Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Chris.
We’ve already had some brilliant entries in for the second year of our Publisher Newsletter Awards. See the categories and enter (for free) before the 3rd May deadline.
On Wednesday we got the gutting news that PressPad — the volunteer-led scheme that aimed to provide opportunities for people from under-represented backgrounds to get into journalism — was closing down for the time being. The industry is better for the work they did, but the lack of representation and diversity in this industry is going to take a concerted effort from everyone to solve.
So it’s great to hear that other grassroots organisations are taking up the charge. Serlina Boyd, founder of Cocoa Girl magazine, is setting up the Cocoa School of Journalism and Creative Arts in South London. Boyd says: “Doing this journalism school, it’s going to inspire the next generation to see that there is a whole new avenue that they can go down instead of the normal stereotypical routes that they may pick, and we do it in a fun way.”
And if you want to know why J-schools like this and schemes like PressPad are needed, look no further than the stats she cites later down in the article: “80% of editors went to private school; only 11% of journalists are from working-class backgrounds, and a measly 0.2% of journalists are Black.” You can’t run an industry effectively with those blinkers on, and so many of UK journalism’s evergreen problems stem from it.
There are plenty of practical lessons to be learned from this piece on The Media Leader, not least of which is that WhatsApp can be a real engagement driver (provided it’s used well). As of mid-March Reach had 170,000 sign-ups to its Communities and an additional 1.7m subscribers to its channels. Now, of course, the real challenge is turning that engagement into cold hard cash.
We (and our regular contributor Charlotte Henry) talk about the value of sports content to a wider portfolio fairly regularly, but it’s interesting to see how an entertainment giant thinks about it. Effectively, in addition to the stickiness that comes with regular sports content, Disney is looking to build adjacent services that will include fantasy sports, betting, e-commerce and more, company Chief Executive Bob Iger said during Disney’s shareholder meeting.
I love a journalism.co.uk podcast, and this one is especially fun. There’s a lot of insight in here about what it is to be a media leader and, as the copy makes clear, it’s mostly relevant no matter the size of your newsroom. Also Patel has an incredibly calming voice, so you’ll get your BPM down while you absorb the insights.
More from Media Voices
