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Here's why Substack's scam worked so well — thehypothesis.substack.com

Here's an interesting counterpoint to the idea of the newsletter superstar. Author Analee Newitz argues that far from being the golden ticket to an individual journalist's subscription-based success, Substack in fact played a devious shell game to boost its own profile. Specifically, she argues that Substack paid a secret group of writers to make newsletter authorship seem lucrative:

"An elite group of Substack Pro staffers, handpicked by editors, have been given the resources to write full time. Everyone else on Substack has to do it for free until they manage to claw and scrape their way into a subscriber base that pays."

As has been pointed out elsewhere - so what? Nobody is guaranteed automatic success, nor can Substack alone gin an audience up out of thin air. We've always known you have to be somewhat successful in order to make a living from subscriptions. However, it is the first wobble in Substack's otherwise meteoric rise, and it could help alleviate publisher worries that their star writers will up and leave them for the greener pastures of Substack any time soon.

Key takeaways from Google’s 2020 ad safety report as hate and fraud cases increase — www.thedrum.com

Love it or hate it (or loathe it in some cases), Google is the bedrock on which many digital ad strategies are based. As the saying goes, if Google sneezes, the NYT catches a cold. So it's interesting to keep an eye on exactly what the search giant is looking at in terms of ad safety, fraud, and opportunities.

Why BuzzFeed and HuffPost’s decline wasn’t inevitable (£) — www.newstatesman.com

HuffPost and BuzzFeed were among the best hopes for digital-first media, back when 'digital-first media' was a meaningful term. Lately, though, BuzzFeed has forcibly trimmed its ambitions - and cut HuffPost jobs along the way. For The New Statesman, James Ball argues that wasn't inevitable, but the result of some poor choices.

Future focus: Inside the business of kids' media — digitalcontentnext.org

A nice one to finish. We've spent a fair amount of time looking at the rise of kid-focused news products on the podcast. For DCN, Greg Dool looks at how the constant search for sustainable, long-term audience growth has led to an increasing number of media companies betting on kid-focused news.

This week's podcast:

Big Issue CEO Paul Cheal on the magazine’s fight to survive lockdown — voices.media

On this week’s episode The Big Issue CEO Paul Cheal tells us about the magazine’s fight to survive lockdown, the innovations that got it through and how those changes have spurred new ways of thinking about how the Big Issue will work in the future.

Media vendors. Want to talk to our listeners? — voices.media

Would you like to tell our audience how you’ve helped your clients tackle the thorny issues of 21st century publishing? Get in touch and find out how you can sponsor one of our Conversations episodes and share your success stories with our audience of media professionals.