Newspaper chains won’t save local news

If local news is going to be saved, it's going to be through hundreds of lean, digital native startups.

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Newspaper chains won’t save local news

For years, there was a simple story told about why local newspapers were struggling. First came Craiglist, wiping out the lucrative classified ads virtually overnight. Then Facebook and Google began vacuuming up more and more of the online advertising market, leaving newspapers with mere table scraps.

It’s a convenient story because it places blame on external factors, when in reality the newspapers themselves were structured in such a way that made them resistant to change. Researchers Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy published a great piece in Nieman Lab that tackles these more nuanced factors: “The local news crisis will be solved one community at a time.”

Starting in the 1970s, publicly traded chains began taking over newspapers, extracting massive profits and cutting back on coverage, leaving the business unprepared for the deluge that was to come. More recently, hedge funds have moved in, bleeding newspapers of their last remaining revenues rather than investing in the future. Compounding all this is that, in many cases, corporate owners take on massive amounts of debt to build their chains and then extract revenues from their newspapers to pay it down.

The Covid-19 pandemic, whose end in the U.S. may finally be coming into view, resulted in further layoffs, furloughs, and closures, according to the Poynter Institute.

Yet even in the midst of this carnage, innovative, independent local news organizations are serving their communities and providing them with the news and information citizens need to govern themselves in a democracy. Examples include nonprofit startups, news co-ops and even old-fashioned newspapers that are reinventing themselves under local leaders who bought them back from chain owners.

I agree with this assessment. Legacy newspapers chains are not going to make a comeback. If local news is going to be saved, it's going to be through hundreds of lean, digital native startups.

I’ve profiled many of these companies in my newsletter and podcast, startups like The Discourse, 6AM City, WhereByUs, ARLnow, TAPinto, The Charlotte Ledger, and Daily Detroit. Having spent so much time speaking with these entrepreneurs, I noticed a few consistent themes:

These startups are lean: Newspaper chains are incredibly top heavy. In addition to the expensive print infrastructure, they employ entire armies of vice presidents and other business-side operators who contribute very little to the publication’s core product. Media startups, on the other hand, have much smaller staffs, with most of the resources dedicated to editorial. Often, just one or two journalists write the bulk of the content.

They embrace native advertising: Local businesses are never going to embrace programmatic display ads, mostly because they’re difficult to place and not very effective. Most of the startups I’ve profiled aren’t squeamish about publishing native ads. Not only is it easy for a local business owner to understand how these ads work, but readers can sometimes actually get a lot of value from sponsored articles. “Our clients have had some really significant success because it's providing useful information to readers in a format where they know it's an ad, but they don't care because they're getting useful information that’s relevant to them,” ARLnow founder Scott Brodbeck told me.

They opt for memberships over subscriptions: Over the last several years, newspaper chains have begun rolling out freemium and metered subscription paywalls. These models have worked well for national outlets like The Washington Post and New York Times, but only because these newspapers are able to publish thousands of articles each month, making it easier for the average reader to trip the meter. Skeleton staffs at local newsrooms aren’t going to be able to match that content output. Many media startups have opted for membership models instead, which allow them to keep all of their content free. I recently profiled a company called The Discourse, which has perfected the art of asking readers for money. “The relationship typically starts with an email signup, and through the publication’s newsletters it will poll readers on which investigative story topics to pursue,” I wrote. “Then, once the community has chosen a topic, The Discourse hits them with messages that ask for money.”

It’s an exciting time for local news. As someone who got his start as a local newspaper reporter, I sometimes fantasize about moving to a small city with about 60,000 - 80,000 people and launching a newsletter. That’s how real I think the opportunity is.

Apple has botched its podcast app updates

A little over a month ago, Apple made some big announcements about updates to its podcast app, the biggest one being that podcasts will be able to charge for subscriptions within the app itself. This news got pretty wide coverage within the mainstream media.

What happened next didn’t receive nearly as much coverage. The industry newsletter Podnews kept hearing reports that podcasters were having trouble within Apple’s podcast ecosystem, so it put out a call for people to write in about their experiences. The newsletter then printed dozens of anonymized accounts. Here’s a sampling:

Episodes routinely get delayed from 5 to 25 hours. I publish daily, so that’s a real issue. I run a daily news podcast and have now had to pretty much give up on Apple as a provider. Sometimes they appear a day later, sometimes 3 hours, who knows. Utterly ridiculous.” … “Apple Podcasts is still a disaster. The new episodes I produce across multiple podcasts are still taking up to 24 hours to appear in the Apple Podcasts app. This is true with podcasts hosted on Anchor as well as Podbean.

These quotes were especially striking:

“I’m about to start putting in announcement at the beginning of episodes encouraging listeners to use any app other than Apple Podcasts if they want to get my new episodes right away.” … “I am changing the language in my podcasts directing people to listen and review on Apple Podcasts to, instead, reference our pod․link site, because I have to expect that Apple Podcasts will be the slowest, latest, and worst experience of all the platforms my podcasts are available on.” … “This whole thing has very seriously shaken how we’re thinking about our promotional strategy for shows.”

Given all the media coverage Apple receives, it's incredible that only a few trade publications have covered all the turmoil going on in the podcast community because of Apple's botched rollout of updates to its app.

It’s worth remembering that these updates were Apple’s signal to the public that it wasn’t going to let Spotify just walk away with its podcast market share. The fact that these problems have persisted for an entire month seems to indicate that the company still isn’t devoting much time or attention to the medium. After all, could you imagine a scenario where Apple Maps or Music went an entire month without fixing extremely basic usability problems?

“Link in bio” startups are becoming huge businesses

Insider reports:

Influencers need a single place to promote their content and anything they're selling to followers, similar to the way a restaurant might share its menu using a white-label web service like SinglePlatform. As creators look at merchandise, exclusive content, tipping, and subscription deals as new sources of revenue beyond brand deals, having a single place to promote their offerings has become more valuable.

"Most creators are creating content on multiple platforms and trying to monetize on multiple platforms," said Neal Jean, a cofounder of the link-in-bio startup Beacons. "Because of that growing fragmentation, they really end up needing a very general connective layer in the middle, which usually ends up being something like Beacons, Linktree, or some other website builder."

How Bustle Digital Group grew its huge TikTok following

Digiday reports:

Unlike other social platforms … in which you can analyze engagement to determine how it performed in as soon as 30 minutes, TikTok videos can sometimes go viral months after they’re posted. “It really is a long-term game in terms of the content engagement,” [said Wesley Bonner, BDG’s vp marketing and business development].

It’s led the publisher to think differently about the themes audiences want to see on TikTok and has shaped how the company approaches video shoots. The team walks away, say, from a celebrity interview with a piece of video specifically for TikTok …

… BDG meets monthly with its TikTok creator team to brainstorm around key tentpole events, like New York Fashion Week — which led to pieces like “what I would’ve worn” at the fashion show or a video summarizing an editor’s favorite moments from the (virtual) event.

Publishers were slow to adopt TikTok — a year ago most didn't have active accounts — but I've noticed an uptick recently of media outlets finding their groove on the platform.

Of course, the reason publishers haven’t been rushing to TikTok is because monetization on the platform is pretty much nonexistent, aside from branded content deals. Snapchat, YouTube, and Facebook Watch all offer revenue sharing, so they’ll continue to attract the most attention from media outlets.

The Hollywood-to-YouTube pipeline

Tubefilter profiles Alan Chikin Chow, a traditional actor who’s seen tremendous success on YouTube:

Chow can’t pinpoint one particular video that went viral and kicked off the near-vertical trajectory of audience growth. And neither can we, because in the past two months, more than 20 of his videos have generated more than 20 million views each. His top-viewed video, Acts of Kindness Gone Wrong, has a whopping 127 million, and the runner-up, Sci-Fi Fanfics Be Like, has 93 million.

For Chow, this virality is a green light to change up his career and make content creation a full-time pursuit alongside acting and other creative pursuits like screenwriting.

There's an interesting trend wherein traditional Hollywood actors are using platforms like YouTube as both a space for experimentation and rounding out their career.

Entertainment careers used to only flow in the other direction: a popular creator on YouTube would land a pilot or major role on a traditional TV show or film.

YouTube has just gotten too huge for Hollywood to ignore, and A-list stars can use it to interact with their audiences in between major film/TV projects. It also generate a lot of additional revenue.

The best example of this trend is Brie Larson, who has a surprisingly good vlog.

The rise and fall and rise of Joe Budden

Vulture published a good piece explaining how C-list rapper Joe Budden evolved into an A-list podcaster:

Who better to give listeners the behind-the-scenes scoop on the business of rap than someone who has seen every side of it (and more or less retired from it after burning every bridge on the way out), who was touted as a mixtape wonder in the same class as future megastars like 50 Cent, who was chewed up and spit out but has maintained a presence in the ever-evolving intersection of music fandom and internet media? Who better to voice the inequities and absurdities of the game than a man immortalized in two Def Jam–themed fighting games, who didn’t get to release two Def Jam studio albums? The Joe Budden Podcast scratches a certain itch for a certain type of hip-hop fan, the irreverent hard-ass old enough to know the classics and observe the old bro code but young enough to have opinions on, say, Nicki Minaj’s personal life. Alongside his co-hosts Rory Farrell and Jamil “Mal” Clay, Joe created a kind of people’s history of the modern hip-hop industry, and points were made in episodes covering shocking events like the Pusha-T and Drake battle and the passing of XXXTentacion. In their wheelhouse, they’re witty and even relatable.

I don’t listen to the show, but I’ve followed Budden’s career with interest ever since he became Spotify’s first big bet on podcasting. Before Joe Rogan, before the Gimlet acquisition, before Spotify even opened up its ecosystem to all podcasters, it spent millions to acquire the rights to exclusively distribute Budden’s podcast.

And then when that contract ran out, Budden famously went independent, launching a paid feed on Patreon. I was looking forward to seeing whether he could build a podcast empire on his own, but, as the Vulture piece details, he had a big falling out with his cohosts, so the show’s future is uncertain.

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