Product managers at publishers see a lot of room for improvement. Only 18% of 52 product managers surveyed by Brian Morrissey’s Rebooting thought their product implementation was excellent or good. A majority - 38% each - found it fine or needed improvement. Regarding funding, 51% thought they had too little funding, and 9% rated their funding as abysmal. The biggest challenge that product managers said they faced (32%) was misaligned incentives.

This echoes the findings of research I carried out for a master’s degree in innovation management and leadership from the University of York. (I graduated two years ago this week.) As I’ve mentioned before in the newsletter, my research looked at how the cross-functional work (boundary-spanning in academic terms) product managers did at news organisations affected their professional sense of well-being. Were they thriving, surviving or burning? I interviewed 17 product managers across broadcast, print and digital organisations, both large and small. Large being national news organisations and small being local or regional. While a relatively small sample, five had left roles or the industry entirely in the year before I interviewed them. Obviously this is important because while the news industry is looking to invest in their product management capacity, it’s difficult if they can’t retain staff.

As Brian found, lack of alignment was a major issue. Some of the themes that came out of the research were:

• Lack of senior management support for cross-functional work

• Lack of alignment amongst managers at different levels about goals and priorities

• No support to set priorities or goals.

What resulted was that despite the talk about being audience-centred, product managers could be relagated to little more than project managers carrying out the initiatives of senior managers. “Decisions are made from the top down. ... We call it HPPO (pronounced hippo), the highest paid person’s opinion,” said a product manager who worked at a small broadcaster.

At best this left product managers with a feeling that they lacked agency. “You are at the center of decision making, when you often don't actually have the power to make the decision,” said a product manager at a small digital news outlet. This lack of agency raised issues for product leaders. “How can we motivate people to continue even working on this, if you know they see their colleagues not understanding the value?” a product manager at a small broadcaster said. This is leading to retention issues. One of the participants at a large newspaper said a colleague had left because “I was tired of taking orders and not feeling like I have any agency.”

Apart from retention, this lack of alignment leads to conflict and failed digital transformation issues. A product manager who had left a position at a large newspaper in the US said that senior leadership had failed to agree on goals. “(T)he goals that his manager had provided to guide product development had not been agreed upon by the newsroom.” People dug in, and when it became clear to him that his manager was not long for her position, he left, describing his experience as “searing”. It is an example of what Brian called “church-state”, editorial-business-techical divides that product teams need to navigate at news organisations.

This isn’t to say that product management has failed at news organisations. I also spoke to product leaders who were driving transformational change and delivering great audience-focused products. One product leader said that C-suite alignment on goals and priorities was critical. It gave product leaders a framework to say yes and, just as importantly, to say no.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I found some other issues in my research, which I’ll discuss in the coming weeks. But for now, onto the links. In the world of AI and publishign, Perplexity is now offering a rev share with publishers. We are going to see a lot of different approaches as the big players in genAI strike deals to feed their models.

Perplexity Says It Will Share Ad Revenue With Publishers

Firm is also collaborating with Amazon Web Services to provide a search tool to Amazon clients.

www.mediapost.com/publications/article/397628/perplexity-says-it-will-share-ad-revenue-with-publ.html

I am still adding to my knowledge about subscription operations, but as a recovering journalist, I had never heard of involentary churn - churn driven by failed payments - until I started doing more work on this part of publishing operations. More than just managing involuntary churn, this piece is worth reading because it highlights the rising importance of retention for publishers. In the State of Mobile Publishing Report we just released at Pugpig, one publisher we spoke to said they had to focus more on retention to combat “subscription fatigue”.

How The Information is combating involuntary churn

Efforts to identify and address weaknesses in its payment architecture are helping maximize subscription revenue.

toolkits.com/publisher-monetization/the-information-involuntary-subscriber-churn

I had a slightly cynical response to this on first blush. “Oh look, they have reinvented the personal ad,” I thought, but it’s an interesting move for a public broadcaster.

Colorado’s Denverite takes on loneliness with classified ads - Current

Colorado Public Radio’s new way to foster friendships in Denver mixes new and old media.

current.org/2024/07/colorados-denverite-takes-on-loneliness-epidemic-with-new-classified-ads

US public media outlets continue to lay off staff. Southern California and LAist said the group faced a $4 to $5m budget shortfall over the coming two years. The group accepted 21 voluntary buyouts but also eliminated seven additional positions. The group is losing some amazing talent, including Ariel Zirulnick, director of news experimentation, who has been a leading figure in the engaged journalism movement in the US.

LAist cuts 28 positions with buyouts, layoffs - Current

The station offered the voluntary buyouts in May, with CCO Kristen Muller saying at the time the organization faced a budget shortfall.

current.org/2024/07/laist-cuts-28-positions-with-buyouts-layoffs/?wallit_nosession=1

Scripts, shot lists and good planning go into making good videos for TikTok. For me, the important take away from this piece is how a small newsroom uses that planning to get the most out of every bit of media they create, not just for TikTok but for other platforms as well.

Finding what works for your community on TikTok – RJI

rjionline.org/news/finding-what-works-for-your-community-on-tiktok

I had to check the date on this. In 2017, I wrote a report for the Reuters Institute about journalism formats that went beyond traditional storytelling, and VR was one of those formats. The New York Times gave away 1m Google Cardboard VR viewers that transformed your smartphone into a VR set, but to my knowledge, the NYT doesn’t produce VR content anymore. It fizzled. I’m not sure that we’re seeing a resurgence of VR storytelling from news orgs, but maybe the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro has publishers thinking again.

Virtual Reality technology offers new avenues for immersive reporting

Imagine stepping into a bustling refugee camp in Syria, the sounds of conversations and the sight of makeshift tents surrounding you, or in a historic protest, feeling the energy and tension in the air. Thanks to Virtual Reality (VR) technology, such immersive experiences are becoming possible.

ijnet.org/en/story/virtual-reality-technology-offers-new-avenues-immersive-reporting

My last role was as the director of digital products and platforms at a public service broadcasting group in the US. For anyone familiar with public broadcasting in the US, most of any station’s revenue comes from members - viewers and listeners who pay whatever they want. When I was asked about our digital strategy, I said it was to build habit and loyalty that led to membership. The BBC has quantified the goal with its 552 strategy. The “BBC aims for audiences to use its services for at least five hours a week, across at least five days, and on at least two platforms on both traditional broadcast and digital products”, as outlined in the Digital BBC Report (PDF). This is all in keeping with research from the Medill Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern University. Researchers there analysed data from 106 newspapers in the US and found that regularity, more than pageviews or session duration, was most correlated with subscription purchase and retention.

Publishers and broadcasters are focused on developing regularity and relationships with audiences. Getting someone to register or subscribe is the start of a relationship, but media operators know that this is just the beginning. Onboarding has become a key activity to communicate the value of the registration or subscription, and it starts immediately. Christian Röpke, Chief Digital Officer of ZEIT Verlagsgruppe, told the WAN-IFRA Digital Media Europe conference last year about how the German publisher had to shift balance its focus on conversion with equal energy put into retention. They had launched a discounted subscription to convert more users but then struggled to move these new cut-rate subscribers to a full-cost plan. They found new subscribers weren’t engaging with content within the first 24 hours after they paid. Interestingly, they also found from qualitative research that new subscribers felt overwhelmed by the volume of content. Die Zeit rolled out an engagement score as part of their “First Day Subscription” strategy so that they could understand how well new subscribers were engaging with content to support retaining these.

Publishers are experimenting with a wide range of ways to communicate the value of a subscription to new subscribers and help them find things that interest them. You only have to look at The Economist’s new printed welcome pack to appreciate the breadth of these experiments. They had seen email open rates decline and felt that their “older and affluent” audience might respond to this high-touch offering. It complements rather than replaces their email onboarding series. By using an A/B test, they found that users who received the welcome pack were 3.5% more engaged.

If you want an in-depth case study of how to design an onboarding programme, David Tvrdon outlines the approach he took for Denník SME in Slovakia. A quick takeaway is that onboarding now starts immediately but goes on much longer. And it delivers. The subscribers who have gone through David’s onboarding programme have a 40% higher Customer Lifetime Value than the rest of the publishers’ digital subscribers.

David also demonstrates how important great user experience is. He started by revamping the group’s newsletter strategy and made sure that their news app engaged users.

He then mapped out all of the features that built habits and delivered value to users. Add them all, and then focus. For him, these are features that “bring immediate value to the subscribers” such as news apps with push notifications, a fast, responsive mobile web experience, paid newsletters and ad-free experiences. He added these into a 10-step onboarding experience.

And now onto our links for this week. With the unfolding crisis in local news in the US, a lot of energy and money is flowing into the system. Matt DeRienzo talks about how the future of local is small scale rather than the big groups that rose and now have fallen. To support these smaller organisations, they need support in building skills, capabilities and technology. This new de-centralised system will need new funding models.

The media support system needs an update

Not too long ago, the consensus was that a significant digital reader revenue strategy could only work at two or three outlier news organizations. The New

digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2024/06/13/the-media-support-system-needs-an-update

Oddly, running counter to that shift to de-centralisation, the National Trust for Local News is working to rebuild the centralised services that have declined as the major chains’ models have failed.

An ambitious news philanthropy makes a sharp turn after just two years - Poynter

The National Trust for Local News has found that the nonprofit sector ‘doesn’t need more coaches.’ Instead, it will send in a hands-on team.

www.poynter.org/commentary/analysis/2024/national-trust-local-news-investments-macon-melody

Interesting. Researchers in the US have found audiences believe “that the news industry as a whole values profits above truth or public service”. People assumed that the ad model forced publishers to pursue large audiences rather than accurate reporting. Well, there were also study participants who believed that news organisations got paid off by the American Right’s bogeyman, George Soros. Sigh.

Is journalism’s trust problem about money, not politics?

The people we spoke with tended to assume that news organizations made money primarily through advertising instead of also from subscribers.

www.niemanlab.org/2024/06/is-journalisms-trust-problem-about-money-not-politics

Research from FT Strategies has shown that publishers are more resilient if they have more than two revenue streams (although there is a law of diminishing returns with more than five or six). At Condé Nast’s Bon Appétit brand, they have moved beyond food with a range of adjacent products.

Jamila Robinson explains why Bon Appétit is getting into sports, relationships and subscription boxes

On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Robinson talks about the new Sports issue of Bon Appétit, hitting newsstands today.

digiday.com/podcasts/jamila-robinson-explains-why-bon-appetit-is-getting-into-sports-relationships-and-subscription-boxes

WordPress VIP has an excellent article on how publishers can adapt to Google’s algorithm changes this year. Publishers have been punished for site reputation abuse. Google’s “policy targets websites that host low-quality content created by third parties with little oversight”. I have seen this with sites that have syndication services to generate revenue. One publisher I advised saw their traffic drop by 60% overnight, and it was down to a low-quality syndication service.

One takeaway is that publishers need to lean into distinctive, high-quality, helpful content. The changes that Google has rolled out require changes in content strategy, not just technical solutions.

Adapting to Google's 2024 Algorithm Updates | WordPress VIP

Adapt to Google's 2024 algorithm update by enhancing content quality and website performance. Learn about the helpful content update and more.

wpvip.com/2024/06/11/google-algorithm-updates-2024

International developments: Aussie publisher shuts licenced US news brands and user needs process in India

Nine in Australia had pursued a strategy that I’ve seen a number of publishers pursue by licencing US brands. You’ll see that in the magazine, broadcasting and digital space. But Nine have now decided to shutter these US brands and focus on their own.

Vice, Kotaku, Refinery29 to no longer publish in Australia after Pedestrian Group announces restructure

Dozens of jobs to be cut as the Nine-owned media company decides to end its use of brand licences and focus on wholly owned brands

www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/jul/08/vice-kotaku-gizmodo-job-cuts-australia-channel-nine

To have a successful subscription or membership strategy, publishers need to have a deep understanding of their audiences, and the user needs model has become one of the most widely used models to achieve this. It has helped them develop an app that has helped them build on their subscription success.

User-centric innovation drives subscriptions at Newslaundry

2024-07-04. Newslaundry, an independent and entirely digital newsroom, was one of the earliest players in India to test subscriptions. By placing user needs at the heart of product development, the team crafted a user-centric app that has become instrumental in driving its subscription success.

wan-ifra.org/2024/07/user-centric-innovation-drives-subscriptions-at-newslaundry

And I’ll add this interesting news item from India, where they are looking to develop a public AI platform.

Ashwini Vaishnaw Unveils Public Platform for AI at IndiaAI Summit

India aims to democratize AI access with a new public platform, says Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw at the Global IndiaAI Summit.

www.medianama.com/2024/07/223-india-digital-public-infrastructure-ai-ashwini-vaishnaw-summit

The Reuters Institute's latest Digital News Report found that across 20 countries subscription growth has been stalled for the last three years at 17%, and they also found that 57% of people would never consider paying anything for news. Worse yet, in the UK, where I’m sitting right now, 69% would not pay anything for news, which is why the UK (8%) is dead last in terms out of the 20 countries when it comes to people who have paid for news in the past year. Ouch.

It reminded me of the research that I highlighted a few weeks ago research covering Chicago area news audiences from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. In line with the Digital News Report, the Northwestern University study found that 19% of those surveyed had paid for or donated to a local news outlet and 16% paid money to a national outlet. And 51% of those surveyed said that no one should have to pay for news with another 29% saying that only those who could afford it should pay.

But it’s not all bad news. The Reuters Institute found that 36% of people would consider paying something for news if the price is right, and as INMA’s Greg Piechota pointed out, that creates the possibility to grow the paying audience across these 20 countries by 3.5x.

However, I want to make another point. For those who work or did work in journalism, this might seem impossible, but most people are not aware that journalism is in crisis financially. The Northwestern University research found that 71% of those surveyed “don’t know that the news business is in crisis”. More than half, 54% thought the local news businesses were doing somewhat well and 17% thought they were doing very well.

Maybe it is time to level with audiences about the financial pressures that our businesses are in before it’s too late. Poynter recently highlighted the case of LA Taco, a “food, culture and community” news outlet in Los Angeles that punched above its weight, enough to win a prestigious James Beard award, which honours chefs and food writing in the US. In April, they announced that they would have to furlough all of their staff because the bottom had dropped out of their business. LA Taco said that they had been doing OK with 2000 members but suddenly that number started dropping until they only had half that number. And then they lost their main advertiser.

But they had never done a membership drive, because as its editor-in-chief Javier Cabral told Poynter, they aren’t NPR. Some folks in the US refer to NPR pledge drives pejoratively as “beg-a-thons” so I took away from his comment that they felt uncomfortable asking. And they didn’t want to be a non-profit.

The crisis pushed the editors and staff to do an “emergency drive”, and they explained the situation to their community via social media. Within 24 hours, they had got enough support to hire back the furloughed workers, and now a couple of months later, they have 3000 members. It isn’t the 5000 members they think they need to be completely independent, but it’s a start.

My takeaway: Publishers and journalists need to get over their reluctance to talk about the dire straits journalism is in. When I was a local newspaper editor, I was honest and open in saying that to provide the kind of coverage our communities deserved I needed their help. I needed them to buy subscriptions, and I needed to work with them in partnership to fill in gaps in our staffing. That was a decade ago now, and the situation now is much, much more dire. It’s not easy. It does feel a bit like begging, but it is obvious that the public isn’t connecting the loss of coverage to the decline of journalism as a business.

Research backs this up, even in the UK where audiences are least likely to pay or even support paying. Last year, the Press Gazette highlighted City University research that compared four different types of paywall messaging with 815 people in the UK.

1. ‘Normative messaging’ that emphasises their subscription would support “independent, inclusive and watchdog journalism”.

2. A ‘price transparency’ message that spoke about the financial crisis in the industry.

3. A ‘digital-specific’ message that focused on the value of the subscription such as exclusive content.

4. A ‘social message’ about how the subscription would allow access for events and would make the subscriber a part of a community.

No single message worked, but a combination of the first two that focused on supporting independent journalism and a message about the dire financial situation of journalism performed the best. I know that this might prick at our pride, but research shows two things. People are not aware of how bad the crisis is, and they will respond to it in subscription or membership calls to action.

And now the links for this week.

GQ found that feeding the algorithm was not building a loyal audience, only people who came from social media, got that quick hit story and then promptly went back to whatever network they came from. They now look at where they can add to the conversation, add value. Their audience numbers are down but the total minutes spent with their content has rebounded in the past year.

What happened when British GQ stopped trying to 'feed the algorithm'

GQ's European director of audience development, analytics and social Neha-Tamara Patel on a major strategy change at the lifestyle brand.

pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/digital-journalism/gq-audience-director-algorithm-platforms-churn-strategy

Less is more. It really is, and data bears this out. This is yet another data point that reinforces that the FT’s strategy to reduce the content that they produce by 15% each year has something to it. It is more important that we deeply understand what audiences want and need rather than simply feeding the algorithms, chasing the same audience with the same commodity content.

Audiences are overwhelmed. It’s time publishers focused on what is valuable to audiences.

Lars K Jensen on LinkedIn: #onlinemedia #digitalmedia #journalism #lessismore #strategy

???? FEWER STORIES, BETTER JOURNALISM. For the last decade — at least — we have talked about publishing fewer articles of higher quality and relevance. Until…

www.linkedin.com/posts/larskjensen_onlinemedia-digitalmedia-journalism-activity-7213445055456436224-7LdR?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

A great article on how to engage with comments on TikTok. Honestly, this feels very much like what I used to do in the Naughties, when I read blogs and listened to podcasts to find sources. (I still remember when I tracked down a podcaster who had recorded their escape from a Hurricane Katrina-flooded New Orleans when I worked for the BBC.) People are talking about the issues that you cover on social media platforms. The value isn’t in simply clipping up their videos or embedding their comments. The value is in following up with them with an interview.

How to engage impactfully in the comment section – RJI

rjionline.org/news/how-to-engage-impactfully-in-the-comment-section

This week in AI content abuse

The next two items are about AI companies being accused by publishers of stealing their content. (Heck even Amazon is accusing Perplexity of scraping its content without permission.)

Quora’s Chatbot Platform Poe Allows Users to Download Paywalled Articles on Demand

WIRED was able to download stories from publishers like The New York Times and The Atlantic using Poe’s Assistant bot. One expert calls it “prima facie copyright infringement,” which Quora disputes.

www.wired.com/story/quora-chatbot-poe-download-paywalled-articles

News outlets are accusing Perplexity of plagiarism and unethical web scraping | TechCrunch

In the age of generative AI, when chatbots can provide detailed answers to questions based on content pulled from the internet, the line between fair use

techcrunch.com/2024/07/02/news-outlets-are-accusing-perplexity-of-plagiarism-and-unethical-web-scraping

A couple of stories about the ongoing crisis in news - local and digital. Paramount shuttered MTV News in May 2023, and now they have taken down the website, pulling years of content from the web. I think back fondly to the excellent coverage that MTV News did of elections with their Rock the Vote campaigns. Sigh.

MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline

The website of the already-defunct MTV News has been fully pulled offline.

variety.com/2024/digital/news/mtv-news-website-archives-pulled-offline-1236047163

In its World Press Trends report 2022-23, WAN-IFRA highlighted how funding from settlements with platforms was going to be a growth area for news organisations in some countries. That’s coming to an end in Australia, and that could mean the closure of 50 regional newspapers.

‘We don’t know what’s going on any more’: how Australia lost its rural newspapers

The Country Press Association says up to 50 regional newspapers could close when Facebook funding agreements begin to lapse later this year

www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/30/we-dont-know-whats-going-on-any-more-how-australia-lost-its-rural-newspapers

But the Associated Press wants to support local news and not just with wire copy. The cooperative has set up a fund to help green news deserts. US funders have really got the bit between their teeth and putting serious cash behind efforts to address the crisis.

The Associated Press finds a new way to combat news deserts

Nonprofit news organizations including ProPublica, The Marshall Project, and The 19th have transformed the American media landscape in the past decade. But the Associated Press has been at it far longer. Throughout its 178-year history, the AP has been run as a not-for-profit cooperative. And talk about impact. The AP has been the backbone of […]

www.cjr.org/analysis/associated-press-ap-news-deserts-joel-simon.php

A new book looks at how “fewer people are seeing a life in news as a worthwhile career. This reflects a broader problem — namely, the ways that relentless economic pressures are pushing people away from socially important careers.”

Journalism has become ground zero for the vocation crisis

Journalists — like nurses and teachers — want to do work that's interesting and socially beneficial. But the industry's increasing precariousness counterbalances the appeal.

www.niemanlab.org/2024/06/journalism-has-become-ground-zero-for-the-vocation-crisis

A call for media companies to invest in culture to make up for the lack of competitive pay. “By prioritising culture, career development, work-life balance, and meaningful recognition, media companies can build and retain effective teams that are happier in the workplace.”

Emotional salaries: How do media jobs stack up?

“And you never say thank you.” “That’s what the money is for!” Mad Men’s The Suitcase may have first aired fourteen years ago, but the episode spawned some of the show’s most-quoted and memed lines. In a disagreement about credit for an award-winning ad, Peggy Olsen communicates her frustration at the lack of acknowledgement, and Don …

pressgazette.co.uk/publishing-services-content/emotional-salaries-how-do-media-jobs-stack-up

The demand for news or the lack thereof has been the theme of the last few newsletters, and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism 2024 Digital News Report chronicles how a lack of trust (although it stabilised this year) and news avoidance are challenging news organisations in a business environment that has led to layoffs and closures. “Selective news avoidance” - where audiences choose to avoid certain issues - has risen to 39%, driven by conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, suggested by some responses to the open-ended comments. The rise was highest in Brazil, Spain, Germany and Finland. Those who feel “overloaded” by the news have jumped 11% since 2019. Applying a “user needs” lens, the report found that news outlets “may be focusing too much on updating people on top news stories and not spending enough time providing different perspectives on issues or reporting stories that can provide a basis for occasional optimism”.

In Dmitry Shishkin’s ground-breaking work on user needs at the BBC World Service, focusing too much on “update me” was one of his major findings. In 2018, he told journalism.co.uk:

When they did the first user needs analysis at BBC World Service, BBC Russia produced 70% of its content to meet the “update me” user needs, but all of those updates were only delivering 7% of pageviews. What Dmitry and several other publishers have found is that they can cut back on all of these updates and focus on the other six needs - inspire me, divert me, educate me, keep me on trend and give me perspective - and reach more people. From my experience with a major UK newspaper publisher, they produced too many follow-up stories based on breaking news. The second story might have done well, but by the third update, the diminishing returns were rarely worth the effort.

The Digital News Report provided an interesting perspective on user needs by using two questions to provide a “user needs priority index” for six different user needs. “Give me perspective” scored the highest with “inspire me” coming in second, with “update me” lagging in third. “Divert me” came in last, which isn’t surprising to me. Audiences have plenty of choices when it comes to diversion, and news media will struggle to compete here and frankly doesn’t need to.

Providing people with perspective and inspiring them resonates with other findings in the report that show that news audiences are overwhelmed and worn out. With COVID, the climate crisis, the cost-of-living crisis and conflicts, people are exhausted by the news. In France, Brazil, Spain, Canada, the United States and South Africa, more than 40% of audiences said they were “worn out” by the news, and this had risen in several of these countries from the mid-20s in 2019. They want to understand the chaotic world around them and find inspiration and agency. People feel that news is part of the problem rather than a solution to these major crises, based on data like this and conversations I’ve had.

The user needs model has proven extremely effective at helping news organisations (and other content companies) create content strategies that deliver the most value to audiences. More than that, when many news organisations are grappling with reduced resources, it helps media leaders know they are using their resources in the best way possible. The user needs framework has reached a level of maturity that it can be effectively applied in newsrooms that operate at any scale, and the smaller the newsroom, the more important it is for them to ensure their people are doing work that resonates with audiences.

User needs is one framework, and the quality reads metric is another tool to align and focus newsrooms so that their work resonates with audiences. The FT has a goal of reducing the volume of content it produces each year by 15% “in order to focus more time on quality journalism”. The quality reads analysis plots stories by the volume of pageviews and the completion rate of content to provide a nuanced measure of audience engagement. High-performing content has high number pageviews and high completion rates so editors know to do more of that content, while high completion rate and lower pageviews appeal to niches. Stories in the lower left corner of the graph are stories that have low pageview and engagement, and editors know with confidence that they can reduce their efforts on these stories.

Returning to the Digital News Report, it has plenty of other insights, which I’ll be mulling over (but not this week as I’m off work), including a “platform reset” and audiences, especially younger ones, consuming more news via short-form video.

Now on to a few links this week. As I wrote in Pugpig’s Media Bulletin, major European media houses are leaning into digital transformation. They have reset their digital subscription North Star goals and are focused on young audienes who consume news primarily on their smartphones. At Mediahuis, they are focusing on flipping their digital-print subscription mix in seven years so that 70% of their subscription revenue comes from digital.

How newspaper giant Mediahuis aims to reach 70% digital revenue by 2030

European news publisher Mediahuis has set a 7-7-7 goal of generating 70% of its revenue from digital by 2030.

pressgazette.co.uk/media_business/mediahuis-revenue-digital-print-subscribers-gert-ysebaert

At NTM, they had to retool their subscription efforts because growth had stalled - something the Digital News Report found in many countries. Mobile is their focus. They redesigned their app to be simpler and cleaner, which delivered a dramatic increase in engagement with stories even deeper on their mobile front page. Focusing on their app made perfect sense with 80% of their audiences coming to them via a mobile device.

Sweden’s NTM doubles subscribers with digital pivot

2024-06-12. NTM, one of the largest media groups in Sweden, is spread across 17 newsrooms, with a 70 percent reach in its operational areas. It launched its subscription efforts in 2017, with a freemium paywall.

wan-ifra.org/2024/06/swedens-ntm-doubles-subscribers-with-digital-pivot

Josh Awtry at Newsweek (who was at Gannett when I was there) spoke about one of my favourite topics - shifting from rented to owned audiences to the Local Media Association. He challenged participants in the webinar with this question: “Do you have traffic or audience?”

Strategies to shift from acquiring traffic to owning audience

The models that fueled publisher growth for 20 years are changing. Social, once a reliable and significant source of referrals, has become a competitor. TikTok, Instagram and others aren’t interested in sending audiences to publishers –– they’re trying to keep audiences on their own platforms. Search is likely to change rapidly because of generative AI. […]

localmedia.org/2024/06/strategies-to-shift-from-acquiring-traffic-to-owning-audience

Suddenly ad economy forecasts get rosier, but the biggest companies will benefit the most

Ad spending looks set to keep going strong for the foreseeable future. In fact, experts have even revised their forecasts to account for the additional upside.

digiday.com/media/suddenly-ad-economy-forecasts-get-rosier-but-the-biggest-companies-will-benefit-the-most

Revenue diversification is one of the major themes for news groups, and the venerable Associated Press is no exception. It’s a good example of how even a wire service can develop new products and revenue streams. Of course, its recent deal with OpenAI is one of their alternatuve sources of revenue.

Advertising, philanthropy and AI: How the AP is diversifying its revenue streams

AP has doubled down on diversifying its revenues in recent years amid headwinds facing many of its former crucial clients - US newspapers.

pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/wires_and_agencies/advertising-philanthropy-and-ai-how-the-ap-is-diversifying-its-revenue-streams

The Digital News Report adds to a recent study that the Reuters Institute released about AI and journalism with additional detail about audiences’ attitudes towards its use. As with the previous research, audiences are open to AI being used to automate processes but less open for genAI being used to create content. Most responsible news companies are using genAI to create summaries and automate back end services such as tagging and other metadata additions. INMA has a good review here of how AI is being rolled out at media companies.

News media companies share AI revenue opportunities, ethical considerations

Media leaders from Times Internet, Nikkei, Stuff, The New York Times, and Bayerischer Rundfunk shared how they are using AI to generate revenue and emphasised the importance of defined ethics around the technology’s use during INMA’s recent Generative AI Master Class.

www.inma.org/blogs/conference/post.cfm/news-media-companies-share-ai-revenue-opportunities-ethical-considerations

Continuing to riff on the demand for news, there were a couple of blockbuster bits of research that came out in the past week. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Dr. Richard Fletcher with help from the pollsters at YouGov investigated the awareness of generative AI technologies and attitudes about their use in journalism (PDF) in six countries. Argentina, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK, and the USA. YouGov polled some 2000 people in each country. Unsurprisingly, young people were more aware of them than older people, but a surprising finding was the gulf between awareness and frequent use. “(F)requent use of ChatGPT is rare, with just 1% using it on a daily basis in Japan, rising to 2% in France and the UK, and 7% in the USA,” the study found. As I wrote in Pugpig’s Media Bulletin, Dr. Fletcher told the BBC there is a “‘mismatch’ between the ‘hype’ around AI and the ‘public interest’ in it”.

However, for news media leaders, I think there is one major takeaway from the report: Only about 5% of those polled in the survey used genAI to get the latest news. genAI and use is far higher in the US than in other countries. Still only 10% of Americans used genAI for seeking out news, and in Denmark and the UK that figure drops to 2%. Morever, the UK also had the highest percentage of people (30%) who hadn’t heard of any of the 14 genAI tools that researchers asked about.

Given the low levels of trust in news media in the US, it was surprising Americans were more trusting of journalists (30%) to use the technology responsibly than other countries. Contrast that to the UK, where only 12% of those polled strongly or somewhat trust journalists to use it in a responsible manner.

The research also had some warnings for journalism leaders in how they approach genAI. People in the study were polled about whether they thought journalism was worth more or less depending on whether it was produced entirely by human journalists or with genAI and human oversight, 41% said they would pay less. This could put pressure on the reader revenue strategies that so many publishers are pursuing.

The research also highlights that publishers have work to do to prove the value of genAI to audiences. The researchers said:

A shift in local news consumption

Of course, working for publishing app builder Pugpig, Chicago news consumers have shifted from reading newspapers and watching local TV stations to using their smart phones, according to research from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. They surveyed more than 1000 people across the Chicago region from the western suburbs to suburbs in northeastern Indiana. While the decline of print is well known, local TV had still held its own. But the study found that 62% of those polled used their smartphones all the time or often versus 52% who said that they got their news via local TV. That number was only 13% when it came to newspapers.

More worrying for local news outlets is that only 19% of respondents said that had paid or donated money to support local journalism, and half of those polled said that no one should pay for local news. That is why I’ve said that we will need to develop a number of different models to support local news based on a number of factors including the size and economic base of the community. However, I think that this is a glass half-full situation. There is a lot of opportunity between the 19% who currently pay and the 50% who will never pay.

A few other highlights:

• Consumers would rather watch (44%) than read (25%) or listen to (10%) news.

• But local TV isn’t benefitting from this desire to watch news, at least amongst younger generations. For audiences under 44, only 22% watch TV for their news. It is most likely that they are getting their news from social media, with 40% of 18-29 year-olds and 36% of 30-44 year-olds checking social media multiple times a day for news.

• While smartphones are now the primary platform for news, this isn’t benefitting news outlets directly as much as it is benefitting Google. Search engines (which means Google) has the largest audience that checks it for news multiple times a day. However, local TV stations still outpace search when it comes to those who check at least once a day and those who use a given platform multiple times a week.

More than the data about the platforms audiences use, the research is golddust when it comes to understanding why local audiences consume news. Topping the list? “(Local news) helps me to save or manage my money”, which was a reason given by 60% of those who responded. “It helps me stay healthy” came in second at 52%, and the next three responses were in the mid-30% range. Of the top five, number 3 “It helps me decide where I stand on things” was the only one that I would say most traditional print journalists would see as hard news. “It helps me feel connected to my community came in at 15%, and “It helps me take action to address issues I care about” was important to only 12% of respondents. Only 10% said local journalism “helps me stay informed to be a better citizen”. Honestly, my priorities as a local newspaper reporter and editor were very different than these responses. I can see how these responses are much more in line with local TV news in the US than local public radio or newspaper coverage. What I would have liked to have seen is an age breakdown on these responses. Is this a generational thing like platform choice, or is this a broader societal shift? Or do we need to rethink our local news agenda? It all raised a lot of questions for me.

One last thing I’ll highlight is that there was a disconnect between audiences and the industry in terms of awareness of the parlous state of journalism businesses. More than half, 54% said that news organisations were doing “somewhat well”, while an additional 17% thought they were doing “very well”.

And now onto the links for the week. While much has been made of the shift of young audiences to TikTok and Instagram, a longer-term trend has been the shift from open social networks to messaging platforms such as Telegram or WhatsApp. The Reuters Institute reported on this trend in its 2018 Digital News report. Khalil Cassimally, head of audience insights for The Conversation, shared a summary of a panel he moderated at WAN-IFRA’s World News Congress. Click through for a very handy guide of the differences between WhatsApp Communities and Channels.

Messaging apps for audience development - Khalil A. Cassimally on LinkedIn: #wmnc24

When news publishers say we need to build direct relationships with audiences, we mostly refer to newsletters. We should be talking more about WhatsApp and…

www.linkedin.com/posts/khalilcassimally_wmnc24-activity-7204455905646546944-X7QE?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

In my previous job as the director of digital products and platforms at a regional US public media group, I said that our digital strategy involved building loyalty and habit amongst our audiences that led to membership. On that theme, The New York Times has built a product portfolio beyond news to ensure that they become a part of their audiences daily habits. The bundle is a re-imagination of the newspaper for the digital age - yes, news and sport but also reviews and a big yes to games and puzzles.

How products help fuel growth and drive traffic at The New York Times

2024-05-29. "Our consumers, our readers, are coming to us with all kinds of different expectations, questions and curiosities. It’s our job to meet those needs in the moment. Every time we get that right, we’re deepening our relationship with them and building trust. And that’s what’s going to lead to engagement and retention," says Emily Withrow, VP of Product and Head of Subscriber Experiences at The New York Times.

wan-ifra.org/2024/05/how-products-are-helping-fuel-growth-and-driving-traffic-at-the-new-york-times/?

Harvard Business Review sees AI as “opening an age of hyper-personalisation”, mining their archive for value and even providing a career development bot for their subscribers.

Learning new tricks: How the 102-year Harvard Business Review is leaning into GenAI - FIPP

One of the biggest reasons for the extraordinary longevity of the Harvard Business Review is the 102-year-old brand’s ability to maintain its strong roots, but also evolve with the times. It comes as no surprise, then, that the venerable publication is taking a long hard look at ways generative artificial intelligence can enhance its operations.

www.fipp.com/news/learning-new-tricks-how-the-102-year-harvard-business-review-is-leaning-into-genai/#

Another example of media rebuilding their own engagement spaces. CBC/Radio-Canada (Canada), ZDF (Germany), RTBF (Belgium), and SRG SSR (Switzerland) are working with New Public have been hosting workshops and “build-a-thons”. What they heard was: “Public discourse, with the existing platforms at our disposal, is hard everywhere — and never more fragile. Our public media institutions need new ways to lead our civic discourse.”

They have now developed more than 100 prototypes “to enable civic discourse for many voices and shape conversational cultures”. Ok, this has my attention.

???? ⚙️ ???? We're working with public broadcasters to reinvent public conversation online

A sneak peek into prototypes from Public Spaces Incubator

newpublic.substack.com/p/were-working-with-public-broadcasters

Speaking of interesting, nonprofit NEWSWELL at Arizona State University has partnered with the Times of San Diego. Looking at this story, NEWSWELL is looking to provide back-office services so that the Times of San Diego can focus on journalism. It’s an interesting model that I’ve heard several people in the industry advocate.

Times of San Diego Joins Arizona State University Nonprofit to Develop New Model for Local Journalism

Times of San Diego will continue to be based in San Diego with local reporting and editing, while the nonprofit NEWSWELL organization provides significant new resources and business services.

timesofsandiego.com/business/2024/06/06/times-of-san-diego-joins-arizona-state-university-nonprofit-to-develop-new-model-for-local-journalism

Looking at the excellent research that Medill has done, a group of action-oriented academics are looking at ways to make this kind of in-depth research scale.

Consortium wants to make local news landscape studies more efficient, less costly

Academic collaboration aims to use automation, common standards to make future research more accessible

newsatknight.substack.com/p/consortium-wants-to-make-local-news

In the UK, Mill Media, which started in Manchester and has expanded to Liverpool, Birmingham and Sheffield, is looking to take on local media in London. Less than a year ago, CNN CEO and former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson and Nicholas Johnston, the publisher of Axios, invested £350,000 into Mill Media. It looks like they are deploying that capital and more.

Mill Media set to double staff total to 22 as it reveals London expansion

Substack-based Mill Media publisher behind the Manchester Mill, Liverpool Post, Birmingham Dispatch and Sheffield Tribune, has announced a major hiring round, looking to add 11 roles in the next six months.

pressgazette.co.uk/newsletters/mill-media-hiring-11-25000-50000-london-glasgow-expansion

Dean Baquet, the former executive editor of the New York Times, said that delivering the reinvention that community journalism needs requires a “shift from competition-driven models to audience-based ones, emphasizing that collaboration is now essential for the economic sustainability and strength of local journalism”.

Former New York Times executive editor says collaboration needed to reinvent community journalism

coyotechronicle.net/csusb-community-news/inland-empire-journalists-and-media-educators-convene-to-discuss-the-future-of-community-media

I am leading a workshop next month about finding stories in data, and it is great to see data journalism starting to become part of the toolkit of smaller newsrooms.

Empowering small newsrooms: The rise of data journalism in local media - Editor and Publisher

At its core, data journalism is seen as a critical way of holding the powerful to account. It allows journalists to share their receipts with the public. That proof comes from finding the relevant data and analyzing it so that it can be presented in a way that explains why it’s important. Cheryl Phillips, the founder of Big Local News at Stanford University, says even the smallest newsrooms with people who aren’t specifically trained as data journalists can do important data work.

www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/the-data-journalism-revolution,250141

Both the US and UK had three-day weekends, so I took a bit of a break. I hope that everyone there had some nice downtime, and in that spirit, I wanted to continue my series on creating demand for news but in a lighter vein. Thinking back to the last edition of the newsletter, one of the ideas for re-igniting people’s passion for local news was co-creation, and we should take a page out of the playbooks of creators.

I was reminded of this when listening to my music collection, and my Plex server threw up a random Coverville podcast from 2008. If you don’t know the podcast, it’s a brilliant podcast of cover songs - covers of an artist’s catalogue or the artist singing cover songs. Host Brian Ibbot seeks out original covers that offer up some surprising interpretations of the originals. In addition to producing a high-quality podcast, Brian has long had innovative ways to engage the audience and partner with other podcasters, which have helped support the podcast and grow its audience. When I first started listening to him in 2006, he had a feature called Musically Challenged, when other music podcasters would create incredible music trivia segments for him and his wife Tina, and he would also host his own Musically Challenged Live episodes when listeners could take part. Now, he has a Patreon membership scheme with multiple levels and benefits, including access to members-only episodes, a Discord channel and coupons for merchandise.

The idea of using co-creation and engagement as a selling point is a common point amongst podcasters, YouTubers and newsletter authors. A couple of years ago, my wife, Suw, turned me on to the Strong Songs podcast. Multi-instrumentalist Kirk Hamilton breaks down famous songs and how they were made. For instance, on a recent episode, he went through the making of Blondie’s Heart of Glass, from an early stripped-down version through every section of the final disco dance classic. This episode was a new experiment for him in which his Patreon supporters voted for the song he would analyse. It came down to Blondie and Nirvana, and Blondie won.

These types of strategies are everywhere in the creator economy, whether it is subscriber-only content like Joyce Vance’s Five Question series on Substack or Action Retro’s Sean Malseed reading out his Patreon backers at the end of his ‘shenanigans’ resurrecting or turbocharging vintage computers.

Of course, traditional media are adopting these tactics as well. Last week at journalism.co.uk’s News Rewired conference in London, The Telegraph’s Head of Newsletters Maire Boneheim talked about how their political reporter Dominic Penna regularly takes questions from paying subscribers who receive the newsletter to put to politicians.

Riffing on thoughts from the last newsletter about creating demand for local news, I think that membership is such a powerful model. Most members will be happy to contribute money but do not want to get involved in co-creation. When I worked at The Guardian, I was introduced to the 1-9-90 model of user engagement and online communities. It states that 90% of people are happy to be in the audience, reading, listening to or watching what you create; 9% will rate or recommend the content; and 1% will engage in active co-creation. While it’s important to involve as many people as possible, it’s also good to manage your expectations.

However, it also is important to understand the different motivations of your audience and build membership or subscription tiers that tap into how and why they engage with or don’t engage with you. The higher tiers can tap into people’s desire to support your efforts and also to be involved in them. When considering your membership tiers, it is always useful to survey existing members or subscribers, if you’re transitioning to a membership programme, as well as your newsletter subscribers who might not yet be supporters.

And now the links for the week. Rasmus Klein Nielsen of the Reuter’s Institute takes journalists to task for their coverage of AI. “(N)early 60% of news articles across outlets were indexed to industry products, initiatives, or announcements,” research has found.

How uncritical news coverage feeds the AI hype machine

"The coverage tends to be led by industry sources and often takes claims about what the technology can and can't do, and might be able to do in the future, at face value in ways that contribute to the hype cycle."

www.niemanlab.org/2024/05/how-uncritical-news-coverage-feeds-the-ai-hype-machine

And the Reuters Institute has also just released additional research into public attitudes towards generative AI. “Most of the public expect generative AI to have a large impact on virtually every sector of society in the next five years, ranging from 51% expecting a large impact on political parties to 66% for news media and 66% for science.”

What does the public in six countries think of generative AI in news?

reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/what-does-public-six-countries-think-generative-ai-news

The big news of the past week was News Corp joining other major news organisations in signing deals with OpenAI. The Conversation looked at what this will mean for journalism, and this analysis says that small and medium publishers will be pushed aside as AI groups look for deals with major players with large archives. This will only add to the pressures on the industry to consolidate.

What OpenAI’s deal with News Corp means for journalism (and for you)

Media outlets like The Australian and The Daily Telegraph will now share their content with the makers of ChatGPT. It raises many questions about the future of journalism and how people access news.

theconversation.com/what-openais-deal-with-news-corp-means-for-journalism-and-for-you-230773

To demonstrate how important AI has become to journalism, Yolanda Ma at the University of Hong Kong will be teaching a course on AI that will be mandatory for journalism master’s degree students.

Yolanda Ma from the University of Hong Kong on making AI training mandatory in journalism education

In this episode of Splice Pink, we speak with Yolanda Ma, a lecturer at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong. Yolanda recently won approval to make AI training a mandatory subject for the masters program in journalism. In this podcast, she talks about why she pushed

www.splicemedia.com/pink/yolanda-ma-from-the-university-of-hong-kong-on-making-ai-training-mandatory-in-journalism-education

As we consider the future, the Pew Centre looked to the past and found that 25% of all webpages that existed between 2013 and 2023 can no longer be accessed. I think of all of the stories that I’ve written and probably many of them are most likely only accessible via microfilm or old hard copies.

When Online Content Disappears

A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible.

www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears

Publishers like the FT and DC Thomson have been using attention metrics like quality reads to measure attention, and now these attention metrics are spilling over into the commercial side of the business as the New York Times. It’s not entirely new as advertisers have wanted a better sense of viewability and engagement with advertising that CTRs don’t capture.

Inside The New York Times' plans to correlate attention levels to other metrics

There’s a lot of buzz around attention advertising right now, but The New York Times is trying to stay grounded even as it develops its own plans.

digiday.com/media/inside-the-new-york-times-plans-to-correlate-attention-levels-to-other-metrics

How journalists and their managers are beginning to address mental health

This past week, I couldn’t help but notice several stories relating to journalists’ mental health and efforts to improve it. Hannah Storm has released a book with practical advice on how journalism managers can support a positive culture. One thing leaps out at me: Journalists are stressed about expressing distress because they fear it will be perceived as a sign of weakness. That speaks volumes about long-standing issues in newsroom culture.

How managers can play their part supporting journalists' mental health

Book extract by Hannah Storm about mental health and wellbeing for journalists. What managers can do to help their staff.

pressgazette.co.uk/comment-analysis/how-managers-can-play-their-part-supporting-journalists-mental-health

Hannah is a growing number of journalists working in this space. From this piece by The Fix, Mar Cabra says, “Journalism is one of the most stressful professions alongside firefighters, military personnel and doctors. Yet despite its intensity and burden, journalists lack the basic training to self-guard themselves. The profession is missing its first aid kit.”

A burned-out journalist’s journey of creating better mental health practises in the industry – interview with Mar Cabra  - The Fix

Mar Cabra talks about her mental health struggles, the pressures of being a journalist and her journey in co-founding The Self-Investigation.

thefix.media/2024/05/24/a-burned-out-journalists-journey-of-creating-better-mental-health-practises-in-the-industry-interview-with-mar-cabra

And I’ll close out on this link that came to me from Samantha Ragland on LinkedIn, who says, “The more we talk about the hazards of this job and how we find our way through, the more likely we are (and others) to navigate them with our minds and bodies (intact).”

It links to Knight Fellow Pavla Holcova’s piece about why pushing harder wasn’t helping. God knows I’ve been there - 80-hour weeks covering elections, months without much of a break after the 9/11 attacks and working through shingles and COVID. It used to be a temporary burst of work until it became permanent. Holcova’s piece is below as well. It’s really worth reading. I’m starting to prioritise leisure, which has meant being more focused when I am working. We need to talk about this and not just journalists. Overwork seems to be a permanent fixture of professional life now, and I think we need to call time on it.

Pushing harder is not the solution

How slowing down helped ready me for whatever is next

jskfellows.stanford.edu/pushing-harder-is-not-the-solution-ad5cf16b7ee6

I am part of the local news problem. I have moved eight times since the beginning of this century, including three times across the Atlantic. Although I dive into the communities where I live, I don’t build the kind of deep roots in a place that fosters a connection to local news. Even though I live in the UK after eight years back in the US where I’m from, I have digital subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post, but I only pick up my local paper - the Reading Chronicle - from time to time. Looking at research from the Pew Research Center in the US, my local news patterns are similar to their findings. I rely on friends and the website of the local social enterprise outlet, Reading Today.

Americans have lost interest in both national and local news, the research found, and while young adults have never been that connected to local news, the declines in engagement happened across all age groups. In 2016, a slim majority of older Americans closely followed local news, but in the following years, they also lost interest. Both the oldest and youngest Americans saw a steep drop in news engagement between 2016 and 2018.

This isn’t about trust

The lack of interest in local news was a rare non-partisan issue. The research found almost no difference in engagement with local news between Republicans and Democrats, and the lack of engagement isn’t down to a lack of trust. Democrats and Republicans both hold positive opinions about local journalism, with Dems having only a slightly more positive view of local journalists than Republicans.

This stands in stark contrast to how Americans view ‘mass media’. At a national level, a 47-point gulf stands between Democrats and Republicans in their trust in mass media.

At the risk of repeating myself, the lack of engagement with local news isn’t down to trust. As Pew says, there hasn’t been a change “between the two major political parties in views toward local media”. Over the same period, trust in national mass media has fallen dramatically amongst Democrats, Independents and Republicans, with only 11% of Republicans having trust in the media.

A few other things to note:

• People with university degrees are even less engaged with local media.

• This makes me scratch my head. “63% of U.S. adults say they think their local news outlets are doing very or somewhat well financially.” Although newspaper readers are a bit more aware that all is not well.

• Only 15% of people pay for local news. 49% say that they can get what they need from free sources, and 30% say that simply aren’t interested enough in local news to pay for it.

Responses to the issues of a lack of demand

In the US and the UK, there is a growing sense of crisis about local journalism. Research and regulators have pointed the finger at platforms. They rightly point out that platforms have captured advertising that used to go to news media. Attempts to force Google and Facebook to pay news providers for linking to their content have created more problems than they have solved. In Canada, Meta - the owner of Facebook and Instagram - simply stopped linking to news content, which decimated small independent news publishers, forcing some to close.

While more revenue would help local news outlets, Pew’s research shows that there is a more fundamental problem: Lack of interest in local news. Joshua Darr, an associate professor in the Newhouse School of Public Communications and a senior researcher in the Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship at Syracuse University, highlighted two studies that found that you literally couldn’t give away local news in writing for the Nieman Lab. How do you solve this issue of lack of demand and interest in local news, the disruption of local news business models and the decline in civic engagement? It is unlikely that local outlets will rebuild their audiences of the past so they will have to adapt to this new era of low demand. He highlighted a new model of civic journalism advocated in the Roadmap for Local News report. Joshua views the problem not only as one of supporting local news outlets but also of re-engaging people in their communities. The solution:

Community co-creation

I did this when I was a local news executive for Gannett serving communities along the shores of Lake Michigan north of Milwaukee a decade ago. A teacher who advised the student newspaper at one of the high schools approached me with a problem. The student newspaper had stopped printing, and the students felt a loss because it was a challenge to get the clips they needed to submit when they applied for university. And it simply created a loss of status for them. In retrospect, we could have simply given over part of the Sunday newspaper to the students on a rotating basis. (Steal this idea!) Always one to over-engineer a solution, I instead gave the students an assignment: How has technology affected your lives? One student interviewed her grandmother about the changes in technology that she had seen in her life, and another wrote about the impact of social media on their lives. In the end, we printed eight stories from three high schools, and I posted others online. I remember a friend who worked for the local chamber of commerce commenting on how impressed he was about the articulateness of the local youth. We can and should empower community members to tell their own stories, freeing up reporters to cover local government and other hard news, while also capturing the lived experience of the community.

Local news as a utility

A working example of the kind of civic journalism that the Roadmap for Local News advocates for is The Documenters project in the US, which trains volunteers to cover local meetings. I also think seeing local news as an information utility as Outlier Media in Detroit does, using a text messaging-based service to provide information to people in the city on how to tap into local services. Both projects aim to get people involved in journalism, not just acting as passive consumers.

And Outlier Media approaches journalism as a utility. The navigation for their site is radically different from most local news sites. Yes, the content might be similar when you drill down, but the navigation focuses on what the content might mean for a person in the community, not just the content category. For instance, the category “Fix this First” takes you to a page titled “Basic needs across Detroit” and includes things stories about infrastructure repair and upkeep. It is a very different positioning for local news. I often talk about how journalism needs not only who, what, where, when and why but also why should a person care.

Does a community still need someone to tell its stories?

I was having a conversation recently, and I was talking about my passion for community and communications. But I wondered if my view of the role of journalism in local communities and also engaged journalism was of a time, a bit nostalgic and also steeped in how people used technology then rather than now.

Do people want to read stories about interesting people in their communities? Does this need to be done by a paid professional, or does this only need to be facilitated by someone? If the need is only one of facilitation, where does that role fit in the community? Is it a volunteer or paid role?

One responsibility of my first job as a reporter was a weekly feature in the Sunday paper - the Nor’wester in the Hays (Kansas) Daily News. I interviewed a Methodist minister who was also an amateur astronomer, a farmer who had turned to organic methods to make a living off of the original 40-acre farmstead that had been passed down through generations of his family and the owner of a local junk yard who was coming to the end of his life and wanted to tell a story he had never told anyone: How his Army unit was one of those that had liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (and had his own photos of the horrors to prove it). Stories are everywhere. Interesting people are everywhere, and people still love to hear these stories about their communities.

As local journalism has shrunk, it often has retreated into covering just the official life of our community - government, crime and infrastructure. We need to be creative and find ways to restore the information utility of local journalism as well as tell stories about the living, breathing heart of community life. To riff on something the great playwright Arthur Miller told The Observer, a good newspaper is a community talking to itself.

But we need to focus on the demand side of the equation as well as the supply. This isn’t just news avoidance or news fatigue. This is fundamental to people’s engagement with their communities as well as journalism. It is going to take systems thinking to restore people’s interest in local news, and I think Joshua Darr is onto something. Next week, I’ll think about the revenue to support this.

And now onto the links this week. In a discussion in the News Product Alliance Slack this week, someone was asking for advice after a deep drop in search traffic after Google’s recent algorithm update in March.

These are the sites with the greatest % declines in Google SEO visibility between September 4, 2023 and April 22, 2024 (@sistrix data)

Gee, notice anything totally obvious, or is it just me?

Sorry to anyone who works on any of these sites, I know a lot of you are seeing this. I… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— Lily Ray ???? (@lilyraynyc)
May 3, 2024

This was one of the stories that got me thinking about local journalism demand. In one report about rebuilding local media, researchers seemed to pass over public media institutions as only “pass-through” providers of local content from their networks. As someone who worked in local public media, that’s a bit harsh, but it was a critique that we heard. Detroit PBS CEO Rich Homberg spoke to Editor & Publisher magazine about their efforts to increase their local content production and also to partner and collaborate with other groups in the community. Ideastream Public Media, where I worked from 2018 to 2022, had a similar programme, but it waned by the time I joined the regional group. I hope that some of the vast amounts of money flowing to restore local journalism flows to public media. And I think projects like what is happening in Detroit show that public media leaders want to play a positive role in rebuilding local journalism.

Detroit PBS CEO Rich Homberg's mission to redefine local media - Editor and Publisher

Detroit Public Television, now rebranded as Detroit PBS, is poised for a transformative journey as it makes a resounding return to the vibrant heart of the city. With a renewed commitment to serving its community with integrity and innovation, the organization, under the leadership of President & CEO Rich Homberg, is embarking on an ambitious mission to redefine local media.

www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/detroit-pbs-ceo-rich-hombergs-mission-to-redefine-public-media,249722?newsletter=249726&vgo_ee=attpsUHuIAvpZHSHx%2BepGPWjdrl1EFXAhipt%2FZY2kFf00ChhR4JKof%2B%2F%3ARH%2BPEIsAy2rqlyzLaqtYlflypJips0Q0

This is a question that I have heard in the US and the UK, especially as journalism jobs have been concentrated in New York, Washington and London where the cost of living is prohibitive. Moreover, it used to be that you started off on a low salary but could grow into higher wages locally or move up to national outlets. That progression has been under threat for much of the past decade. And where digital outlets offered opportunities for a while, we’re in a moment where those jobs are drying up until digital shops can figure out a business model that isn’t so dependent on advertising.

Is journalism just a rich kid’s hobby? - Editor and Publisher

For most journalists who don’t come from generational wealth starting out in their careers, taking up journalism as a career is a risky move, especially for underrepresented minorities like Niya Doyle. Who can survive on the $15–20 an hour a full-time internship might offer? Let alone perform free labor for publications that can't afford to pay writers anything at all? But without clips, you can't grow in the field or eventually write for larger publications, which means bigger earning potential.

www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/is-journalism-just-a-rich-kids-hobby,249762

Legislators in my own state are trying to address this issue.

Illinois lawmakers consider tax break for news publishers, state-sponsored journalism scholarships - Editor and Publisher

A new measure being debated in the Illinois General Assembly would create a tax credit for certain news publishers based on the number of reporters they employ.  The proposal from Sen. …

www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/illinois-lawmakers-consider-tax-break-for-news-publishers-state-sponsored-journalism-scholarships,249874

It is important to say that these projects used machine learning rather than generative AI, and as I have written about quite a bit here and in the Media Bulletin newsletter I edit and write for Pugpig, this bit of AI technology has been playing an important role in journalism for years. It is good to bring this into the light and help people understand the positive role that AI is playing in reporting complex stories.

For the first time, two Pulitzer winners disclosed using AI in their reporting

Awarded investigative stories are increasingly relying on machine learning, whether covering Chicago police negligence or Israeli weapons in Gaza

www.niemanlab.org/2024/05/for-the-first-time-two-pulitzer-winners-disclosed-using-ai-in-their-reporting

This is becoming increasingly common, and actually, AI usually does a pretty good job of this.

USA Today is adding AI-generated summaries to the top of its articles

The summaries are already live on some stories.

www.theverge.com/2024/5/16/24158531/gannett-ai-generated-overviews-usa-today-memo

TV stations in the US make or used to make a lot of their revenue from retransmission fees, fees paid to cable and satellite companies to rebroadcast their content. With the decline of paid TV as Americans turn to streaming services, TV station owners like Sinclair have been hit hard. Most Americans get their news from their local TV stations. I have my issues with Sinclair, which injected a partisan tilt into local TV news that hadn’t been there before. Regardless, this financial pressure on local TV stations could harm an important source of local news in the US.

Sinclair explores selling roughly 30% of its broadcast stations, sources say

Sinclair is looking to sell a chunk of its 185 broadcast stations, according to people familiar with the matter.

www.cnbc.com/2024/05/09/sinclair-explores-selling-30percent-of-broadcast-stations.html

Job cuts and closures across the media in the US, UK, and Canada in 2023 were, in the words of the Press Gazette, “brutal”, and 2024 is off to an equally rough start. In the US, job losses across digital, print and broadcast have led to some describing the situation as a market failure.

What is ailing digital, broadcast and print journalism is complicated. Certainly, news has been losing in the attention economy for quite a while. A 2010 analysis by Ken Doctor highlighted that users of the New York Times site spent roughly 20 minutes a month, which was better than the 8-10 minutes a month that audiences spent on most local news sites. In 2010, the average Facebook user spent seven hours on the social network, more than “40 times more time spent on social sites than on any single news site”, Ken said.

As internet analyst Mary Meeker pointed out for several years in her annual reviews, advertising follows attention. While these issues are connected, it is the loss of advertising that has and is disrupting journalism. The layoffs and closures in the past year have been because of a decline in ad revenue. As Australian media researcher Amanda Lotz recently wrote: “The development of more effective and efficient advertising tools is what killed traditional newspaper operations, not the circulation of news on social media.”

The erosion of the business of newspapers began long before the rise of social media and even digital media, which I have talked about before. Raw circulation for newspapers in the US peaked in about 1991, but if you look at newspaper ‘penetration’ - the number of copies sold versus the population in a circulation area - in the US, it peaked in the middle of the 20th Century and then declined. In 1950, penetration was 123%. That declined to 67% in 1990 and had dropped to 50% a decade later. Circulation declined as people turned to TV and eventually digital outlets and platforms. Advertising followed the attention.

I have another hypothesis that I really to research. I also believe that shifts in retail have dramatically changed patterns in advertising. The consolidation and nationalisation of retail eliminated many of the local advertisers that used to advertise in newspapers. There simply aren’t as many local independent businesses as there once were. When I looked through the back issues of the newspapers I published, it was incredible to see the number of local grocery stores that advertised. In one of the towns where I edited the newspapers, it was the headquarters of a regional department store chain, even though the town had a population of 50,000 people. Those local or regional department stores took out huge full-page ads in their local newspapers.

Another case in point, the sales director at that paper, the Sheboygan Press, told me that when he started in the 1980s, the store managers of even national chains had locally controlled advertising budgets. They could decide where they spent their advertising money whether it was spent at radio stations, outdoor, or the newspaper. By the time I was executive editor, all of the ad inserts were printed nationally and added to the Sunday newspaper. Now, it is just as likely that a major retailer like Target will rely on selling directly to customers via their app as advertising via flyers in newspapers.

This is why larger news and media organisations have pivoted to reader revenue. In the past week, The Atlantic has announced that they now get 2/3 of their revenue from readers rather than advertising. However, more could and should be done to innovate around advertising products and other revenue streams, and the opportunities to do this vary by the scale and market sector of the audience.

• For large organisations like Bloomberg, first-party data has allowed them to end their use of programmatic advertising. The data hold for a very valuable audience provide them with a competitive moat.

• After the pandemic, events are booming again, and this revenue stream works across publishing scales, from local independent publishers to larger publishers, as well as whether the publisher operates in the news, consumer or B2B sectors.

• Publishers in the B2C space are seeing e-commerce as another opportunity, according to the UK Association of Online Publishers.

Space exists for innovation in both revenue and content products. Lotz goes on to say, “The commercial failure of news organisations is not due to their journalism product but because they are no longer nearly so strong a tool for attracting attention for advertisers.” That statement requires some unpacking. I agree that journalism is struggling in the attention economy, but I think there are issues around their journalism products. As FT Strategies and the Knight Lab recently found out, a gulf exists between the expectations of Gen Z audiences about how they want to receive their news and the products that currently exist. There is ample room to innovate around individual products and the product bundle as the New York Times is demonstrating.

And now onto the links for the week. The AI developments continue to come quickly. The Financial Times became the latest major publisher to ink a deal with OpenAI. They will receive attribution for the user of their journalism, and the FT sees this as an opportunity to learn how generative AI will be used to discover content. Their openness to experimentation and learning shows how confident they are.

OpenAI inks strategic tie-up with UK's Financial Times, including content use | TechCrunch

OpenAI, maker of the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT, has netted another news licensing deal in Europe, adding London's Financial Times to a growing list of OpenAI, maker of the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT, has netted another news licensing deal in Europe, adding London's Financial Times to a growing list of publishers it's paying for content access.

techcrunch.com/2024/04/29/openai-inks-strategic-tie-up-with-uks-financial-times-including-content-use

The FT can be confident because it was early to pivot to reader revenue. Financial information and analysis that the FT provides sits on the information wants to be expensive end of the spectrum. The FT has become famous for its North Star framework, in part, because it markets that framework as part of its consulting business, FT Strategies. This new metric includes: “FT.com’s paying digital audience; FT Specialist paying subscribers; FT Live paying attendees; FT newspaper circulation (retail and subscribed print sales) and FTChinese.com paying subscribers.” If a customer is subscribed to multiple products, they are counted twice because it reflects the total revenue of the group.

The FT reorients its business around ‘global paying audience’

The new approach is designed to help grow direct audience revenue beyond its core journalism offerings and across its broader portfolio of products and services.

toolkits.com/publisher-monetization/financial-times-global-paying-audience

As I mentioned above, The Atlantic has announced that it has reached profitability and now earns two-thirds of its revenue from readers. CEO Nicholas Thompson isn’t breaking out the champagne and instead highlighted that he will continue his disciplined approach. He isn’t going on a hiring spree.

What's next for The Atlantic after reaching profitability and 1m subscribers

The Atlantic has reached two milestones: of reaching both profitability and one million subscriptions. Interview with CEO Nicholas Thompson.

pressgazette.co.uk/news-leaders/the-atlantic-ceo-nicholas-thompson-interview-profitable-subscriptions

For The Guardian, a 16% decline in advertising revenue has put pressure on its business, forcing it to seek a small number of redundancies (layoffs for my US readers). For a lot of publishers, I wonder how much they will pivot away from advertising and how permanent that will be.

Guardian to make 'small number of voluntary redundancies' amid ad recession

The Guardian is looking to make editorial voluntary redundancies as it attempts to manoeuvre around a £39m forecasted budget deficit.

pressgazette.co.uk/news/guardian-voluntary-redundancies-advertising-recession

While big players like the Associated Press, Axel Springer and the FT are striking deals with OpenAI, other newspapers are taking a different approach. As I wrote in Pugpig’s Media Bulletin last week, three approaches seem to be developing amongst publishers:

• Licencing deals

• Lawsuits

• or BYO - build your own, strategies that B2B players like Bloomberg and business-of-media site Skift are pursuing.

In this lawsuit, eight newspapers owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital accuse the tech companies of violating their copyright by using their content to train their models.

8 Daily Newspapers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I.

The suit, which accuses the tech companies of copyright infringement, adds to the fight over the online data used to power artificial intelligence.

www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/business/media/newspapers-sued-microsoft-openai.html

Colour Axios CEO Jim VanderHei sceptical of AI. He and his company spoke to all of the AI heavies.

Sounding very much like Wrexham’s Phil Parkinson, he says that AI will write a bunch of commoditised content, which “which I think are fucked anyway”, VanderHei said. It’s a useful contrary position, and VanderHei has launched two very successful media brands so he’s difficult to write off.

Jim VandeHei on AI-Proofing the News and Ignoring ‘Twitter Nerds’

The outspoken Axios CEO thinks the future is personalized, brief, and human.

nymag.com/intelligencer/article/jim-vandehei-on-ai-proofing-news-and-defying-twitter-nerds.html

An interesting stance on how AI will be added to publishing tools. “Primarily, our AI tools streamline editorial workflows by automating routine tasks such as translating, tagging, categorization, titles, and summaries, which frees up journalists’ time.”

Labrador CMS’ Jan Thoresen on why publishing platforms must have AI embedded into their fabric

At this year’s FIPP World Media Congress in Cascais, Portugal, one of the key event partners is Labrador CMS, an online web content publishing system

mediamakersmeet.com/less-than-10-of-reporters-know-how-to-use-chatgpt-labrador-cms-jan-thoresen-on-why-publishing-platforms-must-have-ai-embedded-into-their-fabric

I am going to make a link social media and AI. A YouGov poll found 48% of Brits view AI in journalism negatively, and only 6% believe it will do more good than bad. Across the Atlantic, Americans want the government to make social media better. The

New Report Finds Most Americans Favor Government Regulation of Social Media

Would more government regulation improve social media?

www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-report-finds-most-americans-favor-government-regulation-of-social-media/714657

I’m writing this on Beehiiv, and they made some news last week, announcing a new funding round. The newsletter space continues to be a space for growth.

Beehiiv attracts $33M to make its newsletter publishing platform more sticky | TechCrunch

With the number of people using e-mail globally approaching 5 billion, newsletters delivered regularly into people's inboxes continue to look like a

techcrunch.com/2024/04/30/beehiiv-newsletters

I grew up in a wood surrounded by the corn fields of Illinois about 90 miles west of Chicago. The Windy City was a hub of journalism in the state, and it used to be that the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where I got my bachelor’s degree, kept the city supplied with talent. I know how grim the situation is with local news organisations in the US. But it still took my breath away when I recently found out that since 2005, Illinois has lost 85% of its newspaper journalists, according to Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. Illinois has suffered the highest number of journalism job losses of any state in the US.

But the story is similar across the country, even if not to the same degree. “Total newspaper circulation declined from more than 50 million in 2005 to just over 10 million in 2023,” according to Frank Jones in Big Think. Sadly, not only are things not getting better, the decline is getting worse.

And that means that more communities are losing their only source of local news. For many of these communities, there isn’t a local radio or TV station that is providing coverage.

America’s news deserts are spreading

Most counties in the U.S. have only one local newspaper, often one that publishes weekly instead of daily.

bigthink.com/strange-maps/counties-without-newspapers

I’ve written quite a bit about ways to stem this loss including applying innovation models, different funding models and the revenue mix for the new independent news organisations springing up in communities. we’re going to have to get creative to stem the collapse.

Information Districts offer a new model

We are going to need all kinds of experiments and models to address this crisis, and it is a crisis. For me, it is not just a crisis in journalism but a symptom of the decline of communities and the rising crisis in loneliness, particularly in my native United States. When I was at the BBC, they brought Robert Putnam to talk about his research and book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

Can journalism play a role in rebuilding communities? I think it can in partnership with other local institutions, such as libraries and civic groups. I have long followed the work of Simon Galperin for his advocacy of information districts, which is a form of municipal service district. In the US, there are 33,000 such districts, which are “defined areas in a city or county” where property owners pay an additional tax for extra services in the area. They have been established to pay for fire, water, sanitation or business improvement districts, but Simon’s idea is that the same concept could be used to provide for the information needs of a community. Simon estimated that if the 32,000 people in his community paid $40 a year, it would provide a half-million-dollar budget for a newsroom. He said:

He estimated that the budget would provide for three to four reporters, money for events and community engagement activities. Of course, as Christine Schmidt wrote in the Nieman Lab, it would be difficult for low-income communities to pay for such districts. Galperin said that communities could pool their resources. “The point of an info district it to create more civically engaged communities. It’s about bridging the gap between democracy and journalism,” he said.

Galperin is now testing his idea with the Jersey Bee, which “address(es) people’s basic needs to enable their well-being”. For an info district to serve its community, it needs to identify the information needs of that community. Galperin has applied Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs as a framework to provide a map of community information needs. “It’s a framework we use to prioritize delivering information that enables more people to participate fully in our community by addressing gaps in access to essential resources, public safety, and social connection,” Simon wrote.

It’s a novel model for local news that focuses on engaging the community by listening to community members and collaborating with them. The project looks to build media literacy in the community and help people living there improve their quality of life.

Their research isn’t just driving the topics they cover but also how they distribute their news. Like Outlier Media in Detroit, they are using a text-based information service, which is unsurprising because of Simon’s work with Groundsource. Broadcasters and newspapers are using its text-messaging technology to engage audiences in the process of their journalism not just trying to build an audience after the journalism is finished.

Simon’s approach has elements of human-centred design and Saul Alinsky’s community organising approach. It is radically different than the standard approach to journalism, and I am cautious about invoking Alinsky’s name because he has become a partisan symbol of animosity for the Right in the US, in no small part because of Barack Obama’s history as a community organiser. To me, community organising is about helping communities meet their needs, and I think Simon is right in trying to rebuild journalism’s relationship with the communities that it serves because that is essential in rebuilding the trust people need to have in journalism.

A decade ago when I had the gift of serving as a local newspaper editor in the US, so much of my energy was in building relationships in the communities our papers served. Like what Simon is doing, some of what I did was about facilitation, not just the traditional production of journalism. I was honest with the community that we couldn’t cover the community they wanted without working with them. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much of a runway to run with that approach. Within months after I started, Gannett launched its Newsroom of the Future reorganisation, which I was involved in at the national and regional level. I tried to build my vision of community engagement into what happened after the reorganisation, but due to cuts and people taking buyouts (voluntary redundancy), I lost half of my staff for a time. And the cuts took my own job only months later.

I am rethinking my future, and I wonder if there is a way that I can have another go at my vision. It definitely will have to exist outside of the corporate model. If you want to talk about it, please get in touch.

AI shifts from experimentation to execution

I have been working in digital journalism since the mid-90s, and there have been few technologies that have shifted from awareness to experimentation to implementation as large-language models have. Poynter highlighted an Associated Press survey that found 70% of newsroom staff in the US and Europe are already using generative AI to create content, using genAI to help write headlines, newsletters and social media posts.

AI is already reshaping newsrooms, AP study finds - Poynter

Despite ethical concerns, nearly 70% of newsroom staffers recruited for an Associated Press survey say they’re using generative AI to create content

www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2024/artificial-intelligence-transforming-journalism

I have been a little surprised about the sudden frenzy over AI because journalism organisations have been using elements of artificial intelligence for years now. They have been using:

• machine learning models to find patterns in data, text or images

• natural language processing for entity extraction or topic analysis

• even automated content about topics with consistent data such as sports, weather and real estate. 

However, genAI tools have lowered the bar to entry in using the technology. Lowering the barriers to entry for technology always as I wrote in Pugpig’s Media Bulletin last week, we’re seeing news organisations shift from experimentation to execution with this new generation of AI tools. As with other technological revolutions in newsrooms, the tools have become accessible to a wider range of journalists, and for more advanced news organisations, they have the product frameworks and the cross-functional management muscle to rapidly experiment and iterate AI services.

Leveraging AI to boost efficiency and innovation in the news

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has generated excitement and fear alike within the news industry, prompting many to ponder what lies in store for journalism’s future. If approached smartly and leveraged strategically, AI offers journalists and their outlets promising potential to boost efficiency and innovation.

ijnet.org/en/story/leveraging-ai-boost-efficiency-and-innovation-news

Of course, we are also seeing volume publishers lean into AI to create more content. That way lies madness, and it runs counter to what news organisations need to do. AI should be used to free up journalists time to do more original reporting and engage audiences, basically any activity that creates more value for audiences and captures more value from them.

Newsweek is making generative AI a fixture in its newsroom

The legacy publication is leaning on AI for video production, a new breaking news team, and first drafts of some stories.

www.niemanlab.org/2024/04/inside-newsweek-ai-experiment

And meanwhile, the platforms continue to build their AI capabilities. Google continues its work with Gemini and Search Generative Experience, and Microsoft pushes forward with Copilot. Meta continues to update and roll out its AI tools. I used Copilot to create the image for this newsletter, and I have to admit to being blown away. That being said, I often use Creative Commons images, another community that I am part of.

Meta Brings its Most Advanced AI Chatbot to All of its Aps

Meta's keen to get more people using its latest AI chatbot - but will they?

www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-brings-its-most-advanced-ai-chatbot-to-all-of-its-aps/713662

"Impressed by their agility, shocked by their arrogance": Meta's Llama 3 divides opinion

At a time when Google's Gemini and Open AI's ChatGPT are charging premium subscriptions for the full use of their AI, last Thursday's launch of Meta's

mediamakersmeet.com/impressed-by-their-agility-shocked-by-their-arrogance-metas-llama-3-divides-opinion

Are paywalls ceding the battleground to misinformation?

We wrote about this piece in Pugpig’s Media Bulletin this week. Time’s former managing editor Richard Stengel has researched and written about misinformation, and he is concerned that as more journalism moves behind paywalls, it means that more people will fall prey to misinformation. While I share his concerns about misinformation especially with increased activity by state actors and partisans, I don’t agree with his solution, which is to simply drop the paywalls around election content. I don’t believe in simple solutions. If the solutions to journalism’s problems were simple, we would see more success, especially at the local level. It is more complicated.

I do agree with him that news organisations should leverage the attention that the elections will deliver to attract more subscribers and more registered users. As my friend at The Audiencers highlighted, Bloomberg changed up their paywall to a registration wall to allow audiences to read their climate coverage during COP.

Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls

The case for making journalism free—at least during the 2024 election

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/paywall-problems-media-trust-democracy/678032

And lastly, it is interesting to see the unraveling of the consolidation in digital media. G/O just sold The Onion to local investors in Chicago, giving the Windy City-based staff assurances that they could continue to work where they were and telling the that they would deal them into the satire site’s success. As someone who read The Onion in print at university, I’m pulling for them.

Area man, Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson, buys The Onion | TechCrunch

Jeff Lawson, co-founder and recently departed CEO of Twilio, is the proud new owner of satirical online newspaper The Onion.

techcrunch.com/2024/04/26/area-man-twilio-co-founder-jeff-lawson-buys-the-onion

Vice Media sold Refinery29, which has been hit hard by the decline in social media, to Essence. Sundial Media Group, a VC-backed company that owns Essence, says that the purchase will fill out its holdings across culture and commerce. Commerce is increasingly becoming an element of fashion and culture content companies.

Essence's parent to buy Refinery29 from Vice Media

The deal offers Refinery29 a lifeline.

www.axios.com/2024/04/18/essences-refinery29-vice-media-deal

A bit of an apology for the slight delay. I took up running during the pandemic, and I ran my first half-marathon this week. I have been training for the past four months, and it felt like such a great achievement to finish the race, much less finish it in one hour 41 minutes.

After years of outsourcing interactivity and community to social platforms, news organisations are launching multiple efforts to reclaim their relationships with their audiences. It comes almost a decade after news organisations threw in the towel, shut down their comment sections and focused on off-platform strategies for their audience development. As the executive editor at Reuters said at the time: “We felt that, since so much of the conversation around stories had gravitated toward social, that was the better place for that discourse to happen.”

However, with Meta making it clear that it won’t be promoting news either on Facebook or in its new Twitter competitor Threads and declining traffic from other social platforms, publishers have decided that it is time for them to rebuild their own communities. Comments are reappearing on media sites and apps as community software has become more sophisticated, services such as Coral, Hyvor and Viafoura. (Disclosure, these are all community integrations with Pugpig’s Bolt app platform - my day job.) These platforms use AI to help with moderation and have strategies to help support positive communities. As I know from my years working on engaged journalism projects at the BBC and The Guardian, good technology is part of supporting healthy communities, but the best technology cannot replace the active involvement of the editorial staff.

It is inspiring to see what innovative media companies are doing to reclaim the relationships with their audiences from the platforms. In the Philippines, the groundbreaking journalism group Rappler launched its own community apps on iOS, Android and on the web late last year. Rappler decided to do this for audience development and also to counter disinformation that has been rampant on social media platforms in the Philippines.

“The insidious manipulation of Big Tech – inciting fear, anger and hate for profit – has destroyed the public sphere and the crucial discussions needed for democracy. It’s time to build our shared reality and redefine civic engagement, to restore trust,” Rappler CEO and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa wrote in an article launching the apps.

Rappler has long been incredibly effective at leveraging technology to support its journalistic mission, but they have also married technology with smart community strategies, involving journalists in the conversations on the platform. “When you go into chat rooms and you see Maria or another Rappler reporter asking you what you think, there’s something there that builds trust,” Rappler Community Lead Pia Ranada told Esther Kezia Thorpe for Digital Content Next. Rappler’s success has been its commitment to journalism, its successful development of technology and its product thinking. They have used the community for crowdsourcing and have moved beyond news content, which has opened up revenue opportunities.

Rappler is not alone. I was fascinated to see Jeff Elgie of Canada’s Village Media announce that his group was launching a “local, community-powered social network”. He wrote:

“SPACES: a haven for local discussions, curated by those who know them best—local experts and professional journalists. Our platform is more than just a social network; it's a commitment to reviving the lost art of community engagement. By fostering safe, civil, and meaningful interactions, SPACES aims to strengthen the bonds between neighbours, reignite local passions, and rebuild the trust that has been eroded by impersonal and divisive platforms.”

Elgie’s Village Media has been building a local journalism network in Canada while the country’s local media has been declining just as rapidly as in the US. Spaces and Village Media is a company to watch, particularly if you work in the local journalism space.

Staying in Canada, the Toronto Star added comments across its site in 2022. They tied commenting to registration, which became a key part of their strategy to convert anonymous users to known ones and improve the community experience, according to an article on Poool’s Audiencers. It led to improvement in several KPIs, including:

• A 26% increase in new commenters

• A 72% increase in registrations and commenters now make up 25% of all registrations.

• And since commenting has been tied to registrations, there has been a 405% increase in logins.

They have since added new features that drive engagement from their commenters using Viafoura’s technology. When users login, they are alerted to responses to their comments, much as on social networks like Facebook. The volume of comments has increased by 60%, the replies to comments increased by 79% and time spent in the commenting section has increased by 30%.

Having spent more than half of my career working at the intersection of community, technology and community, it is exciting to see these new efforts. I was involved in several early audience engagement projects at the BBC, including the World Service’s Talking Point, answering crowd-sourced questions about the 2000 US election (using an early mobile webcasting kit), blogging about the 2004 US election and being on the launch team of the BBC’s World Have Your Say. When social media platforms led media companies to focus on off-platform activities, for a time it led to too much focus on building the audiences for those platforms without enough clear benefit for media companies. Certainly, some strategic leaders made sure that their off-platform efforts had direct benefits for their companies in terms of audience development and revenue, but for volume-focused companies, I saw those companies chase the whims of platforms without enough attention to how these efforts supported their own businesses.

The Toronto Star’s success shows how these new community efforts can drive important engagement outcomes, and Rappler is showing how strategic use of community can directly generate additional revenue. I am hopeful that these efforts can restore some of the damage done during the Platform Era.

Now for the weekly round-up. Isabelle Roughol highlights the lack of advancement opportunities for journalists and how this is leading to the flight of talent. She proposes that journalism companies develop a career ladder and communicate transparently how employees can climb it.

The management tool too many newsrooms lack

A career ladder is a roadmap to promotion.

www.isabelleroughol.com/lede/how-not-to-send-the-wrong-people-into-management

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen of the Reuters Institute makes an excellent point that many recent tech advances have failed to live up to the hype that they would transform society such as AR/VR, smart speakers and blockchain/Web3. The demand was dramatically less than the titans of tech led us to believe. He described the public’s approach as “AI pragmatism”, with a mix of concern, scepticism and yet a practical appreciation.

That’s the demand side, and Rasmus also considers the supply side. He says that news organisations are engaging in experimeation and incrementalism. Bookmark this one.

Axios thinks that original reporting and in-person events will become even more valuable in the age of AI.

Axios Sees A.I. Coming, and Shifts Its Strategy

“The premium for people who can tell you things you do not know will only grow in importance, and no machine will do that,” says Jim VandeHei, C.E.O. of Axios.

www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/business/media/axios-ai-strategy.html

With this view in mind, it was interesting to see Yahoo acquire Artifcact, the short-lived app from the co-founders of Instagram. Yahoo will not be bringing the app back but will instead use its underlying technology to power personalisation across its platform.

Yahoo announces the acquisition of Artifact, the news discovery platform created by Instagram cofounders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger | Yahoo Inc.

Through Artifact's AI platform, Yahoo will bring users more content tailored to their interests

www.yahooinc.com/press/yahoo-announces-the-acquisition-of-artifact-the-news-discovery-platform-created-by-instagram-cofounders-kevin-systrom-and-mike-krieger

Pain in media podcasting

Simon Owens explains why local podcasts have struggled. As he says and I know, building audiences for local podcasts is an uphill battle, and he says that local ad sales teams lack the sophistication to do the type of sales necessary to support them. It’s hard to sell ads when local podcasts struggle so much to build an audience. The podcast economy has a high head and a very shallow tail.

Why local podcasts are rarely sustainable

Most local news operators have either never launched a podcast or shuttered one after only a few months.

simonowens.substack.com/p/why-local-podcasts-are-rarely-sustainable

Simon points to SB Nation shutting down its podcast network which covered local sporting teams across the US, as well as The Athletic closing some of its local podcasts as well. We currently don’t have have a generic model for local podcast success, and from the time I worked for a local public media group in the US, I found that we had an easier time of building an audience in 2018 than we did a couple of years later.

SB Nation Podcast Network Being Shut Down

barrettsportsmedia.com/2024/04/04/sb-nation-podcast-network-being-shut-down

Chicago Public Media’s problems run deeper than the difficulty of local podcasts, but that is one element of their challenges. The Chicago public media group is suffering from a declining audience and advertising revenue as well as declines in philanthropic support, which is a major revenue item for stations like the groups WBEZ. The cuts also included drastic cuts in the broadcasters podcast unit. Podcats not tied to its news output were shuttered. If a big shop like WBEZ struggles with promoting its podcasts, it underlines challenges that the medium faces.

Chicago Public Media lays off 14 staffers, citing financial troubles

The move to terminate nearly 15% of 62 unionized content creators at WBEZ and four people at the Chicago Sun-Times comes amid declining fundraising, listenership and philanthropic support.

www.wbez.org/stories/chicago-public-media-lays-off-14-staffers/451b3f28-338c-45bc-98c2-742a7106ecf2

It is not all doom and gloom. In announcing a deal by Substack to allow podcastrers on its platform to distribute episodes on Spotify, Substack annnounced that its podcasters were generating $100 m of revenue a year, which was double the year before.

Substack now allows podcasters to sync and distribute their episodes to Spotify | TechCrunch

Substack announced on Thursday that it's launching a few new features for podcasters on its platform.

techcrunch.com/2024/04/11/substack-podcasters-sync-distribute-episodes-spotify/

Events and custom content are helping the start-up land major accounts including Microsoft, Verizon and Genesis. The young global news site already is having profitable months despite the generally challenging environment in media. Some 20% of Semafor’s audience are C-suite executives, and that is helping to drive their sales.

How Semafor's Rachel Oppenheim is prioritizing predictability in the ad business

Semafor's CRO discussed how she's leading the media start-up's sales team in achieving profitable months.

digiday.com/media/how-semafors-rachel-oppenheim-is-prioritizing-predictability-in-the-ad-business/?utm_campaign=digidaydis&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=general-rss

AI influencers have grown very popular in the Chinese market, and by adding tools to create them in TikTok, the hope is that the app can generate more revenue. All I have to say is what fresh hell is this!

TikTok May Enable Brands To Generate AI Bots to Pitch Products

The process would enable brands to create AI characters that sell their products in the app.

www.socialmediatoday.com/news/tiktok-may-soon-enable-brands-to-generate-ai-bots-to-pitch-products-on-thei/713027