Next up on our Big Noises season is Amy Kean, bestselling author, LinkedIn top voice, former head of innovation for Publicis and now CEO and Creative Director of Good Shout, a company that helps people communicate better. Amy is also a self-confessed weirdo and my big question for her was, could media do with more weirdos to stem the tide of painfully undifferentiated products that Neil spoke about last week? We also spoke about fear, ego, jargon and how to spot a good weirdo rather than someone that’s going to be an HR problem.   Thanks to Glide Publishing Platform who have sponsored this season of Media Voices: Big Noises. Glide exists to make publishers more successful by removing any need to get bogged down building Content Management Systems, providing an industry-leading SaaS tailored to let publishers do more and spend less. Publishers using Glide direct more resources at their audiences and products, and focus on building things that make them money. You do the content, Glide does the management. Glide have created 3 expert guides to getting much more from a new or headless CMS, created for editorial, technology, and product teams. You can get the whitepapers here.

Welcome to the latest season of Media Voices: Big Noises! This season, sponsored by Glide Publishing Platform, we'll be talking to publishing people with something to say. Media Voices co-host Peter Houston is tired of hearing the same old industry buzzwords. The publishing platitudes are starting to wear a bit thin, and he's decided to see if he can shake the conversation up a bit by speaking to some of the biggest characters in the business. First up is Neil Thackray. Neil is a media executive with decades of experience leading media companies both large and small. As one of the co-founders of Briefing Media (home of theMediaBriefing and AgriBriefing), he gained a formidable reputation for calling out executive BS at conferences and in his columns, and being unafraid to point out some of the biggest industry issues.  Neil spoke to Peter about the myth that content is king, the failures of publishing leadership, how media companies have lost the ability to differentiate, and how investors share some of the blame. Thanks to Glide Publishing Platform who have sponsored this season of Media Voices: Big Noises. Glide exists to make publishers more successful by removing any need to get bogged down building Content Management Systems, providing an industry-leading SaaS tailored to let publishers do more and spend less. Publishers using Glide direct more resources at their audiences and products, and focus on building things that make them money. You do the content, Glide does the management. Glide have created 3 expert guides to getting much more from a new or headless CMS, created for editorial, technology, and product teams. You can get the whitepapers here.

The last few weeks has seen the Media Voices team head out and about to various industry events, from a Local News event with Google to the PPA Festival and Newsrewired, as well as running our own Publisher Podcast Forum and Awards.  We were proud to be media partners for the PPA Festival, where Peter and Esther spent the day catching up with industry friends and listening in on all sorts of sessions to do with audience-building. In this special episode from the PPA Festival, we've focused on how publishers are future-proofing audience relationships. There are rising challenges from an economic recession, advertising slowdowns, uncertainty about subscriptions growth and the yet unknown impacts of AI advances which are pressuring publishers. The only way to ensure success is to deliver real value to your audience. The businesses that succeed will be those that prioritise reader relationships. We spoke to a range of publishers at the Festival and sat in on sessions on the Audience stage to find out how they plan to future-proof those audience connections. This episode features the following experts: Sajeeda Merali, CEO, PPA Amanda Wigginton, Customer strategy, data and insight specialist Sarah Ebner, Executive Editor & Head of Newsletters, Financial Times (session extract) Mark Alker, Founder, SingletrackWorld Ed Garcia, Head of Retention, Immediate Media (session extract) Clare Wain, Marketing Director, NEOM Organics (session extract) Seema Kumari, Senior Director of Consumer Marketing and CRM at Hearst UK (session extract) Tony Hill, Marketing & Events Director, Mark Allen Group (session extract) Alix Fox, Writer, broadcaster and sex educator (session extract)  

Our special podcast documentary explores how local media organisations have got started with AI projects, the benefits they're seeing, the challenges they've faced and what advice they would give to other publishers looking to get into AI. This episode and our corresponding report have been made possible with the support of United Robots. There's one topic everyone is talking about right now: AI. Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in November 2022, the potential of AI tools have become very clear to the otherwise uninitiated. Now, everyone from politicians to teachers, technologists, artists and writers are having to grapple with the explosion in use of generative AI and the very real impact it will have on our everyday lives. But away from the hype of ChatGPT, Bard and other headline-grabbing AI chatbots and generators, it’s important to remember that AI isn’t a new area for publishers. From simple tasks like social media posts to content recommendations right through to more complex tasks like distilling mass datasets in a way that reporters can make sense of, we’ve been using these tools for a number of years. For publishers of all shapes and sizes, artificial intelligence is still a largely untapped area. Some prominent brands like BuzzFeed have made industry headlines by announcing their plans to use AI to generate quizzes, while CNET won’t be the last publication to get in trouble for letting major errors slip through on articles written by robots. We’re buckling up for an absolute tsunami of AI-generated content - more than any of us will be able to consume in our lifetimes. The opportunity for publishers, then, as pointed out by Douglas McCabe of Enders Analysis, is to distinguish themselves from the rest of the internet. This doesn’t mean shunning AI. Instead, we should be looking at how we can use it to free writers, reporters and journalists up to do what they do best. Looking to local media Some of the best examples of how this can work in practice can be seen in local media. Often, such organisations have fewer resources than big names like the New York Times or Bloomberg, and certainly aren’t able to indulge in speculative development and testing of these tools. Instead, there has to be a clearly defined use case, straightforward implementation, and measurable return on investment. This has been the focus of a new report from Media Voices: Practical AI for Local Media. In this report, Peter Houston explores the myths and misconceptions surrounding AI, what it looks like in practice in local media organisations, the benefits it brings, and how to get started. The report also includes five case studies from local publishers around the world - who you’ll be hearing from throughout this episode - and how they’ve been using AI tools for years to create and publish journalism that gives local media an edge. We’ve focused on local news organisations, but the processes they went through internally to explore and apply AI tools can benefit publishers of all shapes and sizes, so it's still relevant if you’re looking at what AI can do for you. In this corresponding documentary-style episode, we hear directly from the publishers themselves and other industry experts about how they approached finding use cases for AI, getting staff on board, tackling issues that came up, and the advice they would give to other publishers looking to get started themselves. Interviewees: Elin Stueland, Online Editor, Stavanger Aftenblad Joseph Hook, Editor, RADAR AI Jens Pettersson, Head of Editorial Development, NTM Luuk Willekens, Data & Innovation Manager, NRC Media Cynthia DuBose, Vice President, Audience Growth & Content Monetization, McClatchy Professor Charlie Beckett, Director, The Journalism AI Project, LSE Cecilia Campbell, Chief Marketing Officer, United Robots Thanks to United Robots who have sponsored our Practical AI for Local Media report and this episode. Their mission is to empower local news publishers by helping free up reporter time, expand coverage and grow the business by providing routine reporting produced by robots on structured data on topics like sports and real estate. They’ve helped a number of publishers cited in the report get started with automated content, and Cecilia Campbell and her team are hugely knowledgeable about the real opportunities in AI for publishers. You can find out more about them at unitedrobots.ai

This week we hear from Substack UK's Head of Writer Partnerships Farrah Storr. Over the past decade she's worked in leading editorial roles at some of the biggest lifestyle magazines in the UK before leaving ELLE to join the newsletter platform. She tells us about why more mainstream media brands should be investing in Substack, why she doesn't believe you need a huge profile to start out on the platform, and what problems with the wider internet ecosystem Substack is trying to solve. In the news round-up, the team dissect some unfortunately-timed stories about Reach plc, and why the national and regional publisher's woes are only likely to increase as the ad-stuffing strategy plays out. In the news in brief section, we explore increasingly troublesome links between the Conservative government and senior BBC executives, BuzzFeed's edict to staff to increase story output, and Meta's subtle de-emphasis of its metaverse project. Thus endeth the season. We'll be back in May for the next one!

On this week's episode we hear from Max Tani, media reporter at news startup Semafor. He tells us how he came to Semafor; the Venn diagram between media, politics, Hollywood and pretty much everything else in life; about Semafor’s attempts to balance out news and opinion; and whether covering the White House was anything like The West Wing. In the news roundup the team looks at a bad week for broadcasters, from the BBC's war against Gary Lineker, through Fox News' risible defence in the Dominion lawsuit, to GB News' £31m loss in its first operating year.  Here's to the next 250 episodes!

TIME was 100 last week, and we took the chance to speak to its Editor In Chief and CEO Edward Felsenthal about how the publication made it to its centenary. He tells us about the tradition of innovation at TIME, building trust with global audiences, and how legacy is not a bad word in magazines. In the news roundup the team discusses the fallout from The Telegraph publishing former health secretary Matt Hancock's WhatsApp messages, despite journalist Isabel Oakeshott having broken an NDA to do so. We ask what that does for trust in the media, where the responsibility for putting everything in context lies, and if this is an Alien vs. Predator situation for those of us in the middle of the row.

This week we hear from Bonnie Kintzer, CEO of Trusted Media Brands - which includes brands like FailArmy, Family Handyman, and Reader’s Digest. She tells us about the opportunities she saw to turn around the company when it was facing bankruptcy in 2013, how the business has weathered some of the storms of the past decade, and why she thinks it’s vital to focus on where the audiences are regardless of platform algorithms. She also explains why a 're-start-up' mentality helped TMB get ahead. In the news roundup the team debates why it's so difficult to find common ground on discussions of platforms paying publishers directly, and asks if Google not serving news to Canadian consumers will shift the dial on those arguments. Did you know Elon Musk has a Brummie accent?

On this week's episode we hear from Janice Min, co-owner and CEO of The Ankler, a newsletter-first media brand covering Hollywood and the world of entertainment. She tells us how The Ankler’s revenue streams have evolved over the last twelve months, the potential she sees in lean, newsletter-first businesses, and what lessons she’s applying from her time at big-name legacy publications like the Hollywood Reporter. In the news roundup we avoid AI entirely and do a Media Voices 101 episode, going through a wishlist for what we want to see from media companies in the next year. Please look out for our new 'Humanity is pathetic: How do we monetise them?" tshirts in the near future.

On this week's episode, we hear from Sarah Ebner, Executive Editor and Head of Newsletters at the Financial Times. She tells us about her role leading the newsletter team at the FT, and the value of newsletters in subscriber acquisition and retention but also as paid products in their own right. In the news roundup we take a thorough look at what the integration of ChatGPT and Bard into search results means for news and magazine publishers. In the news in brief, the Mastodon Bump has levelled out, DC Thomson announces 300 job cuts, and we ask why subscription revenue is outperforming expectations. Welcome to your first episode of Med.A.I Voices.