Welcome to your Thursday! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Chris.

Hearst UK’s Digital Spy launches its very first digital magazine, exclusively available on Apple News+ — whatsnewinpublishing.com

Digital Spy is expanding, launching its first ever digital magazine. The TV and movie-based site sees up to 28 million unique visitors every month, but has set its sights on the green pastures of... Apple News+. It's a hell of a vote of confidence for the platform, and one that has led to some real head-scratching among those of us who are sceptical of proprietary digital magazine formats and Apple News+.

Representatives of Digital Spy and Hearst UK said: "The Apple News+ platform gives our readers – who we know are hungry for ever more high-quality entertainment content – a great ecosystem to consume a plethora of deeper investigations, exclusive features, videos and interactive extras." They also said, crucially, that it was partly in service of driving sign-ups to Apple News+, suggesting that Hearst UK has received favourable terms from the platform.

We want this to succeed, as we do all publishing efforts. This could well be the test of whether exclusive content and a native format is enough to convince audiences that Apple News+ isn't just as good a way of reading, but a better one. Ultimately, nothing else will convince audiences to add a new platform to their reading habits.

After quitting Deadspin in protest, they’re starting a new site — www.nytimes.com

Deadspin is a textbook example of mismanagement, with its parent company G/O Media failing to understand its appeal. Now the journalists who took part in a staff rebellion last year are starting Defector Media, with a different culture and model.

The Athletic looking to boost subscribers with cross-marketing deals — frntofficesport.com

We're slightly suspicious of the underlying reasons behind The Athletic's early reported subscription success - and specifically the retention figures it's claimed. Time will tell if free trials and partnerships with T-Mobile are enough to ensure its longevity.

A growing group of journalists has cut back on Twitter, or abandoned it entirely — www.poynter.org

Journalists have a love/hate relationship with the Twitter hellscape, but find it useful as a newswire or community. This piece on Poynter makes the case for cutting back on Twitter, and recognising how small it is relative to our total potential audience.

Thursday throwback:

The Overtake editor Robyn Vinter on overcoming the biggest challenges in local news — voices.media

Founder and editor of The Overtake Robyn Vinter has a fascinating approach to launching local news sites. This throwback episode seems more relevant now, with the growing threat of news deserts, than it did when we published it.

Your chance to lead the Conversation — voices.media

We have an amazingly well-connected, fantastically clever and incandescently beautiful audience. If you have a product or service you think they need to hear about, enquire here about a sponsored Conversations episode.