The Digiday Podcast

At a time when subscriptions are the big topic in the media industry, The Hill is going big on video. Jimmy Finkelstein, chairman of The Hill, discusses the publication's non-partisan coverage, its video ambitions and diversifying its traffic sources.

As publishers focus on digital products -- from their sites to apps to newsletters to podcasts -- it's getting hard to operationalize the process. They face everything from broken workflows, a lack of a seamless functionality and a lack of efficiency. For Paul Ford, CEO of Postlight, publishers need to stop waiting for an innovation that will fix these issues -- and just focus on efficiency instead.

With The New York Times's shift to focus on audience revenue, it's also put more of an emphasis on brand building. David Rubin, the first-ever chief marketing officer for the Times, is leading that charge. Rubin discusses the role of marketing in a newsroom, how the Times sees its brand around truth and the challenge of not being pigeonholed as an anti-Trump brand.

On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, as part of five-episode series where we invite guests to dive deep into the mechanics of making products that make money, we took an in-the-weeds look at what makes a successful events business. We talk to Margaret Low, president of Atlantic Live, the events arm at The Atlantic to see how publisher built its events business, which now stands at 100 events a year.

With publishers refocusing on direct connections with their audience, email newsletters are critical. Quartz has bet on email from its earliest days. On this limited edition episode of the Digiday Podcast, where we invite guests to dive deep into the mechanics of making products that make money, Quartz’s chief product officer and executive editor Zack Seward, gave us an in-the-weeds look at what makes a great email.

On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, we recap the big themes that emerged for publishers this year, from pivoting to a reader revenue strategy to a new approach to relationships with platforms.

Most publishers see Snapchat as a nice-to-have but not a must-have platform. But Vertical Networks, a digital content company founded by Elisabeth Murdoch, is betting on Snapchat as showing the way to the future of mobile programming. Jesus Chavez, CEO of Vertical Networks, joins us in this episode.

Quartz is onto its next big move to diversify reader revenue. The publisher, which originally launched as an ad-supported model, launched a membership program in November. Lauf discusses the subscriptions business, why Quartz remained valuable as a company in the time of fire sales and more.

The pivot to paid models is on. Next up: CNN, who is focusing its strategy on creating a variety of paid products for specific subsets of the CNN audience. Andrew Morse, evp at CNN U.S. and general manager of CNN Digital Worldwide, also discussed rebranding CNN Money as CNN Business, competing with platforms on technology and tools and working with advertisers who don’t want to be next to news.

Craig Silverman’s stories have it all: lies, fraud and billions of stolen dollars. But they’re far from a true crime podcast. The Toronto-based BuzzFeed media editor writes about fake news, the spread of misinformation on platforms and ad fraud, where every participant in the supply chain is a culprit passing on the blame. Silverman discusses the lack of incentive for marketers to speak up against ad fraud, Facebook’s scale problem and more.