Thursday 30th May: London Evening Standard to close daily newspaper

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Two short weeks remain until the Publisher Podcast & Newsletter Summit — and here are the amazing speakers on the newsletter stream! If you’re a publisher with podcasts, this is the conference for you.

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The Evening Standard is set to ditch its daily print paper. Yes, it’ll be replaced in part by a weekly edition, but it’s still the end of an era. The paper went free in 2009, and has been a regular presence in the capital for as long as I can remember. The Publisher Podcast Awards were once even on its front cover. But now — faced with rising paper costs and widespread availability of wifi on the tube — it’s no longer viable. And that’s worrying, because in August of last year the company admitted its online revenue was performing “poorly”, suggesting that even this cost-saving move will not be enough to stem the tide.

“Paul Kanareck, the newspaper’s chair, told staff on Wednesday morning: ‘The substantial losses accruing from the current operations are not sustainable. Therefore, we plan to consult with our staff and external stakeholders to reshape the business, return to profitability and secure the long-term future of the number one news brand in London.’”

Inevitably this means there will be a number of job losses, for journalists, designers and distributors. As ever it won’t be the chair or the owner who will be hurt the most by a lack of strategic vision at the top levels of the business, but the people in the trenches. But hey, at least it gave George Osborne a job for a while 🙄

It’s here… the final version of the Publisher Podcast & Newsletter Summit agenda is live, and as of yesterday, officially un-threatened by train strikes! If you’ve been sitting on the fence, check out new sessions on packaging podcasts for sponsorship, what we can learn from newsletter-first publishers, and who will be sharing their lessons from award-winning podcasts. Plus our first experiment in lunchtime roundtables to help networking and problem-solving.

More licensing deals are coming between OpenAI and publishers. The latest tranche of media organisations include The Atlantic and Vox Media, who have agreed a deal by which OpenAI can license the publishers' archived content to train its AI models. I have a question about this, and would love an answer in the replies: what’s to stop OpenAI from refusing to extend the deal once its AI has been trained?

You know what will definitely, definitely turn BuzzFeed around? Appointing partisan idiots like Tucker Carlson to the position of columnist. Vivek Ramaswamy’s ridiculous suggestion has drawn the ire of Jonah Peretti, who has pushed back against the investor’s call for a pivot. Somewhat annoyingly Peretti points to the quality of its journalism as evidence — you know, the quality journalism created by BuzzFeed News, which was shuttered in 2023.

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