TLDR: Media Voices is repositioning as a weekly publication profiling the people and products that are powering publishing’s future.
2024 has been a hard year for us. Our output has been phenomenal: a weekly podcast, daily newsletter, a four-part documentary podcast series and episodes with some brilliant sponsors, weekly analysis on the website, a full day dual-track Podcast and Newsletter Summit, and two awards programmes.
Not bad for three people who have to spend the vast majority of their working week on other projects or with caring responsibilities, right?
Except it’s taken its toll with the three of us burning out at various points over the past 18 months. We’ve given it all we can, and have had to take a hard look at the output we can realistically produce with the time we have available. Work smarter, not harder, as they say.
We love a peek under the bonnet of other publications, especially indies. So here’s a bit more insight into the whys and wherefores of our decision, and what we are changing.
Our problem
Media is a vast sector. We’ve been naturally drawn to covering publishers as that’s where our expertise and interests lie, but we try to draw other areas into our daily newsletter and podcast guests.
As a result, we’ve found ourselves inadvertently in the ‘mushy middle’ of media coverage; too broad to be of specific value but too small to compete with bigger media publications that have a wider remit.
The irony is, we read, write and analyse businesses like ours day in, day out. But it can be really hard to look at your own business with the same objective, critical eye. You get attached to some elements and dismiss others, and it’s very hard to kill your darlings.
What we’ve realised
We love our daily newsletter The Media Roundup, and know for many of you that it’s become a staple of your morning routine. However, it takes a vast amount of time and energy to write, even between the three of us. Most evenings we’re sending tests past 9 or 10pm, making it difficult to switch off. With limited working hours – none of us are even part-time on Media Voices, much as we’d love to be – we don’t think keeping up daily curation is something that differentiates us enough for the time we give it. We love the contact with the subscribers; we’re just finding ways to do it that are more efficient and, hopefully, better in the long-term.
We also want to be more focused on what our audience needs. Speaking to guests at our recent Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summit brought us some crucial feedback: there’s a gap in the market for regular, deep coverage around newsletters, podcasts and other publisher products. We also have a vast pool of excellent case studies to draw on from past winners and entries. Why not connect the two?
Our hope is that by becoming an invaluable source of analysis on these topics, we’ll support our Publisher Podcast and Newsletter award entrants further alongside the Summits.
That doesn’t mean we’ll be exclusively focused on award winners, or even just podcasts and newsletters. Instead, we want to zero in on publisher products; print, apps and websites too, as well as tools like analytics, data and AI which are influencing these.
What we’re changing
From September, the Media Voices Podcast will be renamed to The Publisher Podcast, by Media Voices. It will still be published weekly, across three 12-episode seasons a year. Our guests will be senior publishing professionals, our interviews will dig into the publisher products they are working on, what they’re doing with them and why. Our mission will be to come away with at least one ‘idea worth stealing’; an actionable insight for our listeners.
We’ll write up the key takeaways from every interview and publish them in The Publisher Newsletter – a weekly newsletter that will replace our daily Media Roundup – and on our website. We’ll be putting a registration wall up on voices.media from September, but current newsletter subscribers will get the full piece delivered to their inbox.
All current subscribers to The Media Roundup won’t need to do anything, we’ll just adjust the schedule and send weekly rather than daily. There’ll still be recommendations and media news alongside the main article, but the purpose is changing from informing you about daily media news, to really going deep into publisher products.
We’ll also be launching monthly virtual events – The Publisher Masterclass – which will provide a regular touchpoint for fellow professionals to come together around a product-related challenge. These will be ticketed, and we’ll be releasing a full schedule for September-December in the coming weeks.
On our wishlist are in-person events and lunches, so if you’d be interested in sponsoring one of those and helping bring that to life, please do get in touch (see below).
So here’s what the Media Voices Universe – The Publisher Portfolio – will look like from September:
- The Publisher Podcast
- The Publisher Newsletter
- The Publisher Masterclass (coming soon)
- The Publisher Awards
- The Publisher Summits
How you can help
We really appreciate every single comment, share and call people have made to us offering support and advice. In the run-up to September, here’s how you can help:
Sponsor us: First and foremost, we’re looking for a sponsor for our Autumn season of newsletters and podcasts. We’ve put a package together offering a great deal for a launch partner, but to be quite frank, we’re desperately short of time when it comes to outreach.
If you are, or you know of any companies wanting to get in front of publishers and looking for a Q4 boost, please drop us a line – Peter Houston (peter@voices.media) would be happy to talk you through what we’re offering.
Buy us a virtual coffee: A formal reader revenue model is on our roadmap for 2025, but first off we need to iron out the new plan and establish what our value proposition is for paying members. In the meantime, we have a Ko-Fi page where you can sign up to make a one-time or monthly contribution to support our work.
Subscribe: If you’re not already a subscriber to the newsletter or podcast, we’d love you to join us to hear your feedback on our repositioning. The newsletter is carrying on daily until the end of July, then we’ll be on a short summer break before coming back with the weekly Publisher Newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here and get the new version automatically in September. You can follow the podcast here on your podcatcher of choice, with the next season starting alongside the new newsletter.
Tell others about us: This is the easiest (and cheapest!) way you can help us. We’re confident this repositioning will help us to do a better job of helping you. But as you know, finding new audiences is really, really difficult at the moment. Every share, like, comment or post about us and our work helps relevant people discover us, and I promise every single one is noticed and appreciated.
Thank you so much again. We’ll continue being transparent about the ups and downs of running a small media business, and our inboxes (esther/peter/chris [at] voices [dot] media) are always open. Please do drop us emails if you have any feedback – or ideas – about any of the above.
Love from Peter, Esther and Chris at Media Voices
All the best for the future—and take some bloody time off, for heaven’s sake! You deserve it! 😉