Friday 15th July: What's next for Media Voices?

July 15, 2022

Good morning! This morning's newsletter is brought to you by Peter.

Since launching our appeal for help a couple of weeks ago, we’ve had a huge number of responses from podcast listeners and newsletter subscribers. We are incredibly grateful for all the Ko-Fi contributions and offers of help we've received since we held our hands up and admitted we were struggling to find a way forward.

This week, fired up by the support we've had, the three of us got together to talk about what to do next. We met in sunny Evesham and spent the day looking at where we are, where we want to be, and what we need to do to get there.

With a spirit of openness and transparency that we hope will help other SME media owners, we're sharing the first ideas to come out of our meeting. We've not solved the future yet, but we're working on it with much more enthusiasm thanks to all of you 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻.

In a report that had me thinking this might be a Stranger Things' promo, Netflix has announced that 80's personal computing pioneer Microsoft will be its “global advertising technology and sales partner” when it rolls out its ad-supported streaming option. Netflix hasn’t announced a date for the cheaper tier’s rollout, but it is rumoured it could be before the end of 2022.

According to Axios, Reuters is launching a new subscription research business called Reuters Insight that will be geared toward individuals making corporate strategy decisions. The new business unit becomes Reuters' first-ever subscription business aimed at individuals rather than whole enterprises. It will launch in the insurance sector, followed by pharmaceuticals, automotive, sustainability and supply chain.

The Fix has compiled a list of media newsletters to subscribe to and we are very happy to be included with some of our own favourites. It's amazing to appear alongside Axios, Reuters and The Rebooting , but there's also one newsletter on the list that I hadn't heard of before. RQ1 is a monthly newsletter summarising the most interesting recent research on journalism and media and I've subscribed!

This week's podcast:

This week we heard from Max Towey, Co-Founder and CEO at RocaNews, a start-up building a community around news that lowers the blood pressure. Roca believe alarmist and partisan coverage has been responsible for much of the news avoidance we’re seeing today and Towey tells us how they are hoping to rebuild the younger generation’s trust in news.

In this Conversations episode we discuss the benefits of systems consolidation, from improved operational efficiency to increased profitability, as well as exploring some of the challenges publishers face when looking to consolidate, and how they can get the process started.