Welcome to the latest season of Media Voices: Big Noises! This season, sponsored by Glide Publishing Platform, we’ll be talking to publishing people with something to say. Media Voices co-host Peter Houston is tired of hearing the same old industry buzzwords. The publishing platitudes are starting to wear a bit thin, and he’s decided to see if he can shake the conversation up a bit by speaking to some of the biggest characters in the business.
On this week’s episode of Big Noises from Media Voices we hear from Jacob Donnelly, founder of A Media Operator and publisher at Morning Brew. His path from crypto reporter to owner and operator of a media newsletter has afforded him a wide-ranging view of the media industry. In this episode he brings that insight to bear on the lure of scale for publishers, the role of VCs, and challenging bad media models.
In the brief news roundup Chris and Peter discuss the interview, contrast Jacob’s points around VCs with those of previous guests, and discover their recording platform has a suite of effects built in. Sound effects ensue.
Here’s a highlight from the full episode:
On why publishers mistakenly focus on scale (when they should know better)
“The reason that media forgot about that is because, you know, the internet sort of makes the ‘who’ a little bit harder to understand. At least it did for a while, it’s getting easier again. All we cared about was ‘how many’, when scale became possible, right? Or the perceived the the idea that there was scale, all we cared about was ‘how many people are seeing this’. Pageviews became a metric, right?
“And so I think that’s really where media companies started to fail is they stopped caring about who was reading their content, they started caring about how many were reading their content, or consuming their content. And you certainly have to care about ‘how many’ of course: if you’re an HR media company, and you’ve only got two HR professionals reading you, you obviously have a problem. But I’d rather have 1000 HR professionals reading me than 100,000 non HR professionals reading me.”
Thanks to Glide Publishing Platform who have sponsored this season of Media Voices: Big Noises. Glide exists to make publishers more successful by removing any need to get bogged down building Content Management Systems, providing an industry-leading SaaS tailored to let publishers do more and spend less. Publishers using Glide direct more resources at their audiences and products, and focus on building things that make them money. You do the content, Glide does the management.
Glide have created 3 expert guides to getting much more from a new or headless CMS, created for editorial, technology, and product teams. You can get the whitepapers here.
