Here's to a good day! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Chris.

The Athletic says it hits 1 million subscribers after surviving sports shutdown — www.cnbc.com

I could not tell you why I'm so suspicious of The Athletic's success. On the one hand, it's doing everything we've considered best practice for publishers for years. It spent insane amounts of money to own a niche by snapping up some of the best talent in the sports world. It continued to invest in its membership-based approach by continuing its direct contact with subscribers even as sports shut down in the face of Covid. It's gone big on podcasts. On the other hand, its digital subscriber numbers rival those of some of the biggest general newspapers, and despite all that success it claims to turn a profit:

"The company makes more than $60 million in pure subscription revenue and has ad sales from podcasts. That’s enough to make our newsroom profitable,” said [founder] Mather. In other words, The Athletic, as a whole — when adding in sales and marketing, HR, cloud computing costs, and so on — isn’t profitable. But the company makes enough money to pay for all of its journalists and editors, including travel expenses and benefits. Mather and Hansmann have tried not to overextend the company by growing too aggressively, moving to new markets only after they’ve established profitability in existing ones."

And maybe it's that final bit that makes me suspicious. The Athletic's eyes aren't bigger than its belly; it's building upon foundations without going astronomical with costs, nor is it counterintuitively cutting its way to profitability from gigantic stature. That alone makes it stand apart from so many new digital publishing ventures of the past years. Maybe that's why I'm suspicious - because success in this space is a rarity.

Should the government use Section 230 to force the tech giants into paying for the news? — www.niemanlab.org

I'm sure it wasn't Joshua Benton's intention, but this article terrifies me. For Nieman Lab he examines a new paper which argues that Section 230 could potentially be used to compel Google and Facebook to support the news industry. The scary part? As he points out, regulation-by-lawsuit of this type has already led to the closure of Gawker, among other outlets, and this paves the way for more of the same.

Taboola and Outbrain end talks to merge after nearly a year — www.cnbc.com

♬ And so, the end is near

And so we face, the final clickbait ♬

The Taboola/Outbrain merger has collapsed as the two recommendation engine providers were unable to come to terms.

How the i newspaper doubled its Instagram following in a year — www.journalism.co.uk

Finally, a solid success story. As this article from journalism.co.uk points out, Instagram is set to overtake Twitter as a source for news fairly soon. Publishers, then, could do much worse than look to the i's track record on the platform - and happily this interview with its social media editor Tash Salmon sets that out in a digestible format.

This week's podcast:

Special: 6 things you missed over summer 2020 — voices.media

In this first episode back following an… eventful summer for media, the team discusses six topics you might have missed over the past month. Get the latest on Facebook & Google vs Australia, what difference mainstream podcast coverage could make, and what media leaders make of Vogue Business' reader revenue play.

Lessons from award-winning publisher podcasts: Digiday Podcast's Brian Morrissey — voices.media

Our stats show you've been loving this mini-series so far! In this episode Digiday's Brian Morrissey argues you need to build your podcast around what you do best, but be adaptable. Be clear on the job your podcast does for your business; think of it as a feature of your brand, not as a separate product.