Tuesday 28th June: NUJ accuses Reach of hypocrisy over pay inequality front page

June 28, 2022

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Peter. No new podcast episode this week as we released three last week: a Digital News Report 2022 Special, and a two-part Media Voices at Cannes series, kindly sponsored by Sovrn.

The Daily Mirror is one of the few left-leaning newspapers in the UK and a front page slamming fatcat pay awards in response to a government call for wage restraint is 100% on brand. The story rightly has a go at CEOs being paid, on average, 86 times more that their staff while ordinary workers are being told to tighten their belts.

Unfortunately for Mirror publisher Reach, a 3% pay offer made by the publisher has been rejected by leaders of the National Union of Journalists branch at Reach with the Union criticising Reach's own CEO, who is paid 107 times that of the average Reach worker.

It's way beyond the scope of this newsletter to tell publishers what to pay or journalists what to accept. But it has to be a mistake to go hot and heavy on inflated executive salaries when, 1. you're offering your staff 3% and 2. your editorial line wildly contradicts your own executive pay policies.

Foundry, the B2B publisher formerly known as IDG, wants to build a new reputation as a provider of data and marketing tech. Advertising is just 10% of Foundry’s revenue, compared with 55% from data and software and 20% from marketing services. The rest comes from events. In this interview, company president Kumaran Ramanathan talks about the pivot away from publishing.

The network of free, local newsletters from Axios, has surpassed 1 million email subscribers across its 21 locations. The publisher plans three more cities by the end of July and is projecting $10 million in revenue by the end of the year - not at all bad for a publishing project that's less than two years old.

Esther has been talking to HistoryExtra’s David Musgrove on the 15th anniversary of the award-winning podcast. As HistoryExtra celebrates this amazing birthday (well over 100 in podcast years) it has also just racked up 150 million listens, just over a year after it made the 100 million milestone.

This week's podcasts

I went to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France and caught up with attendees to find out what publishers and agencies are talking about this summer(clean rooms, cookies and diversity), and how optimistic they are about the next few years. Featuring Brian Morrissey, Dominic Perkins, Jessica Jacobs, James Prudhomme, and more.

One of the people I spoke to last week was Jessica Jacobs from international agency Incubeta. They are offering their own insights from Cannes Lions in this free Insider webinar. It's on this morning at 9.30 BST and again at 1pm EST. You can register here.