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I spoke to Gaby Huddart on the podcast at the start of this year about Good Housekeeping Live. One of the questions I asked her was why the publication hadn’t done an event before, given the obvious opportunity, and she cited the huge number of resources needed to run an event of that scale.
After using the hook of their 100th birthday last year to take the plunge, it looks like Good Housekeeping Live will become a regular feature on the calendar. They’ve taken the lessons from last year on board, and are now at a bigger venue with a number of talks already sold out.
The obvious point here is how much opportunity there is in events, which have come back bigger and better than ever. It’s never too late to launch an event if it makes sense for a brand, and the readers want to be there.
We’re in the middle of preparations for a special four-part series on sustainable local news (dropping in September) so have a special interest in local news case studies at the moment. I do have to pop this superb quote here though from LNN’s Scott Brodbeck: “It’s a notoriously shitty business. I probably would be a lot wealthier if I just owned a series of Airbnbs or something.”
Another excellent post from The Audiencers. Crucially, it distinguishes between an audience and a community, and what it takes to develop passive followers into active community members. It’s packed with lots of useful non-publisher examples as well, for inspiration. We’re definitely taking notes, given that bringing you all together in a community is pretty high up our agenda.
We talk a lot and share a lot of stories about smaller publishers and the challenges of running publications on small to medium scale models, much like Brian Morrissey, who was one of the key builders of Digiday. He’s had a note from an exec at a large media business which serves as a reminder that even sustaining large scale media businesses requires just as much elbow grease. “The media business is hard and will remain hard,” he says. “It’s also why silver bullets or shortcuts aren’t the answer.” Time to invest in those Airbnbs…
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