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Prioritizing subscribers, not fly-by readers, Skift is “debranding” — www.niemanlab.org

How much of the clutter and branding on your site would you be willing to strip away in service of a better reading experience? I'd certainly be reluctant to lose our bold orange header!

Skift co-founder Rafat Ali tweeted earlier this week about Skift's 'debranding'. He explained that they had chosen to "radically simplify the design so the editorial & services we offer & promote for our partners shine through." They decided the two most important things are getting people to sign up for the newsletter, and promoting their subscription product Skift Pro.

We've read in recent years about sites stripping back advertising and the other clutter in favour of a better reading experience, but this is a step further. Rafat is usually pretty open about Skift's experiments, so we'll watch the results of this one with interest.

A guide to social branding on any newsroom budget — rjionline.org

Not feeling a full debranding just yet? This guide from ex-LA Times and Axios Audience Editor Adriana Lacey looks at how to make a social media branding guide for your newsroom, so that your brand looks the same on all social media posts. With tools like Canva, Projector, and Adobe Spark, brand guidelines are accessible to publishers of any size.

“The demand is definitely there”: How Social Spider is making local news commercially viable — voices.media

If you haven't had chance to listen to this week's podcast episode yet, we've done a write-up here. Social Spider is making the economics work for its five community newspapers, and thinks there's still plenty of demand for a print product done in the right way in the right place.

How an Asian business site attracted 30,000 subscribers by publishing one story a day — reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk

A 'less is more' story of a different kind. The Ken is a five-year-old pan-Asian digital news outlet that publishes just one online story every weekday. It's entirely subscription funded, and aims to bring a fresh approach to business stories for audiences in the region and beyond. We know from our time at TheMediaBriefing that there's a lot of power in focusing efforts on one good story a day.

This week's podcast:

Social Spider MD David Floyd on finding a better way to fund local news — voices.media

On this week’s episode of Media Voices we hear from David Floyd, MD of Social Spider, a community interest company that publishes five community newspapers in London. He tells us about finding a new model for local news – one that’s maybe commercially viable enough – and about why local news matters.

How robot journalism is powering the modern newsroom — voices.media

In this sponsored episode Cecilia Campbell of United Robots helps myth-bust some of the common fallacies about what robot journalism can – and can’t – do. To help illustrate what is possible we’re also joined by Ard Boer, Product Manager for Sport at NDC Mediagroep, who tells us how their sports team is making the most of robot journalism.