Last week, I attended WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress in Kraków. With streams for media leaders, editors, digital media, and topical deep dives on specific issues often running concurrently, it’s impossible to take it all in, especially when there are so many interesting side conversations to be had. I focused on the digital media track, and it covered many of the current major digital themes in journalism: community (including young audience engagement), reader revenue, and AI. This week and next week, I’ll be highlighting some of the sessions from the Congress that resonated with me.

Community and sparking more participation at the FT

the rising importance of reader revenue and the decline in referrals from social and search have led publishers to deepen their relationships with their audiences. Hannah Sarney, editorial product director and executive editor at the Financial Times, talked of how they were updating their commenting community. Owned spaces result in deeper trust, she said.

While most publishers shut down their comment sections as audiences shifted to social platforms a decade ago, the FT kept theirs. Comment readers are 11x more engaged than active users who don’t read comments, and comment writers are 48x more engaged. “Community isn’t a bolt-on,” she said. The challenge is to get more readers engaged in the community. Only about half of the audience read the comments, and only 4% wrote comments.

“That leaves quite a bit of a gap,” she admitted, but she argues that this isn’t down to apathy or because the audience doesn’t care. “They don’t feel that the door is open or that the door even exists.”

Hannah and I had some great conversations about product management in Perugia and Kraków, and I appreciate two things about her approach. When I was doing my master’s research, I found that successful product management was built on strong cross-functional relationships, and this is Hannah’s superpower, her ability to foster relationships across the business. The other reason why she is such a good product leader is that she is able to translate values and goals into a product. For their community, the FT wanted to:

• spark participation

• protect civility

• foster togetherness.

Based on these goals, they are now testing a few approaches.

1. To support their moderation team, they have brought in an AI moderation tool from Utopia. “ It really has the human in the loop. It retrains off of the choices moderators make,” she said.

2. Their user research has shown that a sizeable chunk of their audience isn’t even aware the comments exist on the site. To overcome this, they have a new AI-powered tool that generates questions from articles to prompt engagement in the comments. Editors are given choices for the question, and they can choose the one that is the most appropriate for the story.

3. They launched a redesigned live Q&A feature to drive broader participation and deliver a mobile-first user experience, clearly defined roles and the ability to easily catch up after the event is over.

How The City Connects with New York City Communities

Publishers have been struggling to reach new audiences with the decline in referrals from search and social media, but these platforms also don’t reach everyone. As I’ve written before, the Platform Era was an aberration, providing free marketing and audience growth. However, the cost was high. The platforms owned the audiences, and publishers only rented them.

I remember when I first came across the story of how The City creatively did audience development by using postal targeting available in the US in a Nieman Lab article. Nic Dawes, the executive director of The City, told the Congress how they used this technique to reach new audiences, especially those most affected by the stories they were covering. For instance, they did a story about landlords who didn’t heat their apartments, literally leaving their tenants in the cold. They used call data to find zip (postal) codes that had the highest density of heating complaints, and then they used the US Postal Service marketing programme to send postcards to people in areas most affected. Brilliant.

When they first started doing this, they tested the postal outreach against Facebook ads. Readers who received the postcards were not only more likely to read the stories, but they also spent more time with the stories. They have used this technique to target audiences near Superfund sites, highly toxic sites that are being cleaned up.

The other thing I love about their approach is that when they survey audiences, they don’t ask readers whether they liked the piece but “what the journalism helped them do”. Steal this idea.

And this was just one of the sessions. Here are a couple of the LinkedIn posts I wrote about others.

How Der Spiegel reworked its puzzles and comments to drive engagement

#wnmc25 | Kevin Anderson, FRSA

One of the major themes of WAN-IFRA's World News Media Congress 2025 is how publishers deepen relationships with audiences through high-engagement products and features.  Dr. Laura Badura, product manager at Der Spiegel, spoke about two products the news publisher has created that have fostered civil civic debates and increased engaged audiences. Their strategy also demonstrates how they use different engagement products across their subscription funnel to engage, convert and retain subscribers. 🧩 Puzzles - With the New York Times and Wordle and even LinkedIn rolling them out, puzzles are a proven engagement product. • Use is high. On average, 900,000 users play Der Spiegel's daily news quiz every month. • Their morning newsletter is one of the major drivers of puzzle use, and the link to puzzles in the newsletter is the most clicked, which explains why mornings are the most popular time to play amongst users. •Der Spiegel's puzzles are free to play, setting it up as a tool to build habits that lead users to buy a subscription. 💬 From comments to debate - Der Spiegel has long had comments on its articles, Dr Badura said. Conversations were fragmented across articles on its previous commenting system. At its peak, they had 1.7 m comments a month, which presented a moderation challenge and led to fragmented conversations for users. • When trying to decide how to make commenting better, they started with audience research. Did the audience want community? Yes. They liked comments, but only 12% wanted to actively participate by posting a comment. However, 65% wanted to passively take part, by reading comments or listening to events. • Der Spiegel wanted to reduce the number of comments to make them more manageable. • When they relaunched the platform a year and a half ago, they had 10,000 registrations in the first seven hours and now have 350,000 registered users. • Instead of comments on all posts, they have 2-5 debates daily. The debates start with a yes or no question that allows users who want to passively engage. Comments are then added to each position, and comments can be upvoted. • They have hosted 1350 debates, which have received 5 million votes. The acceptance rate of comments has increased, and they now receive a more manageable 300,000 comments a month. • Users who use the product have more pageviews, and users who comment have almost 2x the time on site than those who don't. • The platform is connected to their subscription journey. • Unlike puzzles that are free to use, only subscribers can comment. • Use is much higher for audiences under 40, and 64% debate use is on mobile 📰 The comments section is also integrated into the editorial products. • Journalists participate in the comments. • Comments from the platform are added to print stories and social media posts. #WNMC25

www.linkedin.com/posts/kranderson_wnmc25-activity-7325507946719698944-X_YW?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAQlgMBGsFHXfXgtPL6NkzxRaTIufCZMfc

Digital media trends and how publishers are responding

Arun Venkataraman, the global research lead for Google's news partnership… | Kevin Anderson, FRSA

Arun Venkataraman, the global research lead for Google's news partnership programmes, gave attendees at WAN-IFRA, the World Association of News Publishers' World News Congress a whirlwind overview of changing audience behaviour and how publishers are responding. 📉 Social media has surpassed search and direct traffic to publishers for the first time. This is primarily driven by younger users. Publishers are responding by: • Focusing on getting first-party • Refining their newsletters and apps to drive engagement and loyalty with audiences. • Working to engage young news consumers on the social platforms they use and testing ways to incentivise them to come to their owned and operated platforms. 💡 Publishers are working to understand the reasons why news consumers are avoiding news, with some young consumers avoiding news altogether. "They are overwhelmed when they come across information they don’t know what to do with," Arun said. Amongst those who selectively avoid news, they will engage with positive and solutions journalism and explainers. Fundamentally, they want news that gives them agency rather than leaves them feeling powerless. Publishers are responding by: • Including calls-to-action • Publishing more explanatory content • Creating differentiated content that cuts through 📺 Format preference is changing. As the Reuters Institute Digital News Report highlighted last year, audiences of all ages, but especially young ones, are shifting to video, particularly short-form video. Audiences say the format shift is about authenticity and convenience. Publishers are responding by: • Investing more in their audio and video strategy • Investing in formats that meet audiences "where they are at, whether that is standing in line getting lunch or in bed, where they might be watching a long-form video". • Using AI to personalise the format with text-to-speech or text-to-video transformations. 🤝 Adapting to how trust is established - Younger audiences build trust more at an individual and emotional level, and they are building relationships with individual creators, who are more transparent about their motives. Publishers need a new way to "unlock trust", Arun said. Publishers are responding in several ways. • By exploring collaborations with creators. • By elevating reporters on social media platforms. • Increasing transparency. • Humanising reporters to build affinities with audiences.

www.linkedin.com/posts/kranderson_arun-venkataraman-the-global-research-lead-activity-7325091197545312256-WNdR?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAQlgMBGsFHXfXgtPL6NkzxRaTIufCZMfc

Journalism has been under economic pressure for most of my career, and it is under increasing pressure now both in terms of relevance in a broken Attention Economy and in terms of legitimacy from anti-democratic, authoritarian leaders.

The economic pressure has been almost constant through most of my career. In the mid-90s, I was looking for my first full-time journalism job, only to find hiring freezes everywhere because of the lingering effects of the recession in the first part of the decade. But after the turn of the century, things have become much, much worse economically for news organisations, especially newspapers. We all know the situation. More than 3,200 newspapers have closed in the US since 2005. In the UK, the three major newspaper groups - Newsquest, National World and Reach - now employ a third of the journalists they did in 2007.

I went to the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, and as you can expect, there was a full-throated defence of journalism and its role in democracy. And what I’m about to say is in no way to say that journalism, especially local journalism, is not important to democracy.

Josh Stearns of the Democracy Fund makes this case compellingly:

• More local political coverage translates into higher local voter turnout.

• More local newspapers translate into more ‘down-ballot’ voting, voters fill out their ballots more fully.

• Local news boosts young voter turnout.

• Consuming local news correlates

We have lost so much local journalism capacity, but the loss of newspapers and local radio stations has come against a backdrop in the US of a collapse in trust of journalism delivered by newspapers, TV and radio. While this is usually driven by a loss of trust in national outlets, network and cable TV and major national titles like the Washington Post and New Times, it affects trust in local outlets. I know first as during my work in local journalism in the US that people would call me up when I was a local newspaper editor and complain about stories on CNN.

As you can see from data from Gallup, data has been declining for decades, with an acceleration between 2004 and 2016. The collapse is most pronounced amongst Republicans.

Decline in trust in journalism tracks with decline in other institutions since the turn of the century, including a decline in satisfaction with democracy. In the US in 2024, only 31% of voters are satisfied with how democracy is working, down 10 percentage points from 2021, according to the Pew Research Centre. The US is not alone in a decline in satisfaction with democracy. In the UK (the other country where I hold a passport), satisfaction with how democracy is working is down 21 points, from 60% to 39%. And Pew has found declines across all other democracies - France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Greece, the Netherlands, and Canada.

Doing more to explain our values

Trust in journalism is a complex issue, but I am going to focus on one issue that I think is getting in our way of regaining trust and re-engaging audiences. With all of the pressure on journalism, we reflexively restate our professional values and the value of the role that we play in democracy. I get it because they are my professional values too, and I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Jeffersonian, believing in the core values of the Bill of Rights. However, it is wrong to assume that our professional values are universal social values, especially in this era when views are not only polarised but multi-polar.

I could write a book about this, but in the interest of brevity, I agree with Joy Mayer of the Trusting News Project. We need to engage in much more transparency, not only about our process as journalists but the values that inform the process.

A small example of this: I love how the Christian Science Monitor has a box in stories that explains why they did a story. With President Trump’s recent executive orders targeting high-profile law firms, they wrote about how the British had targeted lawyers who represented “causes it didn’t like”. They highlighted the case of the Boston Massacre, when John Adams, who would become the second president of the United States, chose to represent the British soldiers who were accused of killing five colonists.

They had a box explaining why they chose to cover the story in an act of radical transparency.

It’s a small thing, but I think journalists should do it more often. Explain why we are covering something. Connect the story to our professional values but also the wider values of society.

I used to tell journalists who I worked with or who worked with me that in addition to the 5 Ws of classic journalism - who, what, where, when and why - we should include why people should care. We can’t assume background knowledge. We can’t assume that people will intuitively connect the dots that we are connecting about our story choice. And frankly, story choice is one of the most important elements of journalism. The construction of a news agenda, almost more than how stories are written, speaks to the values of a news outlet. And we need to ground that news agenda in the needs of our audiences, not just the user needs framework, but in their needs. These are things that will restore trust and demonstrate the value that we place in the relationship that we have with our communities and the broader audiences we serve.

A closure of a US non-profit newsroom and the sacking of the editor who wrote it

I met Sewell Chan years ago when he was working at the New York Times, and I was the blogs editor at The Guardian. He was writing the City Room blog, and he wanted to talk about audience engagement and blogging. I’ve followed his career since, from the New York Times to leading the newsroom at the Texas Tribune and finally to editing the Columbia Journalism Review.

The piece that he wrote recently about the closing of the non-profit Houston Landing is a good explanation of why the site failed. They failed to find an audience, and it is unclear the leadership was right to address this.

The Houston Landing Is Closing, and Laying Off 43 Employees

The nonprofit startup struggled to identify a business model, an editorial strategy, and a large audience. 

www.cjr.org/news/houston-landing-closing-closure-lay-off-43-employees-texas-tribune-chronicle-morning-news.php

Sewell was just fired from his role as the executive editor at CJR. The New York Times links to a post written by someone who worked as the digital editor at CJR about his experience working with Sewell.

Columbia Journalism Review Fires Its Editor

Sewell Chan, who started as executive editor of the publication in September, said his firing after several staff complaints was “baffling.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/business/media/cjr-sewell-chan-fired.html?searchResultPosition=1

I first found out about it from a lengthy post that he wrote and posted on Facebook and LinkedIn. He said the firing came after “three pointed conversions”, which he detailed.

My statement, part 1: Yesterday I was fired by Columbia University after… | Sewell Chan | 379 comments

My statement, part 1: Yesterday I was fired by Columbia University after eight months as executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. This was the first time in a 25-year career that I've ever been subjected to discipline in a job — much less terminated from one.  I have immense respect for Jelani Cobb as a journalist and educator, but the decision to let me go was hasty, ill-considered and quite frankly baffling. Jelani hired me last year to revive CJR, which had gone nearly a year without a permanent editor and is currently down to two full-time employees and three academic-year fellows. In my brief but eventful tenure — during which I wasn’t able to make a single hire — we broke stories about the cancellations of presidential endorsements by billionaire media owners, threats to press freedom at home and abroad, the ongoing economic and technological disruption the media industry faces, and much more. Just last week, CJR was a finalist in 3 of the 4 categories of Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications Mirror Awards, which honor excellence in media industry reporting. I was dismissed 74 hours after being told on Monday afternoon that staff had complained following pointed interactions in which I provided fair and critical feedback rooted in editorial rigor. While I disagreed with these complaints, I offered to meet with the staff members involved and requested a coach who could help me navigate a charged higher education environment.  Instead I was fired. Given that CJR’s mission is to shed light on the inner workings of journalism, here are the facts: I had three pointed conversations with staff members in recent weeks. One was with a fellow who is passionately devoted to the cause of the Gaza protests at Columbia and had covered the recent detention of a Palestinian graduate for an online publication he had just written about, positively, for CJR. I told him there was a significant ethical problem with writing for an outlet he had just covered. The second was with an editor who has been working for weeks on a sensitive MeToo investigation I launched about sexual harassment by a prominent investigative reporter. Following a legal review of that story, I urged her to share her draft to the dean so that we could move expeditiously toward publication.  She asked for more time, to which I reluctantly acceded.  The story remains unpublished.  The final interaction was with a staffer who declined to come into the office (even though the school requires attendance four days a week) and to write at least one story a week. With the school’s approval this employee was given several months’ paid leave to look for a new job. These are normal workplace interactions and I did exactly what I was hired to do, which was to provide rigorous, fair, careful editorial oversight and raise the metabolism and impact of a publication that’s supposed to monitor the media.  | 379 comments on LinkedIn

www.linkedin.com/posts/sewellchan_my-statement-part-1-yesterday-i-was-fired-activity-7319075974568951809-bS2I?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAQlgMBGsFHXfXgtPL6NkzxRaTIufCZMfc

The AI discussions at the International Journalism Festival

I went to a couple of AI panels at Perugia, but most of them were from product managers and how they were navigating AI decisions in their newsrooms. I heard about some heated presentations about AI. From some of the things I heard, one fault line was not about how AI was applied in journalism organisations, but anger towards AI companies. Journalists were angry at platforms that had led to a loss of income and stability. David Caswell is one of the smartest people working on AI in journalism, and he calls for a truce.

We need to bridge the fault line emerging in debates about AI and the future of news

reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/we-need-bridge-fault-line-emerging-debates-about-ai-and-future-news

A final link for the newsletter on one of my favourite topics - membership. The folks at Media Voices have a great interview with the strategic partnerships manager at Memberful. Membership is a powerful strategy that leverages the relationship you build with your audience, but it takes effort and finesse. At the start, she advises simplicity, but additional tiers can be added later.

What makes membership models successful for publishers? Tips from Memberful

This feature has been written in partnership with Memberful. Hear more in our interview with Jen Matichuk, Strategic Partnerships Manager …

voices.media/what-makes-membership-models-successful-for-publishers-tips-from-memberful

Sorry for the brief interruption in my newsletter. My wife and I are on our second round of antibiotics for a nasty chest infection that won’t quit. I’m hoping that antibiotics will clear things up, and normal service will be restored.

In 2013, I was in Russia consulting with a local newspaper. They planned to launch a social network for the farmers in their region, and they wanted my experience with social media and community projects at the BBC and the Guardian. At our meeting to discuss the project, the publisher asked if I would speak to the local university’s international journalism course, which her daughter was taking. “Absolutely. I love talking to students”, I said.

Midday through the meeting, the publisher took a call. All I heard was a series of low, very disapproving “oh, oh, ohs”. A conversation in Russian with my colleague ensued.

I asked my colleague if there was a problem. “FSB has noticed you are here. They say, ‘Who is this Guardian guy? Why you no tell us?’”

“Is this going to be a problem?” I asked.

“No problem, no problem. Last time, Danish guy only detained for two days,” my colleague responded.

That seemed like a problem to me, but over the next few hours, things were smoothed over enough for me to speak to the students.

I gave a talk about the changes in journalism, not just the practice of the craft during the digital transition but also the challenges to the business of journalism. Then came the Q&A. The first question was about the skills needed for professional opportunities in the industry.

The next question? “If you had to choose between going to jail or writing an article critical about the government, which would you choose?”

I paused, scanning the room for the FSB agent - playing “one of these things does not belong”. I paused because I needed time to think of an answer to the question but stay on the right side of a line which wasn’t entirely clear, probably by design.

“I’m an American, and for most of my career, I have worked for British news organisations. I have never had to make that decision,” I started off by saying.

When I said that, I always thought it would be the case in the US. Now, I’m not so sure.

Declining trust isn’t just a challenge for journalism

I am becoming sure of a few things. I’m a journalist, although not working directly in journalism at the moment. It will always be a part of my identity, and whether for audiences or myself, I need to make sense of things. I recently read two books, The Upswing by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett and Autocracy Inc. by Anne Applebaum.

The Upswing charts the swing of the US from the partisanship, inequality and corruption of the first Gilded Age (late 1870s to the early 1900s), an era of ‘I’, to the ‘we’ era of reform powered by the Progressives from 1900 to 1920 that carried on through two-thirds of the 20th Century. It led to better education, longer lives and greater equality. Bridging social capital - connections between diverse members of society - created growing levels of trust. Economists have also called this civic capital, which they define as “those persistent and shared beliefs and values that help a group overcome the free rider problem in the pursuit of socially valuable activities.”

Beginning in the mid-60s, the ‘we’ curve swung back to back to an ‘I’ focused society. Social connections started to fray and then collapse as fewer Americans joined clubs and groups. It has driven alienation and eroded trust.

Journalists are rightly concerned about the collapse in trust in the work we do and news avoidance, but efforts to address the loss of trust have been too narrowly focused on our industry. In the US, trust has dropped in almost every institution - the government, Congress, public schools, banks, big business, churches, and just about everything, according to Gallup. The US is a society in crisis, but it is not alone in the loss of bridging social capital. This is a global issue.

Over and over again, I hear how people are feeling powerless, and even I feel exhausted by events these days. I have worked in journalism for more than 25 years now, and I have created a focus on my iPhone called News Break, which shuts off the notifications from my news apps. I turn it on over the weekends now.

The world is on fire, and journalists need to zoom out and understand how they can rebuild trust and help people make things better, not just highlight the shortcomings of politicians and institutions. We have to play a role in rebuilding trust amongst people, reconnecting people to each other and helping them to solve problems. Solutions journalism is an important effort, and constructive journalism goes even further, with an emphasis on fostering civic dialogue. Constructive journalism’s three pillars are “solutions, nuance and democratic conversation”.

That resonates so much with me. I think journalism can connect, engage and inspire people. Bob Putnam highlighted the role of muckraking journalists in helping to set in motion the reforms that were central to the Progressive Era at the beginning of the 20th Century. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair “was the final precipitating force behind both a meat inspection law and a comprehensive food and drug law”, the US Food and Drug Administration says on its site. The muckrakers were not just investigative journalists but also reformers who wanted to root out corruption in public and private institutions. They stood in stark contrast to the sensationalist yellow journalists of their day. Ida Tarbell wrote about the corruption of the massive trusts that dominated American business at the time and fought a successful battle to break up John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.

Journalism has continued in this vein with brave reporting in many democracies, but now the challenge is that people have so little trust in the work we do. Autocrats around the world are leading a relentless attack against journalism, and as I wrote in my last newsletter, platforms support creators and influencers much more than they do traditional journalism institutions. The muckrakers were often super freelancers who worked for a wide range of publications. What tied them together was their passion for reform and several like-minded magazines. Similarly, I think we can use the current eco-system of newsletters, digital platforms and traditional publications to create a constellation of community-building, reform-minded journalism that builds trust in journalism and helps to rebuild civil society.

We need alliances to support democracy and battle disinformation

However, we need a clear understanding of the unique challenges of this moment, and Anne Applebaum provides that in Autocracy, Inc. It is one of the best explanations I have seen about how autocratic countries around the world - Russia, China, Iran, Belarus and Venezuela - have developed a playbook to sustain their control and undermine democracy.

Russia’s RT, China’s CGTN, Iran’s Press TV and Venezuela’s Telesur exist to create easily packaged videos to flood social networks with messages that undermine people’s faith in democracy.

She also highlights how this global network of autocrats has exploited Western financial institutions to enrich themselves. They are bound together “not through ideals but deals”. As the New York Times writes in a review of the book: “Thanks in large part to the opacity of global finance, they enjoy a vibrant trade in surveillance technologies, weapons and precious minerals, laundering one another’s dirty money and colluding to evade American sanctions. This venal compact of convenience she calls ‘Autocracy, Inc.’” More specifically:

In the crush of developments in the US, it is easy to lose track, but amidst all of the changes are ones that will benefit Autocracy, Inc. In February, “[The US Justice Department] has disbanded an effort to enforce sanctions against Russian oligarchs and fired veteran public corruption prosecutors who played a role in the department's two criminal cases against Trump during his years out of office,” Reuters reported. The president also signed an executive order instructing the Justice Department to pause enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for US businesses to bribe foreign officials to win contracts. “It's going to mean a lot more business for America,” the president said as he signed the order, according to Reuters.

Donald Trump has spoken glowingly about the Gilded Age. He says that the US was richest from 1870 to 1913, but wealth was concentrated, as it is increasingly now. This was also a period of corruption and government by patronage rather than by a professional civil service. It was a period of fierce partisanship. Change came from reformers outside of the two main political parties. It came from reform movements grounded in local communities and organising, whether that was the settlement houses such as Hull House in Chicago, labour unions or membership groups that gave new immigrants to the US a sense of belonging.

Autocracy, Inc. has crafted a narrative “that described autocracies as safe and secure and stable, and democracies as divided, chaotic, and degenerate”, Applebaum told Radio Free Europe.

They made existing divisions deeper, she added.

It seems like an insurmountable challenge. But at the end of the 19th Century, reformers faced corrupt politicians, powerful media interests and incredibly powerful corporate interests. We won’t reform our democracies, heal our divided societies and build the future we want alone. Journalists will need to build alliances with others who share our democratic values to restore trust in what we do and faith that together we can all deliver the reform our citizens need. That is the power of democracy.

Successes and challenges in local journalism

I have a soft spot for local journalism. I started in local journalism, and my last two roles before my current one were in local journalism. It’s a difficult business, but successful models are beginning to develop. On the difficult side of things: The Wall Street Journal profiled Jeremy Gulban, who used his family IT business to build out a local newspaper group in the US, CherryRoad Media. He owns 92 newspapers; a third are profitable, a third are breaking even, and a third are losing money. Perceptions of bias, tariffs increasing the cost of newsprint and difficulty finding reporters are making business even more difficult.

However, in Scotland, Newsquest is finding success. They are in the midst of a multi-year digital transformation programme. They have switched from focusing on page views to focusing on paying digital subscribers. They are also diversifying their digital products, launching standalone sports sites and newsletters, both on sports and also as local news aggregators.

'Don't worry about page views': Newsquest Scotland tops 40,000 online subscriptions

Newsquest Scotland has hit a milestone of 40,000 digital subscribers including 10,000 across six standalone sports sites.

pressgazette.co.uk/paywalls/newsquest-scotland-subscribers-digital-herald-national-rangers-celtic

Amedia in Norway has also found success in local media by building and refining a product - +Alt - that allows subscribers to buy a single subscription that includes access to their full range of local newspapers plus those of partners and also to a sports streaming service. Their bundline boasts a higher increase in average revenue per user, a larger decrease in churn and a higher increase in lifetime value than the New York Times bundle. Wow!

New York Times, Amedia are important examples of bundling economics

The New York Times and Amedia illustrate different and worthwhile examples making the business case for bundling strategies.

www.inma.org/blogs/reader-revenue/post.cfm/new-york-times-amedia-are-important-examples-of-bundling-economics

AI: Bloomberg’s ‘rocky start’ and a review of Perplexity’s new interface

Bloomberg has been pushing the boundaries of experimentation with AI, including creating its own LLM, but as the New York Times highlights, that experimentation has not been without its rough spots. The challenge for many publishers is where humans should be in the loop and how to guarantee editorial standards.

Bloomberg Has a Rocky Start With A.I. Summaries

The outlet has issued dozens of corrections to A.I.-generated news summaries since it started using the technology to write them this year.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/business/media/bloomberg-ai-summaries.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k4.rrgt.pt3AGFekgpT3&smid=url-share

As AI Takes His Readers, A Leading History Publisher Wonders What’s Next

World History Encyclopedia CEO Jan van der Crabben saw his site show up in Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT. Then traffic dropped 25%.

www.bigtechnology.com/p/as-ai-takes-his-readers-a-leading

Ezra Eeman, of Dutch public broadcaster NPO, has become of Europe’s leading voices on AI. Here he breaks down the new interface of Perplexity’s new UI and how it changes information-seeking behaviours.

The New Anatomy of Information | Ezra Eeman | 19 comments

Some people collect stamps or garden on a Sunday. I enjoy studying digital species in their natural habitat. In the new AI assistant ecosystem, Perplexity… | 19 comments on LinkedIn

www.linkedin.com/posts/ezra-eeman-8a5ba64_the-new-anatomy-of-information-activity-7309555475761487872-XMsX?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAQlgMBGsFHXfXgtPL6NkzxRaTIufCZMfc

Much has been written about the rise of Creators and Influencers, about the new stars and formats and how it is remaking journalism. I’m more interested in the economics and eco-systems.

My assumptions:

• The Creator-Influencer Economy represents a shift in the primary networks in content distribution.

• Young people dream of riches, but most will be disappointed. Once a new network is established in media, power laws quickly take hold. Just as with legacy media, the Creator Economy is a winner-takes-most market.

• The Creator Economy lives by the algorithms and dies by the algorithm as legacy media found.

The latest chapter in the Attention Economy

The theory of change that has been the most durable over the last 20 years of my career has been the Attention Economy. Psychologist, economist, and Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon coined the term in the 1960s, and he believed that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. In our world, we are drowning in information. In a world where media choices are almost unlimited, time and attention are scarce. It radically changes the economics of media, and it has been the constant over my career.

Changes in distribution and new forms of media have been adding to the amount of information available over the centuries. First, it was the penny press, then radio, then TV, then cable and satellite TV and finally the internet and various forms of digital media. All of these changes have created shifts in the Attention Economy. In 2021, Americans spent 3.16 hours a day watching traditional TV and three hours watching digital video, but in 2025, it is estimated that they will watch 2.48 hours of traditional TV but four hours of digital video, according to data from Statista. “In 2022, 89% of UK children habitually consume content on video platforms like YouTube and Tiktok, while fewer than 50% habitually watch live TV”, Chris Rainville and Simon Levene of Mosaic Ventures wrote.

Attention, and with it, revenue shifted to new platforms that aggregate attention globally on a mass scale. YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are massive attention marketplaces, and newsletter platforms like Substack and Beehiiv provide network effects and revenue infrastructure. First, the network effects: YouTube, TikTok and Instagram all have finely watched and tuned algorithms to deliver more of what you want. Beehiiv and Substack both have referral programmes and network functionality that drive free and paid subscriptions. (For a good overview of Substack’s network mechanisms, M.E. Rothwell goes deep into the network science of it all.)

The success of these platforms is the development of mechanisms to increase your consumption of them. It is why direct-to-consumer video platforms are so much more effective than linear TV in driving consumption. Linear TV will show everyone the same ads about the same programmes. The channels are the mechanisms to aggregate attention. Multi-channel television was just an inelegant way of achieving the same thing by cutting up content and audiences into smaller niches. But with Netflix and any D2C video platform after it, discovery is driven by your use and interests not by showing ads for shows to a single, homogenised persona of their assumed audience. The platforms are built to drive habitual consumption.

Time and attention are finite, so all of the time spent watching YouTube and TikTok or reading Substack or Beehiiv newsletters means less time for other things, like consuming traditional media. Money that used to flow to newspapers, radio and traditional television has shifted to these platforms as they have captured a larger share of attention. With the massive audiences these platforms attract, multiple revenue streams have developed to support creators: advertising, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, live events and merch.

It has minted not only stars but also new media entrepreneurs. Audiochuck, the true crime and mystery podcast network founded by Ashley Flowers in 2017, just received a $40 m investment from the Chernin Group that values her business at $450 m. Over half (57%) of Gen Z-aged people want to be influencers, according to a Morning Consult poll of 1000 young people. As I wrote in my last newsletter, Goldman Sachs Research forecasts that the Creator-Influencer Economy will double to $480 bn by 2027. Some of the Gen Z people in the poll said they were seeking money and fame, while others said they wanted connection and community.

Power laws and the creator economy

When a new medium first launches, there is an opportunity for new voices to establish themselves, but as with most digital markets, power law dynamics quickly take hold. As Chris and Simon of Mosaic Ventures wrote in 2022, creator audiences are highly concentrated. They analysed the number of YouTube subscribers, and less than 1% of accounts had more than 100,00 subs. And they highlighted how less than 1% of Twitch streams earned half of all revenue. They believe the same power law curves exist on Substack and OnlyFans. Goldman Sachs Research estimates the global number of creators will increase 10% to 20% by 2028.

This is where traditional economics kicks in. Oversupply depresses prices, or in this case wages. People flock to media for money, fame or mission. With power law driving the Attention Economy, it means that the vast majority of creators will not earn what Goldman Sachs refers to as professional wages.

Almost half (48%) earned $15,000 or less, according to research from NeoReach. That might be a nice source of supplemental income, but it won’t pay the bills. And the income can be quite unpredictable. Clint Bentley was profiled in a Wall Street Journal article. The 29-year-old has 400,000 followers across TikTok, Twitch and YouTube, and earned $58,084, which is in the upper third of earners, but he still lives with his parents because of the volatility of his income.

Live by the algorithm and die by the algorithm

And just like traditional media that has found they need to keep pace with changes in algorithms, the same is true with the Creator Economy. The difference is that platforms are tweaking their algorithms to the benefit creators, while Facebook and X have both tweaked theirs to the detriment of traditional publishers. But it means that for many creators, their businesses are built on the rented audiences of the platforms. Of course, those creators who have built communities and networks of their own and direct supporters through platforms like Patreon have more of a safety net. One of the creator community networks I follow is vintage computing - Sean of Action Retro, Kate of Macintosh Librarian and Steve of Mac84. They have loyal followings and operate in a mutually supportive community, helping create a larger audience and deeper relationships. Traditional media has made a similar pivot to direct relationships with subscribers and members as platforms have sent less traffic to drive ad impressions.

Something else is at play here: Creator-Influencer businesses are leaner than the large legacy media organisations. In the barbell media economy, big legacy players like the New York Times are the winners that take the most of the pivot to reader revenue and multi-market, multi-product businesses. On the opposite end are agile but also very lean creator businesses. Some are solopreneurs, but others have grown to become nascent media companies in their own right.

Axios’ Sara Fischer was on Brian Morrissey’s Rebooting podcast talking about the Creator-Influencer Economy, and she was quite direct. These new players don’t have the overheads, high-cost structures or, yes, unions, that legacy players have, she says.

Taking a step back, the distribution networks have changed, which has shifted power from television, cable and satellite networks. A Media Operator is reporting that VCs and funds are looking for roll-up investments in the Creator Economy that will drive concentration. This is to say that the Creator Economy is looking a lot like the traditional media economy. The thing that has changed is the distribution networks that are aggregating attention and revenue.

News influencers are a slightly different subset of this economy, and that’s on deck for another newsletter about that. If you want to get ahead and read more, Liz Kelly Nelson, who is laser-focused on this, breaks down where news influencers sit in the new news eco-system.

Newsletters: The cockroach of digital media

These are the stories that caught my eye while I thought about the Creator Economy.

The humble newsletter is like the cockroach of digital media—hardy and resilient. It is the MVP of many digital media operations. In fact, Sarah Ebner of the FT says it is the “biggest driver of reader engagement”. I talk about newsletters as part of the post-platform Push Economy of media. Audiences have committed to content that is pushed to them: newsletters in their inboxes, podcasts in their favourite apps or the push notifications of media apps. Continuing the theme above, she says that the personality-driven newsletter is one of the developments she has seen in her decade of work on the format.

FT head of newsletters on how it tripled its newsletter subscriptions in four years

Publisher newsletter strategies: A masterclass interview with Financial Times head of newsletters Sarah Ebner.

pressgazette.co.uk/newsletters/publisher-newsletter-strategies-financial-times

Media builds its own social spaces

I’ve been following how publishers are reviving their own efforts at creating communities to challenge the dominance of the major social media platforms. I was told by a friend in the industry that Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti has talked about launching a social network before, but it looks like he is serious this time. He has a hypothesis that people are craving digital services that don’t feel like they are manipulating them emotionally. I don’t disagree with him, but Buzzfeed played the game of the social networks a long time that I don’t trust it as a brand to bring something authentic to the table.

BuzzFeed Looks to Launch its Own, More Positive Social Media Platform

BuzzFeed's looking to take a different approach to social platform engagement. 

www.socialmediatoday.com/news/buzzfeed-island-social-platform/739889

Jeff Elgie is one of the most interesting leaders in the local journalism market, and his Villiage Media has launched its place-based social network on select sites in its Canada-based news network. Jeff is smart and focused, and this is an experiment to watch both in terms of audience engagement and how it drives KPIs for the business.

Jeff Elgie on LinkedIn: SPACES at SooToday.com

I’ve been unusually quiet here for the last few months… because we’ve been busy building what we believe will be the future of local media. Our in-house dev…

www.linkedin.com/posts/jeff-elgie_spaces-at-sootodaycom-activity-7293005923466256384-coXg?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

With so much doom and gloom in the industry, it is always good to hear about success and learn from it. Le Monde’s successful subs strategy has allowed it to double the size of its newsroom and see a point where its digital subscribers will pay for that enlarged newsroom.

Le Monde CEO: Digital subscriber revenue will pay for entire newsroom within two years

Digital subscriptions revenue is expected to cover the costs of Le Monde's entire editorial staff within the next two years, its CEO said.

pressgazette.co.uk/paywalls/le-monde-subscriptions-digital-ceo-louis-dreyfus

AI roundup: NYTimes newsroom rollout, Thomson Reuters court win and how journalists are using it

AI is proving itself an important tool for publishers to make their operations more efficient and their revenue models to increase conversion and decrease churn more effective. The New York Times might be fighting OpenAI in the courts, but it just announced a major deployment of AI in its newsroom.

If this case holds up on appeal, it would be a major precedent. AI companies have relied on US fair use provisions to justify their scraping of content from their Westlaw service by a company called Ross Intelligence. Key to the ruling was that the judge found the AI company was attempting to create a market substitute by scraping Westlaw’s content.

Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US

The Thomson Reuters decision has big implications for the battle between generative AI companies and rights holders.

www.wired.com/story/thomson-reuters-ai-copyright-lawsuit

AI adoption is industries often outpaces official guidelines. Experiments with the technology both as part of formal programmes or individual efforts are happening across the industry, and Editor & Publisher provides a useful overview.

Beyond the AI hysteria: What journalists are actually using it for - Editor and Publisher

AI in journalism has shifted from a disruptive threat to a practical tool, helping reporters work smarter without replacing them. While early fears of automation taking over newsrooms have faded, AI-powered tools are proving invaluable for tasks like transcription, data analysis, and investigative research. The challenge now is how journalists can harness AI’s potential while ensuring accuracy, credibility, and public trust in their reporting.

www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/ai-in-2025-from-transcription-to-data-analysis-tools-for-journalists,254253

An old friend, Mark Jones shared this, and it’s a good one to bookmark and use. I saved it because I should follow the suggestions more than I do!

Whether you call it as I do - the Platform Era - or what Brian Morrissey calls it the Traffic Era, the era of building a media business on a high volume of referrals from search and social is over. The sooner we come to grips with it and adjust our priorities and business models, the sooner we return to growth and stability - as many publishers already have.

If we need more proof of the precarity of relying on rented traffic, look at the latest Reuters Institute trends and predictions report. Traffic from Facebook to news publishers has plummeted by 67% in the last two years, according to data from Chartbeat

Search has been much more reliable, but algorithm changes routinely cause audience teams to scramble and adjust to the business imperatives of other companies rather than their own.

Smart minds in the industry predict this year will be even more challenging. “Although this is hardly revelatory, my prediction for 2025 is that the big topic on everybody’s mind is going to be traffic,” Lisa MacLeod, Director of FT Strategies, wrote in the consultancy’s 2025 predictions. Thomas Baekdal added to the voices warning about reliance on “other sources” for traffic. “The first thing to talk about is traffic, because in 2025, we have reached the point where the old strategies and tactics around traffic are no more.”

End the reliance on rented audiences

Since the rise of social media, audience development editors have agilely adjusted their tactics to changes in the platforms’ algorithms. They have become expert in using data and experiments to intuit these changes to re-establish traffic. They have been early adopters of new platforms, and they have quickly got up to speed with new formats and understood the community dynamics. The logic was that we went to platforms because that is where “the audience” is. But as my friend Damon Kiesow asks journalists: Is Twitter actually your community? For most news organisations, the answer is no, unless they are focused on politics or sports. Facebook has been deprioritising news for years now. Google can still drive traffic to journalism sites, but it’s quite a dance. We have spent endless amounts of time and energy chasing the trends on platforms.

You can see this in discussions about whether Bluesky would be a good place to shift to after the changes at Facebook and whether to follow other publications in leaving X. Should we shift to TikTok or RedNote or WhatsApp? I agree with Thomas Baekdal that this is the wrong way to look at things.

The conversation shouldn’t be about what platform publishers should focus on for the next source of free traffic. Not only is that era over, but the last decade has shown us the dangers of an over-reliance on rented audiences. Many publishers have already shifted to a focus on converting rented audiences on platforms to known, owned audiences.

Diversify products, revenue and marketing channels

The traffic era was predicated on the idea that digital advertising was a low-margin business, so we needed to attract as many people to our sites as possible to monetise them effectively. This isn’t working, and it hasn’t been working for years. Diversifying revenue and accepting that smaller, paying audiences are a more stable basis for a journalism or media business than trying to rely on platforms for traffic.

The playbook on how to transition is becoming relatively well established, although even with a clearer path, execution is still critical.

1. Develop and execute an A2K strategy - The strategic shift is acknowledging that known audiences are much more valuable than unknown, lightly engaged ones, and the UK’s independent has the data to prove it. Registered users are 11x more engaged and subscribers are 62x more engaged than unknown users. Even if the Indy was only monetising audiences using advertising, that is a huge delta. Even if the registered users don’t subscribe, they still have more data about them, lifting their ad yields, and they can market other products such as events or e-commerce offerings. However, registration is an important step in their conversion journey, and half of new subscribers are registered users.

2. Diversify products and revenue - Expanding the pool of known users offers new revenue opportunities. I have seen publishers like the Baltimore Banner use their email lists for partner marketing. Publishers market events, wine clubs, puzzle apps and recipe offerings. In India, HT Media has even launched an OTT video service aggregator. The more you know about your audience, the more relevant and effective these advertising messages can be and the more revenue they can generate.

   It’s time to stop putting so much energy into staring into the black boxes of platforms and put more energy, effort and money into our marketing our own work.

3. Invest in marketing your own work - It’s time to stop putting so much energy into staring into the black boxes of platforms and put more energy, effort and money into marketing our work. We need to diversify our marketing channels and work to connect with audiences. Some of this will be on platforms, such as marketing our podcasts, newsletters and subscription offerings via social channels. But there are so many other marketing channels.

This doesn’t mean that this is easy. B2C media leaders all talk about the challenging media market. But by seizing our own destiny, at least we can have a sense of agency.

Of course, Mark Zuckerberg has made a raft of changes across Meta’s properties at the start of 2025. He ended fact-checking and took a poke at “legacy media”. Flagging posts with fact-check details isn’t censorship. It’s context. Alexios Mantzarlis is the director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech and was the founding director of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). He provided this fact-check of Zuck, and it’s an important read.

Let’s fact-check Mark Zuckerberg’s fact-checking announcement

Zuckerberg didn’t mention that a big chunk of the content fact-checkers have been flagging is not political speech, but the low-quality spammy clickbait that Meta platforms have commodified.

www.niemanlab.org/2025/01/zuck-chucks-fact-checkers-to-cosplay-as-elon-musk

As Exhibit A of the challenges facing media, Vox Media continued with its layoffs and made changes to its leadership in an effort to right the ship.

Vox Media shakes up leadership and lays off staff for the 2nd time in about a month

Vox Media laid off staff on Thursday for the second time in just over a month, this time at its general-news and politics site, Vox

africa.businessinsider.com/news/vox-media-shakes-up-leadership-and-lays-off-staff-for-the-2nd-time-in-about-a-month/90t2b3g

Well, credit the Washington Post for ambition, but a goal of 200m paying readers seems a little unrealistic. And I’m not sure by trying to appeal to a wider range of the political spectrum and to blue-collar readers that they’ll achieve their “big hairy audacious goal'“. Of course, paying readers doesn’t necessarily mean full-fat subscribers, and it depends on the range of products they develop.

The Washington Post Wants to Sell You Some “Riveting Storytelling”

As Trump prepares to return to office, Jeff Bezos’s paper is embracing corporate buzzwords.

newrepublic.com/article/190394/washington-post-jeff-bezos-journalism

Reuters has been trying to develop its subscription product, and Gannett has been loosening its connection to the Associated Press. They started 2025 by announcing a bundled subscription.

If you want a good example of the type of diversification strategy I’m talking about, you only have to look to Zetland in Denmark. Their deep content model works and deeply engages their audience. Moreover, their mix of text and audio content connects with young audiences. Half of their members are in their 20s and 30s.

Denmark's Zetland targets 40 percent growth in 2025 as it expands into Finland

2025-01-16. Danish start-up Zetland has found success by focusing on journalism as an experience, which includes highly curating stories for its members, making stories more personable and directly engaging with their audience at live events.

wan-ifra.org/2025/01/denmarks-zetland-targets-40-percent-growth-in-2025-as-it-expands

I practiced data journalism for a long time, and in the current industry research and content marketing that I do, I still try to include data visualisations. Here are some tools to start using this year.

Six tools to elevate your data storytelling

Create visually striking charts and graphs that take your data-led reporting to the next level

www.journalism.co.uk/news/six-tools-to-elevate-your-data-storytelling/s2/a1208218

Creators and influencers are one of the major themes this year.

How influencers are impacting journalism

NPR's Eric Deggans speaks to Summer Harlow of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and V Spehar of UnderTheDeskNews about the role of influencers in journalism.

www.npr.org/2025/01/04/nx-s1-5246011/influencer

In December, I will celebrate thirty years of working in journalism (or journalism-related work). Community has been at the centre of my work throughout most of my career—whether in my first journalism job as a regional reporter at the Hays Daily News in Western Kansas, engaged journalism at the BBC, managing community newspapers in Wisconsin, or even my current work at Pugpig. After years of watching the disruption in journalism, here are core beliefs I have about the industry:

• A media outlet's relationships with its audience are highly correlated with its sustainability.

• Product and audience-centric thinking align both the journalism produced and the user experience, which delivers loyalty and habit that is highly correlated with sustainability.

• Membership and engaged journalism are mutually reinforcing strategies for smaller and independent media organisations that deliver better commercial and editorial outcomes.

I just published a case study of South Africa’s Daily Maverick after interviewing its CEO, Styli Charalambous, about the indie publisher’s journey. They launched in 2009 as a for-profit business at a more optimistic time in South Africa and digital media. Despite publishing high-impact investigations, they struggled to become sustainable so they pivoted to non-profit, hoping that they could tap into philanthropy. That didn’t get them to the point of sustainability, even after they broke a story that would lead to the ouster of Jacob Zuma as president.

Styli developed an innovation tour of the US and visited the Washington Post, the New York Times and National Geographic. What stood out for him was that the most successful and optimistic outlets had a firm foundation of reader revenue. However, a paywall seemed antithetical to Daily Maverick’s mission, but he happened upon a research paper about membership.

He plots membership on a continuum of possible reader revenue models with subscriptions on one end and donations on the other. “At the heart of membership is a community of people joining a cause. People being part of something,” he said, and members have become part of their journalism.

After establishing their brand as a hard-hitting indie investigative publisher, they tested the model and had members within minutes. Styli said they used membership as a Trojan horse to introduce engaged journalism to the newsroom. Now, it is fully distributed across all of the editorial teams. The benefits of membership for members and the business include:

1. They developed a database of ‘superpowers’ their members have. They have tapped their members who are drone pilots. “One of the top constitutional lawyers in the country, who is a member, suggested a panel for an event and ended up being the moderator.” One of their first members even became their first community manager and is now their chief growth officer.

2. It leads to high-engagement products. Their “Your Questions Answered” newsletter which does what it says on the tin. Members ask questions, which are grouped by theme, and then they are answered by ministers, experts or other newsmakers. The newsletter goes out to 80,000 to 90,000 members. During this year’s elections, it had an 85%-90% open rate.

3. This high engagement leads to a high customer lifetime value because he said “after three years, 85% of people who start as a member are still there”. Now 40% of their revenue comes from their members.

What I love about this case study is that Daily Maverick is reaping the benefits of being this close to its members. As an audience-centric product leader, my goal is to make sure the editorial, product and business model are working to deliver the best for audiences and deliver returns to sustain the people who create the content. Daily Maverick shows the benefits of membership in creating a value-creating symbiotic relationship between members and journalists. It supports high-quality, high-engagement journalism that creates value for the news organisation, members and the broader society.

Now onto the links for this week.

Chris Stone, who I know from the New Statesman, has elevated their podcast operations. He is incredibly generous in sharing his expertise, and he recently highlighted a way for podcast publishers to drive consumption of their podcasts on YouTube, which was just shown to be the primary way audiences consume podcasts.

This weird YouTube podcast growth hack should be illegal

If you’ve been to any of the big podcast events in the past year or so - or indeed if you’re just generally online and thinking about podcasts - you’ve doubtless heard the hype around video podcasts. “Video podcasts are the future!” “You NEED to have a podcast video strategy!” “What do you mean you

www.linkedin.com/pulse/weird-youtube-podcast-growth-hack-should-illegal-chris-stone-cgdaf

YouTube tops both Spotify and Apple when it comes to podcast distribution now.

YouTube Is Bigger Than Spotify and Apple for Podcasts, Research Finds

YouTube is the go-to destination for podcasts over Spotify and Apple Podcasts, according to new research from Edison Podcast Metrics

www.thewrap.com/youtube-podcasts-bigger-spotify-apple-data

With this huge reach, podcasts have emerged as an influential platform. Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris went on podcasts this year to reach audiences who had tuned out from traditional sources of news and information. Adweek tracks the rise of podcasts.

How Podcasts Emerged as Vehicles of Mass Reach and Influence

Podcasts offered this year’s presidential candidates something no other mass media channel could.

www.adweek.com/media/how-podcasts-emerged-as-vehicles-of-mass-reach-niche-audiences-and-cultural-influence

As if on cue, the Pew Research Center in the US released a report on news influencers. More than one in five Americans get their news and information from these influencers, who are mostly men. Only TikTok has an even gender balance. And slightly more 27% to 21% were Republicans and supporters of Donald Trump. Another interesting data point: Most news influencers are on X. As news organisations decide to de-prioritise X, it is becoming an alternate news source, or at least a home for alternate news sources.

America’s News Influencers

This study explores the makeup of the social media news influencer universe, including who they are, what content they create and who their audiences are.

www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2024/11/18/americas-news-influencers

This is going to be more and more common. LLMs are actually pretty good at summarising existing text, and as long as humans are in the loop, the process works pretty well too.

The Wall Street Journal is testing AI article summaries

Gannett is running AI-powered article summaries, too.

www.theverge.com/2024/11/13/24295838/the-wall-street-journal-ai-article-summaries-key-points

Have you left Twitter or X? I haven’t yet, but I don’t use it much. I am contemplating whether to leave. Most of my feelings about it are nostaligic, and X isn’t Twitter. X is an influence vehicle for its owner.

Media organisations and journalists don’t need to make some grand political display in leaving. Frankly, there is a strong business case posting there is a waste of resources. Social media has moved on, and news organisations’ time is best spent elsewhere. I said this in The Audiencers WhatsApp community.

Journalists - is Twitter actually your community?

It is long past time for journalism to abandon Twitter. We ourselves have torn down the wall between editorial and business interests if as journalists, our calculation here is not values-based. To wit: “But I have a large following and neither BlueSky or Threads does.” That is the rationalization of

kiesow.net/journalists-is-twitter-actually-your-community

Vertical video is something I’m about to dive into for one of my next research projects. The BBC started using vertical video in its app in 2017 and saw dramatic results in terms of the number of videos viewed and the number of users viewing video. The data is there to support that vertical video is a no brainer for engaging mobile audiences.

Nine Metros uses vertical video, habit building to capture Olympics audience

The Nine Metros social team approached the Olympics with a dual focus: increase brand awareness and traffic while also cultivating a strong sense of fandom around the event.

www.inma.org/blogs/digital-strategies/post.cfm/nine-metros-uses-vertical-video-habit-building-to-capture-olympics-audience

A good roundup from INMA about the thinking amongst US newsroom leaders after the election. Misinformation is overwhelming, and a lot of newsrooms are struggling with a lack of resources. This common stood out for me from one editor who wants to focus on “common interests and concerns across the county, across political divisions, and then hopefully start[ing] some conversations around those common areas of concern and interest.” Journalism as a service is a powerful way to re-establish its role in people’s lives.

Fact-checking, AI remain top of mind in post-U.S. election coverage

The U.S. election may be over, but media companies will be addressing many challenges related to it for the foreseeable future.

www.inma.org/blogs/research/post.cfm/fact-checking-ai-remain-top-of-mind-in-post-u-s-election-coverage

Exhibit B on the usefulness of short-form, mostly vertical video. Francesca Barber, Politico’s executive director of global newsroom strategy. hit on themes that resonate with what Styli was talking about, namely listening and building a direct relationship with audiences.

“Trust is important here: it means listening, not just opining. It means having a direct relationship to audiences in the formats they are consuming (e.g. video, audio, shareable direct messages). And it means being clear who your audience is and building expectations and habit throughout the year, so that during an election cycle, they come to you.”

Polls, trust and video shorts: Lessons for news publishers from US election

After the US election, we asked: "What is the biggest thing you think the media needs to learn about connecting with audiences?"

pressgazette.co.uk/north-america/us-election-media-reflections-trump-harris