Good morning! Nearly the weekend and Friday's Media Roundup is brought to you by Peter.

Berlin-based startup wants to build a European news product — thefix.media

We've talked about how Europe is not really a single media space before, with no one quite able to appeal to a continent-wide audience. This piece from The Fix focuses on how Berlin-based Forum.eu is hoping collaboration and curation can change that.

Every day, the digital news startup delivers readers up to seven stories that feature high on the European news agenda. Forum take the stories from its publishing partners and translates them into 6 European languages. Partners include Der Zeit in Germany, El Mundo in Spain, The Telegraph in the UK and now, the New York Times.

The business has backing from social impact VC Bonum, but is banking on 4 euro subscriptions to make it sustainable. The founders hope that curation, translation and the debate that runs around the stories it publishes will give it an edge. I like the idea, and I kind of hope they're right.

UK ad spend suffers another blow, but IPA expects outlook to brighten — www.thedrum.com

Covid-19 and lockdown restrictions continued to squeeze brand budgets at the end of 2020. According to the IPA’s latest quarterly Bellwether report 40% of the companies surveyed said the pandemic had led to sharp declines in ad spend. If you need some good news though, 25% of senior marketers were more optimistic than they were three months ago. YAY!!!

Survey says... surveys are overused and unreliable — www.medill.northwestern.edu

A survey of 1,400 US media people judged polling 'overplayed and unreliable' in the 2020 US election, so says the first-ever Medill Media Industry Survey at Northwestern University. Irony aside, the issue might be around 'horse race' style polling rather than using polls as indicators of opinion on public policy.

More than 100 years of Editor & Publisher available on the Internet Archive — blog.archive.org

I love stories of people taking really old magazine content and making it available online. This one's especially interesting because it's all about publishing. Find out what 'The War' was doing for advertising' in 1918 over at the archive of Editor & Publisher magazine.

This week's podcast:

Think Publishing CEO Ian McAuliffe on perfect staff and clients — voices.media

Ian McAuliffe, founder and CEO of Think Publishing, talks about the evolving landscape of contract publishing. He tells us about the ideal employee or a contract publisher, the ideal client and how the pandemic has accelerated digital adoption amongst traditionally conservative clients, but still not killed off print.

Media Voices Conversations:

Pugpig's Jonny Kaldor discusses the state of the digital publishing market — voices.media

In this new Conversations episode, Peter Houston is joined by Pugpig founder and CEO Jonny Kaldor to discuss what’s been happening in the world of digital publishing, and what to expect from 2021.