Weekly Media News
It’s all Substack, now. I know many in the business of media are discussing Andreessen Horowitz’s Clubhouse drop-in audio chat and the blank check of SPACs to scoop up media companies… but in the media reporting world everyone is obsessed with Substack, as you will see in the news compiled from the past two weeks. Fortunately, for AH, they also led the recent $65M raise for Substack. Hard not to wonder about a future media kingdom based on ClubHouse and Substack. Whatever comes next, independent writing is having its moment and journalists are jumping ship to monetize their followers, directly.
If you didn’t listen to Kara Swisher interview Tim Cook on her podcast Sway, it is well worth your time to listen in.
Looks like both WSJ and Fox have some challenges afoot with Lachlan moving to Australia and the NYT story on tensions inside the WSJ to survive. What shocked me most this week was that The London Times, also owned by Murdoch, has less than half a million digital subs! Whaaaat?
Oh, and The Block, a cryptocurrency-focused media startup, bought out its investors to ensure less bias. (groan)
Happy weekend,
Heidi
Reuters Puts Its Website Behind a Paywall – NYT
The company, one of the largest news organizations in the world, announced the new paywall on Thursday, as well as a redesigned website aimed at a “professional” audience wanting business, financial and general news.After registration and a free preview period, a subscription to Reuters.com will cost $34.99 a month, the same as Bloomberg’s digital subscription. The Wall Street Journal’s digital subscription costs $38.99 a month, while The New York Times costs $18.42 monthly.
Reuters.com attracts 41 million unique visitors a month. Reuters’s profit is small for the size of its business. Last year, it made $73 million in pretax profit on $628 million in revenue. It named its first female editor in its 170-year history, Alessandra Galloni, a native of Rome who has been working in the company’s London office, will succeed Stephen J. Adler, who led Reuters for a decade before announcing his retirement this year.
Inside the Fight for the Future of The Wall Street Journal - NYT
A special team led by a high-level manager says Rupert Murdoch’s paper must evolve to survive. But a rivalry between editor and publisher stands in the way.
“The No. 1 reason we lose subscribers is they die,” goes a joke shared by some Journal editors.
Now a special innovation team and a group of nearly 300 newsroom employees are pushing for drastic changes at the paper, which has been part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire since 2007.
Why We’re Freaking Out About Substack – Ben Smith for NYT
A company that makes it easy to charge for newsletters has captivated an anxious industry because it embodies larger forces and contradictions.
“Danny Lavery had just agreed to a two-year, $430,000 contract with the newsletter platform Substack when I met him for coffee last week in Brooklyn, and he was deciding what to do with the money.
Mr. Lavery, founded the feminist humor blog The Toast and will be giving up an advice column in Slate and already has about 1,800 paying subscribers to his Substack newsletter, The Shatner Chatner, whose most popular piece is written from the perspective of a goose. Annual subscriptions cost $50. His wife, Grace Lavery, an associate English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who edits the Transgender Studies Quarterly, had already signed on for a $125,000 advance.
Signing up two high-profile transgender writers was a signal that Substack was trying to remain a platform for people who sometimes hate one another, and who sometimes, like Dr. Lavery, heatedly criticize the company.
Swiss Billionaire, Influential Liberal Donor, Is the Top Bidder for the Tribune Newspapers - NYT
Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss helped build a sophisticated behind-the-scenes operation that attacked Republicans and promoted Democratic causes. He quietly created a sophisticated political operation to advance progressive policy initiatives and the Democrats who support them.
The organization, called The Hub Project, was started in 2015 by one of Mr. Wyss’s charitable organizations, the Wyss Foundation, partly to shape media coverage to help Democratic causes. It now has 60 employees, according to its website, including political organizers, researchers, and communications specialists.
Is there a plan for church and state for the bidders, as we watch others like Jeff Bezos's own influential newsrooms? Let’s hope.
A new way of looking at trust in media: Do Americans share journalism’s core values? - API
The study finds that not all Americans universally embrace many of the core values that guide journalistic inquiry. And uneasiness with these core values of journalism is more connected to people’s underlying moral instincts than to politics.
Only one of the five core journalism values tested has the support of a majority of Americans: the idea that more facts get us closer to the truth (67% of adults support this).
There is the least support for the idea that a good way to make society better is to spotlight its problems. Only 29% agree.
Only 11% of Americans fully support all five of the journalism values tested.
But support for these journalism values does not break cleanly around party or ideology. Instead, there is a link to differences in moral instincts, which cut across demographics and ideology.
People who most value loyalty and authority are much less likely than others to endorse the idea that there should be a watchdog over those in power.
Americans who most value care and fairness, meanwhile, are more likely to think society should amplify the voices of the less powerful.
Introducing Substack Local, for a new generation of local news - Substack Blog
Substack Local, a US$1,000,000 initiative to foster and develop the local news ecosystem by helping independent writers build local news publications based on the subscription model.
A panel of independent judges will work with Substack to select up to 30 local news writers to participate in the program. Substack Local will provide each writer with mentorship from experienced journalists; business support such as subsidized access to health insurance, expert advice, and design services; and a cash advance designed to reduce the financial risk of starting a new business.
Former Condé Nast Editor Plans a Vanity Fair for the Substack Era - NYT
Think Vanity Fair meets Substack. The new company behind the publication, Heat Media, hopes to unveil it in the coming months, four people with knowledge of the matter said. The start-up is partly the brainchild of Jon Kelly, a former editor at Vanity Fair who worked under its previous editor-in-chief, Graydon Carter.
If all goes according to plan, the start-up’s contributors will include writers whose contacts include the power elite of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington, and Wall Street. An annual subscription would cost $100 and could include a daily newsletter, a website, and access to events, the people said. The publication does not yet have a name.
Why Being ‘Anti-Media’ Is Now Part Of The GOP Identity | FiveThirtyEight
In the past two decades, trust in traditional media has plummeted — especially among Republicans. According to polling from Gallup, since at least the late 1990s, Republicans have been less likely than Democrats (and independents) to say they trust the media. But starting in 2015, trust among Republicans took a nosedive, falling from 32 percent to 10 percent in 2020. (Meanwhile, among Democrats, trust in the media has actually climbed back up, and by quite a bit.)
Clubhouse Is at an Inflection Point – Adweek
But with concerns mounting over its posterity post-pandemic, how much time marketers should invest in it is still a question mark.
Lawyer Behind Fox News - NYT
Even before the company’s C.E.O., Lachlan Murdoch moved to Australia, Viet Dinh was seen as Fox’s power center.
The Telegraph has 594K digital subs and The Times 335K - Press Gazette
Whoa! Remember NYT has 4.5M for news. WashPost over 2M. The Telegraph reached 594,324 subscriptions across print and digital in February, of which 401,938 were in digital and 192,386 were print. The Times had 335,000 digital subscribers as of the end of 2020.
The Telegraph is aiming to have 1m subscribers and 10m registrants signed up by 2023 and says the continued growth in its numbers shows its strategy is paying off. The 60 jobs on offer, some of which have already been filled and some of which are yet to be advertised, include an investigations reporter, homepage producer, digital edition content editor, audio producer, deputy digital picture editor, social media editor, evergreen content editor, newsletter editor, arts reporter, and deputy comment editor.
The race for attention on YouTube – Shira Ovide NYT
Cade’s reporting is an opportunity to ask ourselves hard questions: Do the rewards of internet attention encourage people to post the most incendiary material? How much should we trust what we see online? And are we inclined to seek out ideas that stoke our anger?
Caolan and the YouTube personalities he worked with also learned how to play up or invent conflict. They could see that those kinds of videos got them attention on YouTube and other websites. And YouTube’s automated recommendations sent a lot of people to those videos, too, encouraging Caolan to do more of the same.
In a Pennsylvania town, a Facebook group fills the local news void - NBC
Information about Jones wouldn't be public for days, so as helicopters flew overhead and police dogs searched the surrounding woods, residents logged on to Facebook. And that’s when the fear, and the exaggerations, and the falsehoods begin to circulate and multiply.
"Word is he escaped from Detroit where he killed someone," a woman offered in The News Alerts of Beaver County, a public Facebook group where 43,000 members — roughly a quarter of the county population — post and comment on local news from potholes and closing businesses to lost dogs and suspected criminals on the loose.
Substack shows publishers the value of journalists - FT
When the American newspaper was in its prime, there was a rule of thumb for newsroom size: one staff member for every 1,000 print copies sold. What would its equivalent be today?
At $10 a month, 1,000 or 2,000 paying subscribers per staffer is enough to earn a decent living for a Substack writer, and potentially to turn a profit in a digital newsroomBehind the Austrian publisher’s successful digital transformation - Nieman
The team then came up with its performance prediction tool. Austria being a popular skiing nation, the tool was named “The ski jumper’s graph.” In Körner’s words, this was because ski jumpers and Die Presse stories seemed to have a lot in common.
“In skiing, you can jump far only if you have the perfect take-off and the right technique at the same time. Basically, this is what we try to do in our performance prediction. The graph shows story engagement and story openings. It allows us to see which story might be interesting to a bigger audience.” Körner explained.
What Happens When 70 million people visit your joke site? Charlie Warzel NYT now turned Substacker
For Tom Neill, the five-day fiasco was surreal. Bored in lockdown in London, Neill created a simple website: www.istheshipstillstuck.com. It was part joke and part act of service journalism. In the process, Neill inadvertently inserted himself into the center of one of the biggest news stories in the world. I caught up with Neill (who runs a fun Substack called Not Fun At Parties) and asked him to walk me through the chaos of manning the S.S. Is Ship Still Stuck through the choppy international waters of the internet.
Washington Post’s Cho named editor in chief of Barron’s | Talking Biz News
Americans who mainly got the news via social media knew less about politics and current events, heard more about some unproven stories - Pew
Alden Clashes With Billionaire Over Future of Tribune—and Local News - WSJ
Why Buy a Yacht When You Can Buy a Newspaper? - NYT
Billionaires aren’t usually cast as saviors of democracy. But one way they are winning plaudits for civic-minded endeavors is by funding the Fourth Estate. From Utah to Minnesota and from Long Island to the Berkshires, local grandees have decided that a newspaper is an essential part of the civic fabric. Their track records as owners are somewhat mixed, but mixed in this case is better than the alternative.
Does the mainstream media need to bring back the ombudsman to restore credibility and trust? - Poynter
Facebook has beefed up its ‘oversight board’, but any new powers are illusory | Facebook – Consistent OpEd view from The Guardian
How Facebook let fake engagement distort global politics: a whistleblower's account - The Guardian
I Thought My Job Was To Report On Tech In India. Instead, I Got A Front-Row Seat To The Decline Of My Democracy - Tech writer Buzzfeed News
Social media companies are now required to take down anything the government deems problematic within three days, and anything that law enforcement is unhappy with within 36 hours. Platforms must also hand over people’s information to law enforcement agencies if they ask for it. If the platforms fail to comply, their local staff can be prosecuted, and companies could lose their protection from being held liable for content that people post.
Luminary, NYT, Athletic veterans raise VC cash for new media startup - Axios
The yet named company aims to bundle journalists and resources, just like a traditional newsroom, but empower them to create more multi-channel content, according to sources familiar with the business plans. The outlet will focus on premium news and analysis of business and culture, according to sources familiar with the company's plans.
The co-founders plan to hire seasoned journalists and provide them with the technology and marketing support needed to help them build their audiences further across new platforms, like live audio, newsletters, and live events
Crypto media company, The Block, buys out its investors - Axios
The Block, a cryptocurrency-focused media startup, tells Axios that it has bought out its non-employee shareholders, including its investors and co-founders (who have left the company).
The company says it wants flexibility to better compensate existing and future employees in an increasingly competitive talent market, and to be independent from outside investors and interests.