Рубрика: news

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«.

🤖 A new INMA report shows how publishers are using robots to expand coverage as well as generate revenue.

It also features tips for publishers who are interested in introducing automation in their newsrooms.

«Newsrooms are learning to embrace automated tools» as fears about robots taking jobs abate, according to a new INMA report.

«With that acceptance comes the reassurance and understanding that, no matter how capable automated software becomes, it can’t replace the skills of a good journalist or editor» — writes author Paula Felps, Ideas Blog Editor, INMA and author of the report.

Details: What’s New in Publishing

💡 WEEKEND NEWS. British prefer to watch World Cup on TV. Qatar’s beIN Sports blocked streaming World Cup via TOD TV to hit Saudi Arabia football fans. Shutterstock will sell AI-made stock images.

World Cup in Qatar:

🤡 Saudi Arabia football fans hoping to watch World Cup action on streaming service TOD TV claim the government has blocked the platform from screening the games. TOD TV, which holds the rights to show the World Cup in Saudi Arabia, is owned by Qatar’s beIN Sports Media Group / Advanced Television

⚽️ Ofcom: 69% of those British fans would like to watch World Cup on TV. Among younger audience — 51% prefer TV / Advanced Television

What else:

🆘 The BBC says journalist Ed Lawrence, who was covering protests in Shanghai, was detained for several hours and beaten by police, without a credible explanation / Guardian

🍃 The Washington Post has grown its climate and environment team from six in 2018 to now more than 30 people. The investment signifies the importance of the coverage area for the publisher as it chases young readers who, it says, are drawn to this topic area / Digiday

😉 A torrent site user accused of downloading and uploading at least 120TB of movies, TV shows, eBooks, music and software, has avoided an immediate prison term / Torrent Freak

🚷 Shutterstock has begun experimenting with using generative AI, an emerging innovation that lets people enter text-based “prompts” to generate unique computer-made digital images. In late October, the company announced a plan to sell AI-made stock images in collaboration with OpenAI / Digiday

🤷‍♂️ Twitter’s $5bn-a-year business hit as Elon Musk clashes with advertisers. For example, platform’s ads team has shrunk so much after layoffs that ad agencies complain its ads systems are now buggy and that they lack a point of contact there / FT

🤔 ANALYTICS AND OPINIONS: 80% of your content is not worth to be published. Catch22. Median media industry salary in UK.
#mediaweek, vol.5

1️⃣ 80% of pageviews come from 20% (or less) of content. But it depends on topics, the size of the website and even on countries. For example, in UK 80% of page views come from 25,8% of content. In Japan — from just 12,5%. So… maybe 80% of your content is not worth to be published? / WNIP

2️⃣ Why are successful paywalls such a rarity in UK local press? The answers are in the size of the country, in BBC and in.. catch22 of course / PressGazette

3️⃣ Seven tips on producing a news series: think resource-friendly, consider lightweight options, brainstorming meetings are rarely useful for conjuring up ideas… / Journalism.co.uk

4️⃣ Almost a fifth of UK media worker make under £25,000 per year. And the median media industry salary reported by respondents to Press Gazette’s pay salary survey for 2022 was £41,700 / PressGazette

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Opinion: Facts are free, but comment is sacred: the new reality for news publishers / Alan Hunter

💡 CASES: Simple revenue model works better for DAN. £134 400 per year — that’s how much local newsletter earns.
#mediaweek, vol.4

1️⃣ DAN, a US hyperlocal newspaper, built a sustainable revenue stream by charging its 500 subscribers $10 a month for a low-tech newsletter. The company is a family business created in 2019 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, US, covering a zone of about 30,000 people. Editor Peter Rice works with his wife Lindsay Wood and dad David Lee. The revenue model could not be much simpler. All stories are emailed once a week to some 500 subscribers and nothing is given away for free online. Its growth strategy is mostly word of mouth and since its inception, DAN’s audience has been growing at a steady rate of some 10 subscribers a month / Journalism.co.uk

2️⃣ Manchester-based email newsletter The Mill says it has reached profitability a month ahead of its second birthday. The outlet, which publishes through newsletter platform Substack, now has 27,000 people in Greater Manchester on its email list and 1,600 paying subscribers. Meanwhile, its sister newsletters, the Liverpool Post and Sheffield Tribune, have reached 650 and 900 paying subscribers, respectively. This gives them annualised subscription revenue of £134,400 for The Mill, £54,600 for The Post and £75,600 for the Tribune / PressGazette