In preparing for a talk to master’s students at the University of Central Lancashire this week, I will discuss my motivations for the research I did during my master’s in innovation management and leadership. I wanted to understand why, despite perceiving the disruptive possibilities in digital media, traditional news organisations failed to adapt. For years, I had subscribed to Clay Christensen’s disruption theory that he outlined in The Innovator’s Dilemma. He pointed out that incumbent leaders in many industries have failed not because they didn’t recognise new technologies but because they “failed to value them correctly”. The ROI seems too low. It was the classic trading print dollars for digital pennies argument. However, disruptive innovators continue to experiment and move up the value chain.

The common argument has been that the “original sin” of digital journalism was giving away our content for free, something we never did before. However, this ignores the economics of newspapers, especially in the US, where I come from. When I was studying journalism at university, our professors told us that 80% of newspaper revenue came from advertising. The 20% of revenue from subscriptions, didn’t pay our salaries, it only paid for paper, printing and distribution. Advertising was our main revenue stream, and we failed to understand how digital media would disrupt those value networks. Digital news organisations did pivot to deal with the threat from digital classifieds with vertical-focused businesses around cars - Cars.com in the US and The Guardian’s AutoTrader - or real estate. However, the development of entirely new ad models, ads targeted by search intent or based on activity on social networks, have radically remade ad markets. It was a classic example of disruptive innovation in which upstarts found the right application and then entered the higher-value markets. For years, Google and Meta have been growing by cannibalising ad revenue from non-digital markets, print and broadcast.

For publishers operating at a certain scale, their response was to grow even bigger. This drove M&A activity as publishers tried to scale their audience to compete against Google and Facebook It got to such a point that a major UK publisher, Trinity-Mirror, even rebranded itself as Reach. This strategy has not succeeded for several reasons:

1. For publishers like Gannett, their acquisitions left them with unsustainable levels of debt.

2. Reporting is an expensive business, and especially for publishers with local news properties, scaling is much more expensive than for a digital business like Google.

3. Scaling the business didn’t fundamentally answer the issue of non-competitive ad products.

When media folks speak about the duopoly of Google and Meta, it is a rather superficial analysis of how these companies changed the value networks of advertising. As Clay Christensen pointed out, upstarts experiment by trial and error to find a model that eventually scales. John Battell covers the journey that Google took to find its business model in his seminal book on the history of the search giant. He called Google the “database of intentions”, and they have used those intentions to remake marketing and advertising. It is so clear how Google and Meta disrupted the value networks of traditional media when you hear about how Temu and Shein spent billions of dollars to advertise with the two companies last year.

After developing disruption theory, Clay Christensen went on to create a process in which companies can uncover the unmet needs of their customers to respond to disruptive innovation: jobs to be done. In a Harvard Business Review article describing how focusing on jobs to be done could achieve this, he wrote:

• Most managers have based decisions on quantitative-data-based correlations

• We need to know what the customer is trying to accomplish. The customer’s jobs to be done.

• “When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” it to help us do a job.”

• “(D)isruption theory doesn’t tell you how to create products and services that customers want to buy. Jobs-to-be-done theory does.“

As I wrote recently, Seth Lewis, Alf Hermida and Samantha Lorenzo wrote about how the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework could be applied to local journalism. It is a paper well worth reading. This is the kind of audience research that is so desperately needed (and frankly, I’d like to do).

Internal boundaries, barriers to innovation and burn out

However, in my master’s research, I focused on another barrier to innovation: Internal boundaries and the boundary-spanning work of product managers. As David Skok said in the report with Clay Christensen about innovation in journalism, Be the Disruptor:

Product managers operate across these internal boundaries of editorial, commercial and technical operations, but that boundary-spanning work has its own set of challenges. Of the 17 product managers and product-oriented managers I interviewed, five had left positions or the industry entirely. My research looked at what had affected their sense of professional well-being so profoundly. Also, of the five, four were women.

This is a scene setter, and I’ll be writing more about this in the coming weeks and months.

Now onto the links from the past week. INMA has a huge range of pieces from their recent subscription summit in New York. This piece has good details about how Hearst is using data to optimise its pricing. The data has allowed them to identify and target in-market audiences to drive subs, and they are also creating some interesting products that allow them to connect with subscribers at multiple price points.

And the piece has details on how the Irish Times has leaned into newsletters, push notifications and events to keep their connections with readers.

News media companies share their best practices for driving growth

During INMA’s Media Subscriptions Summit, members heard about best practices for driving growth from Mark Campbell of Hearst Newspapers, Carolyn Adams of NZME, Madelein Venter of Media24, Lior Kodner of Haaretz, and Cliona Mooney of The Irish Times Group.

www.inma.org/blogs/conference/post.cfm/news-media-companies-share-their-best-practices-for-driving-growth

Following the non-profit news organisation trend in the US, a local news publisher in Guildford has just become the first outlet to attain charitable status.

‘Glimmer of hope’ for local news as Surrey publication given charitable status

Guildford Dragon will be able to benefit from tax breaks after becoming UK’s first charitable public interest news provider

www.theguardian.com/media/2024/mar/15/glimmer-of-hope-for-local-news-as-surrey-publication-given-charitable-status

Here is another data point of how the platforms remade the value networks of media. Facebook Marketplace has become the go-to place for young users to buy things. This would have been the newspaper classifieds years ago. Gen Z may not use Facebook to post social updates - they have TikTok and Instagram for that - but they still use the venerable network to find cheap stuff.

One Big Reason Gen Z Is Still on Facebook: To Save Money

For a generation that loves thrift-shopping, Facebook isn’t a place to socialize online — it’s the best place to score some deals.

www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/business/gen-z-facebook-marketplace.html?searchResultPosition=1

AI revolution continues to roll through the media

As one commentator put it, last year media experimented with AI, and now they are starting to deploy it. And they can’t move fast enough as developments in the field are announced at a furious pace.

LMA is partnering with AI companies to help its members adopt these technologies quickly, with applications across editorial and commercial operations.

Six LMA R&D partners leading the way in AI technology for local media companies

When participants in LMA/LMF labs and collaboratives attended an invitational summit last month in Austin, six LMA R&D companies presented and discussed their technologies, and how local media executives can save time and money using these tools. Attendees took it all in with enthusiasm. As one attendee said, “Watching the Nota demo creating a newsletter […]

localmedia.org/2024/03/six-lma-rd-partners-leading-the-way-in-ai-technology-for-local-media-companies

A thoughtful piece in the Press Gazette explaining to publishers what hill they should choose to die on when it comes to LLMs scraping their content. Archival content isn’t of as much value as their current news content. It is one of those harsh truths that news, by definition, has a short shelf life. However, AI can’t do reporting. Most parts of that will still require journalists, and that is what news organisations should be defending.

Why defending current news coverage is publishers' most important battle versus AI

ChatGPT has stirred debates around intellectual property, but producers should concentrate on exploiting their content's real value.

pressgazette.co.uk/comment-analysis/ai-training-data-battle-journalism-real-time-value

Google’s Search Generative Experience promises to deliver information that people want without the need to go off to a site to find that out. It is one of the things that is keeping publishers up at night, and now AdWeek has put a dollar figure on exactly how much Google’s SGE may cost media. Ouch.

Google's Gen AI Search Threatens Publishers With $2B Annual Ad Revenue Loss

Publishers are retooling their SEO strategies, investing in content expertise and diversifying traffic, to combat traffic loss from Google’s SGE.

www.adweek.com/programmatic/googles-gen-ai-search-threatens-publishers-with-2b-annual-ad-revenue-loss

Gen Z is using TikTok to search, not Google, but the search giant and others are fighting to remain relevant by introducing AI into their products. The disruptors are being disrupted.

Floating The Balloon: AI Moves Search From Mobile 'Near Me' To 'For Me' Mindset

The biggest challenge for search is to summarize the world's information - not just organize it, says Jason Hartley, PMG privacy lead and head of search & shopping.

www.mediapost.com/publications/article/394433/floating-the-balloon-ai-moves-search-from-mobile.html

Thomson Reuters shows that some of the major media players are looking to invest in AI. It is one way that well-heeled media players can try to cash in on the technology.

This was a week in which all of the harsh lessons and dangers for media of relying on rented audiences were on display. For one, Facebook completed its divorce from news media and told Australian news outlets that it would stop making payments to them. Facebook also announced that it was retiring its news tab in Australia and the US and would soon be doing so in other countries as well.

Alan Soon of Splice Media and Adam Tinworth have both said that it was time for media to move on, and Social Media Today gave a reason for media to do so with confidence. Research from “media insights platform Memo” found “no direct link between how much engagement a post gets in social apps and how many people then read it”. People aren’t reading the article but merely reacting to the headline, Social Media Today goes on to say. No journalist or journalism business wants that result.

And all the data shows that referrals have plummeted from social media over the last few years. Through my work over the past decade, I have seen the data of hundreds of publishers, and while Facebook used to drive significant amounts of traffic, it has been declining for years. Social Media Today says that there is still value in brand awareness, but research has shown that correct attribution is much lower for visitors from search and social than it is from direct traffic.

More than that, the research in Social Media Today found that negative content received more engagement than positive or neutral content. Outrage on social media drives more engagement than positive or neutral content. While it will surprise no one, it still underscores the perverse incentives that have operated on social media that have damaged not only media businesses but our societies and democracies.

Report Finds No Correlation Between Social Media Engagement and Content Readership

More comments and likes doesn't necessarily lead to more clicks.

www.socialmediatoday.com/news/correlation-between-social-media-engagement-content/709565

Of course, social media still has a place in audience development. As Adam Tinworth says, we are moving to a platform+ era in which platforms and rented audiences play a role, but the focus must be on the KPIs that favour converting the relationships developed on social media into direct relationships. In my previous role, we used organic as well as paid social media to drive newsletter subscriptions. I’ll be honest, the newsletter we got from Facebook weren’t as engaged as those we got directly from our marketing or on our properties. And membership and subscription services like Poool are creating opportunities to convert social media users into known, registered users.

And on Bluesky, this was shared from Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. It showed the collapse of programmatic ad revenue for TPM over the past eight years. “As I think is pretty clear, if this is your business, you’re dead. You don’t have a business,” he wrote. The scale model of digital media was all about using social media to build huge audiences that could then be monetized through programmatic. I even remember hearing media executives talk about how they would make newsrooms pay for themselves through traffic and programmatic ads. It didn’t play out.

Micah (@rincewind.run)

illuminating graph here from @joshtpm.bsky.social on the complete collapse of the ads business for news sites bad management or no, this is a big reason why publication after publication is shutting down and why many of the remainders have shifted to a subscription focus

bsky.app/profile/rincewind.run/post/3kn2lnq6wpk2b

And that brings us to the current sad state of affairs for the scale players. This is how it played out. For groups in the US, many of them took on unsustainable amounts of debt in their pursuit of scale as they bought up more and more properties. They were forced to make cuts, in both the newsrooms and in their ad sales staffs, which meant that they struggled with direct ad sales. The newsroom cuts ran deep, and they made tepid efforts at reader revenue experiments with little conviction. The experiments usually failed because often they came at a point when the product was so gutted that it didn’t attract enough takers to offset the loss of advertising. The paywalls came down and the ad loads went up. (My wife used to say that she knew when she was on a news website because the fans on her laptop would spin up so high that it sounded like it was ready to take off.) Invasive ads made the user experience horrible, driving down traffic and yields even further. In a slow-motion car crash that played out over years, social traffic collapsed, pushing ad revenue down even further. It is sad. Poor user experience and poor products have turned off users, and after endless rounds of cuts, the content isn’t local enough to serve communities or good enough to convince people to pay.

That brings us to where we’re at now. And now, as we see from the latest print circulation figures in the UK, newspapers will have to develop digital revenue streams. There is no other option available.

Regional ABCs: Print decline for UK dailes averaged 19% in second half of 2023

Data from ABC shows that regional daily newspaper circulation for 2023 was down 19%, but some local brands have doubled online audiences.

pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/media_metrics/uk-regional-daily-newspaper-circulation-print-2023-abc

Here are some steps to start that journey:

• The first step should be a range of tactics to convert unknown audiences to known audiences, and they need to do this with all urgency. It has shown such promise for so many publishers and has so many benefits.

• They also need to get closer to audiences. In the past few years, I have developed such an appreciation for qualitative research. I have been a ‘numbers guy’ for most of my life, and quantitative data is a great way to measure what your audiences are doing, but qualitative data tells you why they are doing it.

• Use all of that rich first-party data to improve all of your operations - product, revenue and marketing.

We have models of how to make this work at almost any scale, and it’s sad to see how much damage is being done to journalism and media brands by doubling down on a strategy that has not worked for years - chasing scale via rented audiences.

The chains in the US have turned to try to capture some of the philanthropy cash that is now flowing to communities, but look at this story. Report for America says that they won’t put their reporters in hedge fund-owned publications.

Why Report for America will no longer place corps members in hedge fund-owned publications - Poynter

Our program must focus on areas where it has the most impact, RFA executive director Kim Kleman writes

www.poynter.org/commentary/2024/report-for-america-kim-kleman-hedge-fund-private-equity

Google is paying some publishers to test an AI product on their content. As publishers develop their strategic guidance on AI, they will need to define their terms of engagement with AI players just as they should have with social platforms.

Google Is Paying Publishers Five-Figure Sums to Test an Unreleased Gen AI Platform

Google is paying a handful of news publishers to test gen AI products.

www.adweek.com/media/google-paying-publishers-unreleased-gen-ai

I am sad for all of the journalists, photographers, ad staff and others who have lost their jobs over the last 20 years in the US and UK, where I have predominantly worked. But I do see green shoots of growth now as small start-ups launch with the MVP of the day, a newsletter, and then build out from there. They are far from replacing the reporting capacity that once existed, but I do hope that it is clear that it is time to close this disastrous chapter in journalism and move on.

Now to the round-up for this week. Like other major responsible news publishers, the BBC has announced their well thought through plan on how to use generative AI. The announcement looked at experiments in three areas:

1. Maximising the value of existing content

2. Reaching new audiences

3. Improving processes to make them more efficient

An update on the BBC’s plans for Generative AI (Gen AI) and how we plan to use AI tools responsibly

www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/articles/2024/update-generative-ai-and-ai-tools-bbc

Meanwhile, Mattie Peretti who started out during an ICFJ Knight Fellowship to find out how AI could be used to help news organisations serve their communities better. After four weeks, he found the problem statement was wrong, and he says: “we can’t make our industry more sustainable without radical new solutions and creating products that users actually want. The role AI might play in creating them is somewhat irrelevant.” Amen and read on.

It’s not about AI: Toward a user-centric, sustainable future for journalism

Hi, my name is Mattia Peretti and I’m a 2024 ICFJ Knight Fellow. I became a fellow to explore how generative AI can be used by news organizations to better serve their communities, and I’ve spent the last four weeks talking with many smart people in the industry to make sense of this problem statement and figure out what to build from it. 

ijnet.org/en/story/it%E2%80%99s-not-about-ai-toward-user-centric-sustainable-future-journalism

A blockbuster piece from the New York Times looking at how Google and Meta have benefited from a Chinese e-commerce spending spree to crack the US market.

Big American Tech Profits From Chinese Ad Spending Spree

Temu, Shein, and streaming and gaming apps looking to break into the U.S. market are spending huge sums to get their wares in front of American consumers.

www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/business/google-meta-temu-shein.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

My first glimpse of the future of media came in a student computer lab at my dorm at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in August of 1993. (Yeah, I’m that old.) My friends were buzzing about a new app that was in beta, something called a web browser, Mosaic, which had been developed by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications on campus. Before Mosaic, I couldn’t imagine my parents ever using the internet. It was just too technically complicated, but Mosaic made the internet visual and accessible. As a journalism student close to graduation, I know that it would change my career, and it did in so many ways I never anticipated.

In 1996, I had my first proper digital journalism as a digital news editor at WWMT - a local TV station in Kalamazoo Michigan. The next year, I moved across the state to work as a special projects producer at Advance Local’s MLive. The next year - 1998 - I became the first digital journalist for the BBC outside of the UK, working in their flagship bureau in Washington DC.

But I was not the first wave of digital innovators by a long chalk. My friend Steve Yelvington was the founding editor of Star Tribune Online and has written about pre-internet online efforts by newspapers. He was building that service as I was exploring the web with Mosaic. And there was Roger Fidler, who I knew about by reputation but never had the honour of meeting. He envisioned a future of “tablets and e-readers” in 1981 and spent the early 90s trying to build that tablet at the Knight-Ridder Information Design Lab! This is to say that plenty of visionaries were already working towards a future of media before I had even left university.

Now 30 years later, the New York Times interviewed Fidler in “How the Media Industry Keeps Losing the Future”. "After decades of decline, their collapse seems to be accelerating,” writes technology reporter David Streitfeld, adding how Fidler “helped develop technology for lightweight tablets that would use flat-panel displays that were low cost but clear and bright with a relatively long battery life”.

How the Media Industry Keeps Losing the Future

Roger Fidler tried his best, but the excellent business of journalism is gone for good. Can the idea of “news” survive in a digital world?

www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/technology/news-media-industry-dying.html

What went wrong?

I was too narrowly focused as well. I thought the cost savings of digital distribution would open up a new era for journalism. However, if you save money but can’t earn it, it doesn’t matter. Your business will still fail. I started thinking about digital revenue at MLive, but then I went to the BBC. We had the luxury as a public media outlet to produce incredible, ground-breaking digital journalism without having to think about a business model. When I worked at The Guardian (2006-2010), it had an almost anti-commercial culture. I did not turn my attention back to thinking about revenue until I joined Gannett in 2014, and by that time, it was too late.

How we might regain the future

During the pandemic, I finally fulfilled a promise to myself and got my master’s degree in innovation, management and leadership. I try to apply what I learned to help media companies as the consulting director at Pugpig so that publishers, their reporters, product managers and the technical and commercial staff have a brighter future.

One way publishers need to adapt is to consider their marketing orientation, which is the process that a business engages in to identify and satisfy the needs of its customers. First, let’s discuss who the customer is. In As a journalist, we always thought our customers were our audiences, but when I started working in the industry in the US, 80% of our revenue came from advertisers. People seem to think that delivering eyeballs to advertisers is a recent development of the digital age that sullied the noble profession. When I was in journalism school, my professors were honest and said that subscription revenue paid for the cost of paper, ink, presses, and distribution but not our salaries.

I’m going to reference this incredible graph from 2016 by Thomas Baekdal. It tells the story quite clearly about what happened in the US.

Search and social media advertising became a much more effective way to reach audiences than newspaper ads. What would have happened had we poured as much innovation effort into the commercial side of media as we did into the editorial side? It was done in fits and starts. Gannett owns a digital media marketing company. The Dallas Morning News bought up several local digital marketing companies in the middle of the last decade. So much more should be done in terms of digital publishing commercial innovation.

However, with the major focus now on reader revenue, our readers are our customers, which brings me back to the concept of marketing orientation, I am going to focus on three: sales, product and market orientation.

• A sales orientation focuses its energy on selling its product to its target audience. “In a way, it does prioritise its customers but not in a sense of listening to their needs and wants – it simply wants to sell to them,” according to Orientation Marketing.

• A product orientation focuses on continually improving its products to deliver the highest quality product possible. “Premium products fall into this category, but the approach does not always offer what its target audience actually wants or considers the factors that the audience uses to form its purchasing decision,” Orientation Marketing says. The benchmark is competitors.

• A market orientation considers the target audience before any product is created. Audience needs are taken into account. “Market orientation, in marketing strategy terms, commonly revolves around culture, values and other internal behaviours focused on satisfying customer needs that are usually well-researched prior,” Orientation Marketing adds.

The marketing orientations all have their pros and cons. A sales orientation can be effective when you have proven the product-market fit and have a relatively stable market environment. However, that isn’t the environment that newspapers have been operating in for decades. How long did we cling to a sales orientation? How long did we simply focus on selling what we had always done without listening to our audiences? Too long.

And how many times have I heard a product orientation from news leaders who thought that quality would always cut through? Reflexively saying that “content is king” has too often been used simply as a thought-terminating cliche. It rallies the troops. But what content? In which format? Delivered in what way? Recently, there was a discussion in an industry Slack in which an exasperated product manager asked if a podcast could gain an audience simply on quality alone. It was an assertion made by a producer where she worked. What arrogance! Such self-importance! It’s as if the audience is an afterthought and the only thing that is required is to produce something that passes exacting quality control based on journalism’s own professional standards.

For product managers who use tools like design thinking or jobs to be done, we have a market orientation. We ask who is the audience for this news product. We think of the audience in granular terms and consider their needs. We actively seek out quantitative and qualitative data, and we understand the variety of news and information needs that exist in our audiences. A good example is Schibsted, which sent three qualitative researchers on a road trip for a week to find out if people outside of the two main cities in Norway - Oslo and Bergen - had similar media habits. They have balanced editorial and algorithmic curation of their homepages based on a range of criteria. They understand that providing a homepage for the “average user” would present news that appeals to a white man in their 50s, and they want their homepage to meet the needs of the range of users and engagement levels that they know they have.

And we need to break down our internal silos so that editorial, commercial and technical can think broadly about how to solve the existential crisis facing journalism. We need this kind of collaboration to create products and revenue models that will pay living wages for the journalists, editors, sales staff, developers and other staff. ader revenue, a

And now onto things that caught my eye this week.

I start with a fascinating case study from Romania. It highlights how newsletters have become the MVP for media, and it is a rare examination of the revenue sources involved in local media start-ups, a mix of reader revenue, ads and grants. The case study also highlights how scrappy journalists have had to be to make a go of it over the last decade or so.

Lessons learned from creating a local news startup in Romania

This is my interview with Alex Enășescu, who launched a newsletter and website focused on news about his hometown, Iasi, Romania. We began a conversation on Substack when he commented on one of my posts. I thought his story would inspire other digital media entrepreneurs. This interview was done by email.

ijnet.org/en/story/lessons-learned-creating-local-news-startup-romania

Three young leaders shared advice for meeting challenges including imposter syndrome and having to remake a media brand to help it move upmarket. I particularly enjoyed Aliya Itzkowitz of FT Strategies view on the value of voicing uncertainty. When you’re dealing with innovation, you have to deal with uncertainty and find a way to systematically work your way through it.

How young leaders can shape the future of the media industry

LadBible, FT Strategies and boom saloon talk about the challenges and opportunities in modern leadership

www.journalism.co.uk/news/how-are-young-leaders-shaping-the-future-of-the-media-industry-/s2/a1119103

My former BBC colleague Alf Hermida has just released a paper with Seth Lewis and Samantha Lorenzo on Clay Christensen’s jobs-to-be-done framework and how it can be applied to improving the products of local journalism. This was a popular framework in the first decade of this century, and there were a lot of advocates of it, including Steve Yelvington who I mentioned before.

Jobs-to-Be-Done and Journalism Innovation: Making News More Responsive to Community Needs | Article | Media and Communication

Seth C. Lewis, Alfred Hermida, Samantha Lorenzo

www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/7578/3649

The FT seems to be going from strength-to-strength, and now it is prospecting for new opportunities with its own venture fund.

In AI news this week, OpenAI alleged that the New York Times hired someone to manipulate its systems to make it appear that it frequently plagiarised the newspaper’s material. It was a forceful response to the Times’ lawsuit.

OpenAI claims New York Times ‘hacked’ ChatGPT to build copyright lawsuit

In a filing Monday, OpenAI claims a ‘hired gun’ took ‘tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results’

www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/27/new-york-times-hacked-chatgpt-openai-lawsuit

Having worked in US public media for four years, this makes me sad. It was one of the early efforts by public media to move beyond its traditional audio and video content to provide local news in a digital-first way. It speaks to the challenges facing US public media in this soft ad market.

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

The loss of reporters

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

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

An exodus of product talent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Schibsted and Mediacorp are deploying AI in the newsroom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publishers test new Offerwall monetization tool from Google

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A manifesto for audience centricity in journalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?

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

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

This sums up the Platform Era.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Games Advertising, The New York Times Is Pitching Habit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With removal of Instant Articles, VíaPaís reinvents audience engagement strategy

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

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

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

Building direct traffic is more important than ever for news publishers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sports Illustrated’s $10 Million Mystery

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Messenger was killed

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

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

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

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

Brian Morrissey said in his Rebooting newsletter:

Receipts

Standing on business

www.therebooting.com/receipts

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

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

Why Google and Meta ‘owe’ news publishers - Poynter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over the last two weeks, I have written about the crisis in media, particularly local journalism, and ways to address it. For much of my career, I have worked with two assumptions:

1. We needed to create new products for the new ways that people consumed and interacted with media.

2. We needed to develop a new relationship with “the people formerly known as the audience”, as Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and Dan Gillmor talked about this shift in the early part of this century.

   The first decade of this century was heady days for digital media innovation, and the media is launching a new wave of community strategies as publishers and broadcasters seek to reclaim their relationships with audiences and drive higher revenue as those relationships develop and deepen. Reflecting on community strategies and the media for Pugpig’s Media Bulletin, I believe that we’ve seen three eras of community strategies in media.

The first era: Forums, blogs and podcasts

The first era began in the late 1990s and early 2000s with forums, blogs and the first generation of podcasts. Quite a few media organisations, like the BBC and the Guardian (I worked at both during this time - the BBC from 1998 to 2006, and the Guardian from 2006 to 2010), launched blogs and podcasts. I wrote a guide to blogs and blogging for the BBC that supported those efforts. At the BBC, we often used Jeff Jarvis’ phrase that news had become a conversation, and as public service media, it was our civic and missional responsibility to take part in those conversations, whether we initiated them or not.

I was asked to write the guide to blogging because I had written a blog for the BBC during the 2004 US presidential election, but I had been involved in very early experiments in audience engagement dating back to the 1990s, with Talking Point at the World Service, which allowed audiences from around the world to pose questions to newsmakers. During the 2000 election, we took this a step further. We took questions from the BBC’s global audience and hosted webcasts using a portable satellite data uplink allowing voters and experts to answer those questions.

When I was writing the guide to blogging, it was the beginning of the rise of media critics who referred to the BBC and other traditional outlets as the “lame-stream media”. Defensiveness led many media outlets not to engage with the critics, but I did, often directly. When I was covering Tony Blair’s visit to George W. Bush’s ranch. I referred to a local news story jokingly discussing cow tipping. An angry reader wrote to us assuming that I was a member of some coastal elite who wasn’t aware of farming. My mother grew up on a farm, which is still in the family, and I grew up helping friends on their dairy farms. I responded directly to the reader in good humour about my farming experience. It broke the ice, and I had a wonderful exchange, converting a critic into a supporter. Trust is based on relationships, not just professional standards.

However, during this first era of community strategies, many other publishers simply added comments to the bottom of their articles. Journalists wrote and audiences were consigned to the comment sections, which often became toxic and combative. Many media outlets didn’t adjust their editorial strategies to this new interactive era. It reinforced the us vs. them strategy. It didn’t deliver increased engagement or increased revenue because moderation costs often outweighed any benefit.

The second era: The rise of social platforms

The second era shifted community efforts from publishers’ and broadcasters’ websites to social platforms. It seemed to make the most sense to follow where the audience was, and audiences had moved en masse to myriad social platforms before settling on Facebook’s platforms and, to a lesser extent, Twitter (well and now TikTok).

As I said in the Media Bulletin:

“Eventually, those early on-site community projects were shuttered. NPR, Reuters, Recode, The Verge and USA Today closed their comment sections. As NPR’s public editor said of the decision, “The audience itself has decided for NPR, choosing to engage much more via social media, primarily on Twitter and Facebook, rather than in the NPR.org comments section.” Unfortunately, outsourcing their relationships to audiences on social platforms has had disastrous effects on publishers.”

The Third Era: Membership and Community

Now publishers and broadcasters have a renewed interest in membership and community. While NPR - US public radio - has had a membership strategy since its inception, the model is expanding, from small local start-ups to large publishers. For community outlets and public media, membership means a sense of belonging and connecting to the mission. But membership can also mean exclusivity, which is what Elle is trying to do with its membership model with its Collective. Hearst and DC Thomson are rolling out several different approaches to community depending on the product. DC Thomson’s newspapers are leaning into the nature of community and place. It’s Stylist title is focusing on activism and empowerment for the women who read it.

For news publishers, I believe relationships are key to responding to the decline in trust in journalism. Trust is not abstract, and it is built on genuine engagement between publishers and their audiences.

The challenges are strategic, cultural and organisational we well as material. Strategically and culturally, organisations will need to develop clear propositions and the capabilities - editorially and technically - to carry out these strategies. Organisationally, it will be a challenge to develop and find the talent as well as reconfigure their operations to manage these strategies. And lastly, it will be a material challenge. It takes time and investment, and those are in short supply in media now.

The technology has matured with services like Coral and Viafoura, which leverage AI to ease the management of comments and offer new ways for publishers to interact with audiences.

Viafoura has some excellent data on why the effort is worth it. They say that audiences actively engaged in comment communities are six times more likely to subscribe. It proves the hypothesis that drove a lot of original engagement strategies - that engagement would lead to more time on-site and a deeper relationship with the media outlet. Moreover, with reader revenue now a meaningful part of many publishers’ and broadcasters’ strategies, this engagement translates to revenue. Greater trust and higher revenue are the key KPIs that will measure the success of these strategies.

Now onto the key media stories from the past week. David Cohn has worked at the intersection of media and technology for years now, and at this moment of immense change in media, he riffs on the environmental three Rs - reduce, recycle and reuse. says that publishers need to reduce reliance on platforms - the issue of an owned or rented audience. Read on to find out how he thinks recycling and reuse are relevant to publishers.

The Fix spoke to Mattia Peretti about his career river - the unique path professionally that he has taken. From a local radio station in Italy to LSE working with JournalismAI, he talks about that professional journey. This is just one bit of insight from the piece: “A helpful distinction Peretti suggests is discerning ‘knowledge tasks’ from ‘language tasks’. Current generative AI systems do a poor job producing content just based on prompt, but they are much better with repackaging existing content, meaning “language tasks’”.

AI consultant Mattia Peretti on his “career river” and how newsrooms should approach AI - The Fix

We spoke Mattia Peretti, AI consultant and learning experience designer, about his approach to his career and advice for newsrooms on approaching generative AI.

thefix.media/2024/01/26/ai-consultant-mattia-peretti-on-his-career-river-and-how-newsrooms-should-approach-ai

One of the major changes this year will be the end of third-party cookies. The Press Gazette says that publishers must fight this new move by Google. During a time when digital advertising revenue has fallen dramatically for many publishers, the PG says that this will only make the situation worse.

Why news publishers should fight to stop rollout of Google Privacy Sandbox

Google Privacy Sandbox: Why publishers should fight to stop rollout of technology which will further erode ability to fund journalism.

pressgazette.co.uk/marketing/why-news-publishers-should-fight-to-stop-rollout-of-google-privacy-sandbox

For one of the UK’s largest publishers, Reach, they have announced a strategy to respond to the end of third-party cookies:

• First-party data collected through its customer value strategy

• Contextual advertising through its in-house AI-powered tool Mantis

• And industry ID and cookie-less solutions.

Reach reveals 'three pillars' that prepare it for end of third-party cookies

Reach digital director Terry Hornsby explains three pillars of advertising strategy for 2024 which prepare publisher for post-cookies world.

pressgazette.co.uk/marketing/reach-digital-third-party-cookies

A very bad start to 2024 for US media

Last week was particularly grim for US publishers, the LATimes laid off 20 percent of its staff. There was a strike at Condé Nast due to the expectation of job cuts while the company is engaged in contract negotiations. And there is a story about how all of the turmoil is making journalism students concerned about their professional opportunities

Tuesday was a bleak day for the media industry - Poynter

And journalists at several Condé Nast publications struck over proposed job cuts. It was a bleak day for the media industry.

www.poynter.org/commentary/2024/los-angeles-times-time-magazine-national-geographic-news-layoffs

The Media Apocalypse

Condé Nast and other publishers stare into the abyss.

nymag.com/intelligencer/article/conde-nast-pitchfork-gq-layoffs.html

Months of layoffs and controversy unearth old concerns, anxieties in some journalism students - Daily Trojan

The Israel-Hamas war has drawn students’ attention to the challenges of the journalism industry.

dailytrojan.com/2024/01/25/months-of-layoffs-and-controversy-unearth-old-concerns-anxieties-in-some-journalism-students

Nic Newman at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has released his annual trends and predictions report based on interviews with 300 media leaders from more than 50 countries and territories around the world.

• Less than half of the leaders - editors, CEOs and digital executives - (47%) say they are confident about journalism’s prospects this year, and 12% say that they have low confidence.

• Chartbeat shows that traffic is down from Facebook by 48% to news sites, and two-thirds of the leaders said that they are concerned about this sharp decline.

• More than that, there are concerns that search-generative experiences and AI chatbots pose additional threats to traffic to news sites.

• While 2023 ended with Axel Springer striking a big deal with OpenAI, half of those surveyed thought that little money would come from AI companies for licencing. And almost a third thought the major cash would go to big players (like Springer).

• A majority (56%) of publishers were looking to leverage AI for back-end news automation. The other applications for AI include better recommendations (37%) and commercial uses (28%).

• More publishers will stop the presses this year.

Some leaders believe that they can or must build direct relationships with their audiences to break their dependency on the platforms. Much of this isn’t new, but Nic has quantified the level of anxiety amongst media leaders. And while some publishers feel so stung by the loss of referrals that they are questioning their past reliance on platforms, other publishers are looking for new platforms including TikTok and WhatsApp to reach audiences. I think that there is a middle ground in which platforms are understood as ways to raise awareness of your brand but that they are understood as a part of a larger conversion process to a range of conversion goals including newsletter signups, registration and subscription.

Reading this, I have concerns. Publishers are looking to create more video, more newsletters and more podcasts. Much of this feels like publishers are going back to the well, turning to traffic-driving formats as the traffic from search and social dries up.

Advertising was soft in 2023, and 80% of those surveyed will continue to invest in subscriptions and membership, more than either traditional display or native advertising. The survey also hinted that subscription growth is slowing.

It sounds like another year of upheaval in journalism. A year full of elections will drive traffic, but it’s unclear if that traffic will translate into more revenue or more trust.

The first story below is Nic’s write-up about the report, and the following are two summaries.

Facebook traffic to news sites 48pc down in 2023 - Journalism News from HoldtheFrontPage

Publishers fear further falls in social traffic in year ahead

www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2024/news/facebook-traffic-to-news-sites-fell-by-48pc-in-2023-report-reveals

News media trends for 2024: AI, Whatsapp, newsletters and video among focus areas

News media trends and predictions for 2024: News leaders tell Reuters Institute survey what their focus areas are for year ahead,

pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/news-media-trends-and-predictions-2024

Building on the responses from the survey, big publishers and broadcasters will seek leverage to strike deals with AI firms. Exhibit A is Fox trying to use blockchain to help media companies keep track of how their content is being used. The system is designed to empower media companies to manage how LLMs use their content.

Here is OpenAI’s response to the New York Times’ lawsuit. It sounds conciliatory, and the company says that it wants to strike a deal with the Times and other media companies. However, they also accuse the Times of manipulating its system to create the ‘regurgitation’ that the newspaper cited in its suit, and they say that they are working to eliminate the LLM regurgitating aka copying/plagiarising content.

OpenAI and journalism

We support journalism, partner with news organizations, and believe The New York Times lawsuit is without merit.

openai.com/blog/openai-and-journalism

OpenAI launches a store to make it easier to create custom AI chatbots.

OpenAI Launches ‘GPT Store’ to Provide More Specialized AI Assistants

The GPT Store will feature custom AI chatbots to assist with specific tasks.

www.socialmediatoday.com/news/openai-launches-gpt-store-to-provide-more-specialized-ai-assistants/704258