Monday 28th June: Reach to hire online safety editor to tackle 'endemic' abuse

June 28, 2021

Happy Monday! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Peter.

Reach has created an online safety editor role to tackle “endemic” abuse and harassment of it journalists. Reported as the first role of its kind in the UK, the person appointed will liaise with social media platforms on individual cases of abuse and to push more generally for improvements.

Group editor-in-chief Lloyd Embley said online abuse has become endemic and can severely impact the mental health of journalists. "We felt that with online abuse only increasing across the industry we needed to dedicate a role to tackle it head on."

We love this move. One person working at one publisher can't change the toxic nature of social media discourse. But anything that helps protect individuals has to be welcomed as an important starting point and a benchmark for other publishers to aspire to.

Some Globe and Mail readers might never encounter a paywall, while others might see one every time they visit the site. The newspaper's Sophi AI technology uses deep-learning techniques to optimise as many publishing decisions as possible and one of the biggest is when - or even if - it's worth presenting a paywall.

Vogue, with a global reach of 270 million people, has historically relied on advertising funding. But along with the rest of Conde Nast, it is moving to diversify revenue and is developing membership tiers and a range of e-commerce offerings. The shift spans consumers looking for inspiration and fashion professionals that need market data.

Despite a surge in consumption during the COVID crisis, the number of people accessing news in print in Australia has halved since 2016. Only 13% of Australians pay for online news, but that's not because they're buying a paper - 80% of Australians say they haven’t read a newspaper or news magazine in the past week.

This week's episode:

This week, we hear from Jo Holdaway, Chief Data and Marketing Officer at Independent Digital News & Media – home of The Independent and The Evening Standard. She talks about what sort of data is important to publishers, especially when it comes to subscription strategies, why it’s important to have a diverse team working with data, and how she’s preparing the business for the sunsetting of third-party cookies.

We don’t accept advertising or sponsorship in the Media Voices Podcast’s weekly episodes; we think it’s important that we remain free to say exactly what we think in reaction to the week’s media news. But we do offer a limited number of media vendors the opportunity to lead the conversation for our listeners. Learn more here.