Месяц: Декабрь 2022

Hello! This is Sergei Yakupov — founder of MediaMedia. I would like to restart my newsletter about media, but can’t figure out what it should look like to be interesting for the subscribers.

The newsletter will be biweekly. And I’ll start it on the Beehiive platform. Here is the link to subscribe. I hope to launch newsletter in January 2023.

So, I would like to ask you to spend 30 sec. and answer these simple questions. The first question is about the type of newsletter. You can choose single answer or all three of them.

The second — about the focus. I think that business and technologies are the most interesting things in media to follow. And I do it everyday, reading a lot of news, articles, researches about it. And for the newsletter I would like to be focused. So, there is only one answer — what should I be focused on.

📅 5 December — 9 December. What else was interesting this week?

💰 Media Business: General Electric buys 22 full-page and five partial-page color ads in NYT. Can news be a good sustainable business. WaPo to discontinue ad tech arm Zeus as a standalone business. Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget — It Wasn’t Enough. → Details

📊 Analytics & Opinions: How to convert print readers to digital: 2 effective strategies. To address the challenges around publisher-seller transparency, our team at Video Discovery platform Primis created Sellers.guide, based on ads.txt and sellers.json data → Details

📰 Journalism: Rupert Murdoch to be deposed in $1.6 billion defamation case against Fox. Al Jazeera files a case against the IDF at the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the killing of journalist Shireen Abu Aqla. → Details

🛠 MediaTech: he New York Times had three podcasts in the top 10 US shows, Audiochuck was the top free US channel. Meta threatened to remove news from its platforms if Congress passes the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act as part of the annual defense bill, and Congress excluded it of the deffense bill. Apple News+ ranking: Circulation growth slows across top 25 US magazines → Details

🤔 Cases: In the 11 months since, the New York Times says “tens of millions” of people have played the Wordle. Puck sought to capitalize on the same idea driving the newsletter company Substack—that certain writers, with dedicated followings, can be their own profit centers. → Details

🤔 TOP OF THE WEEK: Nieman Lab started to publish its annual prediction for media industry.

And here are some of already published predictions. All other predictions for 2023 you can find here (and here — the last year predictions, interesting to read if something goes as predicted).

Al Lucca (head of design and creative at Semafor):

— Modern digital design has drained all sentiment and inventiveness from products we use on a daily basis. From streaming platforms and shopping apps to, of course, news websites, everything looks the same. As a designer, I’d be excited to see the news industry bring back the uniqueness we used to see in printed newspapers — the content density, the grid (and how to break it in clever ways), the personality, the focus (Details)

Joanne McNeil (the author of Lurking: How a Person Became a User):

— Facebook spends a fortune lobbying Congress. But next year, the corporation might win back prominent members of the media with nothing more than a few freshly updated press releases. Watch for Facebook to reemerge, promoting itself as the sensible, mature alternative to Elon Musk’s Twitter chaos. This has happened before (Details)

Esther Kezia Thorpe (a media analyst and cofounder of Media Voices):

— Publishers could use subscriber-only podcasts or paid newsletters as ways to build a relationship with audiences who aren’t yet ready to pay for the full-price experience. Tortoise is just one publisher offering a podcast-only subscription to attract younger audiences to its journalism (Details)

💡 WEEKEND NEWS. Semafor’s climate vertical is «under Chevron». China’s spam to hide information about COVID protests. New Zealand is like Australia and Canada. Twitter reinstated the account of neo-Nazi.

😉 Semafor‘s climate and energy editor Bill Spindle left last week, citing the outlet’s «over-dependence on Chevron advertising». But he is still on the website as an editor / The Wrap

💰 New Zealand plans to introduce legislation requiring companies like Meta and Google to pay local publishers for news, modeled after laws in Australia and Canada / Reuters

🤷‍♂️ Justin Smith says Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t hold shares of Semafor, but if his interest converts to equity, he’ll have a single-digit minority stake / Justin Smith

🚫 China is flooding social media with spam to crowd out protest news. And network of bot accounts also hijacking hashtags in large-scale attempt to obscure coverage / Guardian

Twitter downfall:

📉 Twitter’s US ad revenue was 80% below internal expectations for the week of the World Cup’s Nov. 20 start, as Twitter keeps missing weekly ad targets / NYT

🆘 Twitter reinstated the account of Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi who founded the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer, after originally banning him in 2013 / HuffPost

🤡 Elon Musk blasted the New York Times Saturday for its refusal to cover the ongoing firestorm over political censorship at Twitter — damning the newspaper as a “lobbying firm for far-left politicians” / NY Post

💣 TOP OF THE WEEK: Two news media top manager departured this week — Mark Bauman from Grid and Keith Grossman from Time.

Initially we wanted to talk about the 30 years deal between Yahoo and Taboola, but then almost everyone wrote about it. So we’ve changed our mind and decided to write about two news media that missed the tops this week.

Grid. News media was founded by Laura McGann (ex-Vox) and Mark Bauman, a former ABC News reporter (and the money came from Abu Dhabi-based International Media Investments). McGann explained the main idea of Grid: “Our job is not to incrementally cover the news. We think that lots of places do that well. We’re watching the news and thinking, ‘OK, how can we freeze-frame and help people see a fuller picture?’”

So what? And now Mark Bauman is leaving the media he co-founded. As Axios wrote, Mark Bauman said he would be transitioning to an advisory role while the company looks for a new CEO that’s more focused on monetization. There are some financial issues in Grid: it spends a lot on office in Washington and on the staff (50 people). News media has attracted just 12,700 followers on Twitter, 1,676 followers on Instagram and 3,739 followers on Facebook since January — not much. So probably it’s time to change something. And they started with new CEO.

Time. Yes, Time is going to loose its President Keith Grossman, a staunch advocate of crypto and NFTs at Time (look at the NFT project TIMEPieces). He is leaving after 3,5 years in magazine to be the president of enterprise at crypto trading service MoonPay. Maya Draisin, Time’s chief brand officer, will lead TIMEPieces. Grossman began transitioning out of his role as president in January to focus on the publisher’s NFT business when Ian Orefice was named president and chief operating officer, according to a Time spokesperson.

So what? It is hard to predict the future of Web3 now, but Time was one of the first news media to pivot on NFT. And they are still going to follow this path after Grossman departure for MoonPay. Time has spent this year operationalizing its Web3 business and expanding out its team, and pointed to a TimePieces community of what he said is over 60,000 people and 150 artists. MoonPay’s pitch to investors is that it offers a “gateway” to digital assets. And despite of the FTX collapse, Grossman said that «it’s important to separate a bad actor from an industry«.