Publishers look past crypto and the metaverse as they embrace AI PLUS How YouTube has become the preferred platform for podcasters

Today, we take a look at what comes next in innovation at media groups, what technologies are being passed over and what technologies and formats media companies are investing in. As Chris Sutcliffe writes in his summary of the Media Moments 2022 report, the media is experiencing its own crypto winter as money flows out of this risky, speculative asset class as the era of easy money and pandemic stimulus packages end.

What is very much on the innovation for 2023 is AI and short-form video, and Digiday highlights how Betches Media is leaning into their success. And Chinese internet giant Tencent is trying to play catchup and develop a response to TikTok. 

Plus, we look at how YouTube is becoming a major platform for podcasters, and how a newsletter for how to live inexpensively in London grew its audience. With the cost of living crisis really biting not only Londoners but everyone in the UK, it seems to be at the right place and the right time. 

And don’t miss an interesting proposal for the future of Twitter. A hybrid cooperative run as a B corp social enterprise? 

Chris has some solid numbers here about how the Meta is simply not hitting its numbers when it coes to the Metaverse, despite aggressive advertising and promotion. And he also has a rundown of how far NFTs have fallen, although he expresses cautious optimism that their is still room for innovation. 
However, the area where he see the most investment and interest is AI. 

Speaking of AI, Brian Morrissey offers up some predictions. Marketing and advertising copy will go first he says. Search will become a mess, but he also sees AI as continuing to rebalance power from institutions to individuals. I’m not so sure about the creator economy getting a boost from that, but AI will definitely be a key area of technological development and disruption. ChatGPT is just the beginning, and investment will flow into this area as major players look to ensure that they are as dominant in the future as they have been in the past.  

Speaking of AI, transparency will be a major issue. CNET has been experimenting with it, but some have accused the tech site of not being clear on what it was doing. It’s trying to do that now. 

YouTube as a podcast platform should not be a surprise, and Morning Consult has some fascinating numbers that show a complicated picture of the relationship between video and podcast listening. 

The idea is so simple: A newsletter full of free events for people in London. I remember back in the day in Washington DC that there was something similar – a happy hour listing where unpaid or low-pad interns could get free snacks with their drinks. Note, word of mouth has been important but so has good, old local BBC radio. The relationship between emerging and traditional media often has a symbiotic element. 

Developments in vertical, short-form video

The story about Betches Media, which is focused on serving young women, is another data point about the importance of YouTube. They are experimenting with YouTube Shorts. Why? Because it ties into their podcast strategy. I spot a trend. 

And not only is Tencent placing a big bet on social video, newsletter startup Morning Brew just bought Our Future because it gives them a foothold in short-form video. 

Industry news: A mixed bag of growth and inflation-fuelled losses

When we put together our State of the Digital publishing report at Pugpig, we heard a lot of stories about increased costs, and that is playing out as media groups report their results. DC Thomson and National World both saw increases in revenue, but increased energy and paper costs have taken a bite of healthy revenue as pandemic lockdowns ended. 

Twitter as a social enterprise? And what next for your career

This an interesting proposal for a hybrid-cooperative model: a social enterprise. The one major hitch that I see is the sums that would be required to buy out Musk and his backers. However, as he drives the company into the ground, creditors may be willing or be forced to accept pennies on the dollar. 

As media jobs become not only rarer but also the path to senior roles becomes more difficult, a former BBC journalist discusses how to make a personal pivot in 2023. 

Publishers shift their attention to retention PLUS WAN-IFRA

Welcome to the new look newsletter on a new platform, Beehiiv. A big thanks to Esther Kezia-Thorpe at Media Voices for helping me narrow down which newsletter platform to choose. I could tell when we were doing our State of the Digital Publishing Report at Pugpig that we were on the cusp of a new tack strategically for media as the economic cycle was turning. As looks ahead, predictions and forecasts come out for 2023, subscriber retention has shot to the top of many lists. FT Strategy found that retention is the top priority for 68% of the subscription businesses that they spoke to, according to What’s New in Publishing. 

On that theme, WAN-IFRA looks at the playbook that the Star-Tribune in the US has for retaining its subscribers. They have focused on getting email contacts for their subscribers, and they focus on getting their subscribers to renew that first time. 

Plus, INMA looks at the product priorities of publishers and finds that personalisation and new content format intended to engage audiences are high on the list. So much of what publishers are focused on relates to efforts to engage and retain audiences. 

And we have a brief social media platform roundup with a look at the expected impact of a new online safety bill in the UK and the most recent ructions at Twitter, where it has become clear that they shut off API access to certain third-party apps. 

As I settle in with Beehiiv, things might change a bit over the coming weeks. If you have any suggestions please feel free to drop me an email or message on Twitter @kevglobal. Thanks for coming along for the move. 

George Adelman, Principal, FT Strategies in a new report, says that we’re entering a third phase of the subscription economy, according to a summary from What’s New in Publishing. Beginning around the turn of the century, subscriptions began to take hold, and then he points to COVID as a period that drove subscriptions. Now, we are entering the retention phase. 

The retention phase will likely be one in which consumers will be more reserved about their spending and will be more likely to jump from one subscription to another to find the best fit for their needs.

They have aligned the organisation around the goal of getting new subscribers to renew for the first time. That is the best indicator of whether they will develop a long-term relationship with a subscriber, and they frequently reinforce the quality and effort of their content. Email is a key component, and they send content-led emails twice a month to try to re-engage inactive subscribers. 

Social Media Roundup: Platforms prep for fallout from UK online safety bill, and Twitter shuts off API to some apps

The FT (£) looks at how social media platforms are preparing for a new online safety bill in the UK. They are expecting to see a drop in users due to the bill. 

This weekend my wife was upset because Tweetbot, which she uses to manage tweets for her business went offline. It was no accident John Gruber of Daring Fireball says as he refers to internal Slack messages first reported by The Information that show that this was a deliberate move by Elon Musk’s Twitter. 

Social Media Today says that Tweebot and Twitterific were two of the apps affected by the API change. Twitter under Musk continues to make erratic moves with little communication with partners or customers. 

The developer community has been highly critical of Twitter’s actions, which it says are unprofessional and represent ‘an unrecoverable breach of trust between it and its developers and users’.

What pandemic playbooks taught media companies about resilience PLUS Manchester’s The Mill shares it’s two-year break-even growth plan for local news

Agility both in terms of operations and also in terms of where they sourced talent has been an important lesson for media managers during the pandemic, and they are relying on those lessons as they prepare for next turn of the economic screw. Digiday reviews what other lessons in resilience they will focus on in 2023. And the digital publishing industry review also looks into what is hot and what is not in terms of the ad industry in 2023.

In a very long look back, the New York Times looks back a decade ago when it introduced Snowfall, which has inspired a decade of long-form digital media storytelling or scrolly-telling as it has been sometimes called.

PLUS journalism.co.uk has a great overview of how newsletter-based The Mill in Manchester broke even in two years. It’s a playbook to study for sure. And a look at a YouTube powerhouse, Channel 5, not the UK’s Channel 5 but a group of young journalism upstarts using the platform to reach the massive audience there.

This is the last week that this newsletter will be sent out via Revue. Next week, we’ll have a new-look newsletter and a new platform.


WSJ, Insider, BDG among publishers revisiting pandemic lessons in business ops as potential recession looms – Digidaydigiday.com

BDG, Insider, WSJ and other publishers are bracing for the uncertainties of 2023 with lessons from the pandemic.

One of the the themes that seemed to gather more attention in the tail of 2022 was how to continue to manage hybrid working situations. This was driven not just by the desire of staff to work remotely but also the economic motivation of many publishers to reduce their costs by reducing their real estate portfolio. It’s been happening in newspapers for years, but it is spreading to other outlets now. They also learned about flexibility in ad sales. More about that in a minute.

‘Snow Fall’ at 10: How It Changed Journalism – The New York Timeswww.nytimes.com

The Pulitzer Prize-winning multimedia feature about an avalanche in Washington State changed the way The New York Times approaches storytelling.

They took what they learned in creating Snow Fall and productised it. They created tools and workflows.

The definitive Digiday guide to what’s in and out for advertising in 2023 – Digidaydigiday.com

From esports is dying to retail media hype, here’s what’s in (and out) for advertising in 2023.

What jumped out at me in this was how crypto ads and NFTs are so last year, but I am curious about how media will experiment with the metaverse. It feels like a bit of a blind alley for me, similar to 360 -degree video in which there will be a rush of largely undifferentiated projects without a sense of what really works in the medium.

Andrew Callaghan and Channel 5 Co-founders on New HBO Doc. Covering Jan. 6 Resurrectionwww.esquire.com

Channel 5 has gone from upstart YouTube channel to undeniably influential reporting powerhouse. And they’re just getting started.

How a group of young video journalists used YouTube to break into the mainstream.

The Mill’s two-year roadmap to breaking even | Media newswww.journalism.co.uk

The Manchester-based startup has convinced 1.5k people to pay for local news powered by newsletters. The CEO shares tips on early growth strategies

Grab the low-hanging fruit right away so that you have the runway for long-term, sustainable growth. This is a good, practical business case.

Coming to a Hawaii library near you: Honolulu Civil Beat is hosting pop-up newsrooms around the state | Nieman Journalism Labwww.niemanlab.org

“We learned that people have an interest if they can get to us.”

This is one trend that I keep an eye on, how local indie digital publishers are using libraries in different ways to

Ukraine, Queen lead Chartbeat’s list of 2022’s most-engaging stories – Poynterwww.poynter.org

But ESPN led the list with its story about sexual predator and former Penn State football player Todd Hodne

One of those great end-of-year links.

Google Releases Guide to Search Ranking Systems

Google has provided a short guide to help web publishers better understand their search ranking initiatives and perspectives.

A good guide to keep handy to inform your SEO efforts.

YouTube secures NFL Sunday Ticket in landmark streaming deal • TechCrunchtechcrunch.com

YouTube and the National Football League announced on Thursday that the two have reached a deal for the NFL Sunday Ticket.

YouTube’s deep pockets allow it to play in the big leagues.

Slow fade for Google and Meta’s ad dominancewww.axios.com

Online advertising’s dominant “duopoly” faces a wave of new challenges that are eating away at their numbers.

How the duopoly’s position is starting to fade and the challengers the are eating into their online ad revenue.

Most-Read ‘Mobile Insiders’ (But Don’t Waste Time Rereading Them) 12/22/2022

Most-Read ‘Mobile Insiders’ (But Don’t Waste Time Rereading Them) – 12/22/2022

Some sense of what mobile issues gained traction from a newsletter in 2022.

User needs and how to weave your podcast, your journalism, your magazine deeper into people’s lives PLUS how to successfully identify data talent who have unconventional backgrounds

We’re winding down the year and the newsletter on Revue, and everyone is looking back and looking forward. On the note of the coming shutdown of Revue, I’ve had people suggest Ghost and Beehiiv. I’ll be looking into the next home for the newsletter over the holidays and making a decision. If you have a suggestion, I’m @kevglobal on Twitter – well at least for a little while longer.

And now the newsletter. Ariel Zirulnick takes up the user needs model, which has been most notably promoted by former BBC media leader and now consultant Dmirtry Shiskin. The crux of her piece is that we in media need to look beyond our core users and use cases to really become a part of people’s lives.

The Local Media Association has a review of newsletter projects by four Canadian outlets as part of Meta’s Accelerator programme. It’s a good overview of different approaches to using newsletters for audience development and subscriber growth.

PLUS With data talent in such high demand, INMA looks at how to identify strong candidates from unconventional backgrounds. A survey for why people have left US public media after a spike in departures including some high-profile talent in the past year. Experimentation is in the air when it comes to news and information websites. After settling into a relatively stable pattern for the last decade, site design is getting a shake-up.


Journalism doubles down on user needs » Nieman Journalism Labwww.niemanlab.org

“If we continue to study just the tiny portion of a person’s day that they spend consuming journalism, we will miss innumerable opportunities to weave ourselves into people’s lives.”

An interesting piece by Ariel Zirulnick: “The user needs framework currently copy and pasted from newsroom to newsroom focuses just on people’s news consumption habits. If we continue to study just the tiny portion of a person’s day that they spend consuming journalism, we will miss innumerable opportunities to weave ourselves into people’s lives.”

4 email campaign themes that grew reader revenue for Canadian publishers – Local Media Association + Local Media Foundationlocalmedia.org

In nine months, publishers collectively added more than 23,000 newsletter signups — which led to 4,700 new members, subscribers or donors and generated more than $1 million.

Whether it’s campaigns to increase the number of subscribers or onboarding campaigns to help retain those newly acquired subscribers, this is a good overview of four types of newsletters and how publishers in Canada used them to grow reader revenue.

Media companies, data teams should question hiring culture to attract better talentwww.inma.org

Does the hiring culture at your news media organisation — and within your data team — make it more difficult to bring in and keep promising talent?

Some tips on how to identify and recruit talent from unconventional backgrounds.

Publishers: Does the 80-20 rule apply to audience metrics? | What’s New in Publishing | Digital Publishing Newswhatsnewinpublishing.com

Can the 80-20 Rule be used to spotlight the types of content that deliver the best audience engagement? Identifying the content that drives the biggest share of audience engagement is crucial for publishers; knowing what works best can help fix overall content strategy and guide targeting for specific audiences. The Data Science team at analytics …

A good practical piece. In my previous role, I found that a modified Pareto distribution helped to filter out noise in the data. We also used the Audience Explorer Dashboard to segment our audience based on loyalty and identify content that was likely to convert audiences who had demonstrated some affinity towards membership.

We asked people why they left public media, and here’s what they told uscurrent.org

Here’s what we learned from our survey about why people leave public media, based on more than 300 responses.

As someone who left US public media in April, this leapt out at me. The top two

Bezos appears to lose interest in the Washington Post as its tech ambitions wither | Semaforwww.semafor.com

Employees and observers of the Post are left wondering what Bezos is doing with the publication.

The drum beat of stories about the Washington Post being a bit adrift are increasing.

What The Verge’s website redesign tells us about the future of media | What’s New in Publishing | Digital Publishing Newswhatsnewinpublishing.com

The Verge has a new website design that rethinks the experience of news readers. What does this move say about the state of news media? The Verge’s radical website redesign was announced three months ago, and one of America’s biggest tech news publishers is still the talk of the town. While most news websites tend to highlight …

A response to social media and focus on the homepage. The latter does not surprise me. I’ve seen the analytics of a lot of digital properties, and the amount of time spent on the homepage is tremendous, and the challenge is really to get people to engage more with the entire site.

Whither the Metaverse

Two pieces that demonstrate the challenges but also continued commitment that Meta has to the Metaverse.

Virtual Reality Pioneer John Carmack Is Leaving Meta – The New York Timeswww.nytimes.com

John Carmack, who was chief technology officer of Oculus, which Meta bought, is departing the company.

Meta Will Continue to Invest Big in the Metaverse in 2023, According to CTO | Social Media Todaywww.socialmediatoday.com

Social Media Today

Apple is considering allowing side loading and third-party app stores in the face of EU legislation PLUS Revue is shutting down so the newsletter is moving

Working at a company like Pugpig where we build apps for hundreds of media brands, we keep a close eye on the app stores, and big changes could be coming as the EU rolls out new regulations. Google already allows side loading from third-party app stores. Apple is considering making a similar move by 2024 in anticipation of these new regulations. The devil will be in the details, especially when it comes to the cut that Apple might take, even for app sellers who sell outside of the app store.

There was also big news this week that will affect this newsletter. After weeks of rumours, Twitter announced that it will be shutting down Revue, which it bought last year. That is the platform that I use for this newsletter. I’ve been reviewing my options, and I’ll be moving first the newsletter first thing in the New Year. Please watch this space.

We’ve also got predictions for journalism next year, which include a call for clarity from leaders and a focus on new products. Plus, we look at the fallout from a ransomware attack at Norway’s largest local publisher. Plus industry news from NPR and Spotify.


Predictions for Journalism in 2023: newsroom leadership, product, and revenue | Media newswww.journalism.co.uk

The second installment of our annual predictions looks at the skills journalists will need in the year ahead and the news products that are likely to grow

There are predictions of a tough time ahead, but also calls to focus on products and growing revenue. On the individual level, it’s also a time to learn new skills so that you can adapt. I really appreciate Lucy Kueng’s point of view. Leaders need to focus on the must-win battles. During turbulence, clear priorities are a must.

Will Apple Allow Users to Install Third-Party App Stores, Sideload in Europe? – Bloombergwww.bloomberg.com

Apple Inc. is preparing to allow alternative app stores on its iPhones and iPads, part of a sweeping overhaul aimed at complying with strict European Union requirements coming in 2024.

INMA: How can product help newsrooms connect to users?inma.org

During Wednesday’s Webinar, INMA Product Initiative Lead Jodie Hopperton led a discussion about how product and newsrooms can work together to reach users in an increasingly digital environment.

This definitely caught my eye due to my work at Pugpig. Apple is expecting to allow side loading and third-party app stores in the EU by 2024. The move anticipates changes in EU regulation, but coverage across the internet highlight that European countries are not alone in reviewing competition in app stores.

Twitter Shuts Down Revue Newsletter Platform Following ‘Twitter Files’ Response from Former CEO | Social Media Todaywww.socialmediatoday.com

Social Media Today

And this is the news that will mean that this newsletter will be moving. Expect details early in the New Year.

Rising costs force more digital innovation » Nieman Journalism Labwww.niemanlab.org

“Those who moved fast over the past five years will come out on top, and those who didn’t will struggle, fire staff, and disappoint customers and advertisers with clunky sites, second-grade apps, and increasingly thin newspapers they’ll still try to charge the earth for.”

The introductory pull-quote sums up Peter’s points well. “Those who moved fast over the past five years will come out on top, and those who didn’t will struggle, fire staff, and disappoint customers and advertisers with clunky sites, second-grade apps, and increasingly thin newspapers they’ll still try to charge the earth for.”

“Hacks occur at the most inconvenient times”: Lessons from Amedia’s Christmas shutdown | What’s New in Publishing | Digital Publishing Newswhatsnewinpublishing.com

Between December 27th – 28th last year, one of Norway’s largest media groups – Amedia – was hit by a catastrophic ransomware attack that shut down its printing presses and also impacted the company’s advertising and subscription systems. Here are the key takeaways… Editor’s Note: Our thanks to Jim Bilton of wessendenbriefing for the original …

Lots of important lessons here because the cost is extreme. “In all, it took €3 million and nine months to get back to where it was before the attack, not to mention the loss of ongoing tech development and, crucially, user trust.”

NPR cancels internships, citing economic woes | The Hill

National Public Radio on Monday said it would do away with its annual summer internship program as a cost-cutting measure. “We are seeing a worldwide set of economic challenges that have weakened the advertising industry and negatively affected media and technology companies. A major portion of NPR’s revenue comes through corporate sponsorships which are sensitive…

The US public radio broadcaster is making cuts to try to protect staffing level as sponsorship drains away as the US enters a recession.

Spotify is ending production of several of its live audio shows • TechCrunchtechcrunch.com

Spotify looks to be scaling back its live audio ambitions, as the company is ending production of several of its live audio shows.

Spotify has pinned a lot of hopes on its original spoken word content. That has mostly been podcasts, but they dipped their toe into live audio, mostly focused on sports. Some of those sports shows will remain, but a good chunk of them will be going dark.

Personalisation, audio and highly engaged in-app subscribers: Pugpig’s 2022 State of the Digital Publishing Market Report PLUS the end of the innovation team

I’ve spent the last three months elbow-deep in our data at Pugpig. We have access to the app data of more than 350 media brands who use our mobile platform, and it provides us with some unique insights from the aggregated data. We also spoke to dozens of media leaders and analysts about what the last 12 months were like and what they expect in 2023. We’ve got details about their product roadmaps for the next year, where will they be spending their innovation time, attention and resources. We’ve got details on the challenges that they are facing and what they will be doing to face them, and we’ve got data on which subscription segment is the most engaged. It’s free to download.

Plus, I’ve chosen a few of this year’s Nieman Lab predictions that caught my eye, including Cindy Royal’s look at whether news product managers need to know how to code and Gina Chua’s ongoing, positive advocacy for a rethink of journalism formats.

And we also look at Heinekin and Dentsu’s project to measure attention in their campaigns. While this is an effort in advertising, the same techniques will have an impact on journalism and content.


Pugpig 2022 State of Digital Publishing Market Reportwww.pugpig.com

Where are we now and what does the future hold? We’ve created a comprehensive industry report covering the state of digital publishing.

We hope to have added to the current understanding of digital publishing, particularly on mobile. A few things stood out for me while we were doing the report. The publishers we spoke to are focused on growing their subscriber base, and to attract more subscribers and keep the subscribers that they have, they are focused on delivering more value to them – not with flashy things like AR/VR or selling NFTs – but through personalisation, the ability to tailor experiences to their loyal, paying customers. There is a lot more in the report, and I hope you take a look.

Lastly, there is an interesting piece from Interhactitives about why data journalism is disappearing in South Korea.

The innovation team, R.I.P. » Nieman Journalism Labwww.niemanlab.org

“You might be forgiven for suspecting that news companies are more interested in appearing innovative than actually doing something new.”

This prediction more than anything speaks to how innovation teams can become isolated from the rest of the organisation, their innovations lauded but ultimately having less organisational impact than if they were core to the organisation itself.

The Economics at the Heart of the Times Union Standoff | The New Yorkerwww.newyorker.com

Thursday’s walkout was part of a bitter contract dispute over wages—but the impasse poses a larger question about how the growing company should invest in its future.

Journalists want the paper not just to invest in technology, acquisitions and executive salaries, they also want a slice of the success at the paper, which has been held up as a model for how to navigate the digital transition.

Yes, journalists should learn to code, but… » Nieman Journalism Labwww.niemanlab.org

“They’ll need to think of coding as not just a single practice, but a range of related practices.”

Cindy Royal is a giant in terms of the field of study of journalism and product management, and here she looks at the question about whether journalist and specifically journalism product managers need to learn to code. As the industry has become more technical, the answer has changed. Tech used to be far divorced from the practice of journalism, but it is now the case that the two are much more intimately linked so that journalists and product managers need deeper digital domain skills.

The traditional story structure gets deconstructed » Nieman Journalism Labwww.niemanlab.org

“Despite huge changes in the technology of news, the structure of a story today doesn’t look hugely different from one in, say, 1932.”

Gina and I connected years ago over our blogs when she was writing about her thoughts about new journalism formats, and my wife Suw and I had plans to try something new after I took a buyout from The Guardian. It’s interesting to see how Gina is putting her ideas into practice at Semafor, and here she writes about thinking behind those ideas.

Semafor Will Generate 30% of Its First-Year Revenue From Eventswww.adweek.com

The publisher, whose inaugural Africa Week begins Monday, will host 40-plus events in 2023.

And here is some thoughts about how Semafor will pay for it.

Next challenge for publishers is restoring revenue back to print levels – Press Gazettepressgazette.co.uk

How publishers can restore revenue to print levels – media technology Q&A.

While this might be a piece from a the view of a specific technology provider, it is interesting to think about different revenue stream might be able to rebuild the revenue that media once had back in the days of print and broadcast TV and radio before streaming.

Why is data journalism waning in South Korea? – Interhacktiveswww.interhacktives.com

Facing decreasing attention from outlets in a portal-oreinted media environment, South Korean data journalists seek

How the media market in South Korea has meant the death knell of data journalism there (or probably more precisely a certain kind of time-intensive data journalism).

Heineken Develops Attention Measurement Campaign With Teads And Dentsu 12/12/2022

Heineken Develops Attention Measurement Campaign With Teads And Dentsu – 12/12/2022

Twitter’s risky plan to save its ads businesswww.platformer.news

Agree to personalize your ads — or else

You can pay to opt out of personalised ads, which means that the information that they gather as you sign up will be used to show you personalised ads.

Finding My Professional Tribe

I am in a reflective mood, not because it is the start of a new year or a new decade, but because a big part of my life and my Sir Izacat Mewtonwife’s life – our beloved Sir Izacat Mewton, a big cuddly tom, passed unexpectedly right before Christmas. We just buried him, and we are grieving. He was 10 and a half years old, far too young, and this more than anything in the calendar is pulling us back through a decade of memories with him and our lives together.

Ten years ago, we went to Lanzarote for New Year’s. I was still at The Guardian, serving as the digital research editor, and I hadn’t yet decided to take voluntary redundancy, a buyout.

The first 10 years of this century had been an amazing decade for me professionally. I started it working at the Washington bureau of the BBC, and then after blogging the 2004 US elections, I transferred to London to write a strategic white paper for the BBC on how it should respond to blogs and podcasts. And in 2006, I left the BBC to join The Guardian.

I was often restive during this period, trying to find a way forward professionally in a world where digital journalism career paths were about blazing new trails but didn’t have a clear or clean progression.

Kevglobal Goes Global

Not long after the New Year a decade ago, I decided to take VR (a buyout) from The Guardian. I didn’t really have a plan, but I wanted the freedom to explore. And over the past decade explore I did. I spent a good chunk of the last decade building my own business, working with dozens of media companies and non-profits in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. I trained thousands of journalists in digital journalism skills including social media, data journalism long-form storytelling as well as audience development and engagement. I worked with Al Jazeera journalists before and during the Arab Spring, and in one of my proudest moments, I worked with Tunisian journalists as they prepared to cover their first free and fair elections in three decades in 2011. I was a guest lecturer at Oxford University and LSE, and in 2017, I wrote a report on innovation management at media companies for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford.

In between working for myself, I held various full-time positions, as an editor and digital strategist with the Media Development Investment Fund, as a regional executive editor for Gannett and now as a digital managing editor with ideastream, a large regional public media group in the US.

Even friends said that I didn’t seem to have a sense of what I wanted to do. I have always wanted to create the future of media. But as for so many journalists over the past decade, my different jobs weren’t so much of a career journey as they were a forced march. With the changes in media, roles simply weren’t durable. In my last role in newspapers with Gannett, I joke that I survived the first six rounds of cuts in the 21 months I had my role but not the seventh.

With my current role in public media in the US, I have finally had the gift of stability, and I have had the opportunity within my role to plot a future. It has given me time to think about what I want to do and where the most exciting and promising future lies for me.

Over the past decade, I have discovered an entrepreneurial passion and drive that I didn’t know I had, and I have become fascinated with not only product development but also with organisational dynamics. How can I help the organisations that I work for manage change? That has been one of the constant themes of my work, and I hear it from my team at work and the teams that I have worked with during my consulting.

This is what I want to do: Develop products for changing markets and help companies re-orient themselves towards these new market opportunities. I have been developing products for more than a decade, but I know I need new skills to help organisations adapt. That’s why today I’m starting a master’s degree with the University of York in innovation management and leadership. I’m so excited to be able to do this while I continue working. I’ll be learning new skills and also being able to apply those skills in my day-to-day work.

Quartz to kill its chatbot-inspired mobile app

Graffiti of a sad robot with his head hanging down
20150225 02 Sad Robot, by David Wilson, from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

Top of today’s newsletter: Quartz is killing its Brief app, which emulated a chatbot but was really driven by editors giving you the impression of personalisation. The emoji-filled app, allowed users to get a quick taster before deciding whether you wanted to skip the story, get a chatbot-style summary or the full story from the source – often the BBC, Reuters, the New York Times or other outlets.

I profiled the app in my Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report – Beyond the Article, Frontiers of Editorial and Commercial Innovation – on innovation and product management in 2017. Quartz originally launched with a responsive site and was very focused on serving mobile audiences while not having a mobile app. This was after the first wave of apps when a lot of news organisations launched apps but quickly found that they lost the attention wars to social media or other apps.

Quartz had decided to join the second wave of apps after realising that they wanted to get onto the lock screen of mobile users as notification use exploded. The app was really a Marmite one – people either loved it or hated it. I liked its earlier, more playful iterations. I often used an example of one of the chatbot lines as the way to write creative, audience catching push notifications. The notification was about a pop-sci story about how female Orcas that had just passed out of calving age. Quartz’s writers teased you in with the line: Menopausal sharks are bad ass. Click! Click! Click!

The Digiday story tried to read the tea leaves on why they killed the app. Was it the loss of editor Adam Pasick to the New York Times? Quartz says no. Was it the fact that the Japanese company that bought Quartz has its own news app, NewsPicks? Probably, but more than likely, it had a cult following. These days in digital media, unless you operate at a certain niche scale, small cult-ish devotion isn’t enough.

In the end, I think this probably sums up the apps death:

“Some people loved it!” one former employee said. “Just not hundreds of thousands of people.”

Quartz is shutting down its Quartz Brief mobile app July 1, by Max Willens, Digiday

To be perfectly honest, I used to get pulled in by the notifications. Then they became a little more pedestrian, and I turned them off when I was on holiday. And I never felt compelled to turn them back on, and then I can’t remember the last time I opened the app.

A couple of other notable items in the newsletter today:

And please help me sort through all of the British PM race and Trump noise right now by sending me media news of note. Drop them to me at @kevglobal on Twitter.

Pivot to paid driving pivot to CRM for media companies and start-ups

Fork in the road Gypsy lane to the left, Brobury Lane to the right. by Jonathan Billinger, Wikimedia Commons, Some Rights Reserved

I had to do some digging into the stories that my network was sharing today to find this gem about Pico, one of a number of media services providers that are pivoting to provide customer relationship management (CRM) services. It may be at the bottom of the list of headlines in my newsletter today, but it tops my list in terms of personal interest.

The profile of Pico by Nieman Lab got my attention because it is connected to the conversion funnel work that I’m doing in my day job. Beginning in 2017 as I was doing more and more consulting work with media companies in Europe and Asia, I realised how important conversion funnels were as more companies shifted to paid strategies. If I had studied marketing rather than journalism, conversion funnels would be old hat, but they were something that I stumbled upon as my work with audience engagement shifted to audience development and flowed naturally to conversion to paying customers.

Back to Pico. The company started out as a micro-payments provider called PennyPass. Micro-payments (think iTunes for news – garf!) didn’t really convert many readers to subscribers, but founders Jason Bade and Nick Chen realised that that they had collected a lot of leads during the pilot.

What publishers really needed was a funnel to some sort of reader revenue, and we had been too prescriptive about that type of reader revenue.

Pico wants to inject CRM smarts into news sites hungry for reader relationships, by Christine Schmidt, Nieman Lab

Now, they are building propensity to subscribe models as well as handling a lot of other “customer-relations stuff”. They connect Mailchimp or another email service and a payment service like Stripe and link the data flowing through the site and these other platforms.

But Pico isn’t the only company making this pivot. GroundSource, which started as an SMS-based engagement platform; Steady, which grew out of KrautReporter in Berlin; and the News Revenue Hub are all shifting to this space.

Pico just landed a $4.5m funding round that includes money from Stripe and Bloomberg Beta so they have some runway to find the right model.

I would say for the public service broadcaster that I work for, we’re looking for something that integrates more effectively with other software services that we’re currently using to allow us to segment more effectively, especially when it comes to knowing who is a member and who isn’t when it comes to the users of our digital services. We believe that would be transformative for our business.

Fascinating stuff, and if you see a story that you think I should share with my readers, let me know @kevglobal on Twitter.

A deep dive into Schibsted’s plan for $115m in reader revenue by 2020

Departure hall at Bergen Railway Station, Norway. Neon sign with logo of newspaper Bergens Tidende.
Departure hall at Bergen Railway Station, Norway. Neon sign with logo of newspaper Bergens Tidende, by Wolfmann, Wikimedia Commons, Some Rights Reserved

The top story in the newsletter today is a look at Scandi media giant Schibsted’s march to 1 bn NOK ($115m) of reader revenue by next year.

You need to read this piece because it challenges conventional wisdom and explains some of the thinking behind Schibsted’s nuanced and data-informed strategy. Their strategy has changed over time and is flexible enough to make allowances for the audiences and positioning of their different properties.

In terms of how their reader revenue strategy has evolved, it started simply by trying to grow their paying audiences when it launched in 2017, and then as they built the customer base, they pivoted to customer retention. And now, they are focused on “pricing, packaging, user experience and additional products, all the while keeping a steady hand on churn”.

What is really impressive is how adaptable and flexible their thinking is. They eschew the one-size-fits-all model that can be the reflexive response by some large groups. In that model, they run the same playbook everywhere. One gets the impression that this is to control costs because they don’t have the resources for multiple strategies tailored for different products.

For Schibsted, they have different models for their high volume tabloids – VG and Aftonbladet. Those properties remain mostly ad-supported. The reader revenue component is mainly to do with premium content. But for a local title, Bergens Tidende, up to 70% of the content is behind the paywall.

But they are also adding information into their model about stories that converted users to subscribers in the past. Very smart and well worth your time.