Happy Monday! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Peter.
Our agenda reveal for the Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summit on June 12th is nearly ready, but if you want to get in early, we have a bargain pre-agenda rate on tickets.
This week we hear from Chris Minasians, Director and Editor at TotallyEV, an independent site dedicated to articles, reviews and interviews about electric vehicles. TotallyEV has recently hit 5 million views on YouTube, so he discusses building an audience through video reviews, and what it takes to run your own reviews site – including getting access to vehicles – as a solo publisher.
Minasians also explores the differences he’s noticed between his electric vehicle coverage on TotallyEV, and his more consumer-focused tech reviews on his other YouTube channel TotallydubbedHD, from audience engagement to relative revenues.
In the news round-up, Chris (Sutcliffe!) and Esther run through a busy week in audio and podcast news. We ask where people listen to podcasts – not Google Podcasts any more – and whether podcasters are seeing any benefit from Apple’s promotion of paid shows. There’s also the first agenda sneak preview for the Publisher Podcast Summit…
Esther has been writing about moves by Filipino news site Rappler to shift social engagement around its news coverage from online spaces controlled by Big Tech to its own community platform. The plan is to create a ‘true digital town square’, moderated by Rappler’s own journalists, to connect people around topics like local politics, tech, food and climate change. Their plan to cut Big Tech out of the mix is is ambitious, but potentially game-changing.
I am absolutely 100% behind proper magazine comebacks, seriously checkout what’s going on at Saveur, but the hype around the Life reboot is crushing my soul. The billionaire ‘brains’ behind this reboot – entrepremodel Karlie Koss and Ivanka Trump’s brother-in-law – also rescued i-D magazine from the Vice clown show late last year. Except, they’ve already paused print and digital publishing with staff layoffs reported. Celebrity capitalism is the worst.
This, dear reader, is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with an AI generated whimper. Just imagine the time wasted trying to figure out how best to respond to an AI generated legal letter from AI generated lawyers asking for back links to keep a non-existent complainant sweet. As T.S. Eliot often implied, but was too polite to say out loud, we are all properly fucked.
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