- The Publisher Newsletter
- Posts
- Monday 13th March: Gary Lineker really is not the story
Monday 13th March: Gary Lineker really is not the story
Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Peter.
#Ad: If you’re looking for a new podcast editing tool, we can recommend Hindenburg, a professional-grade audio editing system made for simplicity, speed and agility. It’s built for podcasts and audio storytelling, with lots of features like auto levelling which help streamline the process. This link will get you an extended three month trial of Hindenburg PRO for business.
Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Hindenburg. (Book this ad slot)
We led on this story in the podcast today and as you'll hear when you listen, it's not a fun discussion. For us this is a symptom of a much bigger problem in media - the trust issue - and no one is going to come away from this looking more trustworthy than they went in. At every turn there is misrepresentation, double standards and more axes being ground than at a Lumberjack convention.
The key points for me were actually summed up excellently by Charlotte Henry last week when the whole thing blew up. I dislike the present government of the UK (a lot), but they are not fascists or Nazis and to suggest they are belittles the people who suffered appallingly at the hands of that regime. However reasoned the link Lineker made with the rhetoric common in Germany in the 30s, it has only served to give the government cover.
And on the other side, the hypocrisy from the BBC management and our so-called leaders is off the charts. When a sitting Tory MP is tweeting #defundtheBBC, the agenda is obvious and they are damaging the credibility of our national broadcaster at every turn. And finally, this sad little culture-war spat that has occupied the British press for days, replacing real issues on the front pages with a handy distraction from our country's failing leadership.
Happy Thoughts... Happy Thoughts... This is a nice interview on The Audiencers with The Atlantic's newly appointed executive director of audience research Gina Bulla. It covers audience research objectives, methodologies and my favourite, the process for setting research priorities. That basically comes down to two questions:
Can we make a decision based on the research?
Is it a question our audience can answer for us?
Digiday is reporting that after a strong 2022, Ozone’s big plan for 2023 is pretty much more of the same: Bring in more publishers. Leverage increasing scale to attract more advertisers. Develop new video and shoppable formats to retain those dollars. The steady-as-you-go approach is founded on ad revenue growth of 61% last year and the hope for the UK news publisher consortium that owns the platform is they build on that momentum.
Forgive me if this story makes me a little bit happy. Finding joy in losses at another media outlet is 100% not our style, but GB News is a special case. The bottom line, literally, for the channel is that they're having to pay big bucks to get the leading outrage merchants to front their shows, while advertisers remain wary of throwing their lot in with the 'controversy prone' brand. Hopefully this is as good as it ever gets for any of them.
More from Media Voices
On this week’s 250th episode we hear from Max Tani, media reporter at news start-up Semafor. He tells us how he came to Semafor; the Venn diagram between media, politics, Hollywood and pretty much everything else in life; about Semafor’s attempts to balance out news and opinion; and whether covering the White House was anything like The West Wing.
In the news roundup the team looks at a bad week for broadcasters, from the BBC’s war against Gary Lineker, through Fox News’ risible defence in the Dominion lawsuit, to GB News’ £31m loss in its first operating year.
