Friday 19th April: From a tiny island in Maine, Today in Tabs serves up fresh media gossip

Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Peter.

From Esther: Thanks for the emails on yesterday's Guardian story pointing out that, in fact, they have had a paid puzzles app for some years. Interestingly they're winding it up at the end of this month and rolling the puzzles functionality into their main subscription app, which makes redundant much of my speculation yesterday...!

Author, screenwriter, columnist and podcaster Terri White joins the line up for Magazine Mayday, talking about the good the bad and the ugly in magazines.

I LOVE this story for so many reasons. I love the idea that someone who lives on an island more than six hours from the publishing capital of America has become the go-to guy for New York’s mediarati. I love that he’s a one-man band being covered by the New York Times. And I love that he’s making a decent living doing what he thinks of as a hobby.

Rusty Foster’s decade-old media newsletter Today in Tabs has 36,000 subscribers, with about 10% paying him $6 a month or $50 a year. There are no scoops, readers are paying for what the NYT calls Rusty’s ‘sensibility’, a “cynical but still bright-eyed, quirkily punctuated, jokey style… that will be recognizable to anyone who remembers Gawker, The Awl or, further back, Suck.com.”

Finally, in an industry where it’s all to easy to get buried by the doom and gloom, I love that people read Today in Tabs for fun. Elizabeth Lopatto, a senior writer for The Verge, told The New York Times, “I get the sense that Rusty is writing that newsletter trying to make himself laugh.” Maybe I just love Rusty 🧡

Press Gazette is reporting that three-quarters of the UK’s biggest media organisations increased the percentage of women in their top teams in the past year. Of 34 media organisations big enough to be required to report gender pay data to the Government, 26 increased the proportion of women in their top pay quarter between 2022 and 2023. But while there progress at the top, 82% have more women than men in their lowest-paid group and women are on average paid 11% less than men. Getting closer, but still no cigar.

No, I don’t love the headline * Print! Never! Went! Away! * but this is a brilliant piece on the print revival. With a way younger perspective than me, writer Laura Holiday says, “By investing in print, we’re establishing checkpoints and time capsules that stop micro-trends and aesthetics in their tracks, creating a permanence that we long for in today’s rapid trend cycle, and cementing hypothesized trends in reality.” YES! And I learned the word ‘mukbang’.

Subscriptions are not a silver bullet for everyone. Meta, eager to charge people that didn’t want to be tracked for ad-targeting, has been slapped down by EU regulators. Looks like the OG social network and associated properties will actually need to offer people an opt-out option for free. Could the surveillance capitalists actually be running out of road?

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