#21 — The future of news is digital
Hey there - rounding up this week with the freshest news in publishing! If you’re enjoying this newsletter or have any feedback, we’d love to hear from you, hit reply and get in touch 🗞️
💯 Top picks
Future of news to be more digital, personalised, automated, paid for
Bloomberg’s Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait discusses the future: sustainable business models, personalisation and automation.
💸 Business models
This publisher tested a third party personalisation vendor with disappointing results
Norwegian publishing group Aller Media tested out a personalised third party vendor and found the results disappointing. Now running in-house algorithms, they’re seeing an influx of new subscribers!
Thread: Restoring trust should be the number one priority in journalism and membership can help
A few weeks ago we shared an article about De Correspondent becoming more transparent about their membership revenue. The founder shared some more interesting thoughts about the future of subscriptions in this thread - we love a good Twitter thread!
How a subscription video service doubles its subscribers by owning a genre
Shudder, a subscription video service for horror movies fans, has seen compounding subscription growth by taking ownership of their niche and combining horror classics with original content.
✍️ Modern journalism
Scholars are helping journalists find more (better) data to support local newsrooms
A team at Stanford University are launching a data-driven initiative to help journalists find stories at a lower cost, and fight against misinformation.
ICYMI: The truth about the great 2016/17 pivot to video
Here’s what happened when Facebook inflated their video-view statistics, causing an entire industry to pivot away from writers towards expensive video producers… here’s an article on the same subject.
Axios Media Trends: Facebook and Twitter are declining
Lots of interesting insights in this article about the latest trends in the digital media ecosystem. Point #2: “Users are increasingly using search for news as well as migrating to publisher and news aggregation apps.”
👩💻 Technology
How BuzzFeed is using automation to ensure every piece of content reaches the right audience
With 200m+ monthly unique visitors, BuzzFeed are using AI and automation to make publishing decisions and push the right content out to the right people. Read more about how they’re doing it!
🤷 WTF?
Meanwhile, digital direct-to-consumer brands are still trying to share raw customer data...
Procter & Gamble wants retailers to share *their* customer data so they can build a makeshift graph to target audiences against. Their goal is to build stronger relationships with advertisers to compete with pressure from Amazon.
