Happy hump day 🐪! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Esther.

Won’t Subscribe — www.tbray.org

This piece by Tim Bray sets out nicely what I've seen many argue before, that paying for content is still a very immature market and publishers still have a lot of work to do.

He lists a number of publications he subscribes to, and the problem many of us face when we hit a paywall of a publication we aren't likely to visit very often. Call it subscription fatigue, reluctance to pay, or whatever you like.

“But wait,” says the Mr Manager of Bray's article. “You already subscribe to five publications, so you’ve proved you have a propensity to subscribe! You’re exactly my target market!”

"Wrong," Bray responds. "It’s exactly because I’ve done some subscribing that I’m just not gonna do any more."

There must be a better way to pay for content from sites that you might visit at best once a month; not enough to justify subscribing to but whose work you value on the occasions it's relevant.

Of course, this conversation always comes back to micropayments or bundling, both of which Bray highlights as having issues in themselves. But as he concludes, the only way forward is to figure out how to sell articles.

Verizon scrambling to unload HuffPost as losses mount — nypost.com

The telecom giant — which acquired the site formerly known as the Huffington Post as part of its $4.4 billion purchase of AOL in 2015 — has approached multiple digital-media companies during the past few months in a bid to get the property off its books as losses accelerate due to the coronavirus.

A new set of threats to the BBC — internal and external — challenges its role as anchor of U.K. media — www.niemanlab.org

It's always interesting reading about the BBC from the non-British point of view. This from Joshua Benton does a nice job of setting out what some of the challenges are for the Beeb, and gives an overview of the competitors circling around the more divided discourse in the UK. An essential read for non-Brits, and an enlightening one for us on the island.

Facebook leaks show Mark Zuckerberg defending his decisions to angry employees — www.theverge.com

If you're keeping up with the Facebook drama, this from Casey Newton at The Verge is a superb look at how Zuckerberg is attempting to steer HMS Facebook through some very choppy political waters. Also, give employees their free snacks back.

This week's podcast:

Director of Cognitive Publishing Roy Rowlands on going all-digital with B2B magazines — voices.media

Director at Cognitive Publishing Roy Rowlands on working in a family publishing business with a trillion-pound audience, going all-digital with their B2B titles, and the benefits of being in Manchester. He also outlines how they've adapted in lockdown, including the reasons behind their decision not to go virtual with events.

Lessons from award-winning publisher podcasts - Olive magazine’s Janine Ratcliffe — voices.media

The latest in our mini-series is live, featuring Janine Ratcliffe. She says your podcast doesn’t need to be super slick, but it does need to be a pleasant listening experience, care about commercial content every bit as much as you care about your regular episodes and the best publisher podcasts develop a life of their own.