The Rebooting Show

Will Hayward, the CEO of Private Media, an independent publishing company in Australia that publishes several titles, including politics-focused Crikey, recently faced the intriguing and likely slightly terrifying experience of being the subject of a defamation lawsuit filed by Lachlan Murdoch over a Crikey opinion column that held the Murdochs were “unindicted co-conspirators” of the Jan 6 attack on the US Capitol. Murdoch withdrew the lawsuit in the aftermath of Fox settling its case with Dominion, much to Will’s relief. We discussed the case, the decision to stand firm against a powerful and angry individual, and how Crikey made lemonade out of lemons by using the case to rally support for the politics publication through subscriptions. We also touch on the impact of Australia’s news bargaining code that has wrung payments from platforms and is the model for similar laws worldwide, including in the US, as well as lessons learned from the social publishing era, since Will was in the thick of it.  

When I sent over topics for the latest episode of The Rebooting show to Axios’s Sara Fischer and Vox’s Peter Kafka, Peter replied with an editorial note: “maybe something deliberately upbeat to counteract a very gloomy pod.” Listeners, we tried, but journalists don’t naturally do upbeat. Some highlights:This is a good time to be niche: “Niche media is thriving in an era where generalist media seems to be declining,” Sara said. “Companies that launch with a little bit of money, but in a targeted way, focusing on one specific thing with authority, tend to build incrementally and more sustainably than companies that try to do it all at once upfront.”The Messenger is coming next week and… counterintuitive: “I don't believe that there is an audience that's salivating out there for straight-down-the-middle news,” Peter said. “Anyone who says that is lying to themselves or to the public.”After the streaming wars comes the winnowing: “You’re going to have fewer of these big subscription services, more of these free ad-supported services, and streaming will continue to dominate more of the time that people spend in terms of consuming television,” Sara said. “No longer is it plausible that everyone can just launch a subscription service and think that they're going to take meaningful market share.”The AI “tsunami of bullshit” is coming: “We're still relying on Google for referral traffic and the idea that people might find our articles there,” Peter said. “Whether or not you use AI, you are going to be swamped by the tsunami of bullshit, whether it's good or not, content made by robots. And even if every publisher and every trade group in America agrees to not do it, it doesn't matter because it'll come from all over the world.”

The Bitter Southerner began as a passion project for a group of natives to the South who were, well, a bit bitter about how it was often caricatured or reduced to its historical legacy as the birthplace of American slavery. That’s a past that is unfortunately still alive and is an indelible part of the American story. The Bitter Southerner confronts such issues head on but while telling a more nuanced and expansive story of this unique and yes complicated part of the world. Kyle Tibbs Jones, a co-founder of The Bitter Southerner, joined me to discuss the decade-long effort to build a sustainable, independent publication.

News on its own is often not a great business. Advertisers want to avoid it, and the humans required to recreate the product every day drive up costs, and subscriptions can only go so far. New York University journalism professor and media analyst Jay Rosen sees the need to discover new sources of subsidies to maintain a healthy news ecosystem. In this discussion, we cover that issue as well as the end of BuzzFeed News, the prospects for The Messenger and Semafor, why Trump hacked conventional political news coverage, promising efforts at building sustainable local journalism models, and Jay’s belief that Fox News is not a legitimate news organization.

Brian Hanly, CEO of Bullish Studio, is creating media brands from memes, working with a stable of finance meme accounts in particular to build media properties. I got to know Brian over the pandemic, and quickly became fascinated by Bullish’s business. No doubt much of the fintech media segment was helped along by ZIRP and crypto craziness, but the use of memes as the starting point for lightweight media businesses is a good template as we enter into what’s sure to be another crazy cycle for the media business.

Last Thursday, I spoke to Substack CEO Chris Best to get a better understanding of where the company is going. We recorded the interview before Elon Musk threw a temper tantrum over Substack's coming Twitter competitor. Chris and I spoke about a couple of important issues to me: ads and bundling. On ads, Chris explains that Substack is trying to occupy a part of the market on an opposite pole from the attention grabbing part of digital media defined by platforms like Facebook and TikTok. But he allowed that ads could be done in a way that makes sense for the space Substack wants to occupy. On bundling, Substack is opposed to a "subscribe to Substack" option that obviates the direct relationship with individual publishers. Instead, he's more interested in "writer federations" and reader-directed bundles that get the upside of bundle economics but don't tradeoff the direct relationship between the audience and publishers.

Joe Ruffalo was recently named senior vice president and general manager of Nexstar's NewsNation digital operations and The Hill. At both, Nexstar is looking to occupy a lane of "non-partisan" news outlets, betting on a middle ground that seems to have disappeared from the news landscape, as personality-driven opinion has proven far more lucrative and scalable.

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.