No 30: How Product Thinking Can Lead to Better Climate Coverage PLUS Quartz's 'Weekly Magazine' Newsletter Strategy

August 11, 2021

I wanted to flag up a piece by media consultant Thomas Baekdal calling on a different model of journalism to cover the climate crisis. I couldn't agree more, and while this might seem a stretch, I'm going to make the case for why product thinking can lead to better climate coverage but only if media organisations are open to questioning the underlying logic of what news is.

The primary logic for news journalism is based on things that are new, novel and short-lived. Journalism, structurally, has a blind spot for things that happen on geological or meteorological timelines. We've been pumping gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere now for the better part of two centuries, and journalism just isn't set up for these slow-burn stories that unfold over decades but have tremendous impacts on people's lives, their homes and the planet we call home. It's a radically different story type that doesn't fit well into current models for journalism.

After I took a buyout (voluntary redundancy) from The Guardian, I explored an idea that we gave the working title of No 30. For my international readers, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, American journalists used to end a story - internally - with —30 —. (I have heard a lot of different explanations, and this one based on telegraph codes makes as much sense as any.) However, if you wanted to communicate that there was more to come, you would end with No 30. I wanted to communicate that some stories don't end, they are No 30 stories.

From a product standpoint, this was my design question: Could you create a platform to explore stories that not only crossed a newscycle but actually were wicked problems that operated on my much longer time cycles? I think the 'Deeply' network took a stab at this, but we actually approached the problem from an attention economy point of view. Telling the story was part of the problem, keeping people's attention over the long, slow burn of the exploration was another problem. I'm still really intrigued by the ideas that we generated, but in the end, I had to shelve the idea because needs must. And we couldn't generate enough interest from the usual suspects of funders - foundations and the academy - much less an audience. I still think it's a fascinating problem, and now as I am a product manager, there are a lot of ways I would approach exploring it that I wouldn't have thought of a decade ago.

Much more in today's newsletter. Thanks for reaching and let me know how you would solve the problem of big stories that don't hang easily off of a news peg.

Quartz will make four email newsletters the core of its subscription program, after determining that most of its paying members were accessing its content through email.

They see the newsletters as weekly magazines. "And like a magazine, the newsletters don’t have “endless space,” so the newsletter team aims to keep the emails concise, insightful and useful for readers, Bell said."

Since the start of the year, total revenue for the sneaker vertical has doubled over 2020 thanks to seven signed brand deals in 2021.

The sports site uses a sketch comedy to attract new advertisers. That is creative and then some.

As publishers define their Instagram posting strategies, they often ask: when is the best time to post on Instagram? New research has the answer

What can news publishers do to sweeten the pot for potential subscribers, or cash in on readers who are never going to return or pay for content?

A great piece from the end of June on subscription models from my friends at journalism.co.uk. One interesting point was how The Atlantic felt trapped in an advertising model due to the audience growth of their website. Victim of its own success?

Climate change is not a news story. It's a community project.

The full report requires a subscription to Thomas' excellent newsletter, but this is a good thoughtful piece.

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.

A good rundown of how the UK media industry is winding down state support as the pandemic impact starts to wane.