Friday 23rd July: The future of local journalism doesn’t have to be rubbish

July 23, 2021

Happy Friday! This morning's newsletter comes from Peter.

Remember local newspapers? Community newspaper publisher David Loyd says try not to cry when you see what they look like now.

He paints a bleak picture of cut-and-paste, press releases and no-show local reporters. And its not just the reporters that aren't showing up. The readers that local businesses used to reach through the pages of their local paper are mostly no longer paying to read locally produced news.

But this isn't a doom and gloom story. David's realistic about the challenges, but he lists a number of ways local news can be made sustainable. He says:

"If significant numbers of people in an area want that area to have (or continue to have) a high quality news publication, there’s a good chance they’ll work out how to help make it happen."

* We'll be talking more to David about this on the podcast in September

Future inspired almost a billion dollars of e-commerce revenue for its affiliate partners in 2020, and the growth is continuing through 2021. Referral traffic has been driven by evergreen content, shopping events like Amazon’s Prime Day and the stay-at-home online shopping spikes forced by lockdowns.

* Listen to this week's episode for more on Future's e-commerce strategy.

The first non-Facebook app to reach 3 billion downloads globally, TikTok has over 1 billion monthly active users from 150 countries. With an age profile lower than most social media networks, publishers are keen to mine TikTok for younger audiences. This list from The Fix highlights the top 20 European media accounts on the platform. Look out for the Daily Mail and the Telegraph.

America has to be the centre of the universe for sports no one else plays. That said, the country is big enough that even new, niche sports can support a magazine. In Pickleball is a new sports-lifestyle magazine aiming to be “the Vogue of Pickleball”, printed on heavy stock and appealing to the mostly older, well-off Americans who live to play the badminton-ping-pong-wiffle-ball hybrid.

This week's episode:

In this episode Future’s chief audience and ecom officer Aaron Asadi tells us about where the ecommerce function sits within Future, how it relates to audience development, and creating content for affiliate ecommerce revenues across a huge range of brands.

Let us toot our own horn for a second here. We've made it onto this list of 10 can't-miss media podcasts, and we're delighted to sit alongside these amazing contemporaries. Please do click through and give the other media podcasts a go - after all it takes a village to report on an industry!