Thursday 25th April: Five talking points from Perugia

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One day — one day — the Media Voices team will get ourselves in gear and go to the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. Until then we have to satisfy ourselves with the many excellent write-ups from people who were there or watching remotely, including this one from journalism.co.uk which pulls out some fascinating lessons and talking points from this year’s festival.

I particularly liked the section with practical advice on engaging audiences from The Daily Maverick and its newsletters: “Your Questions Answered is an elections guide newsletter that also goes out to 60,000 people and it has among the strongest open rate at the organisation at around 60-70 per cent on average. It found that readers wanted more basic questions answered than the editorial team anticipated.”

There’s plenty more in there, from the (still!) contentious relationship betwixt platforms and publishers to how some newspapers are engaging with AI. My favourite part, as you might expect, is the bit that explains why podcasts remain a growth industry. Go team podcast!

The long-running saga of TikTok’s ban has a new chapter, as the US Senate has voted to effectively ban the platform in the US. As Adam Tinworth points out, this is unprecedented in a number of ways, not least the fact that social media teams are going to have to contend with the possibility a platform that was being used for audience engagement suddenly vanishes as a result of a vast geopolitical game.

Oh wow, Ofcom seems to have finally stopped simply talking about GB News’ problematic use of politicians as news presenters. Now, instead, it’s talking about it but just a tiny bit louder. Honestly, what is the point of a regulator that seems so opposed to actually doing any regulation? This isn’t how you deal with distrust in the media.

Joy of joys! It’s a practical story with plenty of applicable lessons. As the introduction makes clear, Poynter had never combined its training and newsletters — until this year. I was particularly interested in how the team goes about teaching the course attendees how to make newsletters more visually interesting. It’s a welcome reminder that journalists can add new strings to their bows through training (and that newsletters are still vital to business models, too).

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