Brands are really eager to sponsor live events

PLUS: How the NFL became the most valuable media property in the world

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Quick hits

Time CEO Jessica Sibley says B2B shift is working for 101-year-old brand

In 2023, Time dropped its digital paywall and doubled down on growing its events business, which is primarily monetized through brand integrations. "Events revenue is now 28% of the total, up from 14% two years ago, and events revenue margins are up 50%." Since its new CEO started two years ago, it's gone from seven annual events to 30. [Press Gazette]

Woj’s Next Chapter: Why the Preeminent NBA News Breaker Walked Away

Adrian Wojnarowski was one of the most influential journalists in the world and pioneered a method of breaking news on social media (whereas most reporters are trained to hold all their scoops until their employer can publish an article). He was also well-compensated for his success. So why did he walk away from the job entirely? [Sports Illustrated]

The ‘Mainstream Media’ Has Already Lost

The term "mainstream media" is becoming more and more anachronistic: "Within a week, [Joe Rogan’s] interview with Trump racked up more than 40 million views on YouTube alone, and millions more on other platforms. No single event, apart from the Harris-Trump debate, had a bigger audience this election cycle." [The Atlantic]

Is Politico Really That Awful of a Place to Work?

Politico is no longer the scrappy, nimble startup that was once able to outmaneuver much larger media outlets. It's part of The Establishment now and seems to be struggling with the question of how it can differentiate itself in a crowded political news market. [New York]

Condé Nast Culls Its C-Suite in Fresh Round of Layoffs

This seems significant. Several of those laid off by Conde Nast were senior level business people — the kind of folks who typically survive layoffs and are often the ones who facilitate them. It could be an indicator that higher ups at the parent company are extremely unsatisfied with how Conde Nast was being run. [Adweek]

How Freetrail carved out a media niche for one of the country's fastest-growing sports

In 2019, Dylan Bowman received the kind of devastating news that no professional runner wants to hear: he had broken his left ankle.

By that point, he had been a professional trail runner for the better part of a decade, and this was easily the biggest setback of his career. “It was a super depressing moment,” he told me. “Up until that point I had been totally healthy throughout a decade plus of racing professionally. Even before that, when I was playing lacrosse in college, I never missed a practice, let alone a game, due to injury.”

Bowman had about a year of recovery ahead of him, and that reality forced him to meditate on how he could use this slowdown period to his advantage. “I was 33 years old and was really starting to feel the urgency of time and just the finite nature of being a professional athlete.” Back then, he didn’t have much of an online presence, but he’d long held a fascination with sports media, having grown up with subscriptions to outlets like Sports Illustrated and ESPN the Magazine. “I always felt in the back of my mind that I would love to have my own radio show or my own podcast or something.” As an avid listener of Bill Simmons and other sports podcasters, he was drawn to the audio format.

With his racing at a complete standstill, Bowman figured that then was as good a time as any to start podcasting. He scheduled interviews with several fellow professionals in the trail running community, and in late 2019 he launched The Well. “It was a homage to going to ‘the well,’ which is sort of a term of art in endurance sport.” The podcast found an audience almost immediately, and it soon dawned on him that it could serve as a launching pad for his post-racing career.

After all, trail running is one of the fastest-growing sports in the US, and Bowman was at the center of its tight-knit community. He felt that he had the credibility and the knowledge to build an enduring media brand that would serve this community. Around the same time that the podcast took off, he met Ryan Thrower, a professional photographer and videographer who expressed an interest in running the creative side of the business. “We had time on our hands,” said Bowman. “We had a lot of ambition. We had a lot of enthusiasm about this new project, and our skill sets were so different and complementary to each other that we just really hit the gas.”

In late 2020, the two co-founded Freetrail, a media outlet dedicated to the trail running community. What started as a single podcast soon diversified into written content, video, ecommerce, memberships, coaching, a podcast network, and even ownership of actual trail races. In a recent interview, Bowman explained to me how all these business models complement each other and why his company represents the next evolution in sports media.

You can find the interview over here.

More quick hits

The NFL Is Ready to Take Over Hollywood Now

The NFL generates billions of dollars from licensing its game broadcasts to outside media companies, but it also has its own internal media operation that's ramping up production of docuseries, streaming shows, and other football-related content. One could argue that the NFL is essentially one of the most valuable media properties in the world, and it's only continuing to grow revenue year after year. [Hollywood Reporter]

The Future of Johnny Harris’s Channel

Johnny Harris announces he's launch a third channel within his network. I think there's an argument to be made that Harris is quickly becoming one of the most influential journalists in the world when you consider the reach of his videos. He's basically a Walter Cronkite of the YouTube generation. [Johnny Harris]

Informa TechTarget emerges as a B2B data giant

B2B media is getting huge. 20 years ago, B2B publications were considered to be extremely unsexy, and that's no longer true. These types of companies are also benefiting from a post-pandemic explosion in industry events as more and more workers seek out in-person connections. [Martech]

BuzzFeed could be on the hook for $124 million this week. Does it have a plan?

I wonder if there's a day that goes by when Jonah Peretti doesn't regret taking on huge amounts of debt to buy HuffPost and Complex at the absolute peak of the zero interest rate market? [Business Insider]

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