#51 — Avoiding over-reliance on any one platform or revenue stream
Welcome to Issue #51 and thanks for being a member of Publisher Weekly. You’re part of a growing community of over 620+ people who care deeply about the future of publishing. Here’s your weekly roundup of the most important news, stories and ideas!
💯 Top picks
PinkNews’ Benjamin Cohen: We'll never be dependent on one platform [Podcast]
PinkNews, a bootstrapped publication covering news and entertainment for the LGBT community are growing, with 24 employees and an expanding community around the world. Founder Benjamin Cohen talks about revenue streams for growth and what they’ve learnt on the Digiday podcast.
💸 Business models
Innovation vs change: 5 ways publishers have truly innovated
A short summary of the best ways in which digital publishers have innovated and grown in the past year, including harnessing adblockers, subscriptions, testing storytelling formats and owning the relationship with readers.
How this Swedish newspaper halved subscriber churn
Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter managed to halve their churn in under 2 years by building a multi-faceted paywall that helps to attract subscribers - and most importantly - keep them around!
Life after print: How 3 magazines are navigating their new business models
There’s no single solution for everyone, but there are several success stories to learn from. Journalist Beth Braverman shares some interesting examples of publishers who have managed to evolve and diversify.
Medium are still going all-in on building subscription business - but they're not too worried about profit
For Medium CEO Ev Williams, building revenue and a subscription business is important, but building a profitable business is not an immediate concern.
Winter may be coming for HBO’s streaming subscriptions, but it doesn’t have to for your organisation
What happens when the thing subscribers signed up for goes away? Joshua Benton discusses how to provide value, build habits, and build “long-term, repeat-consumption value”.
McClatchy reports large increase in digital subscriptions... as well as first quarter losses
Sacramento-based media company McClatchy (publisher of 30 daily newspapers) reported even deeper losses than expected for the first quarter, despite digital subscriptions increasing by 60 percent.
✍️ Modern journalism
Newspaper readers are learning to love the iPad
In a letter to readers, to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette announces that their organisation was becoming unprofitable in 2018. In order to adapt, they shifted their newspaper subscribers to an iPad version, and discovered that many of their readers enjoyed it more!
Finland is winning the war on fake news!
An anti-fake news initiative in Finland that was launched back in 2014 taught residents, students, journalists and politicians how to counter false information. It seems to have worked pretty well and now others may be looking toward Finland for inspiration.
The power of journalism collaboration is also the power of inclusion — here’s how to harness it
“As resources (especially locally) in journalism recede, collaboration has emerged as a way to do more with more by sharing skills, networks, and other reporting tools for maximum impact.”
👩💻 Technology
YouTube is changing how subscriber counts are displayed, possibly shifting its culture
“YouTube is introducing a major change to the way real-time subscriber counts are displayed, which could prevent analytics sites like Social Blade from actively displaying whether creators are gaining — or, more importantly, losing — subscribers.”
Introducing PodFinder — A new way to discover great podcasts
A new tool launched this week to help people with discovery in the exploding Podcast industry. PodFinder is a platform agnostic Facebook messenger chatbot that sends Podcast recommendations to searchers.
🤷 WTF?
Can decentralised IndieWeb social media save us from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter?
What if we had many decentralised platforms (like Mastodon and Micro.blog) with far fewer people spending time on them? Interesting take!
