#26 — Memberships & subscriptions are not the same thing
Publishing news was quieter than usual this week with everyone enjoying Thanksgiving and the beginning of the shopping season. That said, we’ve consumed some really good reads, and some of them are a little different than usual. Enjoy! 🛍
💯 Top picks
BuzzFeed & The New York Times are using Black Friday to drive revenue
Black Friday and Cyber Monday is not only a big deal for ecommerce businesses, but for publishers too. Take a look at how six publishers utilise this week of the year to sustain their consumer revenue business models.
💸 Business models
Are you selling memberships or subscriptions? Here’s some reasons why they’re not the same thing!
Emily Goligoski and Kate Myers discuss the ways in which subscription and membership models provide different value propositions for audiences and why they should be considered carefully for a sustainable future.
Do “Many-Model Thinkers” make better decisions and achieve more success?
As the new and existing business models in publishing are shifting, everyone from large news orgs to independent creators are thinking about how to adapt. HBR argues that the only way to stay relevant is to combine multiple business models for the future.
✍️ Modern journalism
Axios’s Associate Director of Communications explains: “how to go deep, but write short”
Axios aims to make readers smarter, faster, with a new format which they’ve described as “smart brevity longform”. This critic piece discusses the validity of this method of making journalism good again!
Why are Facebook investing £4.5m in local UK news?
The Community News Project is a £4.5 million (USD $6 million) fund designed to support local journalism in the UK and help people see what news matters to them.
Roundup: The most interesting new digital and social media research
“Journalist’s Resource sifts through the academic journals so you don’t have to. Here’s their latest roundup, including research into how Twitter impacts reporters’ news judgment, how often we remember where we read something, and why Facebook makes you feel bad.”
👩💻 Technology
Is it finally time for media companies to adopt a common publishing platform?
Jesse Knight, former CTO at Vice, shares some interesting insights into the needs of large media companies when it comes to publishing platforms - and how that is changing now that some of the biggest publishers are licensing their own in-house technology.
Quartz AI Studio gets a $250k grant from the Knight Foundation
The new Quartz AI Studio aims to take data journalism to the next level and transform the way that journalists share and spread the news.
🤷 WTF?
Here’s what clickbait looks like when it’s powered by artificial intelligence
This Twitter user shared some interesting (and hilarious) results from an experiment in training a real AI on the titles of BuzzFeed YouTube videos. What it came out with could genuinely pass as real articles…
