What The Athletic’s success teaches us about monetizing local news
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What The Athletic’s success teaches us about monetizing local news
This is my latest piece for What’s New in Publishing. The Athletic’s chief innovation is that it unbundled local newspapers by luring away its top sportswriters and then combined their content into an entirely new bundle that focuses solely on serving one very specific type of news consumer. [link]
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Hollywood’s impact on magazine journalism
In 2020, Netflix is projected to spend $17 billion on content. Disney will spend $24 billion and AT&T will shell out over $14 billion.
With all that money on the line, there’s an enormous amount of demand for new intellectual property that can be adapted into movies and TV shows, and a lot of that IP is being drawn directly from magazines. The Oscar-winning film Argo, for instance, is based on a 2007 Wired article, and the critically-acclaimed Netflix miniseries Unbelievable was sourced from a longform Propublica article published in 2015.
This rising demand means that Hollywood is throwing larger and larger sums of money at journalists just to option their articles for potential adaptation. All that money has had a distorting effect on the entire magazine industry, with writers increasingly pitching more narrative articles in the hopes of luring a Hollywood agent.
At least that’s according to journalist James Pogue, who recently wrote a piece for the Baffler about what he sees as the negative impact of the streaming wars on magazine journalism. I recently interviewed Pogue about this phenomenon and why he thinks it’s changing longform reporting for the worse.
To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player. I also rounded up some of the biggest insights from the interview over here: [link]
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Other news
What's most interesting about the Ringer acquisition is that Spotify now owns the best talent across the entire spectrum of podcasts. Gimlet is the best at highly-produced narrative podcasting. And the Ringer has mastered the conversational podcast. [link]
Most publishers will try to maximize value by bundling as much content as possible and selling it at a single price. But in some cases it may be worth launching several subscription products simultaneously that solve different needs. [link]
A really good example of the "1,000 true fans" theory in action. It's especially interesting to me given that I'm about to launch a paid newsletter soon. [link]
Wow, the final issue of BoingBoing's short-lived print zine in the 90s had a print run of 17,500 issues! Talk about pre-internet word of mouth! [link]
Another digital media company that's managed to achieve profitability by simply staying lean, focused, and efficient. [link]
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Creative Commons image via Pxhere