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Our regular guest columnist Charlotte Henry has penned this pithy look at why publishers should be wary of their journalists — underpaid and frequently unappreciated — taking their audiences and going elsewhere. After all, when the audience recognises the name of the individual journalist just as much as that of the parent publication, that journalist has become a brand in their own right:
“Institutions and brands undoubtedly still carry cache and prestige with them, but so now do individuals. An example of all this coming together successfully is the way the BBC has provided Ros Atkins with the opportunity to continue making his popular explainer videos. However, it is a rare example and I suspect the ones of frustrated journalists feeling stifled and quitting various institutions are far more numerous.”
However, as she points out, those selfsame journalists do not then have absolute control over how that audience discovers and interacts with them. In this platform-centric world, even the most benign newsletter service or social network remains the intermediary — so those journalists end up facing many of the same problems around audience development that their previous employers do.
I missed this before the weekend, but it’s worth including here because some of the stats are really heartening: “Americans ages 16 to 40 are more than twice as likely to pay for or donate to email newsletters, video, or audio content from independent creators (47%) than to traditional sources like print or digital newspapers (22%)”. That could explain why propensity to pay for news seems so low whenever it’s examined — because people are choosing to support news outside of the traditional ecosystem.
This is extremely relevant to our discussion about who is creating value in newsrooms — and who is leeching it away from them — in this week’s podcast. Report for America “found that the pursuit of profit at [some hedge fund-owned publications] has produced difficult working conditions for our journalists whose careers we’re helping to launch”.
Over the past few years Reddit has been doing its damndest to ensure it’s a brand-safe environment for advertisers. That’s all been leading to this — though $6.5bn is an extremely large number for a site that is so idiosyncratic that it can’t really be thought of as a social platform at all. Let’s see who bites.
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