Good morning! This morning's media roundup is brought to you by Chris.

“Convert subscribers from print to pixels”: Publisher reduces churn to a “phenomenal” 1% after replacing print edition with digital replica — whatsnewinpublishing.com

Let's say that one again - a one (1) percent rate of churn. As this article points out, that "means that you expect your customers to be around for 100 months, which is over eight years, which is phenomenal." In an industry where the wisdom is that it costs around five times as much to attract a new customer as to retain an existing one, that's a victory on two fronts.

What's more impressive is the way the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette got to that point. It ditched print for the most part, saving the cost of print production and distribution, to get its audience habituated to reading digitally. But in doing so they had to think outside the box - by physically lending their subscribers iPads for the duration of their subscription. That's one hell of an initial outlay, as the article makes clear:

"They saw encouraging results in the third try in which they just gave an $800 iPad Pro to readers and backed that up with one-on-one training sessions. Subscribers were individually guided on how to consume news on the device.  [Publisher] Walter Hussman acknowledged it was expensive, 'It’s costing probably, I think the last estimate was $90 per subscriber to do all that training,' he said. 'But it worked.'"

What's especially interesting is in how the strategy has bucked some long-established pieces of received wisdom about digital editions. Namely, that skeuomorphism is doomed to failure, and that tablet editions are a tertiary considerations at best. So there you go, publishers - hand iPads out to save your businesses. Simple.

Television is making more documentaries than ever - but skipping the journalism — www.cjr.org

The reemergence of the documentary as a medium can't be understated. From the true crime juggernauts to explainers like Vox's, um, Explained on Netflix, the documentary is increasingly how we get our fact fix offline. However, as this CJR article sets out, the price of access to the celebrities at the heart of some factual series is the loosening of journalistic rules - to the detriment of the medium and the public.

Meredith, an overachiever in the magazine business, now finds itself in trouble — www.poynter.org

In this week's episode we spoke of Future plc's successes in launching new brands around its portfolio. It was a small speck of good news amid a lot of bad times for newspapers. Now, facing layoffs, declining stock prices and the recession, the magazine industry’s brightest star Meredith is heading in the wrong direction.

Twitter’s ‘Birdwatch’ looks like a new attempt to root out propaganda and misinformation — www.theverge.com

Twitter is slap in the middle of a (deserved) controversy about its seemingly selective application of rules regarding threats of violence. Outside of that, though, it has taken a step forward in countering misinformation on its platform recently - and it seems like there's a more robust feature to use community moderation to shout down misinfo in the works.

This week's podcast:

The Week Junior Editor in Chief Anna Bassi on why a print magazine for kids is growing strongly — voices.media

This week, we hear from Anna Bassi, Editor in Chief of The Week Junior. They’ve had a milestone couple of months, recently releasing their 250th issue and increasing circulation during lockdown by 22% year on year. She talks about why a print magazine for children is doing so well in 2020, how they approach really difficult topics like protests and pandemics, and how their podcast is doing a year on.

Thank you for your support — ko-fi.com

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