Tuesday 30th July: Lessons from the creator economy: allowing talent to operate like creators

Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Chris. This is the last daily newsletter I’ll be writing for you fine folks — but it’s not goodbye. See you on the other side, and please do stay in touch!

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I’m delighted that my last daily newsletter gets to include a top story from someone who I might never have even met without having done it for so many years. Charlotte Henry is — like so many of our readers — as much a part of Media Voices as any of the three of us at this point: we’re a community as much as a business. And, with this last issue of LFTCE (though absolutely not the last collab between her and Media Voices), she’s taking an in-depth look at how creators are adding value to publications without losing their individual equity:

“It shows the value of journalists being creators and intrapreneurs – building something within a pre-existing company. It helps both the individual journalist and the publication. “The FT gives me a platform, or authority from which to speak,” explains [the Financial Times’] Claer Barrett.”

Claer won Newsletter of the Year at last week’s Publisher Newsletter Awards for ‘Sort Your Financial Life Out with Claer Barrett’, so she knows what she’s talking about. At Media Voices we’ve always been (and always will be) an advocate for the journalist as individual, valuable in their own right, so this was music to my ears.

I know the media industry is cyclical but this is ridiculous; you could have written this headline two, five, or even ten years ago. The body of the article, though, is a really nicely expressed look at the growth (and then falling away, and then growth, and then falling away, and then growth etc.) of podcasting that explores both the popularity of the medium, and perhaps where it goes next.

I remember being on a media tour up to The Herald in Glasgow a few years ago, where the international delegates were fascinated by the idea that a subset of its audience was paying for ad-free digital news. Well, now that idea is getting a second wind — and the author of this article thinks it’s due to increased propensity to pay and increasing concern around privacy online. I agree!

And for the last, the very last, story I’m ever going to include in this daily newsletter, I’m looking to the very oldest story in the book — the contentious relationship between tech companies and publishers. This cold war will outlast this daily newsletter, you and me, and probably the lifetime of our sun.

We’re doing a proper farewell edition of this daily newsletter so this isn’t the last time you’ll hear from me before breakfast, but from the bottom of my heart thank you so much for being a subscriber. You’re all diamonds ❤️

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