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- Tuesday 12th December: Media Moments 2023 is here
Tuesday 12th December: Media Moments 2023 is here
Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Peter.
We’re delighted to be releasing the 2023 edition of Media Moments this morning, our annual report taking a look at key events which have shaped the media and publishing landscape across the last 12 months. This year we are partnering with Media Makers Meet (Mx3) following their acquisition of What’s New in Publishing.
From the maturation of newsletter strategies to a renewed focus on retention, platform relationships turning sour and the opportunities of a print ‘revival’, Media Moments 2023 brings together the most meaningful trends together in one place, with plenty of case studies looking at successful – and not so successful – initiatives across the year.
The report covers ten subject areas: print, AI, newsletters, podcasts, subscriptions, platforms, local news, DE&I, broadcast and trust. Each chapter has a corresponding podcast episode, which you can listen to on our website or by searching ‘Media Voices‘ on your podcast app of choice.
Download Media Moments 2023 here. It’s free, but without a sponsor this year, we’re grateful for any contribution you can make to help us fund it.
Looking back, things must be pretty bad for this to have been the worst year in digital media history. But as Mark Stenberg points out in his Medialyte newsletter, we’ve seen Condé Nast, The Washington Post, Recurrent Ventures, Vox Media, G/O Media and Vice Media make significant staff cuts in the last month alone. As Mark says, with the year’s layoff total approaching 20,000, to say morale is low is an understatement.
And it’s looking like the dystopian AI-fueled future has arrived. According to Semafor, Tel Aviv-based Investing.com has increasingly been relying on AI to create its stories. The financial news and information site provides a mix of markets data and investing tips and trends, but these often appear to be ‘thinly-veiled copies’ of human-written stories that have appeared elsewhere. Yikes!
With all this chatter around Google paying the Canadian news industry to avoid harsher legislation, one commenter has questioned why lifestyle, arts and cultural coverage has completely missed out. “Isn’t that similarly deserving of preservation and compensation as the news?” So should other publishers be fighting for compensation too? Let us know in our community forum.
Elite is one of those words that has been hijacked by the culture warriors, but it’s used here in celebration of the aspirational nature of print magazines: buy a magazine, join a gang. Chris Black has written a lovely meditation on the joy of rediscovering print magazines, acknowledging that: “the presses never stopped. Some of you just needed to be reminded of their value.”
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