#33 — No, tech companies shouldn't fund journalism
Welcome to this weeks news in publishing. In this issue there’s a great round up of interesting articles, twitter threads as well as a new free resource for building successful email newsletters!
Enjoy 👉
💯 Top picks
How The Correspondent exceeded its $2.5 million crowdfunding goal
The English-language expansion of the Dutch news site smashed through the goal for its crowdfunding campaign, beating a $2.5 million target by more than $100,000. Here’s how.
💸 Business models
THREAD: Thoughts on membership strategy from a publication making $3k/mo in recurring revenue
Tiago Forte, editor at Praxis added a paywall to his blog and openly shares his thoughts on membership and the future of this business model.
How New York magazine thinks about having one paywall across multiple verticals
“We wanted to take these three different segments and treat them differently and be flexible enough to really target the people who are most likely to convert, rather than have a blanket rule across every site, every user, and treat them all equally.”
A complete guide for taking your newsletters to the next level – grow your list, make money & more!
Check out this free resource packed with information about how to build a successful monetised newsletter, complete with open source templates that are ready to use.
✍️ Modern journalism
THREAD: Publications aren't cutting jobs because they're losing audience. They're cutting jobs because of tech!
This thread by Brian EdwardsTiekert about the economics of news in 2019 is a must read - it’s packed with articles from important historical events that have shaped the news of today.
The FT is building brand loyalty among young readers by giving schools free access
The Financial Times runs a program that lifts the paywall for participating schools to give young readers access to their content. The publisher is cultivating relationships with teachers via an email newsletter to promote engagement with the program.
👩💻 Technology
No, tech companies shouldn’t fund journalism
Facebook recently announced that it would spend $300 million in the next three years funding journalism partnerships and programs. This opinion piece on Columbia Journalism Review discusses how this could be bad for journalism as a whole.
🤷 WTF?
Netflix is finally sharing (some of) its audience numbers. Several of them are huge.
With more than 130 million people watching TV on Netflix, the company has refused for years to release their audience metrics to the public. A recent announcement sharing some of this data for the first time suggests that Netflix could already account for a full 10% of TV viewing time.
