers in November. Bing Chat is also rolling out more personalized answers, based on users’ Bing search history.

• Snap’s subscription service, Snap+, now has more than 5 million paid users.

Rupert Murdoch: 

• The 92-year old Murdoch is stepping down as chair of Fox and News Corp in November. 

• His son Lachlan Murdoch will continue as executive chair and CEO of Fox and become sole chair of News Corp.

• NYT profiled Lachlan, calling him “less overtly political than his father” but also noting that he’s “certain to continue Fox News’s right-wing stance.”  

• Recode’s Peter Kafka interviewed Brian Stelter about the news. 

Interesting reads:

• Press Gazette analyzed data on subscription offers at 60 UK and European publishers.

• The Generalist profiled the critically-acclaimed movie studio A24.  

• Formats Unpacked explained why Wired’s 5 Levels video series is so successful. 

• NYT’s Kevin Roose tested the new Bard Extensions feature, which allows Google’s AI chatbot to connect to your Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Drive.  

• Rest of World reported on why AI training companies are hiring poets and fiction authors.

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Last week, we learned that USA Today and The Tennessean (both owned by Gannett) are hiring a pair of journalists to cover Beyonce and Taylor Swift. 

On Twitter / X, there were lots of “dream job” jokes, but reactions were otherwise divided. Some saw the positions as a savvy business decision to cover Beyonce and Swift as the economic and cultural forces they’ve become. But others questioned whether these beats would come at the expense of local coverage, particularly given that Gannett laid off six percent of its news division last year. 

But I’m most intrigued by another aspect of the move: Intentionally or not, Gannett is investing in coverage that has built-in distribution, courtesy of Beyonce and Taylor Swift fans. 

Focusing on Swift (and the Swifties), there are dozens of fan accounts dedicated to providing news and updates on the artist. On Twitter, top accounts include @SwiftNYC (313K followers), @TSwiftLA (277K), and @swifferupdates (154K). On Instagram, there’s tswiftcandle (209K), swiftiesforeternity (121K), and taylorswift.updates13 (104K). And there are dozens more fan accounts with tens of thousands of followers each, many with a country-specific focus. 

While these accounts have different approaches, many post multiple times per day and will often share posts from mainstream news outlets (here’s a recent example). And competition among accounts can be fierce, as they vie for the attention of news-hungry Swifties. In a 2018 Vox interview, Zainub Amir, who runs @SwiftNYC, explained, “It’s hard. The thing is … you just have to be really fast. The whole point of an update account is getting the news first.” 

For Gannett, it’s one thing to invest in coverage with a large potential audience; it’s another to invest in coverage that fuels a robust fan economy, with dozens of popular accounts competing to share news with engaged followers. 

And while The Swifties and the Beyhive are uniquely fanatical, the internet is full of engaged niches hungry for more quality journalism. For publishers, it’s worth thinking creatively about how to tap into these communities, particularly as existing distribution channels like organic social and search become less reliable.

To go deeper, read this Vox piece on the business of Taylor Swift fandom. 

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And here’s the latest news in digital media:

Publishers:

• Time announced Time100 Voices, a new editorial platform highlighting opinion content from global thought leaders. Separately, the company appointed a Chief Climate Officer. 

• Advance Local is planning to launch a New Orleans-based sports and news site, four years after selling The Times-Picayune. 

• NYT staffers marched through the office on Monday to protest the closure of the paper’s stand-alone sports desk.

• WaPo launched a coffee blend, “The Post Roast,” in partnership with DC-based Compass Coffee.

• The BBC is planning to relaunch its news website and app in North America to allow for more “localised and personalised” content. 

• More publishers are investing in Instagram, according to a Digiday survey.

Platforms:

• SmartNews launched a new tab featuring more positive and useful stories.  

• TikTok is launching a feature that allows creators to label their AI-generated content.

• Google’s Bard chatbot can now integrate with Gmail, Docs, and Drive.

• Electrify Video Partners raised $85 million to invest in and acquire YouTube channels. 

• Max will launch a live sports add-on for $9.99 per month in October.

Interesting reads:

• Casey Newton on what he learned in his third year running Platformer (Platformer)

• An interview about NPR’s new website pop up that asks readers for donations (Nieman Lab)

• An interview with The Independent’s CEO Christian Broughton on the company’s “global growth” plan (Press Gazette)

• How streaming is changing music (WSJ)

• TikTok stars are becoming best-selling cookbook authors (NYT)

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Punchbowl has burst onto the scene with its buzzy newsletter products, but I’ve also been impressed by its events business.

In 2023, so far Punchbowl has held or scheduled at least 22 sponsor-supported events. Most follow a consistent formula: 

• An interview with a political figure, often a congressperson

• A “fireside chat” with the event’s sponsor

• In-person (in Washington DC) and virtual 

The events double as reporting that can help fuel the newsletter – for example, an event with House Financial Services Chairman Patrick McHenry supplied a key quote featured in the next day’s newsletter. 

In May, Punchbowl offered a scaled-up version of their formula with its Women Challenging Washington event, hosting multiple panels & networking sessions. (Attendees could also get headshots, which I thought was a cool perk.) 

Each event is generally supported by one or two sponsors, spanning categories such as finance (e.g. Goldman Sachs), pharma (e.g. AstraZeneca), and tech (e.g. Google). The event’s moderator, often Punchbowl Founder & CEO Anna Palmer, will interview the headliner guest as well as the sponsor, which brings continuity to the event. 

There’s so much value in an effective, repeatable formula – and it seems that Punchbowl has found one. 

To go deeper: 

• Punchbowl’s events schedule

• A Semafor deep dive about Punchbowl’s reporting

• Axios pieces about Punchbowl’s new financial services coverage and text alerts

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And here’s the latest news in digital media:

Launches: 

• Yahoo Finance is launching a number of new video shows. 

• The Examination, a health news nonprofit, launched with a model anchored around collaboration with major outlets, including WaPo, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and USA Today.  

• Billboard and TikTok partnered to create a “top 50” song chart. 

• Publishers are creating Taylor Swift and Beyonce reporting beats. 

Benchmarks: 

• Newsquest grew revenue 6% in 2022. 

• The Daily Mail has 90,000 digital subscribers. 

Cuts:

• The Dallas Morning News is offering buyouts.

• The Toronto Star’s parent company is cutting 600 jobs and seeking bankruptcy protection for the newspaper unit. 

Publishers & government: 

• The White House sent a letter to top news companies asking them to increase their scrutiny of the impeachment inquiry. 

• The RCFP and 62 media organizations urged the Supreme Court to continue live audio of oral arguments.  

More on publishers: 

• Hedge fund founder Ken Griffin subpoenaed ProPublica for documents related to stories about his tax returns. 

• Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner was removed from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his comments diminishing the contributions of Black and female artists. 

• The MailOnline will pay “substantial damages” after publishing a false claim.  

• Politico Playbook co-author Ryan Lizza is reportedly in talks about joining the NYT.

AI & platforms: 

• AI-generated articles by G/O Media’s A.V. Club have copied content from IMDB.

• Microsoft’s MSN published a garbled, inappropriate obituary, apparently generated by AI. 

• Adobe is paying bonuses to contributors whose work is used to train its AI model. 

• X CEO Linda Yaccarino made a number of new hires, including executives from NBCUniversal, Warner Bros, and Dow Jones. 

• Artifact added a “links” tab. 

Interesting reads:

• An experiment giving readers a say in what stories are pursued (Nieman Lab)

• Background on politicians’ retaliation against local papers via revoking public notice contracts (Freedom of the Press Foundation)

• An interview with Future CEO Jon Steinberg about his business and “high-intent” media (Press Gazette)

• How live blogs are still working for top publishers (Press Gazette) 

• The Seattle Times’ 127th anniversary message (Seattle Times)

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I’ve been intrigued by the membership model within Fortune’s events strategy. In today’s note, I’ll give a brief primer, with some thoughts on why it’s compelling. 

Fortune’s events memberships center around annual summits, in addition to other benefits: 

• Virtual events & roundtables

• Meetups at major industry events, such as Davos and CES

• Access to other Fortune conferences

• Member directories

• Mentoring programs

• LinkedIn groups

• Complementary subscriptions to Fortune

Today is actually the summit for Fortune’s community of ESG executives. Next month will be the summits for Fortune’s CEO Initiative (a $17,000 annual membership), as well as the Most Powerful Women community. The $9,500 Brainstorm Tech membership had its summit last July.

Interestingly, CEO Initiative members “have the opportunity to participate in a video interview series with a Fortune staffer, highlighting your business with purpose, and published on Fortune.com.”

From a business perspective, memberships like these are compelling for a number of reasons: 

1. They provide a revenue stream that’s more stable than one-off ticket sales – and a strong foundation on which to layer sponsorships.  

2. They provide a framework for ongoing engagement with members throughout the year.

3. They further network effects as participants build relationships with one another over time. 

The hardest part of building a membership like this might be getting started – there’s a chicken & egg problem before you have network effects in place. Sometimes a buzzy moment can do the trick – Fortune’s CEO initiative, for example, grew out of a 2016 meeting between 100 CEOs and Pope Francis at the Vatican. Publishers that have existing tentpole events – or even engaged readers within a specific segment – already have a running start. 

To go deeper, here are PDF overviews of benefits included in Fortune memberships: 

• Impact Initiative (ESG)

• Brainstorm Tech

• Most Powerful Women

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Some interesting intel from ’s podcast interview with Bustle Digital Group CRO Jason Wagenheim:

• 85% of ad revenue comes from their in-house agency (as opposed to on-site media impressions), with the agency promoting content on social platforms.

• Advertising headwinds. Bustle’s revenue will be down this year, the first time in 10 years, expecting to hit $175 million. Marketers are releasing dollars later than normal, and the tech category is down, while the auto category is up.

• Live experiences often anchor deals. “We had Samsung make a significant investment with us… to activate on the ground at Coachella. We created this massive immersive art display using some well-known visual artists… they had this massive footprint where guests were able to trade in their iPhone and check out a Samsung Galaxy phone for the night and use the photography feature, which is something they were really promoting… and overall we generated 2 billion press impressions just for Samsung.”

And here’s the latest news in digital media:

Publishers: 

• The Economist will launch a $4.90-per-month podcast subscription tier. 

• WaPo revamped its Style section with a new design, newsletter, and social products. 

• The Sporting News raised $15m in a round led by a gambling software company. 

• Barstool reportedly used anonymous X accounts to post copyrighted content. 

• More leaders have left The Messenger.

• The Colorado Sun is moving to a fully nonprofit model. 

• A court in The Philippines acquitted Maria Ressa after a multi-year trial. 

Platforms & AI: 

• Google’s big antitrust case kicked off. 

• The US Copyright Office denied copyright protection to another AI-created artwork. 

• X appears to be throttling links from the NYT. 

• More tech companies joined a pledge to help mitigate the risks of AI. 

Interesting pieces: 

• ’s perspective on Press Forward’s $500 million local news initiative (Second Rough Draft)

• Politico EIC John Harris’ memo on newsroom org structure (Politico)

• A podcast interview with Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone (Grit)

• Deep dive on Reach’s reader revenue strategy, which includes a slew of Substack newsletters (Press Gazette)

• First-hand account of how The Guardian’s engineering team has supported its reader revenue strategy (The Guardian)

• Profile of Walter Isaacson (New York Mag)

• Analysis of the resolution to Disney & Charter’s dispute (Stratechery)

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I listened to an interview last week with Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine. A former M&A lawyer, Levine switched to journalism in his early 30s and today writes the daily-ish finance newsletter, Money Stuff. 

Money Stuff is beloved, the rare media product that has attracted not only subscribers, but also dedicated fans. A 2020 NY Times profile put it this way: “The best measure of [Levine’s] audience’s devotion may not be his 112,000 Twitter followers, but rather the 3,000 that follow @MattLevineBot, a fan account describing itself as a bot that mimics his writing style.” At the time, Money Stuff had roughly 150,000 subscribers. It’s surely grown since.

What makes Money Stuff so compelling?

Here are a few insights from the interview:

1) An “art critic” mindset. Levine is, technically, an opinion columnist. But, in his own words, he approaches the job as an “art critic for financial deals” who has an “aesthetic appreciation for stuff that happens in the financial markets.” This lens gives Money Stuff a distinctly insidery feel, one that’s less adversarial than traditional journalism and more focused on appreciating the daily successes and absurdities that finance colleagues might talk about over lunch. 

2) Embracing weird, complex niches. When Levine first started writing, he thought that “weird complicated niche topics have only weird niche audiences.” But he quickly realized that there was an audience hungry for writing that embraces the more complex, technical aspects of finance. Money Stuff reflects this approach – while it will sometimes cover a piece of trending financial news, more often it focuses on esoteric stories, which Levine animates with clear, humorous prose.

3) Recurring bits. Money Stuff has several topics and ideas that Levine returns to consistently. One is that “everything is securities fraud,” which is the idea that companies are increasingly sued for “random stuff that has nothing to do with their financial statements… but gets characterized as securities fraud.” These bits serve as inside jokes for readers and provide Levine a way to tease out a thesis across multiple news stories.

One way to summarize: Money Stuff feels personal. It’s clearly the product of a smart, idiosyncratic individual, even though it’s distributed under the Bloomberg brand. 

And while there’s only one Matt Levine, other publishers can learn from Bloomberg’s approach of highlighting individual writers as part of their newsletter strategy. A quick count shows more than 15 Bloomberg newsletters that feature an individual author or author pair. 

To go deeper: 

• Matt Levine on the Longform podcast

• Matt Levine on the Conversations with Tyler podcast 

And here’s the latest news in digital media:

Publishers:

• A new local news initiative, Press Forward, launched with more than $500 million in funding from a coalition of 22 donors. It’s the largest single philanthropic commitment to journalism ever.

• The Boston Globe is expanding its coverage of the Boston suburbs.

• Axios is relaunching its daily news podcast Axios Today as a weekly show. 

• URL Media secured a $1 million grant from Knight Foundation.

• The Daily Mail’s parent company is in talks to bid on rival Telegraph Media Group.

• Jeff Jarvis is leaving CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the end of the term.

Platforms:

• Substack is “leaning into politics” and hired a WaPo comms professional to lead political outreach for the company.

• Spotify is planning to offer its paid subscribers up to 20 hours of free audiobook content a month, as part of a trial.

• X expanded its crowdsourced moderation program Community Notes to videos. Separately, the platform ran unlabeled ads in users’ Following feed. 

• Amazon is requiring writers who sell books through its e-book program to disclose the use of AI-generated content.

Thanks for being a part of Business Side’s public beta. Have a great day!

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Good morning! And welcome to Business Side. 

Last month, we learned that The New Statesman is hosting all of its newsletters on Substack. It’s apparently the largest legacy publisher to do so. 

The move is unconventional, especially for a UK political magazine founded in 1913. But the platform shift is only one part of a larger evolution in the publisher’s newsletter strategy. 

Let’s look at their approach.

Streamlining the portfolio

This past May, The New Statesman made the decision to trim its newsletter portfolio down to two flagship products:  

• Morning Call (46k+ free subs): A daily, late-morning read on news and politics, featuring a mix of original New Statesman journalism and curated articles. 

• The Saturday Read (155k+ free subs): A weekly roundup of the best political & cultural writing, also featuring a mix of original and curated pieces. 

The Morning Call has been around since 2016, but The Saturday Read was launched earlier this year, as a way to consolidate readership. The magazine’s head of newsletters Harry Lambert explained: “Instead of having a whole buffet of different newsletters and cutting the brilliance up into little segments, we just decided to give [the audience] one that we thought they’d like on Saturday and have the power of a big audience through one newsletter.”

Lambert sees this focused approach as a throwback to the constraints of print newspapers, with Morning Call serving as “your daily paper” and The Saturday Read as “your big Saturday paper.” 

Converting free registrants to regular readers

Readers who want access to New Statesman journalism can either purchase a subscription or register to read three free articles per month. Here’s a screenshot from their article page:

Earlier this year, the outlet updated the flow so that all free registrants are auto-subscribed to The Saturday Read. The move has driven “a lot of the [newsletter’s] growth” and exposes new registrants to the Statesman’s best journalism without being “too intrusive.” 

Driving paid subscriptions

The New Statesman monetizes its newsletters directly with advertising, but the outlet also wants to use the products to convert more paying subscribers. 

Today, both The Saturday Read and Morning Call feature a red “Subscribe to the New Statesman” button that redirects to The New Statesman’s subscription landing page, which makes four interwoven appeals to potential subscribers: 

1. Join a “community of free thinkers”

2. Support “110 years of independent journalism” 

3. “Save money” compared to the newsstand price

4. Get “unlimited access to our progressive writing and analysis”   

Going forward, the magazine is considering other ways to more tightly integrate newsletters into its subscription funnel. One idea is to launch a paid version of The Saturday Read, with the goal of attracting new readers at a price point below a full New Statesman subscription. According to Lambert, “The whole point of the newsletter was to engage people, and then hopefully encourage them to subscribe.”

To go deeper, read The Press Gazette profile.

And here’s the latest news in digital media:

Publishers:

• Facebook referral traffic declined 40% in the first half of 2023, according to Chartbeat data.

• NPR’s CEO John Lansing will retire at the end of this year.

• Local news startup The Mill raised a £350k seed round from several prominent individuals, including new CNN chief Mark Thompson.

• The Alden-owned MediaNews Group is buying four daily papers in Pennsylvania, including The Scranton Times-Tribune. 

• G/O Media shut down the Spanish-language version of Gizmodo.

• The Guardian is also blocking OpenAI’s web crawler.

Platforms:

• Meta is planning to shut down Facebook News in the UK, France, and Germany this December.

• Meta is considering paid, ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram for users in the EU.

• Substack introduced AI audio transcription tools.

• Threads is testing full-text search in Australia and New Zealand, while Instagram launched a “For you on Threads” carousel.

• X updated its privacy policy so it can use public X data to train its AI models. 

Interesting reads:

• An excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography on the Twitter takeover.

• An interview with event advisor Victoria Matey on what makes a great media event.

• A deep dive into Spotify’s $1 billion bet on podcasting.

• A New Yorker profile of new CNN CEO Mark Thompson.

• A Nieman Lab profile of Pamplonews, a Pamplona-based newsletter distributed via WhatsApp.

Thanks for being a part of Business Side’s public beta. Have a great day!

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