Why The Outline failed to live up to its ambitions
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Why The Outline failed to live up to its ambitions
So many publishers have announced major layoffs and closures over the past few weeks that you’ll be forgiven if you missed the news that The Outline has been shut down by Bustle Media Group, the conglomerate that acquired it only a year ago.
Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton published a good piece that revisited The Outline’s earliest mission statements and then detailed how it failed to live up to its own ambitions. Ultimately, Benton argues, The Outline never amassed much of an audience, despite the fact that it published some good journalism.
I don’t have much of an opinion on The Outline either way, mostly because I never read it with any regularity. But I think any analysis of its failure is incomplete if it doesn’t discuss the scattered, unfocused acquisition strategy of its parent company.
Over the last few years, Bustle Media Group has been on an acquisition spree, often snapping up media properties that were dead or on the brink of collapse. These included Mic, Gawker, The Outline, Nylon Magazine, and Inverse.
What’s more, these acquisitions weren’t being made with the profits from its most successful websites (who knows if any of them were ever profitable), but rather by burning through tens of millions of dollars of VC cash. With each successive acquisition, it became harder and harder to discern its strategy. This was an era when digital behemoths like Vox, Vice, and BuzzFeed were struggling to reach profitability, so why was Bustle Media Group spending its VC war chest on struggling properties? As I tweeted back in June of last year, “All I can say about Bustle Digital Group at this point is that it must have very patient investors.”
The best example of its profligacy was its acquisition of the Gawker website, which had been shuttered in the wake of the Hulk Hogan lawsuit. Bryan Goldberg, BMG’s founder, sunk $1 million into buying Gawker and then poured even more money into staffing it up. Then, before Gawker ever actually relaunched, BMG disbanded its staff and Goldberg essentially admitted that he was moving on to other things. “I've been scratching my head for months trying to understand Bustle Digital Group's acquisition strategy,” I tweeted in October. “It turns out it doesn't actually have an acquisition strategy.”
Flash forward today and consider how that $1 million+ could have been used to give The Outline more runway and resources to ride out the coronavirus storm. Instead, Bustle Media Group is quickly becoming a case study in how to set fire to $80 million in VC cash.
Every media company should be a book publisher
Nieman Lab published an article about how The New York Times is ramping up its book output by essentially repackaging its reporting into ebooks and then publishing them on platforms like Apple Books and Amazon’s Kindle. The piece points to one specific example: an ebook titled “Answers to Your Coronavirus Questions.” It’s been downloaded 30,000 times on Apple Books.
It’s great that the Times is experimenting on this front, but it’s being nowhere near as aggressive as it should be in publishing new books.
To understand what I mean, consider Maggie Haberman. The New York Times paid her a salary and lent her its prestige so that she could build out sources and a knowledge base within her beat. The high profile it gave her aided her in growing her Twitter following to 1.2 million and transformed her into a household name (this is not to say her hard work didn’t contribute, but it’s doubtful that she’d have her current status if she were just running, say, a personal Substack account).
Now what happens if she gets a six figure book deal? She’ll likely go on book leave, depriving the Times of her reporting for six months or more. And once the book comes out, she’d leverage her huge following built underneath the Times masthead to sell tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of books, with very little benefit funneling back to the Times. Let’s say she sells 200,000 books. Assuming $18 goes to the publisher, then that’s $3.6 million of value that’s been taken away from the Times. And the Times has 1,000 journalists. Even if the rest of them only have 10% the star power of Haberman, that’s $360 million in potential book sales!
Publishers have already pivoted to video, podcasts, and even TV production. And yet most have only dabbled in book publishing. I’ve yet to see the kind of aggressive pivot that we witnessed with, say, video. This oversight, I think, has resulted in a lot of potential revenue and prestige being left on the table.
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