Friday 30th April: How publishers can incorporate more audio

April 30, 2021

Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Esther.

In 2021, the media platform with the highest weekly reach in the United States is audio. Data published last month by Nielsen revealed that radio reaches 88% of U.S. adults each week, ahead of smartphone apps (85%) and TV (80%).

But you don't have to launch a podcast to bring the benefits of audio to your business. This list from Damian Radcliffe contains some really smart ideas, from taking advantage of improvements in AI text-to-speech technology, to improving accessibility, or using audio to tell the 'story behind the story' in newsrooms.

The social platforms are also rushing to bring their takes on Clubhouse to market,with Facebook last week announcing a suite of audio services. Unlike the 'pivot to video', audio remains a low-cost medium when it comes to creation, making it a perfect experimental tool.

This interview with Phillip Crawley has some really interesting nuggets of info about the Globe and Mail's AI strategy. What has really helped the successful implementation of AI is that the CTO and the Editor in Chief developed a good, collaborative relationship. As a result, their work is driving significant subscriptions.

"We realized we were making pennies on the dollar for what we could make if we monetized our newsletters differently," said Flipboard's Head of Paid Content when explaining their decision to move from programmatic display ads to native newsletter sponsorships.

What will happen to subscriptions once everyone has been vaccinated and the pandemic comes to an end? Thomas Baekdal looks at why it's important to look at convincing your 'Covid-need-based audience' into having a different need, in order to reduce churn. That is, if we get a break from worldwide disasters...

This week's episode:

This week we hear from Gina Tonic co-founder of The Fat Zine, an independent magazine by fat people for fat people, plus those that care. We spoke about the F word, the influence of Pitch Perfect, being an activist vs being a publisher, Fat Liberation and how inside every thin person there’s a fat person dying to get out.

I'm putting this round up together for you at 10pm on a Thursday evening, after my little one has (finally) gone to bed. We're really close to our Ko-Fi goal, and once we reach that, we'll be investing in some equipment to help take our audio quality to the next level. Top of my list? Soundproofing...