Everything Is Newsletter Now
Good morning.
No preamble this week. Let’s get right to it.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week with a Washington Post story by Sarah Ellison on the search for top editors at major publications across the United States. As you may have heard, the Post is one of those publications now that Marty Baron has announced his retirement date. But Vox, Wired, Reuters, and HuffPost, are all also looking for their top editor position. Ellison’s piece outlines the challenges these organizations face—specifically the need for more diverse leadership as well as “running newsrooms that have become 24/7 multiplatform entities; diminished trust in the mainstream media; the pandemic’s brutal impact on already shrinking advertising revenue; and concerns that the end of Donald Trump’s presidency will lessen readers’ interest in the news.”
In other major publication staffing news, the New York Times announced that they had promoted metro desk editor Cliff Levy to deputy managing editor. Part of his role in the new position is “‘bringing newsroom sensibilities’ to the audio group” at the New York Times. The first priority is addressing the issues that have come out of the controversy around the “Caliphate” series, but the longer term goal will be much broader. As Sam Dolnick, who oversees the Times’s audio unit says in the Wall Street Journal: “We were a wildly successful startup...We need to become a core part of the Times. It means having the right processes for ambitious projects and management relationships that tie us to the core new efforts of the paper. Cliff will help us with that transition.”
On Tuesday, Axios’s Sara Fischer reported that Business Insider will now just be known as Insider as part of Insider Inc.’s overall rebranding. The company’s CEO and founder Henry Blodget told Axios that the plan “is to build Insider into the next-generation global publishing giant online, akin to what CNN built via cable or what The Wall Street Journal and New York Times built in print.”
Next, we’ve got a trio of stories from Digiday:
On Tuesday, Sara Guaglione ran a fascinating piece about the Washington Post creating an Instagram Editor position. The editor, Travis Lyles, will be building out a team to increase storytelling on Instagram in an effort to drive new subscriptions. I’m going to give more space to this story down the road.
Last Thursday, as part of a new “Media Briefing” column that will serve as a weekly feature for Digiday+ members, several staffers outlined some of the top media trends of the moment. A brief synopsis: sales teams are sick of RFPs with brands for sponsored content deals because they take too long and often don’t pay off (obviously); consolidation is coming rapidly to the media industry via SPAC (which I discussed last week); publishers are going to struggle to try to replace third-party data for ad targeting; and some video publishers are trying to reach new audiences via apps in streaming platforms on TV sets, like Roku.
Kayleigh Barber wrote an interesting story looking at how Complex used Google’s News Consumer Insights tool to improve cart abandonment rates at their ecommerce property, Complex Shops. Barber writes in the piece that, “[t]his is the first Google partnership with a publisher to be solely focused on e-commerce” but that as with other Google News Initiative content audits that have been done, “audience engagement is the leading metric.”
On Monday, Fast Company ran an account from social media manager Amy Brown about the moral difficulties that come with holding one of those positions. I recommend giving this one a read.
In some feel good news, the Press Gazette ran a piece looking at the success of the U.K. “slow news” publication Tortoise. The outlet launched in 2019 behind crowd-sourced funding and has now crossed the 80,000 subscriber mark, with about 50% growth in 2020. Perhaps most importantly, a large portion of their audience is under 30 and are paying for news through a variety of Tortoise’s packages. I wasn’t familiar with Tortoise but the success they’ve had with a relatively straightforward model (paid for quality written and audio content paired with a member event business) is very interesting to me.
Finally, I’ve been really enjoying Nick Petrie’s Evolving Newsroom newsletter. Each week he focuses on a particular role in the modern newsroom. This week he talked to AnnaLombardi, who is a data and interactive journalist at The Times and Sunday Times. A brief sample of Lombardi’s week:
“In our daily work, the team and I assist reporters gathering data that is not easily accessible; for example, whenever scraping or coding needs to be involved. We clean and analyse big datasets to spot outliers or patterns that can lead to interesting newslines; we create effective visualizations and digital interactive tools that provide context and help readers navigate complex topics. It’s such a dynamic and multifaceted field that it won’t fit in any simple definition. Aron Pilhofer, former visual editor at The Guardian, once said ‘When you say data journalism, it means something different to just about everyone.’ I couldn’t agree more.”
What I’m Engaged With
The newsletter beat is inescapable. Instead of avoiding that fact, I’m simply going to embrace it. So, this week, I want to catch up on where we are with the newsletter narrative after only (Let me check the numbers again...one month? It’s only been one month?!) the first month of 2021.
Just a little over one short week ago, Twitter announced that it had acquired the newsletter service Revue. That move came after they acquired the podcast broadcasting service Breaker. Both of these acquisitions were seen as ways to compete with Substack and Clubhouse, respectively, and to further expand how people can use Twitter to create more content as well as to keep users even more engaged with the platform every day. And this week, TechCrunch caught a peek at how Twitter is planning to add the newsletter function into the platform.
But right after Twitter’s announcement, the New York Times reported that Facebook was planning to build its own newsletter tool. Per the Times story, the initiative “is part of Facebook’s plan to provide more legitimate news sources.” Considering that most newsletters are made up of individual writers who are operating with editors or fact-checkers, that doesn’t seem to make a ton of sense. In fact, it is sure to add to the issues Facebook is already facing from its independent content review board.
Obviously both of these moves make sense: Twitter and Facebook are the top of the funnel for pretty much all newsletter writers. You grow your following there, then you get people to sign up or even pay for your newsletter offering, whatever that may be. So Facebook and Twitter want to cut out the middle person. Why get off Twitter to make a Substack? Just tweet and then newsletter right here!
But before that, Forbes got headlines when they announced they would be offering their own paid newsletter service. Their plan is to hire a couple dozen writers with built-in followings and give them, per Axios, “all of the marketing, editorial and salary benefits of being a part of Forbes' newsroom, but [give] them enough editorial independence to ensure that their audiences follow them over to Forbes.” Jarrod Dicker had some interesting thoughts on this.
However, if you recall, at the beginning of the month, Substack released some new functionality on their platform. Specifically, per The Verge “a ‘multipub’ tool that will allow writers to aggregate multiple newsletters and podcasts they manage under a single publication.” We started the month with Substack wanting to let its users act more like publications and we ended the month with Twitter and Facebook wanting to let its users act more like Substackers (no one’s ever said that phrase before—I don’t think—but isn’t it cute to think of everyone writing away on here like that?!).
Yet in the middle of the month, we had one more narrative: Are people going to leave Substack to actually create new “bundled” publications (aka publications)? The answer: Sure, probably, if it makes sense for what they want to do.
So in January, we basically got nearly every part of the newsletter narrative imaginable. I can’t wait to see what February has in store! But remember: February is a short month.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: “Let It In” by Heather Trost (2021)
If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I love a good piece of lush psychedelic rock. Obviously this goes back to my love of The Beatles, but traces through late ’60s-era Beach Boys, Zombies, as well as songs like “You Set the Scene” from Love’s Forever Changes album and even some of Carole King’s work with the The City, in her pre-Tapestry but post-Goffin and King prolificacy. Or, if you want to talk about music released in the last ten years, you can find the kind of thing I like on albums by Julia Holter, Quilt, Drug Dealer, and Weyes Blood.
The most recent example of a song in this vein that I happened to stumble across is “Let It In” by Heather Trost on her newly released second album Petrichor. Trost is also part of a folk-rock duo called Hawk and a Hacksaw that she plays in with her husband. Before last month, I wasn’t familiar with Trost’s work at all, but I’ve been listening to Petrichor regularly for the last few weeks.
“Let It In” starts with what I believe is a vibraphone. Then, synthesizers and keyboards begin to layer in, giving the track a shimmering effect before a round, slinky bass appears, providing that throbbing, pleasant feeling that anchors any good piece of psychedelic rock. Midway through the song, a synthesizer that sounds like a not-too-annoying buzzsaw cuts through the song as Trost’s voice becomes reverby and sounds like it’s underwater—or routed through a Leslie speaker, the hallmark of the psychedelic sound. The track is over six minutes long, but it doesn’t feel like it. And, by the time the song ends with clattering drum fills and too many synthesizer and keyboard sounds to keep track of, you’re ready to do it all again.