Publishers Learn Lessons Pitching Funders PLUS Quartz Experiments with Entry Points for News Topics

May 06, 2021

This is a combo newsletter from yesterday and today. Some real gems today. The Local News Media Association shares 16 lessons that publishers learned while pitching funders. And I'm really interested in what Quartz is experimenting with a way to 'extract information from news'. Interesting semantic experiment. Also, the New York Times hits 7.8m subscribers but growth slows. What products will they experiment with for their next phase of reader revenue growth?

The big news yesterday, of course, was Twitter's acquisition of Scroll. You can start to see the outline of a subscription-based content product with Twitter as a discovery engine. That's especially true as you consider that Scroll owns Nuzzel, which I used to create my newsletter up until a couple of weeks ago. There was a collective cry of despair (hopefully temporary) from journalism geeks and product folks because Nuzzel was such a great filter for Twitter's firehose.

Lessons in Pitching Funders for Publishers

By Frank Mungeam • LMA Chief Innovation Officer Want to know if you have a...

NYTimes Subscriber Growth Slows

The publisher added 301,000 digital subscribers for the first quarter, the slowest gain in over a year. Profits jumped, beating Wall Street expectations.

YouTube Launches Digitally Focused Journalism Programs

It's the 1st time YouTube is funding journalism independently of Google's $300 million Google News Initiative.

The project has two elements, a programme for indie journalism creators and also for a 'sustainability lab for digital-first newsrooms'. It's interesting to see this focus more on solopreneurs and also digital-first operations that site outside of large groups. It seems to recognise the shifts in media as more journalists go solo and new digital startups are being launched in areas left behind by big chains (at least in the US).

Twitter Buys Scroll and Nuzzell Goes for Now

Never bury the lede... Twitter is acquiring Scroll. The service will be going into private beta as we integrate into a broader Twitter subscription later in the year. We’re very excited! Since launch last year, Scroll has proven that there’s a model that gives consumers a better experience and journalists a better future. Today when…

Twitter, known for instant and short-form expression, is investing more in the media business and long-form journalism. The company announced Tuesday it's acquiring Scroll, a startup that offers ad-free viewing of news sites for a monthly fee.

Twitter announced today that they will be acquiring Scroll and this version of Nuzzel will be shutting down on May 6, 2021. However, Twitter has spun up an internal team of Nuzzel acolytes whose goal is to take the best of the Nuzzel experience and build it directly into Twitter. Nuzzel users who are interested…

Disinformation as Information Warfare

"You know something is being manipulated but you can’t see how."

Giving Audiences Entry Points for News

The idea is to help get you oriented before diving deeper into our articles—after all, the most important things to know about any topic are rarely just the most recent developments.

Building Regional Journalism Alliances

“African voices need to be heard in global policy-making,” says media scholar Herman Wasserman, author of a recent report on collaboration.