The Rebooting Show

The future of work is one of the most fertile topic areas out there. The pandemic caused a reset, when combined with the labor shortage coming out of Covid, and it’s not going back to normal. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson cited statistics that show basically every industry halted by Covid – from restaurants to cruises – has more or less returned to normal, except ones like movie theaters and offices. I’ve long thought the boss class is kidding themselves about strongarming people back to dreary commutes, fights over who left a coffee mug in the sink, pointless meetings and presenteeism. Work is changing, even if bosses don’t trust people with their cameras off.That’s why I find the scramble to own the future-of-work category fascinating. Jay Lauf, a cofounder of Charter, a new brand exploring the transformation of work, joined me to discuss how this bootstrapped media company is taking a different path than his previous executive roles at Quartz, The Atlantic and Condé Nast.“We've run these workplaces,” Jay told on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show. “We've thought about these workplaces, and we've served different roles within these workplaces. We've been our own test lab in some ways, both prior in our careers and currently, trying to build this out.”Some takeaways: Start with an idea. Jay talks about how he and co-founders Kevin Delaney and Erin Grau all felt like they were “scratching an itch.” Media born from a legitimate interest tends to be more valuable than engineered media that looks for an arbitrage opportunity.Find a high-value area of need. The upending of the work routine during the pandemic was unprecedented. Human resources issues have gone from the sideline to a central organizational challenge.Embed in a community. Charter is both covering the future of work but also living it as they build their own workplace. Being both a participant and observer is a powerful combination.Ads and subs aren’t an either-or proposition. Charter wants to develop a business model mostly reliant on direct payments. But that doesn’t mean it is averse to ads. In fact, ads are the majority of its revenue as it determines the best direct-revenue model. Check out the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Let me know what you think: bmorrissey@gmail.com. Thanks to House of Kaizen for its support.SponsoredHouse of Kaizen is an extension of your subscription revenue growth team. Decades of subscription growth experience are brought to bear to get you where you want to be faster with more confidence and efficiency. House of Kaizen works alongside your team to discover, ideate and execute experiments for sustainable growth.In-House support: When your team needs augmentation, House of Kaizen is there for you. Through collaborative execution and in-depth training, the House of Kaizen team will help improve, expand, and support your expertise and in-house capabilities.Full-Outsourcing:

Check out the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Let me know what you think: bmorrissey@gmail.com.The war in Ukraine is now six weeks old, likely to drag on even longer. It’s important to consider how vital an independent and free media is to a free and independent Ukraine. I visited Kyiv in the fall, and I wrote about how the media operates in a far more complicated context there than in a place like the U.S. This challenge got greater in the wake of an invasion that’s mostly ground the economy to a halt. Andrey Boborykin, executive director of news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda, told me on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show that the independent news media in Ukraine for now must rely mostly on grants from foundations and individual contributions from abroad. (Ukrayinska Pravda is also now publishing in English.)“We are in a very tough position when we speak about reader revenue, because here we are competing with expenses for food and transport and utilities,” he said. “We don’t have the culture of people paying for content.”We spoke about his own experiences being displaced in Ukraine twice, as well as how Ukrayinska Pravda is continuing its operations. I wanted to have Andrey on to bring attention to the threat to sustainable and independent media in Ukraine. Andrey and Eugene Zaslavsky of the Ukraine-based Media Development Foundation have set up a local news emergency fund to help independent media in the country get over to the other side of this tragedy. The institutional-individual divideThe shift from institutions to individuals is happening in many areas of the economy and society. The Economist noted that influencers were “initially dismissed as credulous Gen-Z folk who had mistaken posting selfies for having a job” rather than being the entrepreneurs they are. The same is happening as the media business itself goes through a reorganization that shifts more power to individuals. Dean Baquet’s get-off-Twitter missive to his newsroom can be seen in this light. Reporters should be out reporting, not tweeting all day and having their viewpoints trapped in the Twitter bubble, not to mention the fact that many NYT journalists are “bad at Twitter.” (Starting a Twitter fight is like engaging with a mascot at a sporting event: Impossible to emerge from the encounter looking good.) The Times is in a unique position to be able to set its own expectations as a brand that employs individuals. Other publishers will have a tougher time.The return of Covid (again) and eventsSurprise, Covid is back — well, it never went away. Case numbers have been spiking in Europe, and they’re starting to rise again in many places in the U.S. The Gridiron Dinner, a regular social gathering of Washington powerbrokers, turned into something of a superspreader event<

Welcome to new subscribers. One way to support The Rebooting is by sharing it with colleagues and friends you think would find it valuable. I still view The Rebooting Show, as well as the overall project, as a work in progress, so please let me know guests you’d like to hear and topics covered. My email is bmorrissey@gmail.com – or just hit reply to the email.Niche publishing brands are most powerful at intersections. For Cherie Hu, the founder of Water & Music, the intersection is music x technology x business x web3.Water & Music was an accidental brand in many ways. Cherie was a freelance journalist in 2016, relying on writing assignments from established publications like Billboard, Forbes and industry trade publications. Freelancers were the original creator class of journalism, well practiced in juggling the actual writing with figuring out taxes, chasing down invoices and, yes, tending to their personal brands in order to get the next assignment. Cherie created an email newsletter in 2016 to distribute her latest stories and added pieces she wanted to write anyway without waiting for a publication to run them. The newsletter became a creative outlet.It grew enough that Cherie moved it to Patreon, and by early 2019 it had attracted 5,000 free subscribers. Water & Music is now off Patreon and boasts over 2,000 members. It is also pioneering experimentation in web3 models with its own research-oriented decentralized autonomous organization and a $STREAM token. My takeaways from our conversation:Look for signals beyond analytics. Understanding whether you have the publishing equivalent of product-market fit requires looking for signals. Some are simple math: email subscribers, open rates, paying members, ad demand. But some are intangible, like people reaching out to you, asking how they can support your work and seeing people at conferences who are obsessed with the subject matter and want to connect to each other. “I realized that there are a lot of these readers who would have such amazing discussions with each other, but they just did not know each other.”Autonomy is more than money. Water & Music really took shape as a brand when Cherie started treating it as a creative outlet rather than a promotional vehicle. The individual-led brand allowed her the freedom to “have the kind of career that would allow for the kind of work that I wanted to do.”Build a team. One of the false dichotomies is this idea in the unbundling of publishing that you’re either all on your own or buried in a legacy news organization. At some point, everyone needs to build a team, even if the relationships are more flexible than a typical company. “I  absolutely cannot do everything that is happening at Water & Music just by myself, especially in terms of how I want the community and the brand to grow.”Embed in a community. Just reporting the news is a commodity product. The way out is to provide extra value in the form of analysis and insights, while positioning yourself at the center of a community that wants to connect with each other. “If you're trying to build some kind of media business, there has to be some deeper layer around it, whether it's building a community or even just providing context or analysis.”Check out the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Let me know what you think: bmorrissey@gmail.com.Optimistic mediaI don’t know how many times over the years I’ve been called cynical. I

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Skift CEO Rafat Ali. What I like about Skift is it goes narrow and deep on the business of travel while situating it within the broader context of the global economy and societal trends. Covid was a reminder that external events are out of your control and the best you can do is adapt to them. Nobody likes the painful decisions you have to make to ensure simple survival. Skift ended up cutting a third of its staff and saw revenue decline 40%.For Skift that meant shrinking its business, letting go and furloughing employees, and preserving cash to weather the storm. Skift used the pandemic to refit its business, casting off the expenses of offices and event venues, and building new high-margin products. Skift is more profitable now than it’s ever been. It has just crossed its employee count from pre-pandemic, even as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Covid outbreaks in Asia and a new Covid variant circulating Europe signal even more turbulence ahead.  Some takeaways from our discussion:Apply a consumer lens to B2B. Modern B2B is as audience-focused and quality as consumer media. That means investing in design, quality reporting and writing, and outlook. Travel was historically broken into sectors – flights, hotels, cruises, meetings – but that’s not how consumers approached the category, so Skift took the POV of people, not vendors. Media and data make sense together… on paper. In media, the cliche “Uber for X” pitch is the “Bloomberg for X” pitch. Using publishing as a top of the funnel for a high-priced, recurring revenue data business is a business school case study. The problem: These are very different businesses to staff and run. Skift originally cast itself as a “travel intelligence company,” but ended up being a media company. Covid expanded the talent pool. Skift used the pandemic to become a permanently distributed company. As it has hired people back, of the 20 people brought on, only one has been based in New York City. That’s led to a great expansion of its talent pool, not to mention a lower cost base.Covid changed the client base. The travel industry was on mothballs for much of the pandemic, but Skift found that it was buoyed by the windfall realized by large tech platforms. Much of B2B media business models are driven by vendors, but the big tech platforms are where properties want to get for their stability and massive marketing budgets. Balancing the revenue portfolio. The goal for Skift’s revenue profile is to be evenly split among events, advertising and subscriptions. Going into the pandemic, subscriptions were lagging a category like events. Now, with advertising on a hot streak and subscriptions coming back, Skift has seen subscriptions rise to 20% of revenue.Check out The Rebooting Show on Apple or Spotify. Also, if you’re an Apple user, please leave a rating and review. Let me know what you think of the episode by hitting reply.Lean mediaA key part of primary-engagement media is getting the cost base right. Publishers often have to do so many things to make money that the expenses in the organization tend to go in many places other than the actual creation of content. Fixing that imbalance is key for building sustainable publishing brands. Manufactured growth vs organic growth

Something about the podcast highlights format wasn’t working for me, so I’m switching up the Monday version to feature highlights from the podcast as well as some thoughts on other matters in sustainable publishing. After all, formats matter. Let me know what you think. This week’s topics:Going down the rabbit hole with TCG’s Jarrod DickerCensorship fightsIndividual brands in publishingWell-paid journalistsCompany teardown piecesThe pivot to pragmatism, web3 editionCrypto is polarizing. Talk to a web3 trust believer – I define web3 as encompassing crypto currencies, blockchain, decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens and decentralized autonomous organizations – and you’ll hear we are on the cusp of a blockchain utopia that sounds a lot like a kibbutz designed by Ayn Rand. And if you don’t see that, well, you’re ngmi. The doubters of this “pathetic tech future,”  scramble to dismiss the latest crypto craze as a “bust.” Most critiques at their heart are a version of this throwaway line in an otherwise quite interesting Time  profile of Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin:“Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich, pumped pollutants into the air, and emerged as a vehicle for tax evasion, money laundering, and mind-boggling scams.” Well, when you put it that way…I’m too much of a realist for these extremes. I believe crypto is, in some ways, inevitable based on the sheer amount of capital – financial, people and cultural – going into it. Kevin Roose, who has taken a moderate approach to the Crypto Holy Wars, has a very good web3 primer for those with open minds. The trough of disillusionment is a critical part of any adoption cycle. I’m most interested in web3 through the lens of publishing models. For that, Jarrod Dicker is my web3 shaman, since as a longtime publishing executive at places like The Huffington Post and The Washington Post, he’s got a foot in the Old World of Web 1 and Web 2.0 and now one firmly in the New World as a partner at investment firm TCG.What I like about Jarrod is, despite his affinity for Phish and cryptic tweets, he’s a realist. He knows how early it is for this set of technologies having tangible impact. Some key takeaways from my conversation with Jarrod:NFTs matter. Look beyond the speculative frenzy over ape drawings. The importance of NFTs are when they’re tied to access and community. In media, imagine moving people from a passive audience to active participants to owners.Web3 needs better marketing. Let’s face it, crypto boosters do themselves no favors by coming across as Crazy Eddie on bath salts. The challenge of movi

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify If you use Apple, please leave a rating and review.Every cycle of unbundling is followed by another period of rebundling. Media is no different – just look at the streaming market. In publishing, the shift of power from institutional brands to individual brands has unfolded over the past few years, and now a period of rebundling will begin.Puck is a seven-month-old media brand built with the institutional-individual brand continuum firmly in mind. The publication has recruited several well-known journalists to focus on American power centers in finance, tech, media, politics and entertainment.“Puck is a media brand with creators at the center,” said Liz Gough, a former Condé Nast exec who is COO of Puck. “We are focused on telling the inside story from some of the most important parts of America: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Washington DC and Hollywood.”What I’ve liked about Puck is how it’s not recreating the same old publishing model but instead bringing on its contributors – people like Dylan Byers, Julia Ioffe, Teddy Schleifer, Matt Belloni – as partners, giving them a middle ground that has the benefits of both the institutional approach and personal brand approach. (I have a deal with Puck as a contributor to license some of my writing for The Rebooting. I don’t have any financial interest in the company beyond that.)“We saw two ends of the spectrum,” Liz said. “We saw the individual brands of the world and at the other end legacy or institutional brands that a lot of the founding team at Puck came from and have their own amazing benefits but also challenges. We thought the media brand of the future is taking the best of both of those worlds.”In this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, Liz and I discuss the idea of journalists as influencers, why subscriptions and ads work well together and power centers as an editorial lens.Journalists as influencersThe notion of “personal brands” in journalism is, to put it mildly, a bit of a lightning rod, but Puck doesn’t shy from the concept. After all, journalists have long built reputations for their work – and looked to make money from those reputations.“Journalists are the one of the most original influencers in American society when you think about it. They were the last untapped group in the direct-to-consumer revolution. We started thinking about how to build a business that places journalists at the center of the revenue model rather than as a cost center. But at the same time, we know brand still matters.”No one size-fits-all-approachI’m not a big fan of false dichotomies. There’s no one way to do anything, or one model for publishing. What I think the unbundling of publishing has done – and I give Substack a lot of credit for opening new options – is to give writers more choices about how they work. The idea that many people don’t all have the same needs and motivations doesn’t strike me as crazy – new option

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify If you use Apple, please leave a rating and review.Journalists in their 40s are under no illusions to the need for sustainable business models in news publishing. Being suddenly laid off is a rite of passage.“Those of us who started in journalism in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, very early on we were awakened to the challenges of the business models,” said David Skok, founder and CEO of The Logic, a four-year-old publisher focused on the growth of the knowledge economy in Canada. “We didn’t have the church and state separation as much as others did in terms of  understanding the news industry is as much about product and business strategy as it is your editorial. I’ve always said you could have the best lede or nut graf in the world, but if it didn’t load on your phone in .01 seconds, it was invisible to the reader.”Founded in 2018 and now with 20 employees, The Logic is an independent publication focused on the knowledge economy in Canada as it transitions away from an economy largely dependent on sectors like mining and real estate. David describes The Logic as “a combination of the business model/product of The Information with the editorial focus of The Financial Times.” On this episode of The Rebooting Show, David and I discussed why The Logic doesn’t consider itself a tech publication, differentiating through original reporting and why a subscriptions-based business model isn’t subscriptions-only. Starting from scratchDavid is a veteran journalist, with roles at the Boston Globe and The Toronto Star. He started The Logic almost four years ago after recognizing the challenges legacy news organizations face in changing their business models provides an opportunity for new entrants with the right focus.“I had been a disruptor from within [large news organizations] and seen a lot of the same mistakes being committed and a lot of the same barriers to innovation. I wasn’t seeing a lot of success in large organizations, not because the effort wasn’t there, but because they’re large organizations and they’re slower moving. There was an opportunity, particularly in the Canadian market, which hadn’t had a lot of innovation in a while, to start something new.”Going beyond techTechnology long moved from a vertical coverage area to a horizontal. There is a tech angle to just about every news story. For The Logic, that means going beyond technology to zero in on the big story of the Canadian economy shifting its focus to industries like crypto and electric vehicles.“You can't cover tech anymore without covering the future of everything. Early on, we branded ourselves as a technology publication because it was a way for people to digest what we were doing, but it was almost a Trojan horse. We’re really about the future of the entire economy, not just tech. What we try to do is cover it through a lens of innovation and forward-thinking.” DifferentiationBeing unique and meaningful are the ways to stand out in crowded markets. For The Logic, that means focusing on in-depth, reported stories as opposed to chasing SEO traffic by rushing up an explainer of “What is SWIFT?”“[The Information’s CEO] Jessica Lessin has talked a lot about this: How do you be 10x better than your competition? You have to make sure you stand out. Do we have unique access to someone or something? Are we telling you something original, breaking original reporting you can’t get anywhere else? All our work is based on original reporting so that we can define the agenda as opposed to fo

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyLike just about everyone, I’m both horrified by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and in awe of the resistance of the Ukrainian people. Ukraine is an inspiration to the rest of the world. In places like the United States, we fail to appreciate the staggering advantages we have just by dint of where and when we were born. In September, I visited Ukraine to speak at a conference to build sustainable, independent journalism in the region. This is a hard task in a country with complicated politics where publications are often controlled by oligarchs and political parties, and the economy is far smaller. The Ukrainian people I met were all first rate and incredibly generous. They’re also brave. Consider helping by giving to one of these vetted programs, as well as a fundraising for the Kyiv Independent, an independent English-language publication, and this one for other independent media in Ukraine. A couple years ago, then-Bleacher Report CEO Howard Mittman coined a neat phrase for the end of an era of lightweight content produced for algorithms: Need vs Feed. In the next era of digital publishing, you want to be on the Need side.“When I think about publishing, I think about purpose-driven versus mission,” he said on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show. “Purpose-driven publishing is about ad dollars and collecting affiliate revenue. It's about filling a gap that consumers have based off of a Google search or social media. Mission-driven is where I’m interested in now. You see that in areas like the environment and in news.” Howard spent a dozen years at Conde Nast, occupying top business roles for titles like GQ and Wired. I’ve always known him to be thoughtful about where the media business is going, so we had a discussion about the dangers of going overboard on subscriptions, why now just might be the time for new entrants to address local news and why the betting gold rush for sports publishers might soon taper off.Hope for local newsIf there’s a sector of publishing that could use a comeback, it’s local news. The industry has been decimated over the past two decades, with big-city newspapers shrunken and news desserts dotting the map. But new entrants are emerging.“We live in a world where all politics are still local, but all news coverage is national. I hope there's a compromise. I suspect we're getting closer to finding it. I don't know that local journalism is always going to be defined in its most traditional form. It may not simply be about local news and information. And maybe local journalism is decreasing the proximity between the content creator and the reader. If you look at the podcast system, how many have evolved into live events? That reduces the friction between the creator and the user. Those direct connections people will pay for in pretty intense ways – if you have the right talent, if you have the right topic matter, the right sort of credibility.”The case for ads The pendulum in the publishing business has swung far away from ads and firmly in t

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Over just five years, crypto has exploded from a curiosity to a cultural touchstone, with millions of boosters, Super Bowl commercials and billions of investment in the belief that a new financial system, built for the digital age, is being created.And along the way crypto has become highly divisive. Its most ardent supporters are hardly known for their understatement, giving crypto the whiffs of both libertarianism run amok and a speculative frenzy that’s given cover to all manner of grifters. The Gold Rush mentality isn’t a bad thing, according to Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockworks, a crypto-focused media company that expects to top $20 million in its fifth year.“Bubbles are good,” he said on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show. “They bring in capital, that’s how innovative technologies get built. Railroads went through a massive mania from 1840 to 1870 with all these bubbles. But obviously railroads got built. Bubbles just bring talent and capital.”Jason and I discussed how four-year-old Blockworks has built a $20 million business by positioning itself as the go-to resource for financial institutions to understand the fast-moving world of blockchains and crypto currencies. Believing in crypto’s inevitabilityAs newcomers to crypto in 2017, Jason and co-founder Mike Ippolito saw a nascent industry stuck in boom and bust cycles and with its scruffy edges. But they believed one key thing: crypto would eventually become a very large institutional asset class.“The white space that we saw was around information in the industry. In 2017 there were basically two media sites, CoinDesk and Cointelegraph. You had one or two podcasts, and then a bunch of information on things like Twitter and Reddit. We would go to these events, and they were clearly run by a bunch of scammers. And then you'd look online and it seems like a bunch of people pumping different coins. But 1% of this feels real. We've done so much wrong over the last four years, but the one thing that we got right is believing that crypto would eventually become an institutional asset class and that we would need better information, insights, data analysis, news, research, et cetera, for the massive cohort of capital markets and people coming into crypto.” Building from eventsBlockworks started out in events, hosting its first one in February 2018. Went into the business full-time in May. Blockworks only then branched into content with a podcast network, including popular crypto podcaster Anthony Pompliano. It was only in January 2021 that Blockworks launched its news site. The advantages of this approach: Blockworks was generating revenue from the start.“We've never had to raise outside venture funding because we started with conferences. We ended up building a community of some of the most valuable people in the world: money managers, hedge fund managers, portfolio managers at endowments, family offices. And that turned out to be a really valuable audience for this institutional bucket of crypto companies that ended up getting built in 2017 to 2010 – Fireblocks, BlockFi, Gemini, Coinbase, all these institutional crypto brands –

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Apple users: Please leave a rating and review. When it comes to business models, software models beat publishing ones. Recurring revenue scales more quickly and at far better margins.For a decade, Famous Birthdays has chronicled the rise of digital culture through its platform for finding out more information about the digital stars from TikTok and YouTube, as well as more traditional pop stars. Famous Birthdays has relied heavily on its internal search data as the “North Star” of its business. The company noticed Charli D’Amelio rising in popularity in 2019 and recorded a video interview with her before the TikTok star exploded in popularity. That formed the basis of the Famous Birthdays Pro product that offers proprietary data on who is rising and falling in popularity. Clients include platforms, influencer agencies and services, and talent representation firms.“We add more clients and it just grows,” said Evan Britton, founder of Famous Birthdays. “If you pivot to video, you have to create that content and you get some margin on top of it. Ad-based businesses aren't as exciting, We could have charged our users a few bucks a month and given them extra functionality. But we went with the enterprise model, which is good because we don't have to gate anything with our users.”Evan and I spoke about the opportunity he saw that led to Famous Birthdays, the opportunity for a data business and why he went all-in on programmatic advertising.Finding opportunity in the shift to mobileTechnology shifts create opportunities. Back in 2012, the mobile phone was just starting to usurp the role of desktop in how people found and consumed information. Evan noticed that sites like Wikipedia were comprehensive, but not made for a mobile experience, particularly the small screen size of those early smartphones.“Birthdays are always often the first thing people want to know about a celebrity, but there's other information they want to know. We were a mobile-friendly Wikipedia/IMDB. I'm more about user experience. The user experience on mobile for Wikipedia was not good. You don't want a book report on mobile. You want to get right to it. I saw that as an opportunity as an entrepreneur.”New class of celebritiesAs digital media has grown, it has created its own set of celebrities, grouped together under the broad term of “creators.” These can range from YouTube stars to Instagram and TikTok performers. What Famous Birthdays saw early on, back to the heyday of short video service Vine, was fans often have greater attachment to these digital stars.“We would have a Vine star with a million followers sending us their headshot and their bio. And then at the same time we had these movie actors that wouldn't respond to us that had 5,000 followers. We saw very early that there was a gap between where culture was, but where the industry was set up. Traditional celebrities, you are a fan of them, but with social stars, you are really a fan. It's different when you see someone in a movie acting as someone else versus watching them brush their teeth every morning. Social just had a deeper level of fandom and we always saw that in our rankings.”Why platforms got creator religionJust about every major tech platform has their own twist on creators. Most have lau