The Digiday Podcast

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.

These should be banner days for a Black media site that has long covered social injustice for a young audience.But Blavity CEO and founder Morgan DeBaun describes challenges that start at the initial difficulty of raising investment as a Black company."For me, the systemic racism comes in the fact that I don't ever get the benefit of the doubt," DeBaun said at the Digiday Publishing Summit.As DeBaun sought funds in Silicon Valley, she recalls how investors didn't believe her site's strong organic growth, achieved without investing in Facebook ads. "They're like 'well, we need access to your Google Analytics,'" DeBaun said."It's all of this diligence that certainly is the process, but the question is, would you run the exact same media company through this process if they weren't Black?"Blavity was founded in 2014 and raised a $6.5 million Series A round in 2018.As for 2020, DeBaun said that advertisers have obviously cut their spending. They're also wary of having their ads presented alongside coverage of racial injustice or social unrest."We have 'Black' and 'African American' and 'police' and 'brutality' on all of our news articles. So we can't run ads on them," DeBaun said. "I'm taking so many financial hits for doing what's right and covering what's right — and what's true, most importantly."Fortunately for DeBaun, Blavity doesn't depend on display advertising beyond covering its editorial and freelance budget ("our real bread and butter comes with the experiential, 360 deals," she said)."I'm grateful that we have a diversified business where we can kind of float it. But it is a weird moment where I want to ramp up and hire more, but it's not always the best business decision," DeBaun said.

Subscriptions are gaining ground as a major source of revenue for Bloomberg."We're seeing significant, significant growth and gains," Bloomberg Media Group CEO Justin Smith said at the Digiday Publishing Summit.And that growth in the first and second quarter has proven sticky, according to Smith. "Some of the churn rates are consistent with previous churn rates. This is not just a short-term thing," he said.His forecast is that subscriptions will make up a rising and significant part of Bloomberg's revenue, especially as income from advertising diminishes.Bloomberg started its subscription business in May 2018, and Smith credits its "first phase" growth to the long brand-building that preceded it."The introduction of our paywall benefited from 25-30 years of Bloomberg LP growing out one of the largest newsrooms in the world, creating amazing content," Smith said.His outlook for future revenue also lies in live events, and he's confident that the events business "will come back very, very strongly" once it's safe to convene in big groups again."There's a big opportunity to capture more market share as we go through this lost year in events -- to come back with a much more aggressive slate of event programming and also a whole new range of opportunities tied to virtual events, which will become much more of a complement to the live event experience."

With overlapping crises stretching across health, the economy and society, Fox News Digital editor-in-chief Porter Berry sees Fox bringing "the marketplace of ideas" to its audience."You give them the news. You give them analysis from multiple perspectives, and they can make up their own mind. I mean, that's what freedom's all about," the Fox News Digital editor-in-chief said on the Digiday Podcast.According to Comscore, Fox News Digital had its best ever year in 2019, garnering 19.5 billion page views. This year, the site boasted more than 100 million "multiplatform" unique visitors for a sixth consecutive month, according to another one of Fox's recaps of Comscore data.Berry claims not to follow the coverage of competitors like CNN and The New York Times or criticism over how Fox News operates."If I spent my time worrying about what critics are saying about Fox New then I'd have less time to do my job," Berry said.Regarding the wave of protests over racism and injustice, and the fourth estate's overdue look at its own lack of diversity, Berry said "that's never been something that we sat down with a pen and paper and looked at numbers, per se. But we definitely have people of all backgrounds, and that's important."

The attention economy hasn't just proven to be a losing proposition for media businesses financially. It also encourages quick, outrage-based political coverage that thrives off of (and feeds) poor governance, according to Steve Hayes, CEO and co-founder of the Dispatch."Everything we're seeing in our politics has an emphasis on performance," Hayes said on the Digiday Podcast. "The economic incentives and business models that everyone has pursued in this space in the past 10-15 years have contributed pretty significantly to that."With the Dispatch -- a newsletter-first media company that leans conservative -- Hayes is aiming for subscribing members who aren't monetized by the minutes they spend reading the company's coverage."We don't need your clicks. Come, learn and then go. Live your life," Hayes said. The Dispatch put up a paywall in February, and now has 12,000 paying members — around 450 of them paid $1,500 for lifetime memberships when the company launched in October, according to Hayes. "It's growing faster than we had anticipated."The membership model has also helped the Dispatch forgo venture capital or billionaire ownership, the risks of which Hayes learned first hand as the last editor-in-chief of the Weekly Standard, a conservative institution that billionaire owner Philip Anschutz shut it down in 2018.The Dispatch and its staff of 12 aim for the same conservative readership. Despite concrete evidence of growing polarization, Hayes also gestures toward a middle ground in U.S. politics representing perhaps 70% to 75% of the U.S. population.