Wednesday 22nd November: What's top of mind for today's news leaders?

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There’s just two weeks to go until Mx3 AI; a live event in London from Media Voices and Media Makers Meet. The full agenda is now live, so if you’ve been sitting on the fence, take a look at how local news orgs, nationals, magazines and B2B publishers are getting to grips with AI.

In our first collaborative podcast with our friends at journalism.co.uk, we travelled to Newsrewired in London for a day of panels and workshops about the future of digital publishing. In a world of increasing possibilities and pressures, the central question of the day was this: how can we be selective and effective at innovating?

This isn’t just an episode for news publishers; there’s plenty in there about leadership, AI (of course), collaboration, subscriptions best practice and the must-win battles for publishers.

A huge thanks to Jacob for sharing the mic with us - do check out their weekly podcast as well, or the Newsrewired site for more detailed coverage of the day’s sessions.

This isn’t completely surprising given the shock that Jezebel’s closure caused. Four potential buyers have come out of the woodwork, with two submitting seven-figure offers to bring the site back to life. Former EiC Laura Bassett would return alongside most of the dozen-plus staff if the frontrunning deal goes through, but I can’t help feeling a little sorry for the rollercoaster ride the team must have been on the past few weeks.

“Let me tell you a story about the most cynical, amoral and irresponsible person who has ever held down a job in media publishing or broadcasting…” It’s difficult to write a summary here without ruining the point of the piece, so I’ll simply say, it’s not Elon Musk. Oh, and the header image has put me off spaghetti for a while.

So apparently Black Friday has now morphed into Black Friday [week], or even [month] from some overenthusiastic retailers. But if you have plans to run a sale this coming Friday, here’s some very useful benchmarking from The Audiencers, as well as some best practice tips.

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