Thursday 31st August: Inspiration from a smart recipe app

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Peter included a piece yesterday looking at publishers who were building their own AI chatbots. I wanted to highlight this one today because I thought it was a brilliant example of how publishers could use AI in a way that was really helpful to readers.

Samsung has used a recipe database it acquired to create this ‘AI-powered’ app. It can provide recipe recommendations based on available food items, and has a "personalise recipe" function that uses the AI to alter recipes recipes and create vegan or vegetarian version. It also uses AI to create recommendations for individualised daily meal plans based on dietary preferences and favourite cuisine types.

This goes back to something the publishers in our AI report said: if you have organised data, whether that’s recipes, school rankings or football scores, there will be ways of implementing AI that is useful to readers rather than just jumping on the generative AI bandwagon.

Vox Media’s sports network SB Nation, has unveiled two paid newsletters for American football fans. It’s SB Nation’s first venture into paid products, with the twice-weekly newsletters costing $50 for a subscription. I love seeing experiments like this from publishers and hope it’ll encourage others to try paid newsletters, too.

This was well timed as planning is well under way for our Publisher Newsletter and Publisher Podcast Summits for 2024. Cobus Heyl talks with Victoria Matey, an international event psychology advisor, about what makes a memorable event people will both find useful and want to attend again from the human psychology perspective.

Newsletter-first local news outlet Manchester Mill is preparing to expand across the UK after being valued at £1.75m by a group of investors including the former New York Times boss Mark Thompson. We’re huge fans of the Mill; their model and their ethos, and wish them all the best with the expansion. “We’ve shown in the past few years that very high quality reader-funded local media is possible,” Joshi Herrmann said. “What we’ve done is build up an unusually zealous and committed number of readers who want better coverage, better writing, better investigative writing.”

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