To The Victor Goes the Product Innovation
To The Victor Goes the Product Innovation
Good morning!
Welcome to this week’s edition of Are You Engaged? It is now Week 9 of quarantine, and like many of you I’m beginning to get a little antsy staying at home as we edge toward summer. I’m from the North Shore of Long Island and starting to dream of the first beach trips of the year—but those probably aren’t happening any time soon.
You’ll note this week that I’m trying out some new section headers to better break up the newsletter thanks to a little bit of reader feedback (shouts out to Molly!). And I’m open to continued notes or improvements. But for now, this is your weekly rundown.
Your Weekly Rundown
Following up on the focus of last week’s newsletter, the New York Times reported its updated subscription numbers last week. The major highlight was that the company passed 6 million total subscribers in April. The Times had added 587,000 subscriptions in Q1, with the majority coming through standard digital news subscriptions. That subscription increase came as ad revenue declined, leading to an overall decrease in adjusted operating profit of about 15%. Elsewhere, New York magazine (now part of Vox Media) reported its highest month of subscribers ever via a PR tweet, but actual figures or time period comparisons weren’t provided.
There were more developments in the “Google vs. Publishers” story (which I covered two weeks ago) over the past week as well. First, as the Guardian reports, Google Australia responded to the Australian government’s statement that tech companies like Google and Facebook should be paying publishers for using their content. Google Australia claims that it serves as a kind of advertisement for the work of publishers by surfacing and sending referrals to those publishers’ pages. Will Oremus at OneZero (part of Medium’s suite of publications) wrote a piece suggesting why these efforts to make Google and Facebook pay for using content might not work. And Ben Smith at the New York Times devoted his Sunday media column to the very same topic, outlining the stakes and how the decisions that come in the disputes Google is facing both in Australia and in France could set the precedents for how Google, Facebook, and other tech companies will have to work with publishers in the decade to come.
And, finally, in staffing news, last week BuzzFeed announced furloughs were coming for 68 staff members and are set to start this week. This comes after the company reduced salary across all levels of the company in March. The media employment landscape continues to look as grim as the broader employment landscape.
What I’m Engaged With
This week, I want to focus on two new, inventive audience development tools recently rolled out by big publishers—both of which I learned about thanks to The Atlantic’s wonderful “The Idea” newsletter.
First up is the Wall Street Journal, which published a thorough piece on their Medium page detailing the steps their team took to rolling out a product called WSJ Calendars. The product, which was first tested last year, allows readers to add key coverage dates in the economic calendar and also the 2020 election calendar as events to their own personal calendars. (Note: Sorry for the “calendar” reps.) Once the event is added to the personal calendar of your choice it is populated with key stats or takeaways as well as links to the Wall Street Journal’s own coverage of the event.
Now, I don’t know that I’d use this tool in my own personal reading habits, but as a media professional, having this kind of calendar structured around the key dates of a given “beat” with accompanying articles following a developing narrative would be incredibly useful. And based on the two calendars the Wall Street Journal has released so far, I can imagine their team is betting that subscribers and readers who are professionals in either the finance sector, political sector, or who are potentially covering those beats elsewhere will use this tool, subscribe to the Wall Street Journal to get the tool, or ask whoever handles their departmental budget to add it as a line item. To me, it feels more like a “B2B” audience development tool than an average consumer-facing one, but I’d be interested to know what their data shows.
Speaking of the data, the Medium piece nicely outlines how the Wall Street Journal team tracked the success of their test, where they mere missing data, what they’ve learned, and how they are iterating. I always get heartened (I think you can say that?) when I see media companies transparently sharing their processes for producing new ways of engaging with readers and showing how they take risks and also market test by listening to their audience.
Bloomberg has also rolled out a new tool called Storythread, which provides readers with a consolidated way of following and subscribing to a developing story. As Adweek reports, the product came about through brainstorming a better search landing experience for readers looking to follow a specific news story.
I haven’t personally been able to replicate that experience on a single article without typing in “Bloomberg storythread” into Google, but I could be doing something wrong. Through that search, I did navigate to a storythread about the impacts COVID-19 may have on the meat industry (something I am genuinely curious about). The design of the product is clean and well-done, with an intro graf, links to key stories, and major data points and infographics all coming before the call-to-action (CTA) to expand the actual story “thread.” The experience and tool aren’t necessarily groundbreaking—Vox’s story streams and card stacking have been around for awhile and are very similar—but the design and high-level summary are a nice addition.
Buried in the Adweek story, too, is the fact that Bloomberg is also working on a new tool named All Caught up, which “uses AI technology to summarize relevant stories at the end of an article page,” as Adweek’s Sara Jerde writes. That product is being pressure-tested on COVID-19 coverage at the moment.
What these two developments reinforce to me is that the publishers who are lucky enough to be leading in the subscription game right now and staying afloat, are able to put resources toward continuing to find new (and old reintroduced as new) ways of reaching their audiences. They are doing this by meeting readers where they spend personal organization time, and by consolidating and breaking down coverage for their audience in ways that save them time or deliver a valuable resource to follow and return to.
A Little Bit of Culture:
Each week I end the newsletter with a brief ode/rant/riff on a bit of culture I’m passionate about. It might be music, it might be movies or TV, it might be a book, and sometimes it might be related to sports. Once a month, I’ll go a little longer on something.
This week: “Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey” by Little Richard
Little Richard died on May 9th, 2020 at the age of 87. He was an icon of rock n’ roll and really of 20th Century American culture. There’s so much we wouldn’t have had or gotten to enjoy without him: his music for one, Prince for another. I’m not going to do an obituary because so many others have written about his legacy (including his complicated sexuality) with more detail than I’m capable of. I don’t have an extensive knowledge of Little Richard’s catalog, but all I know is that I love the sound of his voice and the way his songs sound: urgent and alive, even over 60 years later.
There’s something about early rock n’ roll music, like Little Richard’s, that will always speak to me. Maybe it was the Disney “Golden Oldies” LaserDisc I watched as a kid. I don't know. Songs like “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” “Ain’t Got No Home,” and “Slippin’ And Slidin’” just feel familiar to me and make my soul come alive, no matter how simple or rudimentary they sound now. Basically, the song in the “piano scene” in Diner is in many ways my platonic ideal for music. And that song is basically “Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey” by Little Richard. Paul McCartney is the best rock n’ roll singer that ever existed. (He’s not my favorite—that’s John Lennon for about a million different reasons.) When you listen to Paul McCartney’s “rock voice”, especially early Paul McCartney, all you hear is Little Richard. The Beatles, of course, covered “Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey” in 1965, but you hear Little Richard on “I’m Down” and “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “Drive My Car”; in the parts where Paul digs into the lead vocal on “What You’re Doing” and “The Night Before”; you hear him in all-time “rock voice” Paul songs on late-Beatles tracks like “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road” and “Helter Skelter” and on “Call Me Back Again” from his Wings days; you can even hear him in Paul’s vocal, amid the full psychedelia, on the title track of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s the rough edges of the high notes, the full-throated roars, the controlled chaos of the choruses, and the transcendent releases of the well-placed “oooohs.” These observations aren’t new. There are no revelations here. I’m just listening again and hearing it all anew now that Little Richard has passed away.
I’m bad at this, but here it goes: If you liked what you read today, please share this edition or tell your friends to subscribe.
Also, if you want to read any of my non-newsletter work, you can find the majority of my writing here.