The Media Minute 12.17.2019

Media Minute

Now more than ever, the publishing industry finds itself on a quest for more effective ways to make money.

As part of WNIP’s series based around our Publisher’s Guide to Ecommerce report, Damian Radcliffe looks at how platforms are shaping the future of online shopping, from Pinterest and Facebook to Amazon and more.

I was reading a story the other day about next year’s upfront when I came across these quotes from some senior people on the publishing side of the business: ”a culmination of two years of commitment, collaboration and innovation…

Obviously, there are many reasons to attend journalism conferences — networking, an excuse to leave the newsroom, open bars, self-aggrandized posturing, hanging out with friends and former colleagues.

Show me a publisher who is not reliant on email, and I’ll show you a publisher who probably doesn’t do much advertising volume, because anybody operating at scale uses email for everything from marketing, to audience development, to production reminders, to getting invoices out.

With both publishers and advertisers looking to grow affiliate commerce, a growing number of publishers and advertisers have started using affiliate networks’ attribution tools to advocate for bigger commissions from advertisers and even earn commissions from customers that have read their content, even if that read doesn’t lead immediately to a click.

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The Media Minute 12.10.2019

Media Minute

Once a media company has decided to get started with business intelligence (BI), they must choose a vendor. There are many vendors that offer solutions in this space, but for most, SaaS (software-as-a-service)…

Gazeta Wyborcza, one of Poland’s leading newspapers grew from 170,000 digital subscribers at the end of 2018, to 200,000 nine months later. It’s publisher Jerzy Wójcik said…

Splitting Alphabet into three companies — Google Advertising and Other Services, Google Cloud, and YouTube — will not result from any U.S. government mandate…

At the start of my newspaper career I was introduced to a new world of electronic operations. Many of us remember typesetters literally the size of a compact car and costing about the same as a house in the Hollywood Hills.

People just want to learn a playbook. At the high level, it’s motivational, but at the grassroots level, it’s answering what do your proposals look like, what does your budget look like, how are you talking to donors and members.

Cyber Monday and Black Friday have long been make-or-break days of the year for retailers. They have recently become important to publishers selling subscriptions, and many of them found success this year by offering major deals.

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The Media Minute 12.03.2019

Media Minute

2020 is just around the corner. After a roller-coaster year of dynamic shifts in social networks and shaky new Google SEO updates, it’s time to take a short break to focus on what the new year will bring to the publishing landscape.

In this series from our comprehensive report on publishers and eCommerce, we’ve already explored how major publishers like BuzzFeed, POPSUGAR and Marie Claire UK are innovating in this space.

This holiday shopping season might be six days shorter compared with last year, but it has not slowed down consumers searching for deals and spending more per visit.

While the term “fake news” is thrown around with increased—and even disturbing—regularity, there remains the issue of whether reporters are doing enough to ensure that the information they write is factual and accurate.

Local news is important. Local newspapers are important, regardless of whether or not you’ve read a word on a dead tree in the past year. As I put it in a piece back in April:

In her senior year at Harvard College, Yolanda Scott received a letter informing her that her application to the CIA had been rejected.

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The Media Minute 11.26.2019

Media Minute

At this point, there is little doubt that artificial intelligence is the future of business. The Salesforce “State of Marketing” report found that more than a fifth of businesses currently use AI for marketing purposes, including programmatic buying, personalization, and real-time offers.

Whether your expertise is broad or specific, your organization large or decidedly small, every audience will be made up of many smaller audiences.

YouTube is facing new pressure to restrict ads that surround videos aimed at children who use the platform.

Obviously, there are many reasons to attend journalism conferences — networking, an excuse to leave the newsroom, open bars, self-aggrandized posturing, hanging out with friends and former colleagues.

Three researchers argue the dangers of deepfakes are overblown, but they will still require journalists to give thought to how they handle unconfirmed information.

The publishing industry made more incremental improvements in 2018 in several areas that have been long-standing trouble spots, according to PW’s annual salary and job survey.

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The Media Minute 11.19.2019

Media Minute

Measuring the digital performance of stories is part of any modern media company. As editor in chief of a media startup, I spend more of my days trying to make sense of various performance metrics than I ever thought I might back in journalism school.

The subscription economy has grown more than 300 percent since 2012, but it is tech giants such as Netflix and Spotify that have mainly benefited from this.

Fox Sports has sold 80% of its ad availabilities for the Super Bowl LIV telecast, at record prices, according to Seth Winter, executive vice president for sports sales at Fox Sports.

Find out how you can grow your newsletter subscribers with Facebook and Instagram. Use their smart audience features to identify potential new subscribers based on the data you provide for them.

Google News has built a new feature to surface and highlight more in-depth articles.
“Beyond the Headlines” will live on the right side of news.google.com.

In 2018, the Pretoria News in South Africa’s capital city celebrated its 120th birthday. Pretoria was founded as a town in 1855 by a Voortrekker leader named Marthinus Pretorius, and the Pretoria News was its first local newspaper.

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The Media Minute 11.13.2019

Media Minute

When my daughter was five years old, there was a farm stand we’d drive by that had a huge sign proclaiming, “Sweet & Juicy Peaches.”

AI has gradually made its way into the media industry, where it’s beginning to make a significant impact.

Gen Z has a decidedly different approach to shopping, and based on new research from Kantar’s U.S. Monitor, that’s bad news for the many brands pouring their money into influencer marketing.

Scrappy isn’t necessarily a word you’d use to describe a publishing company that houses the two best-selling titles on U.S.

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

The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with. This weekly roundup offers the highlights of what you might have missed.

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The Media Minute 11.05.2019

Media Minute

The publishing industry was up in arms over the summer when Google officially closed the loophole in its Chrome browser that allows website owners to detect whether a visitor has enabled Incognito mode to view their site.

Facebook is currently rolling out what it’s calling a “News tab,” a dedicated section on its platform that aggregates news story links from about 200 publishers…

In the span of two days, sports and culture site Deadspin lost its entire editorial staff and a $1 million ad campaign with Farmers Insurance. Now, parent company G/O Media is left to pick up the pieces.

Thousands of nominations and hundreds of finalists were narrowed down to winners in categories spanning B2B, consumer, association and city/regional publishing.

Local news is more trusted than national news, yes. But that’s largely because national news is not very trusted, especially by Republicans, according to a new study from the Knight Foundation and Gallup.

Our 2019 Publisher of the Year, P.J. Browning, calls herself a “newspaper brat.” With a journalism career that spans more than 30 years, it’s easy to understand why.

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The Media Minute 10.30.2019

Media Minute

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

Media Minute

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

Media Minute

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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