Friday 21st October: The rebirth of magazines (no, really)

October 21, 2022

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Esther from the UK, where we now seem to be changing Prime Ministers more frequently than most men change their bedsheets.

Last night we recorded the next episode of Media Voices where we did a deep dive into newsletter trends over the past year with Mark Stenberg. One of the points that came out was that newsletters - although an ancient format - have been seen with fresh eyes by publishers and are being treated more like newspapers and magazines. Each issue an antidote to the endless scrolling and algorithmic feeds of the rest of the internet.

Brian Morrissey makes the point in his latest newsletter that we're starting to see a resurgence of 'magazine approaches' in digital media. Not ink-and-paper mags, but a renewed interest in hand-crafted media creation and discovery. Some brands are even being quite explicit about trying to recreate the weekend magazine experience in a newsletter.

Morrissey does end on a hopeful note for physical magazines though: "It’s worth remembering that for all the talk of death, most media forms stick around. Streaming music hasn’t eliminated vinyl. Paper books are still more popular than e-books. It wouldn’t be surprising for physical media to become a mental health habit as a way to cut down on screen time."

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With open rates becoming less reliable, the FT needed a way to better measure the success of their email strategy. They found it through surveys. I would bet that the FT have a few million subscribers to their newsletters, which will help, but there are some simple and smart ideas here for encouraging newsletter subscribers to respond in the face of challenging open rate metrics.

By the way, you can respond to this newsletter any time you like. There are 'thumbs up, thumbs down' buttons at the bottom which lets us know if you liked or disliked an issue, or if you'd like to give us more detailed feedback, you can hit 'Reply' and reach us directly.

Ok this headline is a big 'well...DUH' moment. But the piece itself is actually very interesting. It breaks down people's views on how news organisations should be funded, and by age group too. Figure 17 highlights the biggest issue with subscriptions in news in particular: if people hit a paywall, 48% of them try to access the information elsewhere for free.

Push notifications are very, very good at driving traffic to websites. So it's understandable that they've started to creep from being something to alert audiences to Big News Events (like lettuces outliving PMs) to something that many publishers are now sending daily, regardless of whether the news is worth a 'flash' treatment. Mind you, every day feels like a Big News Event here at the moment.

This week's podcast:

Our latest episode looks at how publishers with subscription and membership schemes are handling increasing pressure on consumer budgets, and subscription trends going into 2023 and beyond. To discuss this year’s subscription trends, we’re joined by Anthony Ribeiro, Audience Conversion Consultant at Poool.

It feels ridiculous that it's come round again so soon, but we're delighted to announce that entries for the Pub Pod Awards 2023 are open. They're always a joy to judge and the night of the awards themselves are a highlight of my year. If you have a potentially award-winning podcast, we want to hear from you!