Thursday 2nd December: Media Moments 2021 launches with stellar panel

December 02, 2021

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Peter.

We don't blow our own trumpets often but we hosted a panel dicussion yesterday to launch our Media Moments 2021 report and it was a cracker.

Chris, Esther and I were joined by former Digiday EIC and Rebooting creator Brian Morrissey, The Press Gazette's Charlotte Tobitt, Professor Lucy Kueng of the Reuters Institute and Dominic Perkins, ex Immediate Media and the new MD for the UK and Europe at our sponsors Sovrn. We talked about subscriptions newsletters, ecommerce and M&A activity. We even spoke about NFTs!

The big theme for me, tying together subscriptions, newsletters, M&As and even ecommerce was the flight to niche. If you missed the session, have a look at the Interhacktives Twitter thread or, watch out for a link to watch the entire session on YouTube, on demand.

Massive thanks to our publishing partners What’s New in Publishing and to our report sponsors Sovrn. You can download the report to read for yourself from The Media Voices website, Media Moments 2021.

Following Jack Dorsey's departure, Ben Thomson at Stratechery is asking if it's time for Twitter to revise its business model. His advice is to switch from a predominantly ad-funded model to a subscriber model, focusing on a core group of committed users rather than trying to grow active users. Ben himself advises caution around his own advice, but I think he might be on to something.

Following success collaborating on projects like the Pandora Papers, starting in January 2022, 16 state news agencies in the European Union will band together to create a "European Newsroom" to cover EU-wide issues. Participating countries include Germany, France, Spain and Italy, plus non EU states, Albania, Serbia and Slovenia. Wolfgang Blau commented on Twitter, "This is big. Slowly but surely, we’ll create an EU news media sphere. It’s time."

This is pretty parochial to the UK, but Andrew Marr's recent departure from the BBC after more than 20 years left everyone in media wondering where he would turn up besides already announced radio commitments. This is a big signing for the left-leaning New Statesman and interesting given Marr's comments that he was leaving the BBC to find his 'own voice' again.

This week's podcast:

Noema is a magazine looking at some of the biggest issues of the 21st century – AI, the climate crisis, the future of democracy and capitalism. Its Executive Editor Kathleen Miles tells us about the challenges of publishing into a potentially exclusive niche.

We've launched our latest annual report, Media Moments 2021, with our publishing partners What's New In Publishing and sponsor Sovrn. This year we dig into trends in platforms, advertising, subscriptions, eCommerce and more, alongside emerging technologies like the metaverse and NFTs. Download it for free now.