Texas Monthly Mines Archives for a $1 m Selling Stories to Hollywood PLUS Study Investigates Use of Automated Storytelling During Pandemic

August 09, 2021

It's August so a little quiet, but there are still some interesting things happening in terms of media revenue and products. One bit of cloud in the silver lining of the media business bounce back after the pandemic is that apart from very large sites, Parse.ly has found that traffic levels have declined. Moreover, as the pandemic has waned, traffic at smaller sites is back to where it was two years ago.

US mega-chain Gannett sees digital subscription strategy start to pay dividends but print continues to decline.

A good overview of Tik Tok and where it might fit in your strategy from my friends over at What's New in Publishing.

Texas Monthly President Scott Brown said while licensing has become an additional revenue stream, the main aim is to bolster the magazine's marketing.

Mining their archives for fun and profit.

Going into 2020, publishers wondered whether their site traffic, after being lifted all year by a nearly relentless news cycle, might come down to earth.

Except for high-traffic sites, traffic is broadly down. “While publishers’ traffic across the board has declined from their 2020 peaks — through the first half of 2021, traffic across a 1,400-site sample in Parsely’s network is down 10% compared to the same period last year — the drops for many small publishers have been so steep that they are now behind where they were in 2019 in terms of pageviews.”

Executive summary For all the news organizations that have adopted automated journalism over the last decade or so, the COVID-19 pandemic could have been the perfect story to automate as the technology draws on structured data that can fit into predictable story frames. This report documents the experiences of nine media organizations that have done […]

Summary of research of nine news organisations that used some form of automation to cover the COVID-19 pandemic. It's a good look at the technologies being used and development methods used at large public broadcasters such as the BBC and YLE, wire services and major newspapers such as Le Monde and the Washington Post.

The nation’s largest newspaper company added 145,000 digital subscribers in Q2, bringing the total systemwide number to 1.4 million.

Print circulation and the revenue it generates are falling fast — about 12% year-to-year. New revenue from digital is not yet making up the difference.

If you want to reach out to a new audience between 19 and 49, this is where they spend 52 minutes a day, every day.  Here are a few stats about TikTok to ponder and to help you see if you can in some way incorporate what is happening into your business model. Will it …

By Bo Sacks, "I say again, it may not be for everyone. But depending on your brand, your content, and your creativity, this is where the action is today."