I have just returned from three weeks in the US. It is tense there, and people discussed the election's outcome in very dark terms across the political spectrum. Talking to friends, they expect violence if Trump is elected with one saying, without drama, that she expects civil war. Political scientists from John Hopkins University and the University of Wisconsin Madison found in 2021 that “20 percent of Republicans and 13 percent of Democrats said political violence was warranted these days, while 25 percent of Republicans and 17 percent of Democrats said threats to opposing party officials were defensible”. This is about the same level of support Catholics and Protestants had for violence during the height of “The Troubles”. My fellow Americans, we don’t want to go down this road. Once dehumanisation takes root, it is challenging to reverse.

Journalists have been concerned about restoring trust in their profession. I believe one way to do this is by carrying out projects where people restore trust in one another.

In an era of radical polarisation, tackling dehumanisation helps foster a mutual sense of good faith people have in each other. In 2023, the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service (GU Politics) Battleground Civility Poll has been “tracking attitudes towards polarization since 2019”, and while respondents send mixed messages, 94% believe (with 72% believing so strongly) “Respect for each other is the first step in having a government that works.” And almost the same amount, 89% believe that civility is the language of respect. There is reason for hope.

Throughout my career, I have looked inside, adjacent to and outside of media for solutions to problems. Community and building relationships between media organisations and their audiences have been central to my work, and here are a few initiatives I think can support the restoration of a respectful, civil civic society.

StoryCorps: One Small Step

When I worked at Ideastream Public Media, we took part in a project that was a collaboration between StoryCorps’ One Small Step initiative and Ideastream Public Media to help foster conversations across political divisions.

The Public Spaces Incubator

As a young journalist, a major theme of my early work was using social media and community engagement strategies to engage audiences with public service media. However, digital social spaces also have an increasingly bad reputation. Almost half of Gen Z wish Tiktok had never been invented, and fully half wish the same of X. Instead of abandoning the concept of digital community, as I have written before, publishers and broadcasters have decided to reclaim them.

New Public is working with public service broadcasters including the CBC, Australia’s ABC and European PSBs ARD and RTBF on the Public Spaces Incubator. They want to re-establish direct relationships with their audiences but also experiment with and develop new digital conversational spaces. It’s exciting because they are designing prototypes for nuanced conversations and broader perspectives. For instance, one prototype Representing Perspectives … “explores including a broader spectrum of voices in conversations on different topics and inspires commenters to add their own perspectives”. Public Square View “brings new opportunities for participating in live virtual events and joining conversations to discuss them”.

Good.chat

Can an online chat with someone from the other side of the political divide help alleviate partisanship? Boldium, an innovation agency (for lack of a better description), has kicked off this project. Their team was worried about the same trends I outlined. “The number of Americans with very unfavourable opinions of the opposing party has more than doubled in the past 25 years. And about one-third of Americans believe the opposing party is threatening our nation’s well-being.” (Based on data from the Pew Research Center.)

Disclaimer: I have been so busy over the last month that I haven’t had time to test-drive this, but I’m curious. However, it will take all kinds of experiments to address the issues around polarisation, division and dehumanisation.

Weave: The Social Fabric Project

I first found out about the Weave project from Michael Skiler, the communications director for the project. I’ve known Michael since he founded the Public Insight Network at American Public media. I have long admired his work. Weave is based on the insights from Robert Putnam, who famously wrote Bowling Alone, an essay and then a book about the decline in American participation in civic, religious and political organisations. Weave draws from Putnam’s most recent book: The Upswing: How We Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. To summarise very quickly, the book tracks America’s long track from an “I” society during the Gilded Age of the 19th Century to a “We” society from the 1890s to the 1960s and then a regression back to an “I” society since then. As the Harvard Kennedy School summary says: “He draws inspiring lessons for our time from an earlier era, when a dedicated group of reformers righted the ship, putting us on a path to becoming a society once again based on community.”

The project tries to address “the problem of broken social trust”. It was founded in 2018 by New York Times columnist David Brooks at the Aspen Institute. Brooks started the project on a listening tour “to understand how people in different communities were working to move from a culture of isolation and individualism to one of relationalism”. That produced their founding document The Relationist Manifesto.

It’s an ambitious project looking to support community-minded doers who are working to increase bridging capital where they live to solve problems. You get a sense of the who and what they support through a recently released initiative, TrustMap.

Just writing about these initiatives gives me a little more hope. Now onto to some links I’ve seen this past week.

Major media companies continue to strike AI deals with major tech companies. I highlight this one because Reuters has done a deal with Meta rather than OpenAI, which has had a string of deals with media companies in the US and Europe.

On the audience side of media businesses, there is a new imperative to build direct relationships with readers, listeners and viewers, one that is not mediated through third-party platforms. On the commercial side, this translates into reader revenue through subscriptions and memberships as well as cutting out middlemen. Bloomberg has done this, and DPG Media is yet another example.

DPG Media will pull the plug on selling app ads in the open market

DPG Media will stop selling ads in its apps through open market auctions starting in November 2024. Advertisers must now buy ads directly from DPG Media.

digiday.com/media/dpg-media-will-pull-the-plug-on-selling-app-ads-in-the-open-market

Bluesky use is surging, and as a Bluesky and X user, I feel it and understand it. Musk’s decision-making for X is muddled by politics, which has led to poor financial performance. That drives short-term business decisions that aren’t in line with user experience, satisfaction or safety.

Bluesky surges into the top 5 as X changes blocks, permits AI training on its data | TechCrunch

Social networking startup Bluesky, which just reported a gain of half a million users over the past day, has now soared into the top five apps on the U.S.

techcrunch.com/2024/10/18/bluesky-surges-into-the-top-5-as-x-changes-blocks-permits-ai-training-on-its-data

Data Suggests X Could Post a Significant Loss in 2024

Elon’s X project could be in trouble, but there may be other avenues to consider.

www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-could-post-a-significant-loss-in-2024/730370

Recently, I was asked by a friend who works in a senior editorial position whether product managers should also be project managers. it’s not a simple question, but it’s an important one.

In reality, it is a fuzzy boundary that varies from news organisation to news organisation. In my master’s research, one product manager at a large digital news organisation said: “(I) had to learn quite quickly and on the job what some of these titles even mean and what is the difference between a product manager and the project manager .… And also, what does that mean in every organization, because that can just mean very diffrent things.” This fuzziness - known as role ambiguity in academic circles - has been an issue with product management long before news organisations embraced the role. This is what the fuzziness means to working product managers. Another senior product manager at a large broadcaster told me, “What I find challenging is that inherently I don't think people understand what a product manager does … On any given day I am often referred to as a product manager, product owner (or) project manager.” More than that, on any given day, this product manager also said she might have product management, project management and operational responsibilities.

Some overlap between project management and product development will always exist because it takes some project management skills to deliver the product. After all, a good product roadmap is essentially a project plan. In reality, smaller organisations will need to blend the functions or have a senior manager act as a de facto product manager with project management done by a managing editor.

But clarifying the roles is important. Media managers need to understand the distinction between product and project management and be able to manage the separate functions or activities. Product managers define the product through audience and market data and are responsible for the ROI of the product. Project managers keep the delivery of the product on track. That is an ideal description of the boundary between the roles, and as I said, in reality, it’s a lot messsier. However, it’s one of the seasons, I believe it makes sense to keep these roles separate.

The lack of clarity about the role and managing it leads to several issues. The cross-functional work of product managers relies on their relationships, and I have seen those relationships damaged due to delivery issues. Media managers’ ability to manage product and project functions will mean better products delivered on time. Easier said than done, but understanding product management in media organisations still has a way to go.

More than that, this lack of understanding is also causing issues in retaining product managers. In my research, one of the issues that led to frustration amongst product management is role autonomy - the ability to manage how they get the job done. Not only does this help employees have more satisfaction, but it also helps organisations manage “volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous” (VUCA) environments. If product managers simply as project managers, they do not feel that they have autonomy over defining products. One product manager left a job at a major international media organisation because she felt as if she was working in a “feature factory”. She left and went to work for a succession of tech companies. (Click that link, written by John Cutler. I think a lot of news product managers will appreciate this: “Little appreciation for the health of the whole product as opposed to shiny new objects.” Also worth reading is his update three years later.)

Reading that, I’ll be honest. It makes me realise how much more I have to learn about product management. But in John’s last statement, there is a lot of value in “learning by doing”.

Now, onto the links.

Substack wants to do more than just newsletters, says Max Tani of Semafor. The company still isn’t profitable. Its next move?

But while Substack is attempting another pivot, as Max points out, there are some high profile defections as the economics don’t work out for them.

Mill Media says goodbye to Substack and moves onto competitor Ghost

Mill Media is to leave Substack four years after launching there in 2020, citing costs and a desire for greater tech customisation.

pressgazette.co.uk/newsletters/mill-media-leaves-substack-ghost

How to balance audience growth with public trust? That was the challenge that Sweden’s public broadcaster faced, and The Fix talked to Olle Zachrison, Head of Artificial Intelligence & News Strategy at Sveriges Radio, on how they managed these goals in applying AI to a problem.

What can newsrooms learn from Swedish Radio AI strategy? - The Fix

Interview with Olle Zachrison, Head of Artificial Intelligence & News Strategy at Swedish Radio about their approach to AI.

thefix.media/2024/9/23/what-can-newsrooms-learn-from-swedish-radio-ai-strategy

As data has become more important to publishers, they are working to make sure they get more of it by closing the door on people who don’t accept to get data for advertising.

'Consent or pay': Why UK news websites are getting tough with readers over data

Six of the top 50 news websites in the UK are asking people to "consent or pay" if they don't want to hand over their data for advertising.

pressgazette.co.uk/marketing/consent-or-pay-news-websites-uk

Want to know what it’s like to interact with AI bots? Here’s your chance to interact with lots of them.

New App Lets You Interact With Millions of AI Bot Profiles

SocialAI will feed you social media like responses from a wide range of AI bots.

www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-app-lets-you-interact-with-millions-of-ai-bot-profiles/727451

We are starting to see some green shoots of growth in the local news eco-system around the world, but in many places, local journalism is in crisis. At the News in the Digital Age conference by FT Strategies and the Google News Initiative, Styli Charalambous, Co-founder & CEO of South Africa’s Daily Maverick, asked whether the ongoing crisis is a “Kodak moment” or a market failure. Is the failure based on disruptive innovation in which new products and services will arise that are cheaper and better than what was before? Or are local journalism organisations facing a market failure?

Styli only had a few moments on a panel to outline his thoughts, but he wrote about the question and a solution for Media Makers Meet earlier this year. Ok, let’s break down the questions.

Is journalism simply facing a Kodak moment? Styli put it in terms of Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction in which new technologies, processes and products render previous ones obsolete. Kodak’s film-based cameras have now been replaced by incredible digital cameras cum multimedia communication and commerce devices, the smartphone. (Interestingly, Kodak and its Japanese competitors were fundamentally in the chemical business. Fuji realised this and pivoted into providing chemicals for cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.)

For those of us who have been working in journalism innovation long enough, creative destruction or disruptive innovation is familiar to us. We studied Clay Christensen’s disruption theory and watched as those theories were applied to media specifically by David Skok and Clark Gilbert. Clark not only theorised about responses but created the dual transformation framework that he used to reposition the Deseret News.

Some journalism companies pivoted like this, particularly Schibsted, which saw what happened with Craig’s List and classified advertising in the US and launched digital marketplaces. But leads to its own issues, and Schibsted split the digital marketplace business off from its journalism assets in 2023.

I digress slightly. If the crisis in journalism is creative destruction in which something better arises from the ashes. Styli put it this way:

I think we are seeing new products and services, with newsletters being one, either as an MVP or a sustainable business. However, at the moment, there is no way to make an argument these models have scaled to replace the destruction of so much local and hyperlocal media in the past 15 years.

^{The argument that local media is experiencing a market failure}

However, successful responses to disruptive innovation or creative destruction have been the exceptions, not the rule, especially at the local level. As I have written before, the market conditions, particularly around advertising, have changed dramatically over the last 50 years. Media and advertising have both been nationalised, which has been one of the factors that has led to the “winner takes most” dynamic that is playing out.

Market failures result in an ‘inefficient distribution of goods’, and they happen for a few reasons. Most relevant in terms of local journalism are issues of market control - namely the dominance of digital platforms such as Google and Facebook in the advertising market - and issues related to public goods. Styli focuses on the public good argument but in terms of the market failure concerning journalism, the market control argument is also relevant. Public goods such as education and roads aren’t governed by the same rules of supply and demand as other goods.

However, usually, public goods are seen as goods that the private sector won’t produce due to the lack of returns. News is still quite a lucrative business but not necessarily at the local or hyperlocal level. The Google News Initiative, FT Strategies and INMA researched the issues that contribute to sustainable news organisations, and they found that big news organisations are getting bigger. Smaller, local and hyperlocal news organisations are struggling.

Sustainability Insights from the News Sustainability Project June 2023 report.

It is consistent with the “winner takes most” dynamic that the Reuters Institute has identified in their last few Digital News Reports. However, the challenges aren’t simply about scale. Those local publishers most dependent on print were the least prepared for the future.

For large private and public news organisations like the New York Times, they can approach the challenge as a Kodak moment. They have the resources and more importantly, the scale, to invest in the R&D and products to respond to challenges with disruptive or discontinuous innovation. However, for the smaller local and hyperlocal news organisations, Styli believes that the challenge they face is one of market failure, and he says that whatever challenges news organisations face in North America and Western Europe, news organisations in Africa face seven times the challenge. To meet this challenge, he sees two responses - philanthropy and policy. He gave an example of how the venture capital industry in South Africa was given special tax rules to stimulate investment.

He pointed to efforts in the US. California recently reached a settlement with Google which will provide five years of support for news organisations and set up an AI Accelerator. The settlement has met mixed views (full story also the first link below from Poynter), with some critics saying it is bad for journalism and democracy. As Steven Waldman, the founder of Rebuild Local News said in the piece on Poynter, the legislation in states including California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Washington treats news as a public good, echoing Styli’s market failure view of the issue. “A movement has been growing that treats local news as a “civic good,” essential to the healthy functioning of a community,” he wrote.

I have to agree with one of Steven’s criticisms of some of the new legislation. California’s law excludes public media, which having worked in US public media is a mistake. But I’m not surprised, there has long been a newspaper versus broadcast mentality in the US which ignores a lot of the public interest reporting done by public media. Moreover, non-profit news organisations do not have representation on the board that will govern the programme in California. Legislation in New York excludes funding for non-profits all together as well as “digital only” community news sites. What century are we in?

Ken Doctor was more positive, and he brought an important perspective to this discussion. Not only has Ken written the Newsonomics column for Nieman Lab for years, but he is also the CEO and co-founder of local news start-up Lookout Santa Cruz. He outlined some important questions that policymakers grappled with in developing the legislation. “Who’s a journalist? Which publishers should get priority; should small outfits get more? Should Alden, Gannett, and McClatchy (large legacy chains get any money at all? How do you make sure the government doesn’t pick winners and losers? Should the platforms be forced to pay for their impact on news fortunes?”

But Ken says it is a win. Money will flow to journalists, although he cedes text-based journalists rather than broadcasters. The California plan has some excellent outcomes. Of the settlement, 12% has been reserved for smaller outlets, those with five or fewer journalists. Plus, while the Canadian journalism legislation provided more money for outlets, it also had a horrible unintended consequence when Facebook and Google stopped linking to journalism outlets. “That’s contributed, by one estimate, to a loss of “news engagement” of 58% by local news outlets and 24% for national ones,” Ken said. It was disastrous for local, independent and underserved audiences. Ken estimates tax credits in California’s plan “could amount to 15 to 20% of our expense budgets”. That is not trivial.

I’ve been following the policy debates out of the corner of my eye, but Styli’s comments and analysis and what I have read have led me to understand the importance of a policy response to the crisis in local journalism. I’ll be keeping a closer on this.

The California local news deal with Google is both a model and a cautionary tale - Poynter

The final deal for local news funding doesn't match initial hopes, but Rebuild Local News' founder argues it's still progress.

www.poynter.org/business-work/2024/the-california-local-news-deal-with-google-is-both-a-model-and-a-cautionary-tale

An interesting look at the ‘reboot’ of the newspaper that until recently was known as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Their new strategy has them focusing on the state rather than just the Twin Cities. While they will be focusing on a larger geography, they will be narrowing their coverage to focus on things that they think are distinctive to the state.

Disclosure: Pugpig, where I work, built the new app for the Minnesota Star-Tribune.

Rebooting the Minnesota Star Tribune: A Conversation with Steve Grove

From paper of record to paper of relevancy

open.substack.com/pub/dicktofel/p/rebooting-the-minnesota-star-tribune?r=1u7ee&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Speaking of success stories, the Salt Lake Tribune is building on its shift to a non-profit. Non-profits have a different and wider range of internal and external stakeholders (including their own staff), and this Nieman Lab report talks about a “refreshingly readable and transparent” annual report they have just published.

The Salt Lake Tribune, profitable and growing, seeks to rid itself of that “necessary evil” — the paywall

The first daily newspaper in the U.S. to become a nonprofit has published a refreshingly readable and transparent annual report.

www.niemanlab.org/2024/09/the-salt-lake-tribune-profitable-and-growing-seeks-to-rid-itself-of-that-necessary-evil-the-paywall

Last week at the News in the Digital Age conference, the point was made that generative AI models can’t use AI-generated content to continue to refine their models. After a few generations, the models collapse or are poisoned. Big Think explains the issue. I think it points why OpenAI and other major players are keen to strike deals with content creators. They need a continuous source of new, human-created material.

“Model collapse” threatens to kill progress on generative AIs

Generative AIs start churning out nonsense when trained on synthetic data — a problem that could put a ceiling on their ability to improve.

bigthink.com/the-future/ai-model-collapse

Google’s Search Generative Experience is being rolled out, and I noticed the AI summaries appear in many of the questions that I asked Google. One thing I noticed positively was how Google was linking to the sources that informed the summaries. That’s a good result. Street Fight highlights how local publishers how local businesses and publishers can take advantage of “AI Overviews” and the new Core Update for August. As I keep telling clients with our Consulting practice at Pugpig, Google is rewading “high-quality, useful content while penalizing content designed solely for SEO purposes”. Don’t try to game SEO. Focus on original reporting and high-quality content. Google is aligned with good journalism and good product practices.

AI Overviews , Core Update | Street Fight | Street Fight

In this week’s Streets Ahead update we discuss recent Google changes in AI Overviews as well as the conclusion of Google's August Core Update.

streetfightmag.com/2024/09/05/streets-ahead-ai-overviews-and-organic-search-google-core-update-concludes

And at the other end of the high-quality internet sits Elon Musk’s dumpster file ExTwitter. It shows how ideology can destroy long-term value creation.

Advertiser exodus from X gathers pace with 26% ‘planning to cut spending’

Annual survey highlights growing concern about platform content and trust in information disseminated

www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/sep/05/advertiser-exodus-x-survey-2025-elon-musk

Porto’s Dom Luís Bridge from the Bishop’s Palace.

I am back after a week’s break and an incredible trip to Porto. I promised my wife I would take her there and originally had hinted that I would take her there to propose. We celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary in February so it took me a while. However, this is the quintessential case of better late than never. I first went to Porto almost 20 years ago with my parents, as an anniversary gift to them. I thoroughly enjoyed it then, but my wife and I loved it this time. The city is a foodie and wine lover’s delight with plenty of exceptional food and wine at reasonable prices - case in point, the Mercado do Bolhão. Right, this isn’t a food or travel newsletter so I’ll return to your regularly scheduled programming.

In my last newsletter, I wrote about product managers’ cross-functional superpowers, and that’s true whether they are working in news organisations or other industries. Working across silos is key to managing large complex projects, whether that is editorial or the commercial-technical-editorial work necessary to sustain news organisations in the volatile markets of today. Product managers are naturally inclined to cross-functional work. They explore and cross the internal and external boundaries of their organisations out of natural curiosity. (I am finding that the boundaries I enjoy exploring most are external to the organisation, with customers, partners and suppliers, which is common to market research and partnerships.) Product managers built up expertise, relationships and trust across the organisation before they transitioned into formal product roles.

Transformation projects and product operations are imperilled when that trust is damaged or when frustrations build over delivery, which can be a product or project management issue. When I was at The Guardian, we were in the midst of a massive re-platforming, R2 - re-design and relaunch. It absorbed almost all of our technical and delayed delivery on near-term priorities from the editorial teams. That created a lot of conflict internally between the technical team and the various editorial centres of power, which were legion and fractious.

That is now a long time ago. I was at The Guardian between 2006 and 2010, but these issues still exist, even at large, well-regarded, product-led news organisations. In my research, I thought I would find that large news organisations would be better at cross-functional product operations, and they were in general. However, with the volatile media market right now, several large news organisations are going through major transformation projects - CNN, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. The industry press if full of stories about the challenges and internal tensions involved. If you look at the Washington Post, before its current conflict with its new CEO, it was in crisis with losses and layoffs. For those in the product community, the Post lost several well-regarded technology and product leaders.

Silos that are busted can be rebuilt. Fortunately, there is excellent research on how to work in collaborative, cross-functional teams. Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson outlined how leaders build collaborative teams in the Harvard Business Review. Teams are increasingly “large, virtual, diverse, and composed of highly educated specialists”, but these characteristics “make it hard for teams to get anything done”. To counter these factors and support collaboration, “requires thoughtful, and sometimes significant, investments in the capacity for collaboration across the organization”.

They reviewed 55 organisations that demonstrated highly collaborative working practices and found several common elements, several of which I found in my research as well.

• Executive support - I found that high-level alignment was necessary. This research found that executives also needed to “invest in supporting social relationships, demonstrate collaborative behavior themselves”.

• Invest in signature relationship practices - Collaborative companies invested in “building and maintaining relationships throughout the organisation”. This is critical. Product managers in my research naturally created these relationships. Companies that were able to build collaborative cultures intentionally fostered and nurtured these relationships.

• Modelling collaborative behaviour - The senior leadership in these companies modelled collaborative behaviour. I have seen the inside of a lot of media organisations. Some have collaborative cultures, but I have also worked for and seen many that have high degrees of internal competition amongst fiefdoms.

• Create a “gift culture” - Leaders need to engage in mentoring and coaching behaviour and make sure that it becomes embedded across the organisation.

These are the things that leadership need to do. It goes beyond simply aligning around goals and outlines the continual, intentional process of modelling a collaborative culture that is necessary for complex, cross-functional work, of which product work is an important element. Now onto the links for this week.

Doug McCabe at Enders Analysis looks at ways that publishers can find their next source of growth. He sees a shift from generalist to niche publications, and I would add that those publications need to ensure that their content is distinctive and adds value.

Returning to growth

Where is the growth opportunity for today’s publishers? Douglas McCabe tracks how the commercial model has evolved over the past fifty years and examines whether a better understanding of what online audiences want, will help drive future growth.

www.inpublishing.co.uk/articles/returning-to-growth-24443

This is a great example of how smaller, more engaged audiences are the key to success for modern news organisations. Dennik in central Europe provides a great playbook on how to achieve it.

72k subscribers helping cover 70% costs of Denník N’s 130-journalist newsroom

2024-08-14. Founded by a group of journalists 10 years ago, Denník N has grown into a major player with operations extending into the Czech Republic and Hungary, thanks to its unique subscription model. Tomas Bella, Chief Digital Officer and co-founder of Denník N, describes the news company’s decade-long journey from a start-up to one of the top news organisations in Slovakia.

wan-ifra.org/2024/08/72k-subscribers-helping-cover-70-costs-of-dennik-ns-130-journalist-newsroom

The common theme in the application of AI in journalism is humans in the loop. Ultimately, they assist but do not supplant journalism. I always thought of it this way. I would outsource to machines (or to lower cost labour) tasks that freed up journalists to do more original reporting, a thing that AI cannot do.

How Swedish Radio balances AI and journalism without falling for hype

“These are terrific tools, but they are tools to assist journalism, and doing real human-based journalism has never been more important”, says pioneer Olle Zachrison

reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/how-swedish-radio-balances-ai-and-journalism-without-falling-hype

We’re going through a phase in journalism in which large media organisations have cast off huge numbers of staff, and some of them are creating their own publications and supporting themselves on platforms like Substack or Beehiiv (which I use to publish this newsletter).

Independent journalist era takes off on Substack

A boom in digital publishing tech combined with a slew of media cutbacks prompted a big wave of journalists to go independent during the pandemic.

www.axios.com/2024/08/13/independent-journalists-substack-news

The Boston Globe hired three staffers to create a podcast, but they are now redeploying them because they have found that podcasts do not drive subscriptions.

After hiring new staff, Globe changes its mind on podcast

Linda Henry, the CEO and co-owner of the Globe, said the turnabout on podcasts was driven by the realization that audio journalism may be compelling but does not attract subscribers.

commonwealthbeacon.org/media/after-hiring-new-staff-globe-changes-its-mind-on-podcast

In this year of critical lessons, journalists are working to fact-check candidates. Research has found that journalists gain more trust when confirm claims rather than when they debunk them. That may prove difficult with certain candidates - not naming names.

Readers trust journalists less when they debunk rather than confirm claims

Stein is an associate professor of marketing at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Meyersohn is pursuing an Ed.S. in school psychology California State University, Long Beach. Pointing out that someone else is wrong is a part of life. And journalists need to do this all the time – the...

thefulcrum.us/media-technology/media-fact-check

After I finished my master’s now more than two years ago, I had the honour to present my research to journalism leaders a couple of times. Some of them were doing research of their own. One critique that I have faced is that I had highlighted problems facing product managers at news organisations but that I hadn’t provided solutions.

Academic research is a different beast than industry research, and it is about focus, particularly at the master’s level. In academic research, one paper can identify an issue, and another paper then looks at a solution. I am motivated to continue my research because I have heard positive feedback that I have identified an important issue affecting retention and the effectiveness of product management at news organisations.

However, my master’s studies in innovation management and leadership did give me some great ideas for how to improve product management generally, and in news organisations specifically.

Building cross-functional relationships

To develop managers and to increase innovation capabilities, news organisations should identify possible innovation and product leaders and give them opportunities to work across the organisation, across editorial, commercial and technical teams.

What was interesting is that my research found that product managers did this naturally. They reached across the organisational boundaries in their organisations because they were curious about how everything in publishing or broadcasting worked. For those coming up through the editorial side of their organisations, like me, this was just an extension of the curiosity that had attracted them to journalism in the first place. The relationships that they developed via informal, internal networking positioned them to be successful product managers. One highly successful product manager in a large digital news organisation continued this practice in the role, having informal meetings with colleagues he worked with cross-functionally.

This cross-functional curiosity wasn’t always rewarded my research participants and product management friends in the industry told me (and I have experienced first hand). With editorial being the apex culture in news organisations, any deviation from that career path can be a “career-limiting exercise”, to borrow a phrase from a former manager. Many product managers who left the editorial career path struggled to ever cross that boundary back to senior editorial management. Product-minded editorial managers rise in editorial only if they stay in the newsroom. This is all to say that news organisations have a poor track record of rewarding cross-functional work and leadership.

Outside of journalism, it is much different. Innovative companies formalised this relationship and skill-building. They identified cross-functional curiosity and fostered it in future leaders, either product managers or general managers. It allowed them to build up relationships and domain knowledge across the business.

Supporting cross-functional, boundary-spanning work

I think this doesn’t happen enough in news organisations because of the church-state boundaries between editorial and commercial teams. It’s not just church-state boundaries but the primacy of editorial leadership in news organisations. As Lucy Küng says, editorial is the apex culture in news organisations. Editorial teams need to be more collegial and support cross-functional collaboration.

Working across these boundaries is critical for the future of news businesses, but we struggle to do it. Most journalism leaders call it cross-functional work, but researchers call it boundary-spanning. I came to really appreciate the term boundary-spanning because cross-functional focuses on functions and the org chart. Boundaries are a much richer way to analyse the things that get in our way of functioning more effectively as organisations.

Those boundaries can be physical as well as organisational. At one of the newspapers I edited in Wisconsin for Gannett, the commercial and administrative staff were on the first floor, and the editorial teams were on the second floor. A plaque with the First Amendment hung on the wall of a landing on the stairs. It was a clear boundary marker between the commercial and editorial territory of the newspaper.

Yes, there are team boundaries, but there are boundaries of language. I spoke to a product manager outside of journalism, and he described feeling like a translator at the UN or sometimes feeling like he had to have a passport to reach outside of his team.

In media organisations, boundaries exist around deadlines as well. Print journalists used to talk about the daily miracle of putting out a newspaper, and in the era of 24/7 news, deadlines are continuous and rolling. Digital project deadlines can stretch into months, especially with large projects like re-platforming to a new CMS or CRM. I have seen firsthand how these differing timelines can cause friction. If those conflicts aren’t managed, critical cross-functional relationships are damaged. Product managers rely on these relationships to get things done, and the conflict can lead to unsustainable stress that leads to burnout for product managers.

In my research, many product managers said that their boundary-spanning, cross-functional work wasn’t valued or supported. It might well be that managers don’t understand product management. That was another issue that product managers raised. Of course, it is different for most large organisations like the BBC and the New York Times, and Dean Roper of WAN-IFRA just teased on LinkedIn that news organisations say product management and R&D are their biggest priorities in the annual Press Trends survey.

Managing emotional labour in the workplace

Of course, my research identified another issue: the emotional labour that women in product management experienced. As I pointed out in my newsletter last week. this wasn’t work that the business expected of women, but the women all spoke that they thought supporting their colleagues emotionally was important work. And they didn’t see others stepping up to do it. This was the most unexpected finding of my research, and it made me aware of how this happens in the workplace. It is like something difficult to unsee once seen, and I am very aware of it now.

Another thing that my research sensitised me to is women taking conflict in the workplace personally. As my research unfolded, I began asking the men and women in the research how they interpreted conflict in their cross-functional work. One woman said:

Another woman working at a small digital publisher said she felt a lack of understanding of her role and her team’s role and their contributions. She took this personally particularly when it was directed at her team members.

Taking conflict personally wasn’t universal amongst the women in the research, but it was common amongst those women who left jobs or the industry. But this was almost entirely absent from the men in the research. When men spoke of conflict in their work, I asked them whether they took it personally. One man working at a small broadcaster said he didn’t take it personally and kept in mind they were all part of the same team.

My suggestions to news organisations who want their product function to be more effective and who want to attract and retain product talent:

1. As I wrote as I opened this series on my research, senior management must be aligned on high-level goals and priorities. This will mitigate the conflict around cross-functional work.

2. Managers need to be aware of issues around emotional labour, particularly women in management roles. I don’t think that this impulse is limited to product management roles.

3. Women most often talked about engaging in emotional management when they sensed conflict. Their managers need to be aware of conflict that arises in cross-functional, boundary-spanning work.

On that last point, that is an area that is ripe for additional research. It was one of the shortcomings of my paper that I didn’t leave myself enough space to discuss where to take my findings next. Managing cross-functional team conflict is well-researched, and it’s a way that academic research can support product management in news organisations. I’m going to look into the research a bit more and will add more here.

And now onto the links for this week.

The classic interview question: What do you want to be doing in five years? The Washington Post believes that the job many journalists will be doing in five years currently doesn’t exist. She is the Post’s first senior editor for AI Strategy and Innovation. The profile and interview outline her career journey and the work that she is doing now with teams across the Post to integrate AI into their work.

‘Your job five years from now probably does not yet exist’ – WaPo's AI Editor Phoebe Connelly

The Washington Post’s Senior Editor for AI Strategy and Innovation shares key learnings, inspirations – and why she’s excited about the future of journalism.

wan-ifra.org/2024/08/your-job-five-years-from-now-probably-does-not-yet-exist-wapos-ai-editor-phoebe-connelly

Reach in the UK is seeing some bright spots in their revenue situation as they start to see digital revenue growth for the first time since 2022. The group has seen traffic drop from Facebook, which had been key to its strategy, particularly at their national titles. Programmatic rates have stabilised. It provides insights into how volume publishers are finding some opportunities.

Reach reports first digital revenue growth since 2022

Reach half-year results 2024: Revenue down by 5% year-on-year but digital back in growth in Q2 and data-driven ad revenues up.

pressgazette.co.uk/media_business/reach-half-year-results-2024

El Nacional’s experience with SEO jibes with what I have seen for several publishers: Google Discover is driving a lot of traffic for them. The group’s focus on content makes so much sense with Google’s Helpful Content Algorithm update earlier this year. It benefits distinctive content and will punish ‘spammy, low-quality’ content, Google said, not mincing words.

At El Nacional, they talk about playing offence with their reporters producing original, investigative journalism and defence, journalist producing lifestyle content and their designers, creating great user experience. Their ‘defensive midfielders’ are their SEO staff, working to make sure that their great content is discoverable.

El Nacional takes a whole-company approach to SEO

Using fútbol as the perfect metaphor, Clara Soteras, head of SEO and product at El Nacional, explains how the Spanish news company approaches its SEO strategy.

www.inma.org/blogs/conference/post.cfm/el-nacional-takes-a-whole-company-approach-to-seo

It has been a tense few weeks in the UK after the shocking murder of three girls in Stockport. Communities across the UK have seen anti-immigrant violence with attacks on police and journalists. Another element of this is not only how social media and messaging apps have played a role in fomenting violence but also how EX-Twitter owner Elon Musk has inserted himself into the situation, levelling a charge against the British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer that is common amongst far-right agitators. Across the political spectrum, those who have used the platforms to make threats and stoke violence are facing the full force of the law in the UK. Fighting words aren’t protected speech in the UK or the US.

Journalists facing 'appalling harassment and abuse' amid riots

Journalists facing "appalling harassment and abuse" amid riots across England and Northern Ireland in the past week.

pressgazette.co.uk/news/journalists-increasingly-being-targeted-riots

A cool bit of inside the Olympic games with a look at how Getty is getting those incredible images from the games. Private 5G networks, underwater robots and more.

How Getty beams those incredible Olympic images around the world within seconds

Getty uses private 5G networks and other technology to beam images from the Paris Games instantly.

www.axios.com/2024/08/08/getty-olympics-simoone-biles-rebeca-andrade-photo

Last week, I wrote about how lack of alignment and priorities was causing frustration amongst product managers in news organisations. Without alignment from C-level stakeholders, my research found that pressures built up on the product managers, causing some to burn out, leave jobs or, in extreme cases, leave the industry.

My research found something else that product team managers and other senior stakeholders should take note of. I interviewed 17 product managers, with an even balance of men and women. Five of them had left positions or the industry, and of the five, four were women. What was going on?

Some of it was down to pay differential. “Right before I left, I was promoted ..., but there was no money involved. It was not an actual promotion to reflect the work that I had done for three years,” a product manager at a small digital outlet told me. Moreover, she found that a male colleague who had the same title as she did was given $2000 more in salary when they had both asked for pay raises. “That was pretty devastating for me,” she said.

Women in the survey struggled to find a balance between assertiveness and confidence that was acceptable in their workplace. One product manager who worked for a small print outlet said that she felt as if she was stepping on people’s toes when she did cross-functional work at her publication. She worked to develop her confidence in a leadership development course. But confident, assertive leadership by women in product management was not always rewarded. A woman working at a small digital outlet was told in an evaluation that she was “aggressive … which, as a woman, was just like ‘fuck you’”.

But the research uncovered something else, which managers will need to monitor for women on their team. They spoke about feeling the need to carry out emotional labour. “I don't know how bad this is going to sound, but as a woman, I'm kind of used to doing emotional labour so it doesn't really seem like it's an extra thing that I have to do for my job. It felt like something I always had to do,” a woman working in product management at a major broadcaster said. When I asked her what she meant by emotional labour, she gave the example of feeling the need to make sure everyone was OK after a meeting that hadn’t gone well. Another woman at a large broadcaster described something similar. "(B)eing a female-presenting person in a workplace ... I feel as though I need to be aware of the other person's emotions and (respond) to them accordingly,” she said.

Emotional labour first was researched 40 years ago.

However, when the women in my research talked about emotional labour, the behaviour they described was not due to training or expectations from their employers, but were expectations they had of themselves. I suggested that a new theory was needed to explain what these women were describing.

“To differentiate the participants’ experience from emotional labour, the research suggests a construct that is best framed as gender socialised emotional management. This term captures the emotional caretaking responsibility that women felt for those around them based on gender role socialisation,” I wrote.

I have had some pushback from women in product management because I think they interpreted my research as implying women were acting emotionally. I want to be careful and clear, because that’s not what the women I spoke to were saying. Rather, they were displaying empathy for colleagues whom they felt needed support. Emotional management isn’t acting emotionally, it is when people are doing more than their fair share of managing others’ emotions.

Next week, I’m going to go beyond my research and discuss how managers should respond.

What do I want to do when I grow up?

This is a new section. Let me know how you find it. My work at Pugpig is only the second full-time job that I’ve had that isn’t in media. After I finished my master’s degree at the end of 2021, my wife Suw and I had a plan that I would spend the next year exploring what I wanted to do. Instead, I took the job at Pugpig, and we moved back from the US (where I’m from) to the UK (where Suw’s from). Earlier this year, I decided to return to that plan and do some intentional career planning. I settled on working with both a career coach and a leadership coach. My career coach has been helping me explore different options for the next chapter in life, and my leadership coach is helping me develop my leadership skills and also develop better professional habits.

I’ll be writing a bit more about my process over the coming newsletters, but I wanted to share some excellent resources I think some of you might find useful. My leadership coach, Jo Shaw, suggested that I check out the Anxious Achiever podcast by Morra Aarons-Mele, and I’m glad I did. Episodes I’ve listened to recently cover whether people pleasing is hurting your career and also what to do when anxiety becomes a habit. For those journalists or editors who read this newsletter, the latest episode is about managing your mental health when your job is covering the US election. I’ll be sharing other resources and my career exploration in coming editions of the newsletter.

But for now, the links for this week.

When approaching innovation, it is so often about sequencing. Adam Ryan talks about their intentional and deliberate diversification plan as thy have built their business.

“Diversification too fast is too risky”: Workweek’s Adam Ryan on the importance of baby steps

Workweek is one of the most successful stories in modern publishing and in the space of little over 32 months has turned the traditional B2B model on its

mediamakersmeet.com/diversification-too-fast-is-too-risky-workweeks-adam-ryan-on-the-importance-of-baby-steps

Newsletters have become the goto minimum viable product. For this local news operation in the US, 60% of its ad revenue comes from “high open rate newsletters”. What is a high open rate? An astounding 70%. Their newsletters have five ad slots, and they work with a single local agency to sell the spots.

BoiseDev's winning secret to selling newsletter ads: Only local news, only local ads - LION Publishers

In this spotlight, we take a look at how BoiseDev has built out its successful newsletter advertising program.

www.lionpublishers.com/boisedevs-winning-secret-to-selling-newsletter-ads-only-local-news-only-local-ads

This is a powerful case for audience development. It’s a combination of five lessons from a course that The Fix offered. I’ll highlight just one. “Learning about the audience you don’t have”, from Joy Mayer of Trusting News in the US. It is excellent advice for how to reach those who don’t currently engage with news. In an age of news fatigue and avoidance, Joy has some great advice.

Five lessons I’ve learned about audience building - The Fix

“If you have ten people and one of them resigns, hire an audience person,” recommends Dmitry Shishkin, CEO of Ringier Media International.

thefix.media/2024/07/25/five-lessons-ive-learned-about-audience-building

Successes and challenges in local journalism

Local media has been going through a period of tumultuous transition since the late 1990s. From the early 1990s until the mid-Naughties, large print media groups in the US and UK kept their bottom line healthy by reducing their costs - mostly through cuts. Those cuts have been increasingly deep over the past decade.

But now, we’re seeing green shoots of growth from small, entrepreneurial shops develop new models, like Mill Media in the UK. It is one of those newsletter-led companies, and they have expanded from Manchester to other cities.

Gem in the making? How Mill Media is extracting journalism gold, locally

In mining, milling is the process by which waste rock is extracted from precious metals before smelting – a process Mill Media is following to pave the way for a ‘potential new Golden Age for local journalism’.

wan-ifra.org/2024/07/gem-in-the-making-how-mill-media-is-extracting-journalism-gold-locally

But not all start-ups are thriving. This story from California shows the challenges of a being funded by a benefactor and when that funding wanes without a sustainable business model.

Long Beach looked like it had solved the local news crisis. Then reality set in

An emaciated newspaper and warring websites try to cover Long Beach. Until recently, the Long Beach Post seemed to have the journalistic answers.

www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-24/long-beach-media-coverage

This shows how much pressure the BBC and other public broadcasters are under in the age of streaming. Sitting here watching the US women gymnastics team on the BBC, I still have such deep affection for the Beeb, which gave me my break in international journalism. But they are under tremendous pressure from competitors and after more than a decade of deep cuts.

Half a million households cancelled BBC licence fee last year

Corporation faces stark challenge as it struggles to reach younger audiences who are watching Netflix and YouTube

www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/jul/23/half-million-households-cancelled-bbc-licence-fee-last-year

Google had said that they were going to eliminate third-party cookies, but they have reversed course. They are going to leave the decision up to users.

Why Google's cookie deprecation reversal isn't actually a reprieve for publishers

Publishers are keeping a "business as usual" approach to testing cookieless alternatives despite Google's announcement that it won't be fully deprecating third-party cookies after all.

digiday.com/media/why-googles-cookie-deprecation-reversal-isnt-actually-a-reprieve-for-publishers

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