Good morning! Today’s edition is brought to you by Chris.
We loved gal-dem here at Media Voices. But, despite its closure, there’s so much to learn from it, and it shouldn’t be forgotten. When it launched its membership scheme, it did so with a clear-eyed idea of who it was pitching to. The news site, dedicated to coverage of issues that mattered to “people of colour from marginalised genders”, wanted to speak to audience members who would buy into its mission of providing free-to-access news around those issues.
At the time of the membership’s launch five years into the site’s existence, its head of editorial Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff said: “I fundamentally believe journalism should remain accessible to anyone who needs it and might benefit from it. This was never going to be about us excluding people, it was always going to be about sharing the love.”
As such, the initial announcement was extremely transparent about the reasons why gal-dem was seeking to monetise its audience directly. That’s an approach that has since been applied by a number of other outlets, including the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Defector Media. I spoke to them both for this piece.
Ignore that rather twee headline: the meat and potatoes of this article is in what Zucker says about The Telegraph. His investment firm RedBird IMI — which is seeking to buy the right-leaning paper after the Barclays’ debacle — is currently under review to see if it is a suitable owner. Zucker is bullish, however, and apparently has big plans to push Torygraph content out to the US and beyond.
We have an interview coming up on the podcast about how ecommerce and affiliate sites are based on being authentic — not the woolly term that gets thrown around by publishers, but genuinely authentic. So this updated article arguing that some of the largest publishers are half-arsing their product reviews and gaming SEO nicely tees up that discussion! Get it read.
How do you go about building audiences? It’s the age-old issue for media companies of all shapes and sizes — and it’s what we’re talking about in our community today.
Sports! They’re the most valuable of the treasures that linear broadcasts cling to — but it’s a losing battle for them. Arguably it was over the moment Amazon started bidding for broadcast rights. Well, now Apple has made a genuinely great move in its own bid to be the go-to provider of sports news and information, with an app that both provides free updates and happens to drive users to watch games on its Apple TV service.
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