Developing a Mobile Mindset PLUS a Substack Star (and Investor) Talks Newsletters

July 16, 2021

A quick little Friday rundown . Bill Bishop, who writes the newsletter Sinocism, was an early Substack writer, and as a co-founder of MarketWatch, he's also a Substack investor. The Press Gazette has a great state of Substack/newsletters interview.

Two mobile journalists in Bangladesh have just released a mojo guide in Bangla, and journalism.co.uk have a great interview with them.

PLUS a great deep dive from the New York Times engineering team on how they manage traffic spikes. They use election traffic levels as a benchmark and stress test for the site. Four TikTok strategies for publishers. And why publishers need a dedicated sales team when scaling up the business.

Press Gazette has been reporting on British journalism without fear or favour since 1965. Our mission is to provide a news and information service which helps the UK journalism.

“For a long time journalists, with very few exceptions, were not really considered talent,” Bill Bishop says.

“And now things like Substack, Revue/Twitter, whatever the Facebook thing is, are making it much more complicated for managers at these media companies to figure out how they deal with talent.”

The co-authors of a new MoJo manual share their top tips and takeaways for creating news content using smartphones, live video, social audio and vertical Stories

The main message: all the gadgets and features in the world will only get you so far; you first need to embrace a digital-first mindset.

Rather than hastily address issues in the months leading up to big events where we expected lots of reader traffic, we decided to take stock of our systems as a whole and enact longer term resilience measures.

A good run down of how the engineering team at the New York Times has prepared its site to manage to handle traffic across the spikes and lulls of the news cycle.

Scaling a business – many companies think about it, but not all are cut out for it. If a publisher wants to scale, there needs to be a solid strategy to grow. What is the end goal of scaling? How should the company look in six months, a year, two years after scaling? What new …

In all of the start-ups that I've worked with, there is one determinant of success - whether they have a dedicated sales team from day one. Too often editorially led startups focus solely on the content and ignore the business. They don't last long. If you don't have revenue, you don't have a product.

Recent months have been marked by media companies launching their TikTok accounts and trying to get a piece of TikTok’s insanely fast-growing pie. In September this year, the BBC joined the ranks of Le Monde, NBC, The Washington Post, the Daily Mail and many others in trying to use the platform to engage with audiences in unconventional ways. But how should media …

There are more than 2 million podcasts in the marketplace. And now, thanks to Anchor, that number could grow.

And a gentle reminder that of those 2 m podcasts, a quarter only have a few episodes and six per cent have only one.

YouTube has launched its short-form video format, Shorts, today. The beta version is available in over 100 countries.