At work, my hip-hop name is K-Fun, as in Kevin and conversion funnel. I’m semi-obsessed with how we can convert casual users into, in the case of the public media stations I work for, members.

So it should come as no surprise that the top story in today’s newsletter is about how The Times (of London is using AI and newsletters to reduce subscriber churn.

In my work, I’m focused on the top of the funnel – growing our audience – and the first stages of the conversion process. But for groups like The Times, which has been building its paid content strategy for years now, the focus is much farther down the funnel, on retention. Converting casual users to members or subscribers becomes a Sisyphean task if you have a high churn rate, a high rate at which you lose subscribers.

The Times is using AI to send personalised newsletters based on readers interests. Basically, they are using technology to send the right content at the right to time to subscribers on a level that would not be scalable if it relied simply on human editors. The halving of the churn rate was determined by comparing the churn of a group that received the newsletter generated by the AI and a control group.

Nicely for The Times, a £1m grant from Google’s News Initiative helped pay for the trial, which is a good reason for news organisations in North America to apply for the new challenge that Google is running there. I mentioned the challenge in yesterday’s newsletter.

Thanks for reading, and if you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do so easily on my Nuzzel profile page, and please, if you spot an international media business story I should include, flag it up to me on Twitter, @kevglobal.

In today’s newsletter, we take a look at the fact-checking operation at the Washington Post that manages a database of 10,000 falsehoods spoken, tweeted and otherwise communicated by the 45th president of the United States. The official tally is 10,111 “false or misleading claims” in 828 days in office as of 27 April. How are they managing this?

Each member of (Glenn Kessler’s) three-person team picks a day of the week to sift through Trump’s tweets, speeches and media appearances for potential claims to add to the database. Each person generally picks up two days, and in practice, someone usually ends up losing their weekend.

“It’s now become a bit of a burden because it consumes so much time,” Kessler said. “I’m trying to figure out how we can handle more of this during the week. I don’t know what we’ll do when it comes to campaign season and he’s holding three rallies a day.”

How The Washington Post tallied more than 10,000 Trump falsehoods in less than three years , by Daniel Funke, Poynter

They have added up the time spent, and Kessler said that they have worked an extra 118 8-hour workdays. The project was initially only supposed to last the first 100 days of his presidency, but readers actually called and emailed asking for the project to continue. That’s brilliant.

In addition to that, we also have:

• The rise of fear-based social media like Nextdoor, Citizen, and now Amazon’s Neighbors, by Rani Molla, Vox
• Planting seeds: The new Podfund wants to invest in early-stage podcasts, Caroline Crampton, Nieman Lab
• What stories do well on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google, Sara Fischer, Axios

If you’ve got a story that you’d like me to include, say hello over on Twiter, @kevglobal.

A mic with the NPR (National Public Radio) flag at their headquarters in Washington DC. by Ted Eytan, Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

I wrote about public media groups in the US buying digital local news sites last month for What’s New in Publishing last month after Colorado Public Radio bought Spirited Media’s Denverite. This isn’t really a new trend with St. Louis Public Radio buying the St. Louis Beacon more than five years ago, but we have more examples recently. And now with Philadelphia’s WHYY buying Spirited Media’s original site, Billy Penn, we have another example of this interesting effort by public media groups to scale their digital audiences and ambitions through acquisition.

In my international media newsletter today, we have a couple of pieces looking at the acquisition as well as this in a jam-packed edition:

What will journalists do with the 5G wireless? LSE research role to study AI and news. NYT CEO: Publishers can’t build business model on cuts. Drone journalism tips and more (including Vice’s latest sign of weakness and lack of focus).

If you spot a good story about the business of media, especially digital, feel free to send it to me @kevglobal on Twitter.

If you don’t get my international media newsletter in your inbox, you can get a taste of it and subscribe here. 

Shy Greek Sculpture, by Alan Levine, from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

Good Monday morning! In my international media newsletter today, we hear from my friend Suchandrika Chakrabarti on 7 reasons a freelance journalist should start a podcast. I met her when I was doing consulting and training for her former employer, then Trinity-Mirror, now Reach in the UK. It’s a great post, and I think if you have love audio and have a niche that you’re passionate about, podcasts can be a great addition to a freelancer’s repertoire.

Apart from other industry news today, we also have another bit of sage, actionable advice: If you’re an introvert attending a media festival for the first time, this is for you. Janie Octia of Splice, which aims to become the Nieman Lab/Digiday of Southeast Asia, gives advice for how to get the most out of media conferences if you’re not an extroverted über-networker. I raise my hand to that. I’ve had to learn networking. It didn’t come naturally to me. I still struggle to break the ice, but once I do, I found that I best understand networking (or blogging) as sharing mutual professional passions.

If you don’t get my international media newsletter, you can get a taste of it and subscribe here.