Is Texting the Next Newslettering?
Is Texting the Next Newslettering?
Good morning.
There was a lot of news this past week. No preamble again. Let’s get straight to it.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week with a story out of Bloomberg on Monday reporting that Twitter is considering paid subscription options to diversify its revenue streams. Oh, so that’s why they acquired Revue and Breaker! Well, maybe not exactly why, but as the Bloomberg piece points out, any model should be based on some kind of premium content that only Twitter (or its power users) can offer. Professor Scott Galloway agreed in his blog post from last week where he urged Twitter to move to a subscription model. This is obviously going to be a developing story to watch. (Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Twitter reported its 2020 earnings.)
In somewhat related news, Substack has wholeheartedly welcomed Twitter and Facebook to the Peak Newsletter Age. And they threw in some advice too!
Over at the New York Times, last week the audio producer Andy Mills resigned via a not so contrite resignation letter. By many accounts, Mills sounds like a person who actively harassed co-workers and colleagues and brought an antagonistic and toxic approach to the workplace.
In pretty big Google vs. Publishers news, on Wednesday, Google announced that it had launched its News Showcase product in the United Kingdom, where it will now pay to use publisher content. Per CNBC’s report, Google signed a deal with 120 U.K. publications who will receive “a few million dollars per year” from the company. This comes after Google reached a similar deal in France during January, and as they continue to battle with the Australian government.
Next up, we’ve got a series of earnings, diversity, and business reports from some major media entities
First, the New York Times reported that it had “exceeded 7.5 million subscriptions for its digital products and print newspaper” per the company’s 2020 Q4 report. The Times’s digital news subscription increased subscribers by nearly 50% while its Cooking and Games apps increased subscribers by 66% percent. (And it looks like more games are on the way!) Overall, subscription revenue increased by 10% year-over-year, while advertising revenue decreased by 26%.
Axios’s Sarah Fischer had a scoop that Bloomberg saw a 135% increase in its digital consumer subscription revenue in 2020. The company believes it can turn its digital subscriptions into a nine-figure business by growing subscriptions from 250,000 to about 400,000 by the end of 2021.
Next, Variety ran an exclusive report looking at Vice Media Group’s 2020 DEI report. The report states that 56% of Vice’s workforce is now comprised of people identifying as women, and that 58% of new hires in 2020 identified as women. And the report shows that, in 2020, 48% of the company’s United States employees identified as BIPOC.
Over at the Washington Post, the company announced that its technology coverage increased readership by 40% in 2020. Because of this increase, they will be adding 8 new staff members to cover the technology beat, bringing the total to 27 across reporters, editors, and video journalists.
And Bustle Digital Group wants to increase its newsletter subscriber base to further increase email advertising revenue. Per a Digiday story, the company currently has 2 million subscribers across 14 newsletters, but it wants to see that number grow to 10 million by the end of this year. Nothing like that hockey stick growth at all costs, baby! In the piece, email sage Dan Oshinsky weighs in on the pros and cons of this strategy. It’s worth reading for that alone.
Speaking of business reports, NiemanLab ran a story last Thursday about the New York Times beginning to explore building a subscription product for its wildly popular service journalism arm, Wirecutter. I covered the state of service journalism back in November and I’m probably due for a check-in for 2021. But if the Times wants to keep making those subscription numbers go up this makes sense and because Wirecutter has become such an indispensable resource for a lot of online shoppers, there could be a high reward to the potential risk.
Also over at NiemanLab, Sarah Sicre published a nice Q&A with Jessica Lessin, the founder and editor in chief of the premium subscription publication The Information. For those that don’t know, The Information is a tech and business subscription that costs $399 for the year. There’s great insight in this one.
In some very nerdy media news, Axios’s Sarah Fischer reports that Automattic, which owns WordPress, will be acquiring the analytics platform Parse.ly. The acquisition is actually being made by WordPress VIP, which is operated by Automattic. Parse.ly is used by major newsrooms and brands for analytics reporting and WordPress is used by plenty of media organizations as a content management systems. So this deal makes a lot of sense: they can offer clients essential end-to-end services for pretty much most digital operations. I need to spend some more time thinking about this one.
In an interesting bit of news, on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal announced they were launching their News Literacy Initiative, which will help readers differentiate between opinion and fact.
I also just really loved Brian Morrissey’s latest newsletter. In it, he breaks down how small media organizations should approach building their business models with diversified revenue streams. It’s a great, concise overview. But one line really hit home for me: “Usually, when companies attempt to ‘act like media companies,’ they tend to produce PR or marketorial. Or they lose interest because media, especially niche media, is a long game.”
And finally, this inventive essay from Robin Rendle made the rounds a few weeks ago, but I wanted to highlight it here. In the essay, Rendle addresses why newsletters have risen again and how the promise of websites continues to let us down.
What I’m Engaged With
Last July, I spent a little time covering media organizations that were starting to experiment with using text messages to engage with their audiences. I mainly spent time looking at a Wall Street Journal piece that used BuzzFeed as a case study and how they were working with a company called Alpha Group and their platform Subtext.
Well, that story is baaack. Last Thursday, NiemanLab ran a similar story with the headline “Subtext lets journalists build deeper relationships with readers, one text at a time.” This piece overall, though, serves as more of a profile of Subtext than a look at trends across media organizations. According to the piece, the benefits of using a texting platform for publishers mainly comes down to the fact that texting is a direct audience, it’s private, and there is no outside noise or toxicity from social media.
One of the other benefits of texting with journalists that the NiemanLab piece touts is that fact that you form more of a personal bond or connection with the person on the other side. According to Subtext CEO Mike Donoghue, the company gets lots of emails that say, “Hey, I have to unsubscribe but please don’t tell the host.” Donoghue goes on to say, ““I think it’s a testament to the personal connection that people are making here. I’ve never felt really guilty about unsubscribing to an email newsletter. And I certainly wouldn’t feel guilty about unsubscribing to a digital media subscription.”
But, I don’t know. I’m not sold on all of this. Maybe it’s because I’m not the target demo? Maybe it’s because I’m just bad at texting? (Actually, I know the answer to the latter. Yes, I am bad at texting. I can’t keep up with my friends and family that way, let alone a journalist I don’t really know.)
I’ve even tried to participate as an audience member. A few months ago, through Brian Morrissey’s newsletter, I got turned onto a Subtext program (is that what you call it?) called “This Week In Digital Media.” Basically the gist is that there is a guest host each week who works in digital media who starts an ongoing conversation with the people subscribed. Every week a new host texts me to kick off the week and I see it come in while I’m on a Monday morning Zoom call; then the next day while I’m running a Zoom meeting another prompt or question from the host comes in; the next day I’m trying to put out a fire on Slack and another one comes in and it’s another bit of messaging clutter. By the time Friday rolls around around, I’ve barely looked at the prompts or questions (let alone had the time to think of something smart to say, which for me takes a long time) and another host and another week has gone by.
Maybe it’s just me! But I have to believe that there are lots of digital media consumers out there who are trying to limit the pings and notifications they get. I get that texting is more of a safe haven, a quieter space, than social media. Except...isn’t that part of the reason why we’re in the middle of a newsletter boom? I’m not quite sure text messages are next.
But I could be wrong. I usually am.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: Hedgehog in the Fog (1975)
I first learned about the legendary Russian animator Yuri Norstein through Brian Phillips’s wonderful 2016 essay for MTV News (remember them?!). Hedgehog in the Fog is arguably Norstein’s most beloved work—Hideo Miyazaki has called it one of his favorite animated films—but I had never seen it until recently.
My girlfriend and I are at the point of the COVID-19 pandemic where we are planning movie theme weeks in order to add some kind of variety to our life. Recently, we did an “animal-driven animated movies” theme week (DM me for the lineup). So, as an opener one night (Hedgehog in the Fog is only about 10 minutes), we watched Hedgehog in the Fog. The animation is somewhat singular: the characters are created using a “multilevel” or “multipane” technique where they are drawn and cut and assembled in multiple pieces; parts of each character are placed on glass layers above the background, which gives them an added dimension of depth. You have to see it to kind of get the idea. The film is in Russian and sometimes the translation of the dialogue gives the lines a peculiar glibness—one animal is described as “a weirdo.” The film’s main musical theme manages to be melancholy, stirring, and holy-feeling all at once—like you walked into a Russian Orthodox cathedral while a small ensemble, led by a pipe-organ and flute, was practicing for Easter mass.
The movie is based on a Russian folktale and the story is simple: Hedgehog is on his way to watch the stars and have tea and jam with his friend Bear Cub, a routine they have every night. However, along the way in the forest he sees a white horse, which then enters into a thick fog that has rolled in. Curious, Hedgehog follows the horse into the fog and soon becomes lost and frightened by figures (other animals) that emerge and disappear in the fog. He eventually falls into a stream and gives up hope, expecting to die. But he is helped by a mysterious figure (really, a fish) who takes him to shore where he meets with Bear Cub who has been looking for him. First Bear Cub scolds him, then admits he was worried. Finally, the two watch the stars the way they always do.
But for some reason, this movie haunts me. I’ve scoured the internet looking at random Russian blogs to find some kind of definitive interpretation, but there is none. Maybe because it is so simple—you can read anything you want into what the fog represents and what Hedgehog and his routine symbolizes. I’ve been thinking about it every day for the past few weeks and I haven’t settled on an interpretation that feels right. The best I’ve come up with is that every day we have the chance to get lost in a “fog”—of what we’re supposed to do, of letting our curiosity get the better of us, of wanting more—and it can take us off our path; and, sometimes, thanks to the mercy or kindness of a stranger we’re able to find our way back to someone who cares about us, even if they are mad we lost our way. (Or maybe that’s what Eyes Wide Shut is about? I don’t know, I’ve watched that movie twice over the last month so maybe I’m mixing up my interpretations.)
I don’t know what Hedgehog in the Fog means, and it probably doesn’t matter either. This is a small movie with a simple story, but is has a surprisingly strong grip.