Does being on Twitter drive any value for journalists?

PLUS: The less-is-more approach to audience growth

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Does being on Twitter drive any value for journalists?

Nieman Lab analyzed the Twitter accounts of major news organizations that link back to their websites and compared them to a handful of “breaking news” accounts that almost never include links. It found that tweets with links are almost definitely being suppressed by the Twitter algorithm:

These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings are …

At the other end of the spectrum, the engagement-maxxing account Globe Eye News (with just 886,000 followers) never linked out in the tweets in my sample and saw massive engagement: A median 8,418 engagements per tweet. The New York Times, with a following more than 53 times larger, had a median 383 engagements per tweet.

There are a lot of mainstream journalists who are extremely active on Twitter, and they justify their continued use by saying that the platform still has value in driving attention to their work. But if all their links are simply being throttled, I’m not sure how well that argument holds up.

FWIW, I still technically maintain a Twitter account, but I simply copy and paste the same posts that I’m publishing to every other social media account. I don’t spend any time scrolling or interacting with users there. It’s basically the same amount of effort I put into my Facebook group, which also gets almost no engagement.

Even if I wanted to be more active on Twitter, I doubt anyone would see my posts unless I paid for a blue check—and there’s no way I’m giving money to a genocidal maniac who’s responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children.

Join me for a live Zoom call on Thursday

I’m hosting a live Office Hours Zoom call on Thursday. You should come!

There’s no agenda for this meeting — I’m literally going to show up and chat with whoever’s there. All kinds of media operators have attended these calls, and the conversation is almost always incredible and goes super deep into the weeds of running a media business.

It’s not only a great way to meet with me, but also to network with other successful media entrepreneurs and operators.

You can find the Zoom login info over here.

Here are some folks who have attended previous Office Hours calls:

Tony Mecia, founder of the Charlotte Ledger, the largest business-focused publisher in the city

Todd Scott, the publisher of National Business Review, the largest business-focused publisher in New Zealand.

John Honovich, the CEO of IPVM, the world’s leading publication reporting and researching on physical security technology.

Taegan Goddard, the founder of Political Wire, one of the largest and longest-running political blogs

Alexis Grant, a serial entrepreneur who’s sold several media companies and now runs They Got Acquired

How literary agents came to wield so much influence in book publishing

“There’s only two ways to get rich in publishing: become a commercial breakout author, or become the kind of literary agent who represents those authors.”

This quote is from a great deep dive into the history of literary agents and their roles as both gatekeepers and middlemen in the book world.

From the piece:

Most agents, according to McGrath, specialize in nonfiction. Even out of agents who primarily sell fiction, more than 70 percent of the deals are for expressly commercial genres (romance, thrillers, science fiction, etc).

Within that remainder, the novels that have the potential for mainstream literary acclaim, there is a huge amount of stratification: according to McGrath, “only twenty-five agents are responsible for representing half of the authors short listed for major American literary prizes in the twenty-first century.”

Book authors are increasingly signing hybrid deals

Starting in the 1990s, it became standard for book deals to bundle all publishing rights together—hardcover, paperback, audiobook, and ebook. But according to The Bottom Line, it’s now increasingly common for authors to split those rights across multiple deals. Many retain their ebook rights while selling print distribution to a traditional publisher and audiobook rights to a company that specializes in that format.

This shift makes sense. More authors are launching their careers by self-publishing ebooks and only attracting traditional publishers once those books perform well. If an author has already figured out how to market their ebook, there’s little incentive to give up those rights in exchange for a smaller share of royalties. Instead, they can partner with traditional publishers for what they do best—print distribution—and rely on specialized firms for audiobook production, which often requires professional studios and experienced voice actors.

From the piece:

There can be tension when working with different publishers, whether formats are released simultaneously or split released. … Simultaneous publication across formats is proven to improve sales performance and hit bestseller lists. So if an author is list-driven, splitting release dates across publishers can be a sacrifice. However, Groom said that staggered dates do generate multiple visibility moments, and each launch creates new exposure. The coordination burden typically falls on the author and their team (and agent) to manage separate cover reveals, separate promotional campaigns, separate graphics cycles. So the time and energy required is not trivial.

Why don’t legacy publishers experiment more with paid podcasts?

From Variety:

Podcasts are booming on Patreon — with revenue generated by podcasters on the direct-to-fan platform hitting $629 million in 2025, a 33% year-over-year increase, the company says.

On Patreon, podcasts have become the largest content category in terms of revenue and they’ve continued their upward trajectory, says chief operating officer Paige Fitzgerald. “Podcasts are a resonant medium,” she says. “They work well for multihyphenate creators who want to leverage several types of media formats to connect with their fans.”

I always find it curious that so many independent podcasters have seen tremendous success with paid subscriptions and yet legacy publishers — many of which operate their own subscription businesses — don’t have much of a paid podcast strategy. In the few cases where they do have paid podcasts available, it’s usually just an ad-free version. They’re not producing much exclusive podcast content for subscribers.

ICYMI: Why this business news outlet ditched advertising to focus entirely on paid subscriptions

Todd Scott believes the National Business Review’s sole mission should be servicing its readers.

That case study actually sits behind a paywall, but if you’re not ready to subscribe, I also included it in an ebook that you can download over here.

Democrats might finally have their answer to Fox News

MeidasTouch, the left-leaning media outlet that has a vast social media and podcast operation, just announced a new investment:

To help fuel this growth, we are so excited to announce today that the MeidasTouch Network has completed our first strategic investment round, positioning the company for significant expansion across the United States and internationally as it continues to lead the next generation of independent media.

The MeidasTouch Network will maintain full editorial and creative control, now with the resources to scale. The investment round was led by Soros Fund Management, alongside a group of U.S.-based investors who share the core values and mission of the MeidasTouch Network.

I’m not the first person to point out that liberals have been at a structural disadvantage for at least 20 years simply because they don’t have much media infrastructure in place that’s explicitly partisan, whereas conservatives prioritized building out their own media ecosystem, not only through Fox News but also an entire constellation of rightwing websites, social media channels, and AM radio networks.

Liberals, on the other hand, historically relied on the mainstream media as an arbiter of truth, not recognizing that its coverage could be influenced and gamed by the massive rightwing echo chamber that was only made possible because conservatives invested in their own media.

And sure, there have always been liberal media outlets, but they’ve rarely prioritized the channels where left-of-center demographics congregate. By the time MSNBC really ramped up its left-wing programming, young people were already cutting the cable cord in droves. And liberal outlets like Mother Jones and The Nation have focused primarily on producing, longform text content — which is extremely valuable, but just can’t reach the same sort of scale as a viral TikTok video.

That’s why I think Democrats should be encouraged by the rise of several partisan media outlets like MediasTouch, The Bulwark, and Crooked Media. These companies are not only digital first, but have been adept at creating video-forward content that lives natively on the largest social platforms. They’ve also been accompanied by a rising crop of “news influencers” that are very good at reacting to news events.

It’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison between a Fox News primetime show and a viral YouTube video, but MediasTouch has already amassed 6.1 million views on the longform videos it’s posted just in the last 24 hours — and that’s not counting all its other channels. That’s a level of scale that no partisan liberal outlets were achieving just a few years ago.

The less-is-more approach to audience growth

From Press Gazette:

The Times says a strategy of publishing “fewer, better stories” has led to three consecutive months of record-breaking global audience growth.

The Times news desk has reduced the number of stories it publishes by 20% since the mindset change while the sports desk cut its output by 30%.

But deputy head of digital Anna Sbuttoni said “they didn’t lose any audience. In fact, they gained it.”

A decade ago, you actually could run up the score on audience growth by simply publishing more content. That’s because Facebook was acting as a sort of viral lottery that randomly doled out traffic, and the more times you had at bat the more likely you were to be the recipient of this viral firehose.

But now the platforms have reined in clicks while the chatbots have gobbled up all the low-hanging SEO fruit. That means highly-differentiated content actually stands out.

The WSJ emphasizes original reporting in its video strategy

Press Gazette reports that the WSJ video team now consists of 65 people and is focused primarily on producing content that can sit behind a paywall. This has meant emphasizing original reporting and stylized editing — basically documentary-style filmmaking. It’s also launching shows with repeatable formats to encourage binge watching.

What’s notable is that all the video series cited in the Press Gazette piece also appear on the WSJ’s YouTube channel, which is of course free to access. My guess is that the outlet is making a calculated bet that it will steer subscribers via its newsletters, social channels, and mobile app to the website versions of the video and that there won’t be much overlap with the audiences that discover it on YouTube.

Want to support my work without becoming a subscriber?

I get it. We’re all succumbing to subscription fatigue, and not everyone is eager to take out their credit card and sign up for yet another monthly payment.

Luckily, there’s another way for you to financially support all the free content I publish in the newsletter and podcast.

I packaged 97 of my media entrepreneur case studies into an ebook spanning 558 pages and over 200,000 words. I’m pretty confident there isn’t another book on the market that’s packed with this many insights for how to build a successful content business.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a YouTuber, podcaster, newsletter writer, or traditional news publisher — you’re going to find strategies here that you can incorporate into your own business.

You can purchase the ebook over here.

Journalists deserve signoff on AI-generated content

From the Wrap:

When it came to using their names, journalists at the Sacramento Bee drew a line in the sand against their newsroom’s latest AI tool.

More than 30 staffers in the paper’s union sent a letter to Bee management on March 27 stating they would withhold their bylines from stories created by their parent company McClatchy’s “content scaling agent,” a generative AI product that produces new pieces using the reporters’ existing work …

The “content scaling agent,” which Lange said has been promoted by management as a way to boost the outlet’s traffic and productivity, allows Bee editors to produce summarized and repurposed versions of its reporters’ work under new headlines. Lange said editors can use the tool to produce versions of stories geared toward specific audiences, as well as roundups of multiple stories.

I think it’s pretty much a no-brainer that a journalist should have signoff on any piece that contains their byline, especially one that was generated by AI. It’s their reputation on the lines, and they’re going to be the recipients of any social media pile-on whenever the AI gets caught making a mistake.

I’m also amazed by how many of these AI-rollouts occur without any consultation with the editorial staff. I’ve now seen a wide range of AI uses across newsrooms, and the ones that are launched without first achieving any sort of buy-in have often been the biggest PR disasters. I actually think a lot of journalists are pretty open minded about using these tools, but they’re going to be immediately hostile toward any top-down edict that treats their work as a mere commodity.

How Axios Local is leveraging AI to expand into smaller cities

Axios Local began as an experiment in translating a national media brand’s playbook into the fragmented world of city-level journalism. After acquiring the Charlotte Agenda, Axios used it as a template to launch a network of local newsletters built around a simple idea: hire well-connected reporters, deliver concise, high-signal updates directly to readers’ inboxes, and monetize through a mix of local and national advertising. The model leaned heavily on email as a distribution channel and “smart brevity” as a product philosophy, allowing Axios to build strong brand awareness in early markets while sidestepping many of the traffic and platform challenges that have plagued traditional local news.

In a recent interview, executive editor Holly Moore explained how Axios is using AI to shrink newsroom staffing requirements in smaller markets, why the company is experimenting with regional coverage models that stretch a single reporter across multiple geographies, and how its long-term ambition could see it expand into hundreds of cities.

Check out the interview on YouTube.

If you want to listen to an audio version, subscribe to the Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts: [Apple] [Spotify]