Friday 19th November: Is there an end to Axios Local's ambition?

November 19, 2021

Happy Friday! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Chris.

It's very hard to take a retroactive look at local news provision. Between Facebook's efforts, those of European start-ups and newsletters like the Manchester Mill, there are now far more grassroots and smaller-scale efforts to cover local news than we would have expected even a few short years ago.

That's especially evident when you look at the US, where news deserts were leaving any number of people high and dry, lacking local news provision. And yet Axios Local, not yet one year old, has spread rapidly across the country. Its 50-person team now has more than 500,000 subscribers, and there appears to be no end to its ambition.

For Adweek, Mark Stenberg takes a look at the whys and wherefores of local new provision, and why Axios seems to be betting on a critical mass of subscribers allowing it to become the source of local news, as both complementary service and replacement to the existing and extinct local newspapers in the US.

This is an interesting one - the all-new, all-improved Gawker reporting on one of its former G/O stablemates. I'm actually a fan of Jezebel and its eclectic articles, so hearing about the internal disputes around content production rate under G/O's deputy editorial director (and former Marie Claire editor) Lea Goldman is a little painful. But, as ever, it's good to get light on these issues.

This is a difficult story to read, if only because you get a sense of the struggle that one magazine went through. 'Frontier Myanmar' stopped printing after the coup - but it's survived with the help of a membership programme and a new paywall.

Finally we'd like to highlight an new project intro addressing the gender gap in news - Man Bites Dog and Women in Journalism have conducted a major new study on inequality in UK journalism and media. Well worth a read, and fingers crossed it leads to some major structural changes as a result.

This week's podcast:

This week, we hear from Blair Tapper, Senior Vice President at The Independent US. She talks about what her priorities have been since the brand’s US launch, what an Independent reader looks like across the pond, and why their new commercial offerings are more mission-based.

P.S. Peter wanted me to let you know that the magazine covers story in yesterday's newsletter was the most clicked-upon story.