Boom Times for Service Journalism
Boom Times for Service Journalism
Good morning—and Happy Thanksgiving!
I’m getting back in the groove after my little hiatus so didn’t want to skip this week with the holiday—open rates be damned! I hope you are all enjoying the day safely with someone you care about.
Now, onto this week’s newsletter.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week off with a pair of major shakeups at two of the biggest digital media organizations.
First, last Thursday, CNN reported that BuzzFeed will be acquiring the HuffPost as part of a larger deal with Verizon Media Group. Verizon purchased HuffPost as part of its overall deal with AOL in 2015. BuzzFeed CEO was a co-founder of the Huffington Post back in 2005 before going on to found BuzzFeed. Peretti will serve as the CEO of the combined company, though HuffPost will operate as its own brand. The consolidation of media outlets continues and this is something I want to dive more fully into in a future newsletter.
And meanwhile, Vox co-founder Ezra Klein and Vox.com editor in chief and senior vice president Lauren Williams both announced they were leaving the company. Axios’s Sara Fischer had the scoop on Friday and that was followed by a formal New York Times press release later that day. Klein will host a podcast and serve a columnist at the Opinion desk, while Williams is founding a new startup focused on “creating a news outlet for civic journalism tailored to Black communities.” Klein departs Vox right after another co-founder Matthew Yglesias announced he was leaving the company (for very different reasons) to start his own Substack as I discussed last week. Both Klein and Williams’s next moves reflect two of the major storylines in media this year: the New York Times continuing to expand and swallow up talent from other major media outlets and experienced journalists looking to start new ventures aimed at specific audiences outside of the traditional media business model.
Last Friday, the New York Times’s Noam Scheiber wrote another damaging piece about Bill Simmons, the sports media mogul and head of The Ringer (now owned by Spotify). Scheiber originally published a story back in the summer looking at the diversity issues at The Ringer. This time, Scheiber covers some of the labor issues occurring at The Ringer, namely the media organizatio’s increasing use of well-known personalities as talent for their podcast network without bringing them on as full-time employees. That strategy prevents them from being part of The Ringer Union, which in turn gives the union less leverage in negotiations with management as Albert Burneko of Defector explained in a piece last week. With the sale of The Ringer to Spotify for about $200 million, this year has brought more attention on Simmons’s gradual shift from (generally) beloved sports media pioneer to disconnected and difficult media CEO. And I say that as a fan of his work for nearly 20 years who has had to come to terms with what he now represents.
In a new development in the “Google vs. Publishers” battle, Reuters reported that Google signed copyright agreements with six French publishers that will pay those publishers for their work depending on “criteria such as the publisher’s ‘contribution to political and general information,’ the daily volume of publications, the monthly internet traffic and the use of their content on Google’s platform,” as Reuters notes. Google has moved from its stance to not paying publishers at all, to now striking deals with publishers in countries around the globe. This is a big deal—even if publishers shouldn’t rely on this revenue as anything truly meaningful to their bottom line, as I covered earlier this year.
The Financial Times’s Anna Nicolaou had a really good breakdown of Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch’s current plans to turn the company’s fortunes around. The piece covers how Lynch wants to “make Condé Nast more reliant on its readers and less so on advertisers” and how he’s “investing about 10 percent of the company’s revenues into technology and content to boost online subscriptions and ecommerce.” The piece has some good data visualizations of Condé’s subscriber growth and when you look at it compared to the current digital subscriber leaders, it's shocking how far behind even their most digital-forward brands like the New Yorker and Wired are. To try and make up that ground, Lynch has some smart ideas.
“For example, Condé Nast is preparing to launch a subscription product for Bon Appétit, according to people familiar with the matter, to rival the NYT cooking app which charges $5 a month for access to its recipes. This Bon Appétit product, which would incorporate recipes, video and virtual cooking lessons, is scheduled for the second half of next.”
But the piece ends with a brutal kicker quote from an analyst at a media research firm: “The big challenge for a number of publishers is that they are having to think about a world in which the amount of revenue that can be generated from being an important media brand . . . is probably just fundamentally worth less than it used to be.”
Axios’s Sarah Fischer had a piece this week looking at the latest subscription numbers for the New York Times and the Washington Post, as the Post nears 3 million subscribers and the Times has passed 6 million. Fischer points out the differences in their approaches: namely that the Times focuses on “brand awareness to drive subscriptions, which includes everything from launching TV shows to hiring big-name journalists with loyal audiences and building products around them,” while the Post has been focused on “building a technology stack that can help it accrue and retain subscribers long-term.”
However, there is a reason to be skeptical about these subscription numbers. As former Digiday president and editor in chief Brian Morrisey pointed out in his excellent newsletter this week (the newsletter is excellent every week, not just this week):
“[W]ith Black Friday upon us, you will be able to scoop up a promotional subscription to most publications in the bargain bin. As my former colleague Jack Marshall noted, you can pick up a Times and WSJ sub for $4 a month for a year. There is nothing wrong with using promotional pricing as part of a subscription strategy—consumers expect it now—but these also goose the raw subscriber figures.”
Back over at the New York Times Michael Grynbaum and John Koblin have a profile of Newsmax, which we’ll be hearing more and more about as it becomes a rumored partner/asset in the vague predictions around Donald Trump’s future media venture once he leaves the White House in January after losing the presidential election. The piece is a good overview of Newsmax, but I’m already wary about the coverage Trump’s potential media venture plans (and the people loosely associated with it) will be getting. (Update: The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner also went deep with Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy in a Q&A.)
What I’m Engaged With
I’m going to keep it brief this week. What really got my attention this week was a piece from CNN’s Kerry Flynn that looked at a recent boom in service journalism across media outlets during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As Flynn points out, service journalism isn’t anything new. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, media organizations have found new ways to serve and package service journalism content as they’ve seen high engagement from audiences that are stuck at home and looking for advice and ways to self-improve.
A lot of the focus has been on new newsletter products. (I know, shocking right?!). And a lot of the time, those have taken the shape of email courses, which is a topic I covered back in August.
Flynn’s piece is pretty comprehensive, though, so it goes beyond newsletters. She also covers how media organizations are developing whole new verticals for self-improvement and service journalism and how that vein of content also has upside for revenue from advertisers. I highly recommend giving the story a full read.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: Home for the Holidays (1995)
I’m going with the Thanksgiving theme for this week’s “A Little Bit of Culture” segment. In all honesty, it’s pretty evergreen because I could recommend watching the 1995 film Home for the Holidays every year. And that’s because I watch it every year with my family over the Thanksgiving weekend.
The film has a simple premise: a Baltimore family, the Larson’s, gathers together for Thanksgiving weekend. I’m sure there are reviews of this movie that describe the Larson’s as “dysfunctional” but they’re really just an average family of semi-weirdos. The plot is loose and low-stakes (just the way I like all my books and movies, baby!) and features a bounty (is that a Thanksgiving pun? was it intended?) of stellar performances: Charles Durning is in top-form as a less-racist Archie Bunker-type father; Dylan McDermott is in peak “we’re trying to make this guy a parted-hair 1990s leading man hunk and it almost works” mode; Holly Hunter has, in my opinion, never been sexier than in this movie as the protagonist, Claudia Larson; Robert Downey Jr. gives one of his best early period performances (before the substance abuse problems derailed his career for nearly a decade) that he basically pulls off in his sleep; and Anne Bancroft is a virtuoso as the matriarch of the family and reminds you that she is Anne Bancroft for a reason. Plus, there’s a young Claire Danes!
By the time you read this newsletter, I’ll probably already be watching this movie.