Mather: Digital subscriptions set to take over print for local US news publishers by 2023 PLUS A 'bunch of (digital) tools' to help journalists' research

September 30, 2022

I've got two pieces about Mather's outlook for digital and print subscriptions and also the pricing of those subscriptions. Publishers will be happy to shift more of their audiences from print, which is becoming increasingly expensive to digital, but as they exit print, it will become more expensive.

My friends Esther, Chris and Peter at the Media Roundup have a frank assessment of podcast listenership: On average, most podcasts only have 29 listeners for their first episode.

Also, Refind sent me an incredible email newsletter edition from Francisco Javier Arceo dissecting why his start-up failed and more precisely why he failed in leading it. You don't get this kind of honest post-mortem very often. It's really worth a read.

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.

Digital subscriptions are set to overtake print subscriptions for local newspapers, and that is definitely a good thing, not only because its a durable source of revenue but also because of the increasing cost of print.

We need to talk about podcast listener numbers Yesterday, Bloomberg revealed that podcast companies are buying short podcast plays within mobile game apps, causing ‘official’ downloads of shows to be registered. These 6 million BS listens and the constant pressure for podcasts to get squillions of listeners has properly got me narked, so I’ve gone on a …

This is a sobering but honest piece. For most podcasters, their first episode only has 29 listeners. In my past job, we really had to lean into audience development for podcasts, and it actually got worse over the years.

Some data indicates news publishers know they need to ease the pricing accelerator and elongate their print runway to fund their digital transformation.

One of the areas that I'm fascinated about is pricing. Newspapers have definitely increased in price, as the folks from Mather Economics show. I think pricing is one thing, but as Ken Doctor used to say, the other issue is the product. Print newspapers keep shrinking due to the costs of raw materials and distribution as the price continues to go up. Ken used to compare this to raising the price of a 2-litre bottle of Coke while also only giving the customer a 1-litre bottle. It's shrink-flation at its worst.

Fallout from the Fast Company hack Fast Company’s Apple News account was seemingly hacked. That’s bad enough. But in the immediate aftermath the official Apple News Twitter account was forced to put out a tweet decrying the ‘incredibly offensive’ content pushed out by the hacker, noting it had suspended Fast Company’s account. And then it turned out …

The Media Roundup crew looks at the recent security breach at Fast Company where a hacker was able to send an obscene and racist push notification and also get into their CMS. Crisis communications are needed but so are better security practices.

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.

The full roundup of panels from the Press Gazette's recent Future of Media Technology conference. The two panels that stood out for me were the panel about data and how companies are working hard to maximise their first party data and the podcast panel in which one of the panelists said that sponsorship paid 4-5 times more than programmatic ads but that a podcast needed 10,000 downloads before a sponsor would consider supporting a podcast.

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.

Another Press Gazette summary from their recent Future of Media Technology conference. It was a bit of mish-mosh of a panel combining data journalists with panelists focused on AI efforts to automate some aspects of content creation.

All I would say is that when I was an editor, I would have rather outsourced repetitive, tedious work to robots than treat human beings like robots.

The deal builds on Substack's efforts to provide its writers with tools to organically grow their audiences.

Substack is building up their service offering, and with this acquisition, they will be able to offer a tool to newsletter writers for marketing campaigns to grow their lists.

Image by Sean MacEntee. CC BY 2.0 license Tara Calishain used JavaScript to create a collection of tools that save time for journalists conducting research. In a special guest post for OJB, she explains how five of those work. It's been over 25 years since I wrote the Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research (and…

I love this. A researcher and friend of journalists has written some excellent javascript tools that will automate parts of your work. It's definitely worth bookmarking, and for those of you who want to get into coding, it's a nice entry point if you wanted to reverse engineer or adapt some of these tools.

How not to be a founder

For those working in product management, this is a good read because it outlines some of the pitfalls in developing a product including not doing user research. It was really interesting also for this founder to come from a technical background and focus on building a perfect product in isolation of users. It's a really good, honest read from a very smart founder.