Monday 23rd October: MyLocal’s Daniel Ionescu on platforms for sustainable local news

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

Thinking about what impact AI could have on your business or the opportunities it could provide to transform publishing? Come and join us at Mx3 AI, a new event we’re putting on with Media Makers Meet to come and learn, discover, and discuss use cases with fellow professionals.

This week we're joined by Daniel Ionescu, founder of The Lincolnite, an independent local news publisher in Lincolnshire. He is also the founder and editor of new local news platform MyLocal, which is setting out to create a sustainable ecosystem where local journalism, communities and businesses can thrive.

Daniel talks us through why he got into local news in 2010 and the opportunity he spotted to make local news much more up-to-date when compared to the digital efforts of local news organisations still tied to the print cycle. He explains how MyLocal came about, and how they anticipated some of the problems publishers are facing today with the decline in social media traffic and challenges around sustainable revenue streams.

We also discuss the importance of building human, direct relationships to build trust in local news titles, whether collaboration between large and small outlets is realistic, and if local news can ever truly be sustainable.

I hadn’t thought about eBaum’s World in years before this piece from Media Makers Meet. There are some fascinating lessons in differentiation in here that really only apply to digital-first brands — but more than anything else it got me thinking about whether early popular news and entertainment sites have the same opportunity to trade off that nostalgia as legacy print has. My guess? No.

We’ve known for countless years that the cost of covering wars is heavy for journalists. We’ve also known that toll to mental health is levied even when reporters are remote but still exposed to horrific images and videos. Now, with the hugely polarised and emotive responses to the ongoing conflict, you can add abuse from a subset of the public to that list.

I’m certainly no prophet but I will say that I offhandedly wondered if something was happening with Jezebel over the past few weeks. I dip into the site fairly regularly — most often during October when it does its annual scary story competition — and over the past few weeks it’s been updating far less frequently than usual. G/O Media titles, even those like Jezebel which does excellent work, have been incredibly hard done by these past few years.

More from Media Voices