Monday 24th May: Building a sustainable business alongside Big Tech

May 24, 2021

Welcome to another week! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Esther.

How's that for a headline to start your Monday morning...! It's from a new report from FIPP titled Big Tech and You, which is a comprehensive survey of the strategies that publishers, platforms and legislators are using to deal with the challenges between tech companies and media.

WNIP have summarised some of the key findings in this piece. Unsurprisingly, there's a fair amount on the importance of not becoming too reliant on the tech giants for revenue or reach. This is absolutely correct, but one quote stood out to me as an important reminder:

“If you take the cynicism away, actually, magic can happen,” says Lorna Willis, CEO, Archant Media. Her collaboration with Google helped the company get the most advanced voice infrastructure in UK media. 170 years of the publisher’s archived content is now accessible through NLP.

There are endless complications between platforms and publishers. But it's worth remembering that Big Tech has some impressive tools, and at the moment, are splashing the cash on initiatives and projects. There are some definite opportunities for savvy publishers who accept the ephemeral nature of the relationship.

“Can for-profit journalism work in local markets?” asks Axios CEO Jim VandeHei. “We think it can. But it’s one of the hardest jobs in journalism.” I reckon Axios stands as good a chance as anyone at making the business model for local journalism work. But time will tell.

When looking for ways to add value for premium subscribers, Harvard Business Review dug decades into the past to serve its superusers. This is a really great case study of a publisher being smart about archive monetisation, with one in five of their subscribers willing to pay 50% more to access their ebooks.

Hyperlinks are a powerful tool for journalists and their readers. But hyperlinks are a double-edged sword; for all of the internet’s boundlessness, what’s found on the Web can also be modified, moved, or entirely vanished. One study found that nearly half of all hyperlinks led to content that had either changed since its original publication, or disappeared from the internet entirely.

This week's episode:

This week we hear from Bo Sacks, a columnist and lecturer with a long career history in magazines and publishing. He talks about trends that have come and gone, why he thinks print is strong as a niche product, and why we’re currently in the golden age of publishing.

We mentioned Spotify's plans to auto-transcript podcasts in this week's news round-up. Accessibility is important to us, which is why you can read all our interviews, properly edited and formatted to make more sense than what a robot can churn out. Even Peter makes sense in written form.