Wednesday 12th October: The best insights from this year's Pub Pod Summit

October 12, 2022

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Chris.

Bron Maher's done a great job here of condensing some of the lessons from our Summit last week into a single article. I should know - I'm still digesting a lot of what our speakers had to say about strategy, editing tips, and monetisation around podcasts. So it's wonderful to see some of the day's lessons in one place, including my favourite piece of advice from the entire event.

Chris Stone off've the New Statesman said: "Every publisher I’ve worked for where we’ve launched audio or video, there’s always been a temptation for the new thing to exist over there somewhere. And we’ve always benefited when we’ve worked to bring that new thing more closely into the newsroom – so into the editorial meetings, into the commercial meetings, and to understand where that fits within your portfolio."

Because podcasting is both an editorial product and a revenue driver, the temptation might be to consider those separate areas of discussion entirely. And while that's true to an extent, the reality is that podcasting shouldn't be siloed, but considered holistically as part of a wider publisher strategy.

I for one simply can't - nay, won't - believe that The Sun (a sister title to the defunct News of the World which was closed down due to phone hacking accusations, and which has itself paid out loads of cash to people who have merely accused it of phone hacking) would have done this. After all, it's always denied it, and The Sun wouldn't lie to us, now, would it.

It was ridiculous to halt ad sales on any platform during the Queen's funeral. But it seems the Mirror might have been hit by a problem not of its own making here, as digital advertisers held back on spending during the nationwide Liz II grief-athlon.

It has been ten months since The New York Times agreed to acquire The Athletic for $550 million. That's a silly, silly figure to have paid for an organisation that really didn't seem to have a plan beyond 'get as many people on our books as possible and then sell' - but this is a good explanation of why the NYT might have recognised the grift and still considered The Athletic a good purchase.

New episode:

For this next season of the Media Voices Podcast, kindly sponsored by Poool, we’ll be publishing ten episodes exploring the biggest trends of 2022 and how they affect publishers. For this episode, we're joined by by Chris Jansen, Head of Local News, Global Partnerships at Google to talk about the state of local news in 2022 and beyond.

Our annual Media Moments report brings together the key events which have shaped the media and publishing industry this year, from the boom and bust cycles of the advertising market to news fatigue, the increasing prominence of climate coverage, and the impact of shifting trust. Media Moments 2022 will be launching on November 30th, but you can pre-register here to get it sent straight to you as soon as it goes live.