Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Esther.

More Americans are paying for online news — and those who do say they’re unlikely to stop — www.niemanlab.org

Time to change the narrative about people only ever paying for one news/content subscription. A growing number are now paying for more than one subscription, and in the US, more than a third of those who pay for online news have signed up for two or more subscriptions.

This change in behaviour is hugely encouraging (despite the UK lagging behind), and shows that the move towards paywalls over the past few years is paying off. It's not just those publishers who gate their coverage though; donations for news are also increasing.

Nieman Lab notes that the biggest winners tend to be the large national news brands, but we'll take a growth in willingness to pay as a win for now.

What we learned about Editors vs. Algorithms from 4,000 stories in Apple News — medium.com

If this doesn't convince you of the value of human editors, I don't know what will. It compares what is chosen by humans for the 'Top Stories' section and what was curated by the algorithm for the 'Trending Stories' section. Unsurprisingly, algorithms quickly fall into a pattern of Trump or celebrity news, whereas humans are much more balanced.

Caught in the mushy middle: How Quartz fell to earth — digiday.com

This is an excellent, in-depth piece about how Quartz - once a digital media darling - got caught up in the same 'mushy middle' space as many other digital brands like Mic and Mashable. "Not quite niche enough to be essential to a small group of readers, but not quite big enough to compete at scale."

Digital News Report 2020: How podcast consumption is changing — whatsnewinpublishing.com

My round-up of the key podcast-related learnings from DNR20. Of particular note is the growing number of people who contribute financially to a podcast. A much slimmed-down section from last year, but in fairness Reuters did release a whole report dedicated to news podcasts in December.

Throwback Thursday

Allure editor in chief Michelle Lee on representation in magazines — voices.media

2 years ago, we spoke to Allure's Michelle Lee about a gorgeous series of covers they'd released with Asian models. She put up a must-read Twitter thread this week about the ongoing work they are doing to improve representation, so this is a great time to re-surface our conversation.

Talking of financially supporting podcasts...you can now support our work with a virtual coffee! — ko-fi.com

We're 82% of the way to being able to cover our remote recording costs for the rest of the year! We'd love your help getting us over the line.