The Trend of Statewide News Networks by Legacy Print Publishers in the US PLUS Why a Star Editorial Leader Has Quit Every Job She's Had

August 04, 2021

Plus a summary of a report showing how digital media adoption has overtaken tradition media as the pandemic has accelerated digital media consumption trends. The New York Times stock may be down over the last year, but its subscriber numbers continue to rise.

And how the journalistic bias towards novelty might be amplifying statistical outliers during the pandemic (and feeding the misinformation trolls to boot).

USAToday has relaunched its OTT video channel. It reaches 25 m viewers monthly, which isn't too shabby.

Digital adoption accelerated during the pandemic For the first time, digital media have overtaken traditional media types in adoption, with digital adoption accelerating during the pandemic, according to the latest report by MarketingCharts, US Media Audience Demographics, 7th Annual Edition. This 54-page study—compiled using proprietary data sourced from MRI-Simmons and Comscore—details the audience breakdown of …

Even better news for digital publishers, the highest annual growth (11.8%) was recorded for digital newspapers/periodicals, from 49.4% to 61.2% in just one year.

The intersection of work and life made staying difficult.

An interesting interview with Stacy-Marie Ishmael on her career moves.

“You might be really good at X thing for X amount of time, but if there’s no end in sight for that amount of time, it just becomes harder and harder to sustain the energy and the emotional forbearance required to just constantly be surrounded by fires of every shape and form, including some that affect you personally.”

The inability to separate the series of devastating events from her personal life led to exhaustion. The subsequent burnout led to her resignation from the Tribune after only a year.

The company expects to end the year with about 8.5 million. In its quarterly results, it reported holding nearly $1 billion in cash.

"CEO Meredith Kopit Levien put the potential market size of Times readers at 100 million, adding that there was an opportunity to continue to invest while 'daily habits are up for grabs.'"

CEO

It's a tough truth: most people won't read your article, journalists. You still have a responsibility to them.

How the news heuristic of covering novel things amplifies outliers during the pandemic.

Most news outlets cut back to service only metro areas during the Great Recession. That’s changing in South Carolina, Arkansas and, now, Connecticut.

This is a growing trend in the US where newspaper groups are assembling statewide clusters of papers and then creating a digital statewide news service. It makes a lot of sense, and when done properly, it can be a cost effective way to do provide relatively comprehensive coverage. And if the group is honest about what they are doing, the strategy might not provide coverage in every community but it provides a decent breadth of coverage over a wide area.

Since launching OTT channels in 2018, Gannett has expanded to more than a dozen free ad-Supported streaming TV (FAST) platforms, including Xumo, The Roku Channel, Amazon Prime Video, Tubi, and Samsung TV Plus, among others. The expansion has provided substantial growth in audience and engagement reaching more than 25 million monthly views, and 200% increase in average view duration across all platforms in the last year.

The federal government is consulting with stakeholders on the best way to ensure digital platforms such as Facebook and Google pay for journalism in C...

As big spenders such as Amazon and Spotify fill our ears with more commercial, celebrity-driven fare, can grassroots, diverse shows survive?