Thursday 4th August: "Deliver what you can’t get on the internet"

August 05, 2021

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We missed last month and I'm no fan of celebrity culture or the publications it's spawned (or was it the publications that spawned the culture?) But there's some real publishing wisdom in this interview with People editor Dan Wakeford.

His focus on brand trust and what it takes to build and maintain it works whatever corner of the media market you operate in, from celebrity interviews to B2B case studies.

"At a time when there’s so much distrust in the media, our journalistic rigour and our brand equity [bring] a sense of authority to the content that we produce."

Maintaining a circulation of more than 3 million in a market awash with free celebrity information, Wakeford also has views on his competition.

“They don’t provide anything you can’t get anywhere else,” he says. “The internet provides rumours, speculation and fun. You have to invest in journalism and magazine craft and reporting [to] deliver what you can’t get on the internet.”

Just goes to show, publishing is publishing.

We know that digital adoption accelerated during the pandemic and the US Media Audience Demographics report is showing that, for the first time, adoption of digital media has overtaken traditional media. All digital media showed usage growth, while the opposite is true for legacy media. Readership of digital newspapers and periodicals registered the largest jump.

The Continent is a pan-African weekly distributed on WhatsApp and Signal. Designed to be read on a mobile screen, it features short news pieces of 250 to 400 words with a few longer pieces of about 900 words. Over 50+ issues it has built a subscriber base of 11,000 subscribers receiving the publication for free every week.

It's tempting to see subscriber growth at The New York Times as an inevitability. But stop for a second and consider that it expects to add as many subs this year as it did in 2019, when the Orange Man Baby was still making the news and the pandemic hadn't crushed the global economy.

Podcast throwback:

My Thursday throwback is Mental Floss Editor in Chief Erin McCarthy from back in May when Mental Floss was about to celebrate its 20th anniversary. We spoke about how the magazine started in a university dorm room, its mission to help people feel smarter, and how the team decides what to cover.

Ko-Fi contributions have really helped us cover our costs over the last year. We love one-offs, but we've also introduced a monthly subscription option to make it easier for our lovely listeners to contribute regularly. It's just like buying us a virtual coffee but you can hit the 'Monthly' button to make use happy over and over and over. 💛💛💛