Weekend Reads: What New York Times super power convinced Athletic co-founders to sell PLUS What digital media leaders should learn from Forbes' failure

February 11, 2022

I've found that people are using the Friday newsletter to catch up with reading from the week so I've collected a few longer, more insightful pieces plus a little light news for this Friday edition. If you like it, then this might be a new format.

First up is a CNBC interview with the co-founders of The Athletic explaining why they sold to the New York Times. What was fascinating to me was how they saw this as an opportunity to get the digital subscription expertise of the NYTimes to scale up their business even more. When the New York Times is positioned this way, then it begins to make the Times more attractive for other digital properties with a subscription model that are already scaling but could reach their full potential with the NYT killer subscription shop. Yes, it is attractive to The Athletic to be in a stable of very powerful brands, but it is also very compelling for them to have the subscriber expertise that The Times has built. When you look at the sale from this perspective, it suddenly reorients the media business landscape and explains why the NYTimes and the Washington Post are building such powerful digital media companies. They are bundling digital expertise, not just digital brands, in a way that other media companies simply aren't. And it highlights why product expertise is in such demand.

The next long and very fun read is Josh Benton's incomplete history of Forbes.com's descent as a media brand. The thing that jumps out at me is a cautionary tale of the pursuit of scale at any cost. As companies have looked to remake themselves to face off against the platform, they have often mistakenly tried to replicate the platform model.

Actually, thinking about this further, you can go back even further to when everyone wanted to ape Yahoo's portal model. I remember distinctly in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the portal play was every media execs go-to strategy. What they didn't realise was that portals were only an intermediary step in organising the expansive amounts of information on the internet. It was an analogue analogy based on the concept of a navigable index to organise information. The explosive growth of the internet quickly rendered portals inefficient and rather irrelevant, and in almost the blink of an eye, Google's search-based model sated everyone's information seeking behaviour much more efficiently than portals. And Google's search-based ad model, which while not original, iterated rapidly to become the dominant and durable (thus far) model for the internet.

I digress. Simply replicating the strategy of successful platforms without going through a proper positioning exercise (Porter's Five Forces) means you're lagging consumer behaviour not delivering user value. All of these scale plays ignore the cost of media scaling versus the cost of platform scaling. Google can add capacity so much more cheaply than any traditional media creation model because it's not paying to create the media but simply enabling users to find the media, information and diversion that they want. And when search became the de facto window on mobile, it was game, set, match. Forbes.com's blogger aggregation play recognised how expensive it was to create content so used a HuffPo model that was open to abuse and has effectively destroyed any brand value that Forbes had, which doesn't make me happy because I have some friends who have diligently done good journalism on the platform.

Phew, I guess I'm the long read for your weekend, but now that I'm not reading hundreds of pages for my master's degree and writing thousands of words each week, I've got time to think and write a bit more.

In addition to the longer readers, there are some other things to note. Journalism.co.uk has a piece on the rise (again) of digital and internet culture reporting. Media commentator Dan Kennedy has five things that CNN can do to reinvent itself after the Zucker/Cuomo debacles. There is a great piece from Mind the Product on how to get the most out of your product roadmap. And Rana Ayyub has a harrowing piece about the online abuse that she has suffered. And last but not least, Nieman Lab reminds you how best to pitch them.

In an exclusive CNBC interview, The Athletic co-founders explain why they sold to The New York Times.

That "rapper" accused of billions in crypto fraud was also a Forbes contributor. Is it finally time to move past the contributor network?

The original cable news outlet employs boatloads of first-rate journalists. Why not let them shine?

It is not all about cat memes - from news about influencers to brands' internet presence, the online world is full of real stories that matter to your audience

In this blog post, Paul van den Broek, Product Manager at Coosto, explains why product roadmaps are an essential tool for Product Managers and how you can get the most value out of it.

A weeks-long campaign of harassment and theats, egged on by sitting politicians, has failed to stop me from writing this piece, and the next one, and the one after that.

This is a sad chronicling of the type of abuse that journalists, especially women, face as they do their jobs. One of the reasons that I started to move from editorial to product was that the online environment had started to become toxic more than a decade ago. I applaud groups like Reach (which I did quite a bit of work for from 2016 to 2018) that have hired editors to help their staffs navigate this mental and emotional abuse.

Nieman Lab is open to pitches! Please send them to [email protected] with PITCH in the subject line.

What makes a good Nieman Lab pitch?

A pitch should relate in some way to Nieman Lab's original one-line description: "An attempt to help journalism figure out its future in an internet …