Thursday 4th July: An insight into Threads HQ

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I’ve personally avoided Threads (who wants yet another social media account to manage) but over 175 million users have stuck around since launch, firmly establishing its place as a viable social media network.

Here, Casey Newton interviews Threads chief Adam Mosseri about how its first year has gone. It’s an interesting read not least because Mosseri does an excellent job of wriggling out of some tough ‘news’ questions, but I was struck by his answer to another question about audience growth, which I think we could take on board ourselves as publishers:

“Reach is a perennial problem…My hope is that Threads isn’t just about reach, it’s reach for a reason. What are you trying to do? Hopefully, it’ll help you do that because either the people you can reach on Threads are disproportionately valuable, or the feedback you get from the community on Threads is disproportionately valuable, or just the consumption of content that you find on Threads is valuable to you.”

I don’t think you can ever know too much about your audience – or potential new readers. This piece summarises insights from a research project by Zinc Networks into media consumption preferences in Central Europe. Not only did they discover that more people would be willing to pay for news than currently do (by a fair margin), but they learned more about the types of people who are currently being underserved, and what audiences value.

Two veteran local newspaper journalists in California who left their title amid cost cuts in May are already making more money after launching their own newsletters on Substack. This is the nightmare scenario which plagued publishers back in lockdown, but which never materialised for many. The pair now speculate that their total subscriber lists are larger than their former paper’s circulation…

No easy answers to the issues highlighted recently by the Reuters Digital News Report: that the vast majority of top news influencers are men. Broadcasting professional Marverine Cole hit the nail on the head with one of her reasons: “Men dominate generally in journalism, and media presenting; they are platformed more readily and white men in particular, men’s viewpoints are held paramount above women’s and women having any opinion often get shouted down and belittled when it comes to news topics, and we generally get abused for having one, full stop.”

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