Tuesday 23rd July: City AM signs content sharing deal with Reach

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Big news from City AM. Christian May is returning as editor after four years away and the business daily has signed a major content sharing deal to provide business and financial news to many of Reach’s biggest newspaper titles.

The two-year deal between City AM and Reach will see the London-based business newspaper’s content appear online through the Express, Business Live and sites in Reach’s Live network, plus in print in the Express, Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo.

The move will boost City AM’s bid to break out of its London-only orbit. It took the first first steps earlier this year with the hiring of a UK editor to run a national newsdesk based in Manchester. The deal with Reach looks like the next move in what the publisher calls its “ambition to become a truly national business and finance publication”.

The European Union has notified Meta that its “pay or consent” model for Facebook and Instagram might violate consumer protection laws. The EU says the company has until September 1st to propose changes to its model, which it calls “misleading” and “confusing” for users, or face potential fines. Meta says subscriptions as an alternative to advertising are a well-established business model, but I think it’s charging people to avoid surveillance that’s the problem.

As part of a broader overhaul designed to get the nearly 50-year-old publication in front of a more sophisticated audience, US Weekly is upping its print output. The weekly’s print circulation is 1.95 million, making it one of the largest magazines by circulation in America. Sara Fischer at Axios says the big picture here is that many legacy publications have returned to print or doubled down on it amid advertiser demand for higher-impact placements.

Through almost 20 years of vinyl recovery, print magazine sales have been declining. Digital hit music harder and faster, and music makers have seen vinyl as a way to claw back some cash for a very long time. With digital advertising rates crashing, the social networks turning their back on publishers and programmatic ads exposed as a ponzi scheme, magazine publishers can learn a lot from the music industry’s approach to analogue.

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