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Monday 4th September: Local news giants may not be worth saving.
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Michael Gilson, former editor of news titles now owned by National World and Newsquest, is arguing in Press Gazette that the help the local news industry needs to survive would be better directed away from the few major publishing companies that dominate the sector.
His argument is that we focus our energies on what we have now instead of what we could have: “At almost all levels that is a dismal scene dominated by a handful of husk-like companies led by overpaid chief execs employing ever-decreasing numbers of low-paid but blameless reporters to populate substandard platforms.”
For Gilson, the companies that dominate local news in the UK are not only not worth saving, they are a distraction from dicussions about ways that new journalism might emerge. In other words. “There is much to be said for letting the whole rotting edifice collapse and see what crawls from the rubble.” Ooooft!
Digiday is reporting that a collection of industry reports on the podcast market in the last few weeks are revealing an increase in both listener numbers and advertising spend. Although growth is not what it was, with bigger players rebalancing some of the excessive deals of the book times, the industry is still growing.
The Reuters Institute is asking if journalism is still a dream job? They say many young people around the world still embrace it as an opportunity to investigate corruption, witness history and report on injustice. But for many toxicity, economic instability or burnout are taking their toll.
If you had to draw a unicorn, what would it look like? In a publishing strategies session I run, I ask the group to describe the mythical beast and the aswers range from a My Little Pony character to something one of the Four Riders of the Apocalypse would ride. Just like unicorns, perfect subscriptions strategies don’t exist and we all have a different vision of what perfect looks like.
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