Welcome to April! This newsletter is a Fools-free zone, brought to you by Chris. We're taking an Easter break, but will be back in your inbox next Tues.

31 effective subscriber-retention ideas to steal — www.americanpressinstitute.org

We're combining two stories here under the banner of 'membership best practice', based on surveys of people working in the industry. The first, this API-published listicle contains over 30 ideas of how to limit churn and avoid the dreaded 'zombie subscriber'. Some seem like common sense, but there are some insights in there as to how the length of the first subscription purchased influences retention rate.

The second is this story from What's New In Publishing, titled: '11 ways to make your membership comms more relevant than ever'. There are, again, some obvious ideas in there, but the key takeaway for me was the idea that while some audience habits around digital news consumption have changed, many of the same obstacles to retaining members remain:

"Traffic levels to websites are rising, as members are increasingly searching for content digitally to support their learning and development. But, what is important to note is that bounce rates (a blunt instrument, yes, but an interesting indicator) are not improving, meaning that more attention needs to be given to the customer journey when people actually arrive at the site."

Liz Gerard investigates press bigotry and the claim Meghan Markle coverage was racist — www.pressgazette.co.uk

Liz Gerard - who you should be following on Twitter - excoriates the people who claim the UK press isn't inherently bigoted for Press Gazette. Worth a read even if you, as a smart person, know the press is bigoted. Think of it as stoking the flames of indignation for anyone that would try to claim some papers aren’t racist by design.

For creative publishers, micropayments are an invitation, not a cautionary tale — www.medialyte.xyz

No-one can decide if micropayments for news are viable. For that matter, nobody can decide if 'news' is even a product in and of itself. But this article from Mark Stenberg argues that micropayments could work - provided we break free from our current thinking around them.

Heir to O? Drew Barrymore launches lifestyle magazine — www.theguardian.com

Listen. This might just be another vanity project from a celebrity to hawk her own products, like with goop magazine. But we're always happy to see there's life left in print launches (and maybe there'll be a Charlie's Angels retrospective).

Thursday throwback:

Facebook WTF? - Media Voices Podcast — voices.media

From 2018, we ask what Facebook thought it was up to. The more things change, the more they stay the same... "In this special episode of Media Voices, the team rattle through some news before doing a deep-dive into the realities of Facebook killing the news industry (again)."

Transcripts Archives — voices.media

We have a growing transcripts archive which is being kept up to date by the lovely Rachael Davies. If you'd like to read any of our interviews instead of/as well as listening to them, they each have a transcript linked from the main episode page, or find it in our archive here.