Monday 28th September: What Jessica Lessin hopes Substack changes about journalism

September 28, 2020

Good morning! Welcome to your week. Today's roundup is brought to you by Peter.

We led this week's podcast on the news of a flurry of journalists leaving fulltime employment to launch their own newsletters. Jessica Lessin, founder of reader-funded technology news site The Information, has written her own take on the trend and she is, quite frankly, thrilled.

The trend isn't new, she says, quoting Stratechery founder Ben Thomson who said the newsletters-as-business coverage "officially arrived 2,352 days after Stratechery launched the Daily Update". What is new is easy-to-use billing and emailing infrastructure and, Jessica hopes, a change in how journalists are viewing the value of their work.

"Subscription businesses realign incentives. You have to make something valuable or important to earn money from readers, again and again. The beauty of the model is that the gap between the journalism you want to do and the journalism that is good for the business is gone."

This is very different from the click-driven paywall strategies that see publishers pushing reporters to write only the kind of stories that drive subscriptions. That approach, she believes, tells journalists that what they want to do doesn’t have any value. The paid newsletter does the opposite, "encouraging journalists to consider the economic value of their work—and of themselves."

Esther's written this for new digital publishing news and opinion site PubOps. Despite the challenges of COVID, publishers including The Athletic, The Conversation and Quartz have managed to turn traffic spikes into regular readers. Retention is about developing relationships based on trust, transparency and listening to, and acting on, reader needs.

On the other side of the Coronavirus coin, it looks like Hearst UK will need to use a big chunk of its cash reserves to weather the pandemic after it has reported losses of £2 million for 2019. The good news is Hearst has managed to avoid closures so far and its US parent has promised financial support if needed.

2020 - The year that just keeps on taking. It is being reported that the former editor of the Daily Mail and the former editor of the Daily Telegraph have been asked by our (in)Glorious Leader to head up the UK's communications regulator and public broadcaster respectively. You can hear me have a wee bit of a rant about this lunacy on this week's podcast 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

This week's podcast:

Director at Cognitive Publishing Roy Rowlands on working in a family publishing business with a trillion-pound audience, going all-digital with their B2B titles, and the benefits of being in Manchester. He also outlines how they've adapted in lockdown, including the reasons behind their decision not to go virtual with events.

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