Friday 17th December: Your last Media Roundup for 2021

December 17, 2021

This is our last newsletter of 2021 and we'd like to thank all our readers, old and new, for being with us. It's an absolute privilege to be able to email our takes on the media to you every day.

Today's newsletter is brought to you by Peter, but Esther and Chris join me in saying Happy Christmas to everyone that celebrates it and all the very best for 2022.

We don't often lead on our own stuff, but it's Christmas and we're actually very proud of out Media Moments 2021 Report. If you haven't see it before, Media Moments is our annual look at what happened in the previous year, why it matters and what might happen next. It's available for free thanks to our sponsors Sovrn.

This chapter looks at what went on in the world of print in 2021 and, as you'd expect it's mostly a tale of retrenchment. But as I say in the intro, listening to people talk about the print publishing market is a bit like listening to people describe Rorschach inkblots - they see what they want to see.

Beyond personal, sometimes professional preconceptions, mass market news print is suffering while special interest print is holding on. The one bright spot for newspapers is at the community level. Without the pressure to scale, niche news, like niche magazines are attracting and maintaining audiences big enough to sustain them.

LadBible's shares listed on the London Stock Exchange yesterday at £1.75, valuing the company at £360 million. By the end of the day, LBG’s share price had jumped to £2, lifting the company’s market capitalisation to around £411 million. Alexander Solomou, the 30-year-old founder of the publishing group, now has a net worth of more than £200 million. Who says you can't get rich in media any more?

The Politifact team had a clear winner for their lie of the year competition this year. The lies that surrounded the January 6th insurrection are next level, stretching from the dismissive 'it wasn't that big a deal' to the conspiratorial 'it was staged by Antifa'. Efforts to re-write history are nothing new, said Harvard academic Theda Skocpol. "What is brazen is the history they want to rewrite includes pictures of what actually happened."

The ecommerce boom was far and away the biggest trend to have come out of the pandemic – at least for digital media companies. Scale seems to lie at the heart of the biggest success stories, but the winners, from Future to Hearst, have also established end-to-end ownership of a vertical.

This week's podcast:

UK Editor of The Big Issue Paul McNamee tells us about the Big Issue’s Breakthrough scheme, paying disadvantaged young people to get into journalism. He also talks about why the magazine needed a redesign to make everything important and necessary, working with designer Matt Willey, their relationship with subscribers, digital-first news and balancing campaigning with making a properly entertaining magazine.

If you like what we do, support Esther, Peter and Chris with a coffee-level donation. Give yourself a warm, yuletide glow and relax into the New Year knowing you’ve helped us in a step along the road to achieving our ambitions. Merry Christmas 🎄🎄🎄