Friday 4th March: The Prints and the pauper

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Chris.

This has been an interesting read, particularly because we've actually covered a fair amount of print stories in this newsletter over the past year - some of them even good ones. The Manchester Mill launched a print edition to mark its success, and beyond the one-off iterations many of our magazine focused guests have found a level of stability when it comes to balancing costs with the appeal of a print product.

But writing for MediaPost, Tony Silber points out that for the mass market print's future is not so rosy: "It is not news to anyone that there has been a pronounced shift in readership and advertising from print to digital, and as a result, for a few important brands, print is no longer serving the brand’s core purpose. More than anything else, that accurately signals print’s future. If print no longer serves a brand’s core purpose for some of Dotdash Meredith’s most important titles, how will it serve the remainder?"

Anyone writing in media gets pushback when we talk about the decline of print, both from print idealists and from cynics that doth protest too much about their own portfolios. But as with Reach Plc's results, the long tail of print decline isn't suddenly going to be reversed across the industry, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.

My latest for DCN asks if smartphone manufacturers would ever consider news apps 'essential' and unable to be deleted in the same way that, say, Samsung considers TikTok to be essential. The long and short of it is - news isn't all that high up hardware manufacturers' priority lists...

BuzzFeed Studios and the podcast company Acast have struck a multiyear deal for a slate of six podcasts. It's a recognition of the fact that audio is increasingly lucrative, particularly when underpinned by good adtech - but also of the fact that the space is getting ever more competitive, and you need a provider like Acast on side.

There's a lot in this column I disagree with, not least the idea that people shouldn't be allowed to deal with vicarious trauma however they're able. What it does do, though, is demonstrate that there are many clout-chasers out there - and that newspapers are competing with individuals using the war for their own ends for attention.

This week's podcast:

This week’s guest is Ryan Heafy, Co-Founder and COO of 6AM City, which is just about to hit 1 million subscribers across its 24 daily newsletters. We spoke about his unconventional route into media (via Black Hawk helicopters), and how it helped 6AM launch in 16 cities in a year.

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