Friday 6th November: 'Failing' New York Times hits 7 million subscribers

November 06, 2020

What a week!!! Friday's Media Roundup is brought to you by a still nervous Peter.

Like things couldn't get any more irritating for wee Donny! His least favourite news outlet (except for CNN, The Washington Post and now Fox News) has just announced that 7 million people completely disagree with his 'enemy of the people' BS and regularly give the NYT their money.

The bet on digital almost 10 years ago is paying off handsomely for The Times. In the three months ending September, revenue from digital subscribers surpassed print-subscription income for the first time. Now with 6 million digital subscribers, the company added almost 400,000 subs to the digital total in that three-month period. The goal to reach 10 million subscribers by 2025 now seems eminently doable and more important than ever - income in all other areas is flat or falling.

New CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said, “Our strategy of making journalism worth paying for continues to prove itself out” and this week more than ever that rings true. The '7 million subscribers' announcement has to be seen as a welcome reward for keeping up the fight against the constant stream of misinformation that has made this US election such a sh!tshow.

Data is one of those scary words for me... say it three times and you risk being forever haunted by a pivot-table demon. But knowing what your audience is up to is a key part of modern publishing practise, so here's a thing I wrote about why it matters in product planning.

Talking of stuff-I-don't-like-but-know-matters, Gen-Z's favourite social media platform is gearing up to challenge YouTube's dominance of the How-To video space. It's 'Learn' tab will point users at videos that take viewers through making food, producing art, and how science works.

We all know print is not dead, but if it was, then we would be very grateful to Hymag, the magazine repository formerly known as the Hyman Archive. This piece in It's Nice That talks about the collection, some of its 5,000 titles and the current crowdfunder to digitise all those lovely magazines.

This week's podcast:

This week, we hear from Erica Anderson, Executive Producer of Content and Partnerships at New York Magazine and Vox Media. She talks about what she took from her time working at Google and Twitter, what goes into developing outstanding podcasts, and what Vox Media is doing to prepare for changes in the audio industry.

Lessons from award-winning publisher podcasts

The latest episode in our 'Lessons' series is live and I'm speaking with Arion McNicoll former editor theweek.co.uk about making The Week Unwrapped podcast. He says start with a worthwhile listener experience then work on revenue.