Thursday 7th December: Former Reach audience chief heads up newsletter launches

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Peter. Chris and I are at our Mx3AI event in London today - say hello if you’re there! If you can’t make it, we’ll be doing a podcast and Mx3 will be producing a special report from the event.

It’s nearly time for Media Moments, our annual report looking at the biggest trends which have affected publishers this year. 2023’s edition will explore AI (of course), newsletters, podcasts, DE&I, subscriptions and more. Launching next week, but you can pre-register to get it sent straight to you once we hit ‘Go live’!

Esther led the newsletter yesterday with a piece from Mill Media’s Birmingham Dispatch that slammed Reach’s approach to local news. Today I’m leading on news of 10 new local weekly newsletters to be launched in towns and cities in the North of England and headed up by Reach’s former audience chief Ed Walker.

The launch of a ‘Northern Hub’ will be funded with a ‘six-figure’ investment from left-leaning online magazine The Lead. Only four of the 10 locations have been announced - Blackpool, Bolton, Teesside and Stoke-on-Trent - but they will all focus on local journalism away from bigger cities like Manchester and Birmingham. “I think there’s a big challenge around what the future of journalism is in towns,“ said lead editor Walker.

Content from the newsletters will be periodically bundled together as special edition print newspapers to be distributed in the areas they cover. The outlet hopes to circulate 100,000 papers in the first half of 2024, although these will be seen primarily as a marketing and promotional vehicle for the newsletters.

Our upcoming annual report, Media Moments 2023, has chapters dedicated to the year in local news and newsletters. Pre-register here to get sent it as soon as it goes live next week.

As I mentioned, we’re at MX3AI today talking about all things AI and I’m sure the issue of AI transparency will come up. When it does, publishers will need to be aware of one more wrinkle they have to deal with in using generative AI. While readers absolutely want to know where and how AI is being used to generate the news they read, they trust content labelled as AI generated less than content that isn’t labelled at all. One step forwards, two steps back.

You knew already, but now the numbers are in. The Media Leader is reporting that X shed over 1 million daily UK users between May and October, according to figures from UK Online Measurement. The dwindling number of users still on there have also significantly decreased their usage: total monthly minutes spent on the platform declined by 16% over those five months. Anyone willing to bet against the decline speeding up in 2024?

Twitter’s demise doesn’t mean Threads is a guaranteed success. Digiday is reporting that, although some major news organisations are seeing engagement growing on Meta’s six-month old Twitter killer, they’re not ready to invest heavily. “For now, Threads remains a place for experimentation,” writes Sara Guaglione for Digiday ”News orgs are seeing what posts resonate with their audiences — judging by likes, replies and referral traffic, as no other metrics are available to them.”

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