The Rebooting Show

Claire Atkinson, chief media correspondent at Insider, has long experience covering the ins and outs of the media industry. In this episode, we discuss the state of affairs as different parts of the media business are between eras. What’s next for Vice and the other ailing big digital publishers? The usual answer would be more consolidation, but this time might call an bundling of assets to realize more value.Streaming’s next phase. Disney’s shifts after Bob Iger’s return indicate a new era of sustainability after the free-spending ways of the streaming wars.CNN and Fox News’ identity crises. As what is sure to be a bonkers presidential election campaign nears, the twin poles of the cable news universe are in their own forms of disarray.The sports rights question. Sports programming continues to fetch higher rates as it basically props up many cable broadcasters. Tech platforms continue to tiptoe into this arena, but Claire explains why rights holders are unlikely to cast their lots entirely with subscription streaming platforms.

Dave Finocchio was CEO of Bleacher Report, one of the success stories of the last era of digital publishing. Dave is back in publishing with The Cool Down, which aims to be a mainstream publishing brand for climate conscious consumers. We discuss the lessons from Bleacher, how to strike the right tone to avoid both alarmism and lecturing, and how publishing business models have shifted.

Patrick Trousdale started The Daily Upside in 2019 after working in investment banking at Guggenheim. Patrick saw the success Morning Brew and The Hustle had with newsletters that produced business, finance and entrepreneurial news for younger audiences. He started The Daily Upside with the idea there was space for a newsletter that catered more to investors as a lens instead of general business and finance.The Daily Upside is now at the point where it can incrementally expand. It started that in January with the acquisition of a specialist newsletter called Patent Drop that trawls  patent registries for updates on what tech companies are filing patents that will expand into a publication focused on “technologies like blockchain and AI, how policy is impacting tech innovation, and conversations with the thought leaders and entrepreneurs building the future.” The Daily Upside will also launch Power Corridor, a publication at the intersection of Wall Street and Washington with longtime Institutional Investor journalist Leah Goodman.The opportunity Patrick sees is applying The Daily Upside growth playbook to these new properties – and using them to move beyond aggregation. Making the shift from aggregation to original content is a time-honored and tricky path in digital publishing. I can remember when Business Insider was mostly aggregating the reporting of others.

Axel Bard Bringéus is co-founder of Informed, a Berlin-based company with $5.3 million in backing that’s building a service for subscribers to pay for access to paywalled content from top tier publishers like Bloomberg, The Economist, The Financial Times and more. Informed is focused on people in non-English speaking countries who graze on English-language news content yet not enough to consider a subscription. This is a smart approach. Publishers always struggle to make money from international audiences. Most advertisers do not sell globally. And international visitors, in my experience, are far less likely to convert to paid. Axel and I discuss the Informed approach, and how his experience as a Spotify exec informs how he sees the news market.

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Darren Samuelsohn, a longtime politician reporter who was most recently head of Insider’s ill-fated DC bureau. Darren and I spoke about his new newsletter devoted to journalism, the decision to take an independent path, and the topsy-turvy career that’s journalism.

Bill Bishop likes to make clear he’s not a journalist. Instead, he’s a China analyst who brings his deep understanding of the country to an English-speaking language through his newsletter, Sinocism. In 2017, Bill became the “original Substacker” after teaming up with Substack’s co-founders to be the first newsletter on the platform.On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, Bill and I discuss his independent path, and how a subscription model has created different dynamics as opposed to his experiences in the dot-com era as a co-founder of Marketwatch. What’s telling to me is that Bill is also now considering advertising. The Substack model of “only ads” doesn’t make much sense long term for most writers. Even if they convert 10% of their audience, they’re making no money from 90%. Most businesses don’t operate that way.

The Dispatch is a three-year-old publication focused on bringing fact-based politics news and analysis from a center-right perspective. Steve Hayes, CEO of The Dispatch, joined the podcast to discuss how it's managed to climb to near 40,000 paying subscribers with a healthy 17 percent conversion rate from its free email list. Steve discusses the importance of aligning the editorial mission and business model, occupying the middle ground between the institutional media brands and the so-called creator economy, and its approach to introducing ads to The Dispatch. 

I had a conversation with Krystal Olivieri, global chief innovation officer at GroupM, about whether advertisers would conveniently forget all those promises they made during flush times to support local news. The takeaway: Advertisers will cut here and there, and that’s outside of the control of publishers, but news publishers can help themselves by having better ways of showing the value they’re creating for advertisers. Check out the full conversation on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, followed by a discussion of the year ahead with Outbrain co-CEO David Kostman. Thanks again to Oubrain for the support. Appreciate it.

Substack’s Reid DeRamus talks about growing newsletter audiences. Reid and I have spoken for the past two years on this topic, going back to before Substack bought his company Yem, which was focused on building a growth engine for newsletter writers. The thing about growth, at least I’ve found, is it takes a long time for most people. It’s taken me over two years to get 12,700 subscribers. I always tell people to take with a grain of salt the overnight success stories of newsletters that amass 250,000 subscribers in less than a year. They are remarkable because they are unusual, and the people running them are likely experts in marketing while most of us writing are not.Recommendations is Substack’s No. 1 feature it has rolled out. It needed to provide that distribution function to publishers. Otherwise it would just be a newsletter CMS with Stripe integration. Recommendations are now responsible for 40% of new free subscriptions to Substack-hosted publications. Reid and I discussed that dynamic and other features Substack is rolling out to increase the number of people who covert to paid subscribers.

Scott Brodbeck got into local news a dozen years ago, after working in local broadcast news in Washington DC. “I looked at the direction of the industry and didn't love where local was going and ended up leaving and just on a total impulse to start my own site,” he said. “it was like a one day thing.” After this prototypical shower inspiration, Scott launched a local site to cover Arlington, Virginia.Since then, Scott has built Local News Now into a clutch of local news sites for the Virginia suburbs near Washington, including ARLNow (Arlington), FFXNow (Fairfax) and ALXNow (Alexandria). The opportunity Scott saw was to make local news products that were different from the typical local news efforts from those coming from the newspaper industry. “The local news outlets that were focused on Arlington were meant for people middle aged and up, living in single -family homes and the more affluent parts of Arlington, Scott said of the time when he was in his 20s. “I wanted to launch something that was gonna speak to people my age.”