Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Peter.


It’s less than a week until the Publisher Podcast & Newsletter Summit — and here are the amazing speakers on the newsletter stream! If you’re a publisher with newsletters, this is the conference for you.

See the full agenda and get your tickets


Welcome to CascAIs

Peter Houston gives his view from the FIPP World Media Congress in Cascais, Portugal.

 

Good morning from sunny Portugal. Yes, it’s that time of year and I’m back at The FIPP World Media Congress. This is the third year in a row I’ve come to the beautiful seaside town of Cascais for this magazine media meetup and I reckon the local tourist board has missed a trick. They should have rebranded the municipal signage to read ‘Welcome to CascAIs’.

From the opening keynote – Qantm AI’s CEO Dr Set Dorbin’s ‘AI iQ for a human focussed future’ – the stage was set for an AI extravaganza. There are plenty of sessions on the more traditional aspects of magazine publishing, from the enduring appeal of luxury brands to readers, relationships and revenue, but AI is absolutely the star of the show.

AI to me is a tool to be used, something to make publishing better, more profitable, more sustainable and I was delighted to hear Dr Jon Roberts, CIO at Dotdash Meredith, talk as much about DDM’s underlying publishing strategy as he did about its deal with OpenAI. More presentations that take publishing rather as their starting point, please. Less fear mongering and magical thinking.


 

The pros and cons of publishers’ AI licensing deals

One after another, publishers are signing deals with AI tech company OpenAI to get paid for their content. But at what cost?

If you want to know more about the deal DDM did with OpenAI, and the bargains struck between other publishers and AI developers, this is a great pros and cons rundown by Digiday. This is a contentious area with some applauding the good of publishers finally negotiating payment for training LLMs and others calling it capitulation. Read the pros and cons and make your own mind up, quickly, before everything changes again.


 

Washington Post explores ‘flexible’ payments amid editor change

The title is adding a third newsroom and trying new payment models as it revamps its leadership.

It’s all change at The Washington Post, no great surprise given the paper’s shrinking audience and a $77 million loss. Besides the personnel changes, the paper is rumoured to be considering a first foray into pay-as-you-go content, allowing users to access single articles or content from specific writers. Maybe WaPo will finally be the publisher that makes micropayments work.


 

Facebook deleting local news posts and labelling them as spam

Small independent publishers are frustrated and confused about why some of their Facebook posts are being flagged as spam and removed.

Oh Facebook, get your shit together. Press Gazette is reporting that independent publishers in the UK are ‘frustrated and confused’ about why some of their Facebook posts are being flagged as spam and removed. Some of the posts have been restored after a review, but others have not and the publishers are frustrated at how difficult they say it has been to contact someone at Facebook owner Meta about the issue. It’s easy to say, get off the platform, but for some smaller publishers Facebook traffic is crucial.


More from Media Voices

 

Media Briefs: How live blogging adds an audience-first dimension to election coverage

Rolling election coverage gives publishers the opportunity to keep audiences updated, but also include their opinions in reporting.

 

Podcasts and newsletters: 5 similarities and 1 huge difference

Podcasts and newsletters offer publishers clear, ongoing, opportunities in audience expansion and engagement, content distribution and monetisation.

 

Preview: The Publisher Podcast & Newsletter Summit 2024

While the podcast is on a break we’ve been hard at work assembling the industry’s best and brightest publishers to share the strategies and learnings behind their successful podcasts and newsletters.

✉️ Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up to The Media Roundup here for the four most important stories in your inbox, every weekday.

???? Want to reach our audience of publishing and media professionals? Here’s our sponsorship options for the podcast and newsletter. Or just reply to this email and we can build you a custom bundle.

???? Do you have a podcast and/or newsletter and want to take them to the next level? We’d love to see you at our Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summit.

???? Take your relationship with us to the next level: we’d love you to join our community of fellow media professionals.

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *