User needs and how to weave your podcast, your journalism, your magazine deeper into people's lives PLUS how to successfully identify data talent who have unconventional backgrounds

December 20, 2022

We're winding down the year and the newsletter on Revue, and everyone is looking back and looking forward. On the note of the coming shutdown of Revue, I've had people suggest Ghost and Beehiiv. I'll be looking into the next home for the newsletter over the holidays and making a decision. If you have a suggestion, I'm @kevglobal on Twitter - well at least for a little while longer.

And now the newsletter. Ariel Zirulnick takes up the user needs model, which has been most notably promoted by former BBC media leader and now consultant Dmirtry Shiskin. The crux of her piece is that we in media need to look beyond our core users and use cases to really become a part of people's lives.

The Local Media Association has a review of newsletter projects by four Canadian outlets as part of Meta's Accelerator programme. It's a good overview of different approaches to using newsletters for audience development and subscriber growth.

PLUS With data talent in such high demand, INMA looks at how to identify strong candidates from unconventional backgrounds. A survey for why people have left US public media after a spike in departures including some high-profile talent in the past year. Experimentation is in the air when it comes to news and information websites. After settling into a relatively stable pattern for the last decade, site design is getting a shake-up.

"If we continue to study just the tiny portion of a person’s day that they spend consuming journalism, we will miss innumerable opportunities to weave ourselves into people’s lives."

An interesting piece by Ariel Zirulnick: "The user needs framework currently copy and pasted from newsroom to newsroom focuses just on people’s news consumption habits. If we continue to study just the tiny portion of a person’s day that they spend consuming journalism, we will miss innumerable opportunities to weave ourselves into people’s lives."

In nine months, publishers collectively added more than 23,000 newsletter signups — which led to 4,700 new members, subscribers or donors and generated more than $1 million.

Whether it's campaigns to increase the number of subscribers or onboarding campaigns to help retain those newly acquired subscribers, this is a good overview of four types of newsletters and how publishers in Canada used them to grow reader revenue.

Does the hiring culture at your news media organisation — and within your data team — make it more difficult to bring in and keep promising talent?

Some tips on how to identify and recruit talent from unconventional backgrounds.

Can the 80-20 Rule be used to spotlight the types of content that deliver the best audience engagement? Identifying the content that drives the biggest share of audience engagement is crucial for publishers; knowing what works best can help fix overall content strategy and guide targeting for specific audiences. The Data Science team at analytics …

A good practical piece. In my previous role, I found that a modified Pareto distribution helped to filter out noise in the data. We also used the Audience Explorer Dashboard to segment our audience based on loyalty and identify content that was likely to convert audiences who had demonstrated some affinity towards membership.

Here's what we learned from our survey about why people leave public media, based on more than 300 responses.

As someone who left US public media in April, this leapt out at me. The top two

Employees and observers of the Post are left wondering what Bezos is doing with the publication.

The drum beat of stories about the Washington Post being a bit adrift are increasing.

The Verge has a new website design that rethinks the experience of news readers. What does this move say about the state of news media? The Verge’s radical website redesign was announced three months ago, and one of America’s biggest tech news publishers is still the talk of the town. While most news websites tend to highlight …

A response to social media and focus on the homepage. The latter does not surprise me. I've seen the analytics of a lot of digital properties, and the amount of time spent on the homepage is tremendous, and the challenge is really to get people to engage more with the entire site.

Whither the Metaverse

Two pieces that demonstrate the challenges but also continued commitment that Meta has to the Metaverse.

John Carmack, who was chief technology officer of Oculus, which Meta bought, is departing the company.

Social Media Today