Wednesday 26th October: Channel 4 and the lesser of two evils

October 26, 2022

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

British publicly-owned broadcaster Channel 4 is exploring whether it could be acquired by a non-profit trust as an alternative to a commercial privatisation, the Telegraph reported on Saturday. This would be the least bad of a few options that have been forced upon the broadcaster by the UK government (though it's far from optimal).

Those of you with short-term memory impairment might remember the UK government was seeking to privatise the channel, and accidentally let slip a few times that it was doing it for vindictive rather than monetary reasons. Now, though? It's all change again in Downing Street, so who knows?

Anyway, it's still early days: "The report said the broadcaster is considering whether it could raise money from foundations and charities but added that discussions are at an early stage and have not yet progressed to talks with potential backers. Any such deal is expected to require hundreds of millions of pounds."

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Journalists are excellent storytellers, but that doesn’t always translate naturally to podcasting. Although many of the skills can be easily built up, staff still need the right support in order to sound comfortable and confident. Christopher Phin shares his advice for publishers looking to put their editorial talent in front of a microphone. He's also narrated the article for us if you'd rather listen.

YouTube and Facebook fared better in the experiment - but that's not saying much. Look, managing and moderating misinformation is a hard task, nobody's going to argue with that. But if you want to be a global social network, you best find a way to grapple with it.

All analysts agree on the definition of time spent - but how do you go about factoring context in the equation? Time spent on page is a useful metric, but it is nuanced. Value varies by publisher, user, and context. How do you go about squaring that circle?

This week's podcast:

One of the oldest digital delivery systems of all has continued to dominate industry headlines in 2022 as publishers rethink the way they work with email newsletters. This week we're joined by Adweek's Senior Media Reporter Mark Stenberg to explore newsletter trends, from worldwide readership to how creators are driving publisher strategies.

There's just over a month until we're setting loose our annual report on you all. If you'd like to pre-register to get it as soon as it's live on Wednesday 30th November, you can sign up here. It's excellent bedtime reading 😉