Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Chris. If you missed yesterday's email, it may have gone into your spam filter. If so, please do add us to your whitelist! Yesterday's issue can be found here.

R.I.P. Civil — Lessons from a failed journalism startup — www.poynter.org

Civil - the blockchain-backed attempt to fund burgeoning digital news sites - is shuttering. A well-intentioned project designed to allow the public to support sites by purchasing blockchain-backed 'tokens' ultimately never made the process of actually buying those tokens as user-friendly as it needed to be. Launching officially right before the wind went out of the blockchain sails didn't help, either.

It's a real shame, too. The project was ambitious on seemed to be teetering on the edge of success for some time, with a raft of very smart people attached to provide guidance. It seemed to play into the twin trends of accountability and direct reader revenue, and at the start was poised to allow the outlets it helped fund to work alongside the larger giants in the field. Ultimately, Civil serves as both testament to the good work that can be done when smart altruists put their heads together, and to the difficulties of translating good intentions into practice. There are worse legacies.

'Hey Beeb': new BBC digital assistant gets Northern male accent — www.theguardian.com

Speaking of good intentions and UX - the team behind the BBC's digital assistant Beeb has made the correct choice and given it a Northern accent (the best accent). The thinking behind doing so is interesting - it seeks to help Beeb stand out in what is sure to be an ever-more crowded field. So while platforms and newspapers are developing their own skills, it's worth bearing in mind that USP cannot be neglected when it comes to

Covid-19 crisis drives more than a million new digital subs for leading news providers — www.pressgazette.co.uk

The rich get richer - and it's the same for newspapers (finally). Press Gazette report that Covid-19 has driven over a million digital subs for ten English-language newspapers. The NYT is far and away the biggest winner, but titles like the Financial Times and the Guardian are doing well too. Combine that with the indications that subscribers who signed up due to Covid-19 coverage are more likely to stick around (which I don't quite buy yet...), and you have a nice positive news story for the industry. Happy Thursday!

AgriBriefing and asking the right questions — inpublishing.co.uk

There's tragically no mention of Briefing Media's most celebrated spin-off (Media Voices) in this interview with AgriBriefing's CEO Rory Brown, but you won't find better advice on how to spot opportunities in the publishing market than in here.

Throwback Thursday:

Trump Inc. Senior Producer Meg Cramer on the opportunities of a political podcast - Media Voices Podcast — voices.media

It's a blast from the pod-past this week, as Meg Cramer - Senior Producer of the Trump, Inc. podcast - takes us back to a simpler time when investigations into the US president cheating at golf were big news.