Wednesday 5th January: The Smiths launch a new global news challenger

January 05, 2022

Morning all! Missed you over the festive period. Today's newsletter is brought to you by Chris.

Bloomberg Media's CEO Justin Smith is stepping down to launch a new global news organisation. Details are still sparse, since the Wall Street Journal only broke the news yesterday, but one thing's for sure - he's building an extremely credible leadership team. The NYT's Ben Smith, himself no stranger to breaking media news, is along for the ride as well.

The last thing we'd do is bet against the Smiths. These charming men are luminaries of the media world, their dual expertise and insight go together like hand in glove, and from the sounds of things they want to ensure that quality news is a light that never goes out in a world that sorely needs it. But, to me at least, their aims seem unfocused and undifferentiated from the vast array of existing English-language global news publishers.

Smith (Justin) said his aim is to launch a "premium news business that serves unbiased journalism to a global audience", while Smith (Ben) told the NYT its target audience is "200 million people who are college educated, who read in English". Stop me if you think you've heard this one before - that's not an especially compelling or unique pitch. But it's still early days, and well I wonder, what difference does it make if they don't have a clear-cut mission yet. If anyone can bring new audiences into the ecosystem, it's the Smiths.

That said, maybe it's not new audiences that will be the big challenge in 2022 but retaining existing ones. As this article from Sara Fischer and Neal Rothschild demonstrates, unique visits to news sites, news app downloads, social media interactions with news articles and more all fell last year. 2022 doesn't look like it'll be much better either.

NFTs debuted to the masses in 2021, and publishers scrambled to grab hold of the burgeoning revenue opportunities. We wrote about some of those experiments in our Media Moments 2021 report, in fact. It's very hard to say how this continues to develop - NFT scepticism is rightly on the rise, but the astronomical amounts involved in Beanie Babies 2.0 suggests to me more publishers will hop into the space.

Podcast audiences skew younger than those of traditional radio - and podcasting is increasingly diverse in terms of creator and audience. Small wonder then that NPR is looking to launch a subscription-only bonus offering to appeal to that audience and boost its revenue through growing station membership.

This week's podcast:

We're releasing the first episode of 2022 on Jan 17th; a special looking at local news start-ups in the US and what they need to become sustainable. In the meantime, here's a throwback from last year:

Hey and since I mentioned it earlier... This special episode of Media Voices includes the audio of our launch presentation for the Media Moments 2021 report. We each outline which media moment of the year they found interesting, from the refocusing on advertising and strength of eCommerce, to paid podcasting going mainstream.

We'll be building out our written analysis this year. But did you know we also published a bunch of content before Christmas looking at media trends over the past year? If it passed you by in the pre-holiday rush, you can catch up here in our Analysis section.