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- Tuesday 7th March: Quality is key to DC Thomson's 25,000 subscriber milestone
Tuesday 7th March: Quality is key to DC Thomson's 25,000 subscriber milestone
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I'm actually going to link to two stories about this milestone from DC Thomson. The first, linked above, is from the INMA and looks at how the shift in the newsroom happened in order to achieve the goal of 25,000 paid subscribers in just 18 months.
The other I actually read first in print in InPublishing and have dug the online link out for. It's a fantastic interview with EiC Frank O'Donnell where he goes much more into the why of the decision (although please note this was written before last month's redundancies were announced). I wanted to include it for this quote about having to up the quality of the content before charging for it:
“What I see with a lot of publishers is that they put a paywall up, but the content is pretty much the content they had before the paywall, so they’re just saying to people you now need to pay. We’ve tried very hard to increase the quality by giving people more time to write it, by demanding more, by using tools that are available: data, graphics, different story-telling formats.”
Growth is certainly not slow at slow news start-up Tortoise. Listener numbers at the 'audio-first' publication have grown 90%, not including numbers from their viral hit Sweet Bobby. They also have some thoughtful explanations about why their listenership skews female - a very unusual trait for a newsroom.
Most of the large social media companies have released premium subscription products within the past year. I initially chalked this up to wanting to jump on the reader revenue bandwagon, but this from Alex Kantrowitz offers wider context around the trend. Basically, platforms can't rely on 'normal' people for content generation any more - most now post too infrequently and are too boring. Instead, it's the 'professional creators' who are keeping things ticking over.
I don't know if this counts as a newsgame in quite the way Chris intended to encourage news publishers, but this launch of WaPo's first in-house game is nonetheless interesting. "On the Record" is a news quiz that tests readers' knowledge of the week's top stories. Not one for the news avoiders then...
TIME was 100 last week, and we took the chance to speak to its Editor In Chief and Executive Chairman Edward Felsenthal about how the publication made it to its centenary. He tells us about the tradition of innovation at TIME, building trust with global audiences, and how legacy is not a bad word in magazines.
