Should journalists view newsroom buyouts as seed funding?
PLUS: I'm not bullish on Newsweek's subscription strategy.
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Should journalists view newsroom buyouts as seed funding?
From New York magazine:
Several newsroom leaders are taking the [Washington Post] buyout, including Krissah Thompson, who oversaw WP Ventures (formerly known as the third newsroom); deputy managing editors Ann Gerhart, Monica Norton, and Mike Semel; politics and government editor Lori Montgomery; and features editor Hank Stuever. A handful of people on the video team — a key part of the Post’s digital strategy — are also departing, including the paper’s TikTok star Dave Jorgenson, who is starting an online video company with Micah Gelman, the Post’s former director of video, and Lauren Saks, Gelman’s former deputy.
It used to be that employee buyouts were viewed as a sort of bridge salary to give journalists extra time to search for their next full-time job, but I wonder if these payments are increasingly going to be treated as startup capital for launching independent media ventures. Imagine if a group of business journalists are contemplating quitting a newspaper like WashPo to build their own media outlet, and then WashPo offers them each a year's salary as an incentive to leave. Who wouldn't take that deal? The worst case scenario is that you start looking for a traditional job as you near the end of that year, and the potential upside is that you could build a sustainable media outlet that you fully own.
The Free Press launches new mobile app on Pugpig Bolt
The Free Press is increasingly becoming an odd fit within Substack's ecosystem. Not only does it have its own custom website design — one that looks far different from every other Substack publication — but now it also has its own separate app. Why is it bothering to pay Substack a 10% commission when it's so focused on building its own publishing toolset? [Pugpig]
How did newspapers in places like Harrisburg, Birmingham, and Syracuse become some of America’s most-read online?
This is a pretty interesting deep dive into why newspapers owned by Advance Local punch far above their weight in terms of online traffic. The company kind of floats below the radar despite owning a lot of newspapers because it's privately held. According to Nieman Lab, Advance Local's online success stems from it separating its online brands from its city-based print newspapers and being less precious about shuttering print papers when they no longer make financial sense. While it hasn't been immune to laying off journalists, it seems to be faring better than the other large newspaper chains like Gannett and Alden Global Capital. [Nieman Lab]
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To beat the AI squeeze, Newsweek is building revenue beyond traffic
Newsweek has degraded its brand with clickbait content to such a degree that it's pretty laughable that it thinks it can generate meaningful subscription revenue. Its article pages are also almost unreadable due to all of the abusive ad tech that begins pummeling your eyes the moment you open them. Newsweek is pretty much a case study in what NOT to do if you want to implement a paid subscription strategy. [Digiday]
My Days as a Fact-Checker at The New Yorker
The New Yorker is famous for running the most rigorous fact checking department in journalism, with even the most mundane statements receiving granular scrutiny. One of the fact checkers from Tina Brown's reign at the magazine wrote about what it was like to chase down information in a pre-Google era. [Yale Review]
ICYMI: How Oovvuu grew its video platform to over 400 million streams per day
Ricky Sutton co-founded the company to help publishers claw back advertising dollars from the Google/Facebook duopoly.
How MAGA’s favorite military influencer weaponizes vulnerability
One of the most popular podcasters got his start interviewing military veterans about their trauma, but he's recently branched out into all sorts of conspiratorial obsessions, including UFOs. He caters to right wing listeners who distrust the government but don’t want to reflect on their own role in making our democracy considerably worse. [Mother Jones]
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