Burnout, frustration at the lack of opportunities for advancement or growth, and the hollowing out of the industry: Journalism is facing a talent crisis. While some of the crisis is driven by the collapse of the business at multiple levels, some of it is self-inflicted. Yes, journalism is shedding staff at a furious pace, but it is also is driving people filled with passion for the mission and the work away by having rigid, outdated career paths. And it’s failing to take care of leaders exposed to incredible levels of stress as they must make painful decisions during what feels like endless rounds of cuts.

The loss of reporters

I don’t want to gloss over the loss of reporting talent as well. More than 8000 jobs in journalism disappeared last year across the US, UK and Canada, according to the Press Gazette. Not all of these positions were reporters, but the cuts were still deep and broad. More than 500 journalists were laid off in the US in January alone, according to Politico.

It’s grim, and this crisis has hit so many people. And I know how challenging it is to remain resilient in the face of this. I took a buyout from the Guardian in 2010 and joined my wife in her media consultancy. I had a fascinating role with the Media Development Investment Fund that only lasted a year in 2012. I joined Gannett as a regional executive editor in 2014. I survived the first six rounds of cuts large and small but not the seventh, and the position was eliminated in 2015. I went back to consulting and training before returning to full-time employment in 2018. I have been grateful for more stability since then. And now I work as the consulting director for Pugpig, a company that builds apps, websites and digital archives for publishers. I love helping publishers succeed, but I am wary about doing it inside the burning building.

An exodus of product talent

“Cats need to be herded. Cats don’t like being herded. How does that make the cat herder feel?” That is my tongue-in-cheek summary of my master’s dissertation. Kidding aside, the research looked at how the cross-functional coordination work - known formally as boundary-spanning - affected the professional well-being of product managers at news organisations. Were they thriving, surviving or burning out? Of the 17 product managers I interviewed for my research, five had left a role or the industry entirely not long before the research. Another data point to consider: Although the sample was evenly split between men and women, of the five who left the industry, four were women. That is a topic unto itself, which I’ll touch on in another newsletter.

I was reminded of the conversations I had with these amazing product managers this week when a community I’m part of was expressing frustration about the lack of advancement opportunities for product-minded people in the journalism industry. They told stories of being passed over for senior leadership positions in journalism groups because they hadn’t come up through the editorial side of the business. They believed that their cross-functional skills, particularly business skills, made them uniquely suited to meet the challenges facing news organisations. Like the subjects of my research, some were so frustrated that they were considering leaving the industry.

I won’t say more in detail about the conversations in that community, but I can add some of the findings from my research. One product manager had grown frustrated by what she referred to as HiPPO decision-making - strategies decided and driven not based on data and research but rather based on the highest-paid person’s opinion. It was just one example of a lack of alignment at levels of management above the product manager. Without that agreement on high-level goals, stresses built up on the product managers and they burnt out.

Market leaders like the New York Times have invested heavily in product talent, In other news organisations, managers need to understand that product managers who started as journalists still have aspirations to manage and have influence over wider parts of the business. There need to be clearer paths of progression for these valuable employees. Many of these product leaders have developed expertise across the business, and that would be valued and rewarded in other businesses. In my research, product managers naturally developed cross-functional relationships, many even before taking on formal product roles. Cross-skilling across editorial, commercial and technical roles should be formalised and used to train product managers and product-minded editors to become future leaders.

And now onto the media news for the week. AI is the topic of the year, and in this article, Ross Sleight, chief strategy officer at digital transformation specialists CI&T, talks about the changes that are coming in the industry. Google’s Gemini will change the search experience, and that is just one change coming in terms of interfaces. Changes in technology and the business will continue. New organisations need to do what so many are doing right now, experimenting with proofs of concept, working for internal alignment and adoption and scaling what works.

Ross Sleight on AI: Adapt now, as business models are under threat

“We always overestimate the short-term and underestimate the long-term impact of things. That's exactly what's happening with AI today. So, in the long

mediamakersmeet.com/ross-sleight-on-ai-adapt-now-as-business-models-are-under-threat

“Generative AI is an epochal development—less like social media and more like the advent of the internet itself. Much like that moment, this technology is transformative because it empowers people in how they create and find information.” This piece raises questions about how IP should be licenced and how business models will evolve. And it will allow for the rapid development of new products. This is a good piece that covers the complexities of the changes AI will bring.

AI is a big opportunity for the news media. Let’s not blow it. 

It’s been a rough start to the year for news media. Record layoffs in January have piled on top of years of decline at newspapers, especially at the local level. The explanations are diverse and complicated, but near the top is the impact of online platforms like social media—which have siphoned off eyeballs and advertisers. […]

www.cjr.org/analysis/ai-opportunity-news-media-lets-not-blow-it.php

WAN-IFRA, which I have had a long-standing relationship with, has just launched an AI programme for the year, and they highlighted how major media companies in Europe and Asia are using AI in their newsrooms. I like how Wang Yin of Mediacorp put it in saying that the Singaporean broadcaster was “making (AI) an assistant and not a replacement”. They are looking to use AI to make workflows more efficient. Smart.

How Schibsted and Mediacorp are deploying AI in the newsroom

2024-02-22. As AI becomes mainstream in everyday work, there are many editorial opportunities for newsrooms to discover. However, incorporating AI in your workflow can seem daunting. How does a newsroom begin this integration?

wan-ifra.org/2024/02/how-schibsted-and-mediacorp-are-deploying-ai-in-the-newsroom

The latest Reuters Digital News Report “suggests that knowing your audience is key and media publishers should target readers who are already considering paying for news”. If there is a theme to this newsletter, it is the call to focus on your audience and get close to them. Inside Story in Greece has 4000 paying members, and they connected with many of them through in-person workshops. Ah, the value of relationships.

Thriving without ads: How inside story sustains investigative journalism on subscription revenue - The Fix

As an investigative platform, it made sense for them to use a subscription model. The model gave them the freedom to report without any editorial interference and helped them gain credibility in the eyes of their readers.

thefix.media/2024/2/12/thriving-without-ads-how-inside-story-sustains-investigative-journalism-on-subscription-revenue

Google has launched a new tool called Offerwall that allows a new “range of options such as purchasing a subscription, viewing a video ad, sharing data, or making a micropayment for short-term access”.

Publishers test new Offerwall monetization tool from Google

Audiences unlock access to content by selecting from a range of options such as purchasing a subscription, viewing a video ad, sharing data, or making a micropayment for short-term access.

toolkits.com/publisher-monetization/publishers-test-google-offerwall

With Press Forward starting to name partner communities and states, Dan Kennedy says that there must be other models that reach smaller communities and smaller news start-ups.

Nonprofit local news needs to move past the large funder/ large project paradigm

Nieman Lab now has a reporter devoted to covering developments in local news. Sophie Culpepper previously worked at The Lexington Observer, one of a number of nonprofit news startups in the Boston …

dankennedy.net/2024/02/13/nonprofit-local-news-needs-to-move-past-the-large-funder-large-project-paradigm

My friend Adam Tinworth takes a look at the end of the era of platform dependency. “All this talk of “gatekeepers” and “platforms” disguises the brutal truth: we let other companies come between us and our audience.” Amen. During the platform era, we got focused on the needs of platforms rather than the needs of our audiences.

A manifesto for audience centricity in journalism

The doomsayers are out in force. Journalism is dead, they say. Just look at the job losses, the titles closing. But we’re just paying the price of bungling the last digital transition. Let’s not repeat that mistake with the coming one.

onemanandhisblog.com/2024/02/the-media-inflection-point-a-manifesto-for-audience-centricity

More media business turmoil: Buzzfeed to sell acquisitions and CNN stars face pay cuts

Anderson Cooper makes $20m a year, and Wolf Blitzer makes $15m a year. This level of salaries are unlikely to remain so high as CNN struggles and new CEO Mark Thompson reviews budgets. As The Wrap points out, Thompson is not accustomed to seven-figure on-air talent salaries, and the market simply won’t support these excessive salaries in the future.

Media has always been a star system, and TV is much more so. The median TV producer salary is $53,000, but small station salaries can be a lot less. Wolf Blitzer’s makes 283 times more than the average TV producer in the US. The cable TV news market won’t justify that premium going forward.

CNN to Slash Budgets, Star Salaries as Mark Thompson Digs In

New CNN boss Mark Thompson is ready to slash budgets and star salaries to overhaul the network, experts and former CNN staffers told TheWrap

www.thewrap.com/cnn-looks-to-slash-budgets-star-salaries-as-mark-thompson-digs-in

Two years after Buzzfeed went public to raise capital to go on an acquisition spree, it is now having to sell some of those acquisitions as it struggles to hold on, Sarah Fischer of Axios says.

With such a grim start to the year for media, some analysts are predicting an ‘extinction-level event’ for the media, and it is not hard to imagine that we’re facing this in the US and UK. Brian Morrissey sees this as the end of the mass media era. I think it will result in a painful winnowing. As the Reuters Institute has been saying for a couple of years now in their annual Digital News Report, we are in a “winner takes most” scenario in which a couple of major brands e.g. the New York Times in the US, capture a good chunk of news digital subscription revenue.

Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?

Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press’s relationship to its audience.

www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/is-the-media-prepared-for-an-extinction-level-event

This sums up the Platform Era.

It is not a particularly cheery piece, but like any New Yorker piece, it has some wonderful lines. Clare Malone writes that many will be left out and the focus will be on audiences that will reliably pay - mostly old, rich men. “There will be idiocy and the enablement of rich idiots,” she writes.

But as with the extinction of the dinosaurs, this will give way to new life. Some publishers are serving lucrative niches, such as Politico or Punchbowl DC. In the UK, we’re seeing a new level of local experimentation. Of course, in buzzy Bristol, there is the Cable news co-op. The Manchester Mill is expanding after a £350,000 investment last year from CNN’s new leader, Mark Thompson, Nicholas Johnston the publisher of Axios and others. And just today, the former editor of the Journal in Newcastle announced a well-funded launch of a weekly subscription news site to cover northeast England.

All of this disruption reminds me Stewart Brand’s famous quote, which is rarely quoted in one. “On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.”

For most of the internet era, the focus has been on the information wants to be free part of the quote. The casual use of the quote suffers both from the dual meaning of free in English and also from a lack of deeper analysis. Brand was saying that distribution costs were going to decrease in the digital era. The consolidation of local newspapers in the 1950s meant that newspapers became local monopolies. Print distribution became a valuable local business for newspapers. Brand was saying that the internet would render that print distribution monopoly irrelevant.

Let’s focus on the other part of the quote. Information also wants to be expensive. Yes, this means that certain types of information like the financial data that flows through Bloomberg terminals or the financial news in the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times remain extremely valuable. What is rare and valuable? That can be information, or it can be other things. It can be a sense of belonging, which is why the intersection of media and community has been a major focus of my career. Community and belonging in short supply, and those outlets or individual journalists and creators who provide that are doing quite well. Think of your personal passions and think about the creators who inform and entertain you and make you feel a sense of community. Think of how valuable that is to you.

That is one half of the equation. My editor at my college newspaper, Theo Francis, who now works at the Wall Street Journal, told me how a relative framed the other half of the equation. You know you can create value. But can you capture it? If you are starting a new media venture or looking to remake the one you have, you have to think about how you capture value.

Speaking of capturing value, the New York Times has been building a formidable subscription bundle. Puzzles have been an important part of their bundle, and I can tell you from my day job that puzzle users are a small but deeply engaged segment of the audience. With all of that great engagement, they are now looking to earn revenue by selling advertising around games.

With Games Advertising, The New York Times Is Pitching Habit

With millions of daily users and news nowhere in sight, the publisher taps new advertising categories.

www.adweek.com/media/new-york-times-games-advertising

The New York Times is looking to innovate how they sell advertising in the face of ongoing declines in the revenue source. Fortunately, they have continued to grow their subscription numbers.

The New York Times expects ad revenue to continue to decline in 2024

The New York Times' Q4 2023 earnings report showed the company isn’t entirely immune from the volatile ad market. In fact, the company doesn’t expect to improve in the first quarter of this year.

digiday.com/media/the-new-york-times-expects-ad-revenue-to-continue-to-decline-in-2024

Last year, most publishers finally realised that the Platform Era was finally over, but some publishers still see value in using social media as part of their audience acquisition strategy. In this INMA case study, Argentina’s ViaPaís pivoted after Facebook killed Instant Articles. But even before the end of Instate Articles, they found that awareness on social media wasn’t translating to traffic back to their website to generate revenue. They decided to tease content to bring more visitors to their owned properties, and true to the trends of the TikTok era, they are leaning into short videos.

With removal of Instant Articles, VíaPaís reinvents audience engagement strategy

After Facebook’s removal of Instant Articles, VíaPaís re-engaged audiences by teasing content on social media and doubling down on its video strategy.

www.inma.org/blogs/value-content/post.cfm/with-removal-of-instant-articles-viapais-reinvents-audience-engagement-strategy

Building on the theme of attracting more traffic to your owned properties, my former Gannett colleague Amalie Nash writes about the need to build more direct traffic. It is why a few major news sites that have remained as destinations have continued to enjoy success.

Building direct traffic is more important than ever for news publishers

Research from the Reuters Institute/Oxford University backs up the need for news publishers to create content for social media, despite the decline in referrals from Big Tech companies like Facebook. Yet, the research also says 77% of news publishers say they are working harder on building direct links to their platforms.

www.inma.org/blogs/newsroom-initiative/post.cfm/building-direct-traffic-is-more-important-than-ever-for-news-publishers

We have a stark warning from ITN in the UK. Deepfake videos of their high profile presenters are making the rounds on social media.

ITN sounds alarm over fake online content featuring Robert Peston, Mary Nightingale and others

Deepfake video Mary Nightingale newsreader video sees ITN sound the alarm over a growing problem on social media.

pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/broadcast/deepfake-mary-nightingale

WAN-IFRA CEO Vincent Peyrègne shared this excellent report on AI and journalism. It’s a great long read for the weekend.

Artificial Intelligence in the News: How AI Retools, Rationalizes, and Reshapes Journalism and the Public Arena

Download the pdf here. Executive Summary Despite growing interest, the effects of AI on the news industry and our information environment — the public arena — remain poorly understood. Insufficient attention has also been paid to the implications of the news industry’s dependence on technology companies for AI. Drawing on 134 interviews with news workers […]

www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/artificial-intelligence-in-the-news.php

I’ll write more about this next week because I think that the picture is more complex than simple predictions of “peak subscription”, but Axios serves up several data points.

Last week, I wrote that one of the two guiding principles was that journalism needed new products for new realities and the new audience behaviours. For much of the past decade, a dominant strand of audience and product development reflected the fact that audiences had flocked to social media platforms. In 2023, there was a realisation that renting an audience brought profound risks. The threat had been there all of the time. I had worked for newspaper groups that saw a 40% drop in traffic overnight when Facebook rolled out a new algorithm. And Facebook made it clear that it was de-emphasising news over the last few years. Last year, long-simmering issues came to a head.

Suddenly, there was an emphasis on renewing direct relationships with audiences. At a national or international level, the product mix was there: Newsletters, podcasts and apps. As I say in the Media Bulletin that I write for Pugpig, the Platform Era has given way to the Push Era. Instead of focusing on attracting a large, loosely connected rented audience using social networks, publishers are now focused on building relationships with audiences using content that they had opted receive via push, in their inboxes, their podcast apps and all on their lock screens. Here’s an interview with FT Strategies head of insights about these trends.

“The industry must embrace product & revenue diversification to survive”: FT Strategies’ George Montagu on the importance of content verticals

In a little over six weeks' time, Mx3 Barcelona will take place in the Catalan capital. Alongside a world class agenda, a number of premium event partners

mediamakersmeet.com/the-industry-must-embrace-product-revenue-diversification-to-survive-ft-strategies-george-montagu-on-the-importance-of-content-verticals

Let’s talk about local news. My journalism career started in a local newsroom, the Hays Daily News in Kansas, and a decade ago, I returned to local journalism, managing small newspapers for Gannett in Wisconsin. I love community journalism because I love being a part of and serving communities. But we all know that it is in crisis.

One of my favourite innovation frameworks is Clay Christensen’s “jobs to be done”. As Clay said: “If The New York Times doesn’t understand why I might choose to ‘hire’ its product in certain circumstances and why I might choose something else in others, its data about me or people like me is unlikely to help it create any new innovations for me.”

As a journalist, my professional values tell me that people ‘hire’ what I do because they want to be informed. Dmitry Shiskin’s user needs model accepted the reality that audiences were ‘hiring’ the BBC’s journalism for a range of jobs they wanted to do: update me (inform), keep me on trend, inspire me, amuse me, educate me and give me perspective. The analysis found that the BBC World Service was producing too much “update me” content and underproducing other forms of content. It helps deliver what product leaders call product-market fit. It does the job that audiences need doing.

Let me give you an example. People move around a lot more than they used to. Having moved across the Atlantic three times now, I’m this person. The jobs that newcomers need to be done are different from the jobs of someone who has lived in your community for years or their entire lives. One of the products that has been developed by local newsrooms to cater to these newcomers is a welcome email series. It helps them understand It’s free and starts a relationship with those new community members, and it starts the relationship so that they might hire you for other jobs that they need to do.

Good journalists know their communities deeply. To build products that do the jobs that communities need to be done, journalists need to deploy that knowledge differently. What are your community’s needs that journalists’ capabilities can uniquely satisfy? Ask them, and then reflect on what you can do. (And check out human-centred design if you need a process.)

This will go beyond articles and with good reason. Meta is not going to hold an event about key issues in your community. They aren’t going to create a podcast about local school or amateur sports. Local media innovators will have to balance effort, impact and financial return with all of these products. And one key thing that I learned is that while operating at a small, local level allows you to be nimble, you will always have to be thinking about sustainability - not only in financial terms but also in human terms. One of the lessons from my master’s degree is Michael Porter’s line that managers are the guardians of trade-offs. Too many managers do not wrestle with trade-offs. That lack of focus is never successful, and it comes at a high cost to the people who work for them.

And now into the round-up. With social media declining as a source of traffic for news sites, journalists at a non-profit newsroom got creative in coming up with new ways to reach audiences. Students at New York University’s Studio 20 masters program decided to go low-tech to reach older adults. They leveraged a marketing service from the US Postal Service that allowed them target specific areas affected by the stories that they were covering. And they could target areas “30 times smaller than that covered by the Facebook ad”. They also ran an A/B test by running a Facebook ad. They found that the audiences who came from the postcard promotions were more engaged. Fascinating!

How to meet readers where they are (when where they are is offline)

"Traffic to news sites through social media has dropped in recent years, and over half of adults over 65 don’t use social media at all. We wanted to build a way to get The City’s service journalism to New Yorkers who wouldn’t otherwise see it."

www.niemanlab.org/2024/01/how-to-meet-readers-where-they-are-when-where-they-are-is-offline

Did Sports Illustrated need to fail? “…interviews with shareholders and current and former employees suggest that Arena missed the licensing payment by choice, not because it didn’t have the money to make it”. Read on.

Sports Illustrated’s $10 Million Mystery

There was plenty of cash to keep the venerable sports magazine alive. Why did its parent company, Arena Group, choose not to?

nymag.com/intelligencer/2024/01/sports-illustrateds-usd10-million-mystery.html

Apple wants to use news to train its LLM, and it’s offering better deals and terms than other AI groups. But as INMA says, news publishers are wary.

Apple approaches some news publishers with multi-year, multi-million AI deals

Unlike other Big Tech companies, Apple is asking permission and offering to pay news media companies to use content to train its version of GenAI. News publishers, though, have mixed feelings about the move.

www.inma.org/blogs/Digital-Platform-Initiative/post.cfm/apple-approaches-some-news-publishers-with-multi-year-multi-million-ai-deals

The Messenger was killed

News came out last week that The Messenger was shutting down. It was a surprise to no one who was watching it closely. Digital media veterans including Brian Morrissey and Nieman Lab’s Josh Benton roasted The Messenger’s owner. The model was based on wistfulness for not only a pre-internet media landscape but a pre-cable TV world and a trying to run a digital strategy that might have made sense in 2014 but not at all in 2024. He managed to blow through $50m in nine months. It was a disaster from the start with editorial leadership defecting almost immediately after launch when it became clear that the site was more content farm than a hearkening back to some vision of the glory days of journalism.

“Economic headwinds”? No, The Messenger’s flop is the result of one man’s blindness to his own bad ideas

The flaws in the site's strategy were highly predictable (and repeatedly predicted). But Jimmy Finkelstein's muddled nostalgia has still left hundreds of people out of a job.

www.niemanlab.org/2024/02/economic-headwinds-no-the-messengers-flop-is-the-result-of-one-mans-blindness-to-his-own-bad-ideas

Brian Morrissey said in his Rebooting newsletter:

Receipts

Standing on business

www.therebooting.com/receipts

Platform updates: Poynter calculates how much Meta and Google owe news publishers and validate your email your domain now!

Two researchers have calculated just how much Google and Meta have profited from news publishers, and they offer up a robust defence of their methods and explain what it means.

Why Google and Meta ‘owe’ news publishers - Poynter

Our working paper found that the tech giants owe publishers billions of dollars. Here’s how we arrived at that conclusion and what it means.

www.poynter.org/business-work/2024/why-google-and-meta-owe-news-publishers

If you are a publisher and send more than 5000 email messages a day, you need to validate your domains or your emails will go straight to spam for Gmail and Yahoo users. And this isn’t just these platforms being bullies. Email fraud has spiked.

Navigating the new 2024 email guidelines: A roadmap for Gmail & Yahoo

Today, new guidelines have been introduced by two of the largest email service providers, Gmail and Yahoo. The changes will require email senders to prove

mediamakersmeet.com/navigating-the-new-2024-email-guidelines-a-roadmap-for-gmail-yahoo

My wife publishes newsletters on Substack so we have had plenty of conversations about whether or not to abandon that platform that has been described as having a “Nazi Bar problem”. In a well-reasoned piece, The Fix’s David Tvrdon explains that for people feeling ethically uncomfortable about Substack there are other choices out there that make it easier to leave.

Why I left Substack, a European perspective. And the surprising alternative that works - The Fix

It just gotten more difficult to run a free newsletter if you take into account how platform approach content moderation

thefix.media/2024/02/01/why-i-left-substack-a-european-perspective-and-the-surprising-alternative-that-works