Monday 18th March: Making inclusion a strategic priority

Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Esther.

Charlotte Henry built her newsletter, The Addition, from scratch and was named ‘Best Solo Newsletter’ at the Publisher Newsletter Awards just over a year later. Now, she wants to help others build their own successful newsletter. You can book either a single hour-long call or a course of three calls with her. These are all 1-on-1, so you can really drill down into what you need to make a newsletter work for you.

(Book this ad slot)

Ridhi is one of those guests who you can’t help but smile when listening to. She has a genuinely infectious enthusiasm for ED&I, so it’s to Immediate Media’s credit that they’ve recognised that and given her the space and tools to pursue it.

The other thing I love about this interview is that Ridhi has a rare optimism about the industry; something that many of us can struggle to maintain when we see what’s happening in other countries with diversity efforts. When people are taking conversations out of the workplace and into the pub, that’s a sign that change is really happening.

“Seeing more people like me in the industry, seeing more people like me in our company, seeing more people talk about neurodiversity and intersectionality, and looking at how our content and stories have changed, I think we’ve come a long way as a media company in the last three years,” she tells us. “And I feel very optimistic about the industry when I look at it that way.”

If you missed Joshi Herrmann go up against Reach and Newsquest in the House of Lords enquiry a couple of weeks ago, you missed a treat. Either way, this column from Herrmann himself on the state of local news is a must-read. “It’s obvious that the corporate owners are only going in one direction: relentlessly cutting costs to maintain profit margins for shareholders,” he says, before listing some actions the government could actually take to give newer players a fighting chance in the market.

The NYT’s dedicated audio app has hit 1 million downloads. There are some interesting points in here about the app experience and what the NYT are hoping to do with it, but given only subscribers can listen to content, I’d actually be more interested in seeing how many of those downloaders are actually active in it.

Google’s AI-powered search engine, Search Generative Experience, could cause traffic declines for publishers ranging from 20% to 60%. There’s not space here to go into the quality vs. quantity debate, but pity those titles reliant on traffic for answering questions about what time Strictly is on the TV.

More from Media Voices