Journalists should start building life rafts earlier in their careers

PLUS: How mainstream publishers should engage on Substack

Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

Let’s jump into it…

Journalists should start building their life rafts earlier in their careers

After being fired from ABC News for telling the truth that Stephen Miller is a hateful bigot, Terry Moran launched a Substack:

“For almost 28 years, I was a reporter and anchor for ABC News, and as you may have heard, I’m not there anymore,” he said in a video entitled ‘Independence Day‘. “I’m here, with you, on Substack, this amazing space. And I can’t wait to get at it, to get at the important work that we all have to do in this time of such trouble for our country. I’m gonna be reporting and interviewing and just sharing from you, and hoping to hear from you as well.”

It's good that this is quickly becoming the default move for journalists who decamp from their mainstream media employers — either voluntarily or otherwise. Not everyone is going to launch a successful career as an independent media creator, but journalists should be thinking more about building a home base where they can have more ownership over their audience. I'm consistently astonished by how many working journalists today still don't have a basic landing page where you can do things like sign up for a newsletter, read their bio/clips, or find basic contact information. The $168 annual Squarespace subscription is definitely worth it.

How much runway does CNN have left?

Puck’s Dylan Byers assesses the situation at CNN now that it’s being spun off from WBD:

Given this industrial clarity, some initiatives make sense, while others don’t. It’s hard to imagine how [CNN CEO] Mark Thompson and [EVP] Alex MacCallum’s pivot to digital subscription moves the needle in a cable pure play. It’s also difficult to envision why Thompson, who once led a public company, would want to stick around long-term in the Gunnar administration—and, from a purely financial perspective, I assume Gunnar might prefer a lower-priced programmer in that seat. Do CNN’s bureaus and infrastructure make economic sense in this brave new world? Increasingly less, of course. Over time, it will look more and more like HLN, which is one reason HLN no longer exists.

We're coming up relatively soon on the two-year anniversary of Mark Thompson taking over CNN, and he's yet to make any radical shifts to usher the network into its post-cable future. Sure he's hired and fired some people and supposedly rolled out some sort of digital paywall (I've yet to hit it), but there's yet to be any sort of big swing. And now that CNN is part of the spin-off company that's been saddled with all of WBD's debt, I can't imagine there's much runway or patience left for Thompson to start showing meaningful results to his new bosses.

Nurturing the next generation of indie filmmakers

Tubi is teaming up with Kickstarter to fund feature film projects from up-and-coming creators:

Beginning this fall, more than 20 movies “that uniquely resonate with Tubi fandoms” will begin exclusively streaming on the service. Additionally, Tubi plans to invest in Kickstarter’s FilmStream Collective Fund, which is focused on providing emerging filmmakers with financial assistance to complete their projects. Tubi and Kickstarter also plan to pledge directly to 10 specific Kickstarter-funded movies, which will stream exclusively on Tubi for three months once they’re finished.

This is a cool example of a traditional streamer building a bridge into the Creator Economy. There's a pretty big financial gap between producing a short film for, say, YouTube and developing a full feature movie. With Hollywood becoming increasingly reliant on franchise blockbusters at the expense of small-budget films, it's good that we'll have another pipeline for up-and-coming filmmakers to break in with completely original works.

Please don’t take my newsletter for granted

I rely on paid subscriptions for the vast majority of my revenue. Without enough paid subscribers, I can’t continue justifying spending 40+ hours a week on my newsletter and podcast, and I’ll need to shut them down so I can seek out other work.

Let me put this another way: if you’d be disappointed if I suddenly announced that I’m shutting down my newsletter — a very real possibility — then you should probably subscribe.

Seriously, it’s only $50 for a full year, and if you’re using insights from my content to improve your own business, then that $50 pays for itself. And if you use the link below, you get 20% off for the first year:

The real reason Apple is funding films and TV shows

Variety published a deep dive into Apple’s new expensive F1 film and got this vague reason out of Tim Cook for why the company is funding this sort of stuff:

When pressed about what Apple’s investments in movies and TV shows have meant for the company as a whole, Cook explains that Apple is at heart “a toolmaker,” delivering computers and other devices that enable creativity in users. (This vision for the company, and the “toolmaker” term specifically, was first articulated by Jobs in the early 1980s.) “We’re a toolmaker,” Cook says again. “We make tools for creative people to empower them to do things they couldn’t do before. So we were doing lots of business with Hollywood well before we were in the TV business.

“We studied it for years before we decided to do [Apple TV+]. I know there’s a lot of different views out there about why we’re into it. We’re into it to tell great stories, and we want it to be a great business as well. That’s why we’re into it, just plain and simple.”

For all the theorizing about why Apple decided to get into TV and film when the economics don't seem to add up, I think the company's real reason is fairly simple: it's fun to work with famous celebrities. That's the same reason plenty of rich people have lit billions of dollars on fire trying to break into Hollywood over the last several decades. All the other explanations Apple executives offer up are just window dressing.

How mainstream publishers should engage on Substack

I think what Reach is doing here by giving individual reporters their own Substacks is smart:

With Port Vale FC newsletter The Valiant, longtime Sentinel reporter Mike Baggaley has made it feel like a “shared endeavour” with readers by spending time looking at comments people are leaving and going beyond replying by using their feedback to shape future editions, [Reach audience and content director Jenna Thompson] said.

“He completes that circle by referring back to those things saying: ‘Oh, this actually was inspired by this reader who asked this question, and this is how that’s come about.'”

She added it is “also about just putting us in that space where people might not have that relationship with Reach, but can discover our journalists in that way”.

A lot of mainstream media outlets are dipping their toes into Substack in the hopes of capitalizing on the network effects it's creating. I think they might be in for a disappointment though if they simply copy & paste their other newsletters into Substack; they should instead have a more holistic approach to the platform that includes regularly posting to Notes, uploading native video content, and maybe even publishing some semi-exclusive columns/reporting.

ICYMI: How Andrew Curtin built Construction Wave, a B2B outlet covering the UK's construction industry

Are you following me on social?

You can follow me on Substack Notes, Threads, my private Facebook group, LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Twitter