On the Idea of Media Company as Record Label
On the Idea of Media Company as Record Label
Good morning. I hope you’re all doing well this week. In New York, we’ve had the first taste of spring and it is glorious! February seemed like forever, but now we’re under two weeks from the official first day of spring and this Sunday we get an extra hour of daylight. Things are looking up.
Now, let’s get to this week’s newsletter.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week with a report from Axios’s Sarah Fischer on Tuesday that BuzzFeed is laying off 47 staffers at HuffPost, which it officially acquired last month from Verizon Media after agreeing to deal terms last fall. Just another brutal round of media layoffs. As Fischer reports, BuzzFeed will also be closing HuffPost Canada and pulling back on local coverage in Australia in an attempt to help HuffPost break even this year.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that BuzzFeed was in talks to go public through a merger with 890 5th Avenue Partners, Inc., which is a special purpose acquisition company. (SPACs! You remember them!)
On Sunday, Fischer also reported on how the traffic to news publishers has changed in the early months of the Biden presidency and in the wake of the Donald Trump era. Fischer reports, per SimilarWeb, that publisher traffic was down 20% across the board month-over-month in February, and that politics coverage specifically was down 28%.
Last Thursday, over at NiemanLab, Jacob L. Nelson wrote a piece covering how newsrooms that are leaning on “audience development,” specifically the kind where writers are directly interacting with readers, are putting their journalists in danger. Anyone who works in audience development and who monitors the comments on social media to gauge readers’ responses to specific types of coverage knows this intimately, but Nelson does a good job covering why audience development is important but also how it can be damaging to the writers behind the work that is rapidly consumed and reacted to in the unforgiving day-to-day news cycle.
On Monday, CNN’s Kerry Flynn did a deep dive on what happens when a billionaire becomes an owner of a newsroom. This is a great read and a great idea for a piece. And Flynn’s nut graf does an excellent job laying out the story:
“But a rich owner does not necessarily transform a newsroom into a journalism utopia. They are ‘not a panacea,’ multiple people who work in these newsrooms told CNN Business. They do tend to alleviate the pressures that come with being a part of a publicly traded company or a hedge fund seeking high profit margins. But staffers are still at the whims of a super rich and sometimes capricious owner, and they often have to deal with some of the same issues they'd face with different owners. Employees must adapt to strategic shifts, often billed as ‘restructurings.’ They watch as their colleagues get laid off, resources dwindle and journalism suffers. And on top of that there's always fear that an owner could suddenly decide their hobby needs to make real money and impose painful measures as a result — or simply get bored and sell the company.”
It’s back over to Sarah Fischer for another story! On Tuesday, Fischer wrote a piece looking at how publishers are changing the way they package longform journalism—namely through podcasts, documentaries, and newsletters. Fischer cites some key stats pulled from the analytics provider Chartbeat on how reading habits are driving these changes: The average word count for news articles has fallen from about 449 in September 2019 to about 380 in February 2020 while the averaged engaged time on individual news articles has gone up slightly in that time, from 30.29 seconds per article to 31.24 seconds per article.
You may recall that last year I covered The Compass Experiment (the local news outlet incubator that is part of Google’s News Initiative) a few times in this newsletter. On Monday, the Columbia Journalism Review ran a feature on what The Compass Experiment actually did and why its future is uncertain.
Also on the local news beat, Nonprofit Quarterly’s Tom Stites wrote an interesting story looking at the digital news co-op model being used by The Devil Strip out of Akron, Ohio as well as other outlets across the country. This piece is a great primer on a new model that could help eliminate news deserts across the country.
And we have the rare quadrareference (Is that a word? What I mean is the fourth reference in this newsletter) to Axios’s Sarah Fischer! On Monday, where Fischer reported The Information’s expansion of their newsletter offering. The Information is a premium subscription publication ($33-$39 per month or about $400 per year) covering tech and business that has been around since 2013. Per Fischer, the publication will be launching two new tech-specific and revamping their existing newsletter offering, but has their sights set on even more expansion in the near future.
And over at Digiday, last Friday, Sara Guaglione covered how Bloomberg Media is looking to test out a tiered payment structure for its offering of virtual events. They’ve already piloted some models that include the price of admission for an event as well as a digital subscription flight. As the country increases its rate of vaccinations and publishers cautiously eye returns to the office and the potential return of in-person events, the virtual event space will be an interesting one to keep an eye on.
What I’m Engaged With
Over the last month or so in this newsletter, I’ve been circling around an idea that I’ve been fascinated with: the idea of media companies becoming record labels. This idea (as far as I know) was first posited by Jarrod Dicker, who is the vice president of innovation and commercial strategy at the Washington Post. First in a series of tweets in 2018 and then in a Medium piece from May 2020.
Dicker is a great follow on Twitter. At least once every day he throws out a fascinating thought experiment. That includes yesterday, where he continued to tease out this idea of media companies as record labels, or organizations that really profit by focusing on supporting talent in order to expand their brand vs. upholding and expanding their brand at the expense of the talent they seek out or attract. And at the risk of sounding like someone who doesn’t know what record companies actually do (and I won’t pretend that I really do) I’m going to try to unpack Dicker’s idea a little bit.
In February, Dicker went on Ernest Wilkins’s “Office Hours Interview” podcast to discuss his theory. He explained that the idea clicked when he saw just how many media personalities were building their brands on Twitter outside of the actual brand that they worked for. But there was always a tension: that their employer’s brand was always more important than the individual’s brand. We see this happen a lot when media organizations trip over enforcing social media policies for their journalists. In the conversation, Dicker points to CNN as an example of a brand with multiple sub-brands: Anderson Cooper, Brian Stelter. You could now also maybe add Amy Phillip as one too.
Basically what Dicker says in his conversation with Wilkins and in his Medium piece from last year is that the media industry has always been a talent business, except that it's never approached it that way and never embraced the possibilities that could come with allowing their talent to truly expand their reach beyond their employer’s brand. Companies always want to have ownership over their talent and the content they create, instead of working in a more mutually beneficial partnership.
As Dicker says, media companies can offer creators further marketing muscle, quality control (aka editors and fact checkers, well at some places) legal protection, PR assistance, medical benefits, and, now, even merchandising support. Basically, all of the things that journalists who are now moving to Substack don’t have. Media organizations have infrastructure and that can be very appealing to an individual writer or creator.
That’s where the record label comparison comes in. Artists benefit from all of the infrastructure that a label has and the label makes money off of publishing rights or other revenue sources based on their deal with the individual creator. Labels that support artists and operate in good faith and built their (wait for it…) brand the right way will attract more talent.
Instead what we have now is a system where people kill to get jobs at a few major media outlets who underpay them, take ownership over the rights to their work, and then...lay them off if the economy gets bad or if they tweet wrong. That’s why writers are going out on their own, but its only viable for some and even then, even the ones with the best deals from Substack, will probably need more of the infrastructure that a media organization can provide.
I don’t personally care about what label an artist is on, just like I kind of don’t care anymore about where a writer writes. And I think a lot of us consume media this way. Media organizations should embrace that behavior and the audiences that their writers will bring if they let them do what they are best at instead of trying to reign them in.
Does this idea really hold water? It sounds good when I listen to Dicker or read his explanation. And I’m not smart enough to really know. I do know that Asylum was a famously artist-friendly label in the 1970s and that David Geffen, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, The Eagles, and Linda Ronstadt all benefited from their partnership. But then Geffen sold Asylum to Warner Brothers to turn a profit without consulting with the some of the artists that helped build his label. And this idea of media organizations as places to support talent and allow them to expand their own brands to directly engage with audiences who might not care about the actual company’s brand sounds good—but how does hard news reporting fit in? In the worst case scenario for Dicker’s thought-experiment, doesn’t a media organization then just turn into the New York Times’s Opinion section, except with even more ego and hubris?
I could go in circles talking about this idea, and clearly I’m fascinated by it. Dicker has presented a very appealing alternate approach to operating a media organization. But is it a kind of Utopian ideal, or would it actually work? Dicker is much smarter and more successful than me, and he seems to think it can. It’s just going to take me a little longer to wrap my head around it and see the actual path forward.
But I’d be surprised if you didn’t hear more people using this framework to talk about the future of media as the year goes on.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: “Michelangelo” by Cassandra Jenkins (2021)
In case you were wondering, I’ve been doing a much better job of staying on top of new album releases this year. And a new record that I’ve been really enjoying is An Overview of Phenomenal Nature by Cassandra Jenkins. The album is Jenkins’s second—her debut, Play ’til You Win came out in 2017.
The track I love the most is the album opener “Michelangelo.” It starts with a trembling vocal and lightly strummed electric guitar as well as, you suddenly realize, the faint glisten of an organ. Jenkins’s voice is vulnerable, yet determined, when she sings “I’m a three-legged dog, working with what I’ve got / And part of me / Will always be / Looking for what I’ve lost” and all of a sudden you feel a lightness in your solar plexus, right above your stomach. And it isn’t courage or bravery, but it does feel something like resolve.
At 0:37, the bass and drums roll in and all of a sudden the song feels like something Neil Young would have recorded any time between 1970 and 1975. Then, at 1:24, at guitar solo, which sounds like broken intercom feedback or a piece of light, wooden furniture being dragged across the wooden floor of the apartment above you, tears through the song before dissipating and making room for softer mellotron and string sounds. The song rambles along for just over another minute, it’s head held high, and then all of a sudden dissipates as Jenkins repeats once more, “I’m a three-legged dog, looking for what I’ve lost.” It’s all over—before you even had a chance to get comfortable, or realize what you had.