- Digital Media Products, Strategy and Innovation by Kevin Anderson
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- Digital Media Products, Strategy and Innovation - Issue #178
Digital Media Products, Strategy and Innovation - Issue #178
I'm changing up the format of the newsletter a bit after seeing how my friends at Media Voices use Revue. Now, instead of a long intro, I'll be summarising the articles under the links. Let me know how you like it. The content will remain the same, but how I lay it out will change.
Tom Standage, deputy editor and head of digital strategy at The Economist, shares his thoughts on why great journalism needs a great product and engineering team and why journalists must understand their media company’s business model.
I like two lessons that Tom Standage highlights in this interview with Peter Bale of INMA:
1) Media companies need great product and engineering teams.
2) Journalists need to understand the business model.
And one of the things that my friends at Media Voices highlighted is how The Economist has trimmed its product portfolio so that audiences need fewer products to get the full value from their subscription.
As the company moves forward with sweeping changes to the Facebook experience, news has become less of a priority.
This move by Meta has been telegraphed for a while, but now, they have made it official and announced that they will be ending payments in programmes that began in 2019, which were worth $105m, according to Axios. Facebook said that most people don't use its platform for news so this is a realignment that reflects user preferences. But is this about users or about Facebook and its algorithms? I know from analytics at my previous role and across a wider swatch of sites that traffic from Facebook to those news sites dropped dramatically - by roughly 40% - after the 2018 elections.
IAB Finds Second-Half Ad Spending Better Than Planned, Full-Year Significantly Worse - 07/28/2022
This is definitely a glass half full and half empty. Advertising has always followed the business cycle, but what will be interesting to watch is how reader revenue holds up. I flagged up an article that spoke about the softening of subscriber video businesses recently. How much will this subscriber flight spill over to publishers? I would expect some impact depending on how high inflation remains and how deep any recession is, and I'll be watching for how publishers adjust their reader revenue strategies in a recession.
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.
I would love to have this broken out by the kind of theft that they describe. How many of these are really naive bloggers versus folks setting up fake websites that masquerade as news sites? In the US, the rise of so-called 'pink slime' sites that make themselves look like local news sites has risen dramatically. In 2020, in the lead-up to the election, the number of partisan, pink-slime sites in the US tripled, according to CJR.
Research: Digital product acquisition, consumer spending on subscriptions are likely to remain steady — www.inma.org
Benchmark research from North American news media companies indicates acquisition of digital products is likely to remain at current levels without a significant news event occurring to increase traffic.
David Clinch of Mather, an econometrics firm that has long worked with the newspaper industry on pricing. highlighted some research from the firm in his newsletter. He described the research findings as "a trend toward longer-term, lower-priced promotional offers for digital-only products". With the data that is available through systems like Mather and Piano, publishers have the opportunity to fine-tune their subscription tactics. And they will have to with inflation and spectre of recessions on the horizon.
Two new bots can help newsrooms prioritize accessibility and alt text | Nieman Journalism Lab — www.niemanlab.org
"If accessibility is only pitched as something that’s related to code or only related to computers, it’s going to be real easy for people in newsrooms to distance themselves from that."
From my days managing newsrooms and digital processes, one of the issues that always seemed to suffer from uneven execution waS accessibility and alt text on images. It was a task that always seemed to fall in between the cracks. It says a lot about how digital processes have yet to be fully implemented in newsrooms, but now technology is being rolled out to help make keep track of the process and make it more consistent. Bravo.
Future of Media Explained podcast 11: How to make the most of live events bounceback, with Wired’s Greg Williams — pressgazette.co.uk
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.
Events had become a major money spinner for media groups to such an extent that some publishers had almost become event-first businesses, especially in the B2B space. That all changed with the pandemic as in-person events had to shift to virtual events. Many people have longed to return to in-person events to network and also to signal a return to normalcy. One thing jumped out at me in the summary of this podcast: simple panel discussions don't cut it anymore, according to Wired's Greg Williams.
Spotify forks out $295M for Findaway, Podsights, Chartable and Sonantic, filing reveals – TechCrunch — techcrunch.com
Spotify has quietly announced how much it’s paying for four of its recent acquisitions, revealing that it’s doling out a combined €291 million ($295 million) for Findaway, Podsights, Chartable and Sonantic. In an updated SEC document filed after its official earnings report yesterday, the audio-streaming giant confirmed that it will pay €117 million in cash […]
Spotify has been on an M&A tear recently, with a focus on podcasting, audiobooks and analytics. This story updates those acquisitions by putting a dollar figure on the cost to the company.
We usually post about design inspiration and we tend to focus on the visual side of things. We also understand that design is form plus function in harmony. So for this post we'd love to share a UX design case study highlighting the design thinking framework of empathize, define, ideate, prototype/test, learn and iterate. This project was shared by Alex Gilev and it is quite helpful for those thinking about venturing to the UX design field.
Here is one for product managers and product-minded people out there. One of the major lessons that I learned as a product director and also in my master's degree in innovation management and leadership is the importance of finding market fit and methods for finding it. Design thinking is a popular method, and this post shares some concrete tips on using it.