The Digiday Podcast

There is a finite number of CEOs who can tune into Fortune’s CEO Initiative virtual conference. And there are only 50 leaders who can be on Fortune’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders list. Those communities are limited.But communities drive revenue. And there is an entire untapped grouping of emerging and aspirational leaders that Fortune has identified who can benefit from the information it has cultivated over years of conferences and coverage — and would be willing to pay to gain access."In the Time Inc. era, we only had the extremes of the funnel," said Fortune CEO Alan Murray. "We had all the free content, and then we had these very expensive, $15,000 executive conferences, and we had nothing in between. One year later, we have a paywall and subscription level," he said on the Digiday Podcast.On October 5, Fortune is launching an online learning platform and community called Fortune Connect that will target mid-tier, vp and senior manager executives in a highly monetized way. The membership to Connect is priced at $2,500 per year per person, with an option for companies with 50 or more approved employees to have an enterprise discount.

Scroll through Apple's list of top podcasts and you'll see a lot of big names (including actual Hollywood celebrities).Within that landscape, Wonder Media Network has managed to make critically acclaimed podcasts without the A-listers."That's kind of a silly media strategy, honestly. How are you supposed to build an audience with non-celebrity?" said company CMO Shira Atkins on the Digiday Podcast. "But we're just testing to see if this is viable."One way its managing that is by dedicating a lot of resources to branded podcasts, which offer the possibility of scale."The ideal scenario is, 'let's get Microsoft to sponsor a podcast and also promote the podcast.' Because they look good being attached to the show; we get the audience and we get the money so that we can create the good content and it's a beautiful cycle," said Atkins.One recent example: Fiverr, a freelancers' platform, paid for a month-long takeover of the company's Encyclopedia Womannica podcast, a five-minute daily that tells stories of notable women in history.For weekend episodes, they switched up the formula to focus on women involved with Fiverr instead (including the company's CMO). Fiverr also got post-rolls ads on every episode, and in addition, "we did some PR with them, and they promoted nearly every day on all of their social media," Atkins said.Overall, Wonder Media Network, which was founded in 2018, is a purpose-driven media brand that performs a balancing act between activism and non-partisan story-telling."Our full mission is to amplify under-represented voices and to inspire action and promote empathy," Atkins said.

Paywalls and digital subscriptions may be on the rise at digital media companies around the U.S., but South Africa presents a different case."Our competitors went behind paywalls, and they didn't have a good experience," said Branko Brkic, founder of the South African online news site Daily Maverick, which covers politics and business from their newsroom in Johannesburg."You can't debate the issue that you need income from your readers to be part of your stream of income. But we really do not believe that the paywall is a way to go," Brkic said on the Digiday Podcast.The site instead relies on a model akin to the Guardian's — make the content free, but ask your readers for support at every turn."What we say with Maverick Insider is 'help us actually make this possible for people who cannot pay. Be part of something bigger, be part of something really beautiful,'" he said. "It's an emotional decision."And in Brkic's telling, it's worked. Over last two years, the company has gained 13,000 paying members, each paying at least 75 South African Rand (or about $4.50) per month.The site drew 4,500,000 this past May, its highest monthly figure.Brkic founded the Daily Maverick in 2009, the year after the financial crisis decimated the digital advertising market and taking his previous publication — a magazine simply named Maverick —out of commission in December 2008.The day it was announced that they were going out of business, Brkic said he began designing Daily Maverick. Employees of the defunct Maverick joined the enterprise.The magazine's online successor delivers shoe leather reporting in a country with insular news organizations and reporters who failed to go beyond stenography. "What South African media for many, many years got used to is basically going to press conferences," Brkic said. Brkic's bolder take on journalism included an award-winning investigation into the police killing of 34 striking miners in 2012."South African people need to know the truth," Brkic said. "And as matter of principle, I really don't think we should let only people that have a checkbook be able to know what the truth is."

Podcast's ad dollars may be growing, but Tenderfoot TV founder Donald Albright knows how cagey buyers can be."Even though the numbers are steady, the advertisers are thinking: 'people aren't spending money, so I'm not going to spend money advertising to them," Albright said on the Digiday Podcast.Albright co-founded Tenderfoot TV —named before its pivot to audio — with filmmaker Payne Lindsey in 2016. The production company is behind true crime hits like Atlanta Monster and Up and Vanished."For us, a company with 500 million downloads and six number one podcasts... they don't always just jump right in," Albright said about advertisers.The company's listenership hasn't suffered much from the disappearance of the commute — prime podcast listening minute— that many stakeholders feared."When I look at our data, most of our podcasts are consumed on desktop or laptop, not in cars," Albright said.And he's optimistic about the industry's ability to create more jobs and attract the kind of top talent that in a previous era would have opted to work for Netflix or other giants in video storytelling.Albright himself hadn't listened to a podcast until Tenderfoot's own Up and Vanished — podcasting is his second career, after one marketing and producing music (Lindsey comes from the world of video too). Tenderfoot counts 10 employees, including its two founders.And As podcast companies get acquired left and right, Albright emphasizes the need to preserve the creative independence that podcasts nurtured well so far."My fear is that now everything that you do is going to be through the lens of a corporate entity," Albright said. "Not just them having legal control of what you can and can't say, which in some cases I understand, but creative control. That's something we'll always push back on no matter who our partners are."Tenderfoot TV itself has teamed up with the iHeartPodcast Network on a slate of nine podcasts.

Substack is the newest savior for independent publishing, powering an array of subscription newsletters that give hope to the rise of a new class of journalist entrepreneurs."On Substack there are people paying more for one individual newsletter than they pay for all of Netflix," CEO Chris Best said on the Digiday Podcast. "And it doesn't really make sense if you think about it just in terms of dollars per hour of entertainment or dollars per word that I read or something like that. There has to be something else going on there."People "want to take back their mind" from the social media platforms that have dominated digital ad dollars, Best added.The service launched in 2017 with just one newsletter: Sinocism, a newsletter on China by Bill Bishop that brought in over $100,000 on its first day (Substack takes a 10% cut of subscriber revenue)."We think that we can make the writers much more money, and much more reliable money, by the way," Best said. "A lot of publications have seen their advertising revenue just tank over the course of the crisis, but people who have a subscriber base -- you know, it's much more steady as you continue to provide value."To help them do that, the company has also been piloting Substack Defender, a resource for journalists who have been threatened by a "scary-looking letter on official-looking letterhead from a lawyer saying a bunch of blustery stuff," in Best's description.Often these letters do the trick, intimidating writers who might not have the knowledge to know a legitimate case from a bogus one.

There's a cliche that tech industry founders are bent on reckless growth all because their aggressive entrepreneurial tendencies weren't tempered by any college coursework in the humanities.But Craig Newmark, who founded the eponymous Craigslist in 1995, learned some useful lessons in sociology even before he got to college."In the 1970s, my high school U.S. history and civics teacher taught us about the importance of a free press," Newmark said on the Digiday Podcast. "A trustworthy press is the immune system of democracy."Newmark has gone on to donate millions to journalistic programs and schools via Craig Newmark Philanthropies. His beneficiaries include the Poynter Institute, NPR, Consumer Reports and two journalism schools in New York City — those at Columbia and the City University of New York (the latter of which changed its name to The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York its name in his honor).Dollars go a long way, but Newmark says he also helps generate conversations within his network, especially among "frenemies" working against the same big issues like cybersecurity or the online harassment of women (especially journalists).Or, for that matter, disinformation (it's no coincidence that he created his philanthropic foundation in 2016 when Russia tampered with the U.S. Presidential election). Beyond supporting high quality news, Newmark has taken an active role against bogus political information, "particularly disinformation regarding voting by mail," Newmark said. "And so I'm working with people in journalism, people who are the experts in voting, I'm helping them fight back and to take the battle to the enemy."Social media giants are partly to blame, according to Newmark, even as they've tightened their speech regulations and political policies in recent months. "The social media platform[s] know who the bad actors are. They know who the foreign adversaries are, they know who their domestic allies are," Newmark said. "They should take action against all of them."But what about Newmark's own career, as the IBM programmer who went on to create a free digital version of the classifieds that ate into a traditional (and lucrative) preserve of local newspapers?"Newspaper revenue [declined] starting in the early ’50s. It went down precipitously in 2008 and 2009 when the big guys started getting things done. And that's about it. I asked [economists] to show me what blip I could see due to Craigslist, and they couldn't show me one. I mean, my instincts tell me Craigslist must have had some effect, but the economists have not been able to show me one," Newmark said.

TikTok is coming of age in a post-techlash world.But unlike Facebook and Google, it has the added challenge of doubling as a political football in the Trump administration's clashes with China.Last Friday President Trump told reporters he was considering a ban on the video app, which is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. Over the weekend Reuters reported the company may be looking to divest from its U.S. operations completely — perhaps in a sale to Microsoft — in order to avoid such a ban.Like other tech giants, ByteDance has also hired lobbyists in Washington in an effort to keep its access to a massive U.S. market — and its 100 million existing American users, according to the company.The Trump administration's nominal concern is TikTok's possible ties to Beijing — last fall leaked documents revealed how the app had censored topics that the Chinese Communist Party deems unacceptable, like Tiananmen Square or Tibetan independence. In some cases, TikTok has apologized.Blake Chandlee, TikTok's vp of global business solutions in Europe and the US, downplays any compromising ties between the company and its country of origin."TikTok is clearly an independent company and we've given people lots of reassurances," Chandlee said in an interview recorded last Thursday, a day before Trump's remarks."We built the whole company outside of China. Data sits outside of China, it sits in the U.S. and then it's got redundancy in Singapore," he added.Chandlee argued that the company is more concerned with data privacy than its established rivals."We've watched what's happened and we can kind of see where the world's going," Chandlee said. "People are becoming increasingly aware and educated. How to manage data and privacy is something that we've certainly learned from."Last summer Chandlee was hired away from Facebook, where data collection practices have drawn scrutiny from the press, Capitol Hill and even some users, after 12 years at the company.With Chandlee, TikTok is hoping to prove indispensable for brands eager to market to the app's massive and young set of users."Brands get it," he said in reference to their willingness to work with the company despite the political scrutiny. "There aren't many brands that have stepped back, stepped away from TikTok because of it," he said, adding "most of these big brands have a presence inside of China. They understand, once we give them reassurances. We explain the corporate structure and how decision-making takes place."TikTok's new "Creator Marketplace" connects advertisers with influencers, a transaction the app sometimes participates in.Last week, before Trump ratcheted up tensions, the company announced it would spend $1 billion on a fund for creators in the U.S. over the next three years — and more than twice that around the world.Beyond that, Chandlee was coy on the upcoming ways TikTok will help brands spend money (and creators make it) in a way that breaks with the precedent of its big tech competitors."Stay tuned on that one," he said.

The question of whether podcasts have hit the American mainstream is kind of like asking the same about Major League Soccer.Both have grown for more than 20 years, but remain smaller than their counterparts in media or sports.In the case of podcasts, advertising revenues grew by nearly 50% last year, to $708 million, according to an IAB/PwC report published this month. The figure is expected to grow by another 15% in 2020, despite the coronavirus crisis that temporarily put a dent in listenership numbers.That remains much smaller than traditional TV's shrinking but still massive $61 billion for 2020, according to a recent estimate by GroupM.Plus, "there remains this massive gap between monetization and the actual engagement of it," said Nick Quah, creator of the industry-tracking newsletter Hot Pod and host of LAist Studios' "Servant of Pod."Still, the industry has proven attractive enough for traditional players to make significant investments. "The past six years has largely been the story of capital coming in and different legacy institutions finding their positions in it," Quah said.Those six years cover the time since "Serial," the true crime podcast, captured enough mainstream attention to merit a spoof on Saturday Night Live. The team behind it, Serial Productions, will be acquired by The New York Times Company, it was announced last week.Quah joined the Digiday Podcast to talk about that acquisition, Spotify's recent spree of purchases (including a massive $100 million deal with Joe Rogan) and whether there's a place for paid subscription podcasts.

The coronavirus recession hit the local news industry hard at a time when it hadn't even recovered from the previous crisis in 2008."We're certainly coming up on or in the middle of something even bigger," Lion Publishers executive director Chris Krewson said on the Digiday Podcast. "So I don't see much hope of them recovering from this one either."Krewson obviously isn't rooting for a slow recovery, even as he predicts one. "That's what we've identified as the trend that we need to be ready to help on," he said.Lion — which stands for local independent online news and has staffers outside Philadelphia and in Vermont, Washington State and Kansas — is aimed at helping small news organizations, whether for or not-for-profit, reach sustainability.To that end, it encourages experimentation and a break with the staid business models that lost out to the ad dollar dominance of Google and Facebook."There's a lot of ways that the future of news is going to look, and we just have to be more forgiving and open and able to see more of these experiments so that we can see which of them are worth continuing and adding fuel to," Krewson said.In Memphis, for instance, two Lion members are adopting different approaches. The Daily Memphian has set up a traditional shop, betting on a subscription model and hiring a few dozen reporters to challenge the Gannett-owned incumbent with broad coverage of metropolitan news, from education to the NBA's Memphis Grizzlies.In a nutshell, "the overhead is high," Krewson said.Not so with MLK50, a smaller team focused on covering "poverty, power and public policy," in its own words. It recently teamed up with ProPublica for high-impact reporting that led to large-scale debt forgiveness in the city."I'm not saying either approach is better than the other. I'm just saying there's a lot of ways to slice the ways that local news can have an impact," Krewson said. "And it doesn't necessarily have to be with 30 plus people replacing what the newspaper used to do, just without print."

Hong Kong's South China Morning Post has covered the territory's role as a unique link between China and the rest of the world since the newspaper's founding in 1903.But that link has grown fraught as China continues to crack down on dissent and pro-democracy protests via the national security law it drafted and passed late last month.Gary Liu, the English-language newspaper's CEO since 2017, worries that its independence depends on that of the territory. "If the laws of this city and the judiciary that protects those laws change to the point where there is no longer press freedoms in this city, the South China Morning Post will change," Liu said. "And I think that would be a very, very sad day for this city, it would be a very sad day of course for the Post, and it would be an unfortunate day for the world."The coronavirus pandemic presents an additional challenge. Though Hong Kong was hardened by its experience with the SARS outbreak in 2003, the virus has combined with the protests that began last year to shut down the industries, including tourism -- Hong Kong has been the world's most visited city for years, according to Euromonitor -- that the SCMP depended on for advertising revenue.These obstacles follow years of readership growth for the South China Morning Post. Alibaba bought the paper in 2015, and brought its paywall down shortly after.Liu said this allowed the media property to have "far exceeded" the scale it had set out to meet. The English-language paper went from 4 million monthly active users, when the paywall came down, to more than 50 million in recent months, according to Liu.Now, said Liu, "it's about when do we believe we have the right product for us to ask some audiences around the world to start paying for the South China Morning Post again?"For him, financial success is "the only way long-term to ensure and protect editorial independence." A third of its readers are in the United States, he added.The pandemic has accelerated initiatives to grow reader revenue, with SCMP aiming to organize 40 virtual events this year as opposed to the 10 in-person ones they'd been planning on. The Post is also launching SCMP Research, a paid vertical."China is unique because it's so important and yet it is still a closed information ecosystem. And there are not a lot of people who can properly extract and can properly parse and can properly distribute the information within China to the rest of the world. And we happen to be able to do that," Liu said.