The Media Minute 10.30.2019

The weather is cooler, the pumpkins are here, and it’s time for people with opinions to start publishing articles announcing what to watch for in the media and publishing industry in the coming year.

“The subscriber journey doesn’t end with the purchase (of subscription).” It’s the beginning, says INMA’s Researcher-in-Residence, Grzegorz Piechota.

Winning the Daytona 500 is just one stop on your quest to auto racing greatness. It’s more than going fast. It requires a plan. Race crews test and create a unique plan for each race and race track.

What are some character traits that you admire? Patience, integrity, honesty, loyalty? So do we. Specifically, loyalty.

The money is welcome, and the potential audience is too. But does this push publishers away from being destinations and toward being suppliers?

If you’re over 35, spend and hour or two on the social media sensation TikTok, and leave feeling befuddled, don’t worry.

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The Media Minute 10.22.2019

Advertising has played a vital role in the internet’s mass adoption, but as the industry evolved, consumer privacy took a back seat.

Newsletters are seeing a renaissance, particularly as algorithmic timelines have become saturated with click-bait, advertising, and irrelevant information.

Alternate revenue streams, paywalls, sponsored content, versioning, big data, social media tracking… Today’s publishing environment is complicated.

After nearly two years of ongoing scrutiny related to the alleged activities of its CEO, David Pecker, and chief content officer, Dylan Howard, the company now known as American Media, LLC is moving on to life after The National Enquirer, the cornerstone upon which Pecker built his tabloid empire after taking over the company in 1999.

It has been a bumpy stretch for Quartz, one of the most lauded digital news startups of the past decade.

A national identity among newspapers cannot be separated from the national identity of everyday Americans. And if there’s one thing to learn from the obliteration of a unified American identity in 2016, it’s that there’s a whole lot of work to do to regain a sustainable and inclusive grasp on what it means to be American.

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The Media Minute 10.15.2019

As a publisher, if you’re following a trend, you’re already behind. Here at 101 Network, we discovered that the hard way when we were first starting out back in 2016.

As more companies take content and audience seriously as a marketing function, the bar for audience attention continues to rise. It’s always been incredibly challenging to break through the noise, but we have a secret weapon we’ve been using: data.

Twenty years ago, the news publishing world looked a lot different than it does today. Newspapers were still the main source of information for many consumers, and they had more cash flow and more people working in their newsrooms

You want your emails to get great results. All email strategists know the importance of testing their emails, but the overwhelming majority of tests are focused on subject lines.

Instagram, a photo-and-video-sharing platform, doesn’t initially seem like the best place for a magazine to thrive. Captions are capped at 2,200 characters and links can’t be clicked on or copied and pasted.

They do! Plus: Apple aims for a “super-bundle,” Luminary shuffles executives, StartUp tells its own tale, and Dolly Parton’s America.

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The Media Minute 10.09.2019

Almost half of all internet users are currently using ad blockers, and Google itself has launched a native adblocker in its web browser Chrome. Digiday predicts the cost to publishers could exceed $35 billion by 2020. What can publishers learn from this large population of readers that block ads?

Imagine you’re a barista at a coffee shop. You may have no background in business, finance, or data analysis — but you still probably have a decent handle on how the company you work for makes money and what role you play in that process.

Here at Niche HQ, we believe industry event attendance can make a huge difference to your company growth (I mean…it’s our business model!)

Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp and co-chairman of Fox Corp., who built his fortune in the newspaper business, once called the ad-driven profits from his publications “rivers of gold.” By 2005, he lamented, “Sometimes rivers dry up.”

Jambalaya News is one of those organizations that’s hard to pin down — because it’s busy doing as much as it can for its ever-growing community.

You will be familiar, I suppose, with Apollo 13—if not the phenomenal movie, perhaps the unfortunate outer-space incident that inspired it. Seriously. It was in all the papers.

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The Media Minute 10.01.2019

Publishers looking to deliver more value to their readers, may inadvertently do so at the cost of user experience. “In our shared pursuit to push the web to do more, we’re running into a common problem: performance.

Last summer, I picked up a score of great ideas from the FlipMyFunnel conference in Boston. This year, the conference has joined forces with two other B2B niche conferences to form the B2B Sales and Marketing Exchange…

For those in the events business, you know the better experience you provide for sponsors, the more revenue you generate.

The good news is that somebody is once again making money from journalism. The bad news is that it’s not those who are doing the actual work of producing journalism; instead, it’s Google and Facebook, which have figured out how to “monetize” the publication of news.

For each article, Lesewert comes up with a “reading value” score that brings together the data on how many print readers at least noticed it and how much of it they read.

Bon Appétit’s “Hot 10″ list of the best new restaurants in the country began as a typical magazine feature when it made its debut in BA‘s September restaurants issue in 2009.

 

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The Media Minute 09.24.2019

Over the last year or so, I’ve had the chance to run several editorial training sessions with B2B media players. In these sessions, the number-one question I get from content teams is how to best judge success for their site content, video, podcasts, and other efforts.

Local, independent journalism will get kicked to the curb in more than 20 markets later this month as the Kroger Co. removes free publications from all of its grocery stores nationwide.

Indy’s Child is a parenting magazine based out of Indianapolis, Indiana. Our magazine prides itself on being the ultimate parenting resource for families living in the greater Indianapolis area and beyond.

Defining the edition concept was simple in yesterday’s print world; the newspaper edition was the printed product that landed on your doorstep every morning.

Nonprofit news does not mean news without a business model. As more and more 501(c)(3) status–granted outlets emerge in the last decade of journalism, more and more are building out ways to make money beyond foundation grants — though with less impact from membership than their commercial counterparts.

For many newsrooms, paying subscribers have replaced pageviews as the key barometer of success.
That means thinking up new ways to steer reporters to create subscriber-worthy stories.

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The Media Minute 09.17.2019

The distribution and consumption of news on social media is a central concern for the future of journalism as social media platforms have become a prominent component of the news ecosystem.

Over the last decade or so, many newspapers have slowly reduced print publishing. Between 2004 and 2018, at least 104 US newspapers reduced publishing frequency enough to change…

January 1st is a fresh start date for most folks. But for me, fall always signals that “new beginnings” feeling. I may not have a new Star Wars lunch box anymore… But my pencils are sharpened, and I’m ready to take notes on fresh business growth ideas!

Recently, the New York Times stopped printing editorial cartoons in its international edition due to a cartoon’s anti-Semitic imagery.

Facebook’s News Tab is supposed to launch this fall; the company will pay some news publishers to syndicate their headlines and article previews.

The Guardian has hit 1 million subscribers on its main YouTube channel, racking up 1 billion minutes in total watch time from publishing longer-form investigative journalism, documentaries and explainers, according to the publisher.

 

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The Media Minute 09.10.2019

For so long newspapers have designed content with the print customer in mind, but times are changing. A recent Pew Research Center study based on 3,425 U.S. adults…

We know the reader experience is VERY different between print and digital. But whether we want to admit it or not, there can also be big differences in the writing experience as well.

Eighty percent of news outlets surveyed had established unpublishing policies, but almost half of those policies were not in writing and only two percent were shared beyond the newsroom.

Dramatic changes in the fantasy landscape, including the slowdown of daily fantasy and the rise of legalized gambling, have triggered an explosion of paid subscription products from both newcomers and incumbents.

As marketers turn to first-party data, B2B media company ALM is developing a suite of new advertising products to meet their needs and stand out among competitors.

The Publisher Podcast Awards, run by the team behind Media Voices, are now open for entries from publishers with podcasts.

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The Media Minute 09.03.2019

Fall is approaching, and as the publishing industry dusts itself off from the summer break and goes back to school, we’re heading into peak industry event season.

Publishers get roughly 4% more revenue for an ad impression that is cookie-enabled – or personalized – versus one that isn’t, according to a recent study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, University of Minnesota, and University of California, Irvine.

People say there is power in the words you use, so I did a little research into the most potent power words to suggest in my media sales training.

Recalling my 25 years covering the magazine industry’s tortured migration to digital, TV envy first became evident in the early 2000s.

“The key is the consumer will let you know when they’re done with the print product. Don’t prematurely yank it from them.”

Dream Team, the fantasy football offshoot from U.K. tabloid The Sun, has had a retention problem. From one year to the next, the free-to-play game would have to reacquire two-thirds of its audience who signed up to play the previous year, which is typically around 1 million subscribers.

 

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The Media Minute 08.27.2019

‘Pivot-to-video’ ended up hurting quite a few publishers but many continue to bet on the format. They range from global publishers like Conde Nast to region-specific ones like the Argentinian company Editora Perfil.

“It is important that journalists take the time to fully explain the issue and the response before exploring implementation, results, and insights.”

Events are likely one of the biggest revenue drivers (and if they’re not, they should be!) Everyone knows, the more people you get to your event – the BIGGER the revenue it delivers.

Journalism is, at its heart, about asking questions. And since the dawn of reporting, when civic-minded locals in ancient Rome circulated news sheets about important daily events, one question has been elevated above all others: Does this serve the public interest?

“We realized that it is time to retire MSDN Magazine and to carry on its work through web channels like docs.microsoft.com.”

We’re living in challenging times for digital publishers. While the Facebook-Google duopoly continues to grab an ever-increasing share of digital advertising budgets, a growing segment of consumers are turning to adblockers to opt out of ads completely.

 

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