Tuesday 22nd September: The personal role of the editor in driving subscriptions

September 22, 2020

Good morning (or afternoon, or evening)! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Chris.

Faced with the reality of Covid's acceleration of media business change, the director of the Spanish news website eldiario.es Ignacio Escolar didn't sugar-coat the situation in a direct appeal to its readers. As a result, the site picked up 20,000 new members in one month following an appeal to support the investigative journalism for which the site is known.

"Reader revenue accounts for more than half of total revenue... It is a real shift compared to March when advertising was around two-thirds of its total revenue source. But even now with around 56k active members, the churn rate is just around one per cent."

That personal appeal is something we've seen a lot in the English-speaking world. Famously the Guardian liberally plastered its pages with emotive language around survival and then sustainability, and recently the editor of The Yorkshire Post James Mitchinson made a similar appeal to its readers using much of the same language. The lesson to take away? Altruism is one of the driving factors for people choosing to sign up to news subscriptions - and when editors appeal to that altruism, good things can happen.

If you ever needed an example of how algorithms reflect the biases - conscious and unconscious - of their creators, here it is. Despite the team at Twitter apparently having tested it, the photo cropping tool prioritises white people over Black people. If something this simple can get it wrong, imagine how badly newsfeed algorithms reflect the wider public.

Another Plus has entered the arena. Discovery is seeking to appeal to an audience that skews younger than its traditional viewership, and to that end Discovery+ will feature ad-supported and ad-free tiers and - crucially - carry no more than five minutes of ads per hour of programming.

You can tell that Spotify's entry into the podcasting world is a real media endeavour - because it's already had an honest-to-goodness content controversy. Several of Joe Rogan's past podcasts were excised from the archive when he joined the platform; now Spotify employees are reportedly angling for editorial control. So does this mean that Spotify is now officially a publisher, with all the responsibilities that entails? (The answer's yes).

This week's podcast:

This week, we hear from Tobi Oredein, Co-Founder and CEO of Black Ballad, a UK-based lifestyle platform for Black British women. She talked about what drove her to found the site, why they decided to launch memberships ahead of the curve in 2016, and the impact of their recent HuffPost takeover.

We're not as big a bunch of coffee aficionados as Dale Cooper, but we always appreciate you kicking us a few quid to keep us caffeinated up and ready for the next big media mystery. Coop said "every day, once a day, give yourself a present" - but we don't mind if you want to give us one instead, using the Ko-Fi link above.