Monday 4th December: Tis the season to be jolly

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Esther. No new podcast episode today as we’re releasing a joint one with The Addition on the year in broadcast later this week, so keep your ears peeled.

It’s nearly time for Media Moments, our annual report looking at the biggest trends which have affected publishers this year. 2023’s edition will explore AI (of course), newsletters, podcasts, DE&I, subscriptions and more. Launching next week, but you can pre-register to get it sent straight to you once we hit ‘Go live’!

I’m going to kick off the week with a positive piece - very fitting given the UK has had a dusting of snow, our tree is up despite my toddler’s best attempts, and the first mulled wine of the season has been sipped. The Association of Online Publishers MD Richard Reeves has set out four reasons to be cheerful as we close out 2023.

What struck me reading through is how so many of the challenges the industry has faced over the past five or so years has acted as a bit of a refiner’s fire. Cultivating loyal audiences, increased collaboration, better quality content and sustainable diversification have all come from working through tougher times.

“Today, people working in digital publishing have a broader perspective on their organisations and the wider industry, how their work contributes to the success of both, and what they can do to affect change,” Reeves points out in his conclusion. Happy Monday!

More good news! The Guardian’s publishing director Mylene Sylvestre told a recent WAN-IFRA Summit about how they’ve managed to keep print subscriptions at a stable level, despite wider structural decline of national newspapers in the UK. Their top strategy? Investing time and money in investigative journalism.

Some interesting points about increased engagement from app users on here, although as we’ve said before, apps are an excellent way of building habits with superfans rather than reaching tonnes of new readers. As the cost of building apps continues to come down and people seem to be getting fed up of social media, I do wonder if that window of opportunity is opening up again for some publishers.

I’d definitely classify myself as a news avoider now (something we’ve spoken about in our community recently) so this was an absolutely fascinating read. Three in five news avoiders are women, and mothers in particular have said they avoid the news because it feels like an endless cycle of doom and gloom. One thing they didn’t talk about was the impact of Covid, which I feel was the starting point for my own avoidance after basically binging the news constantly. Anyway, that’s one for another time.

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