The Rebooting Show

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyFor episode 3 of The Rebooting Show’s mini-season focused on modern B2B media, I spoke to Angus Macaulay, COO of Stat, the health-focused site that’s one of my favorite niche media brands. Please send me an email with any feedback. Also, please rate and review the podcast. Thanks to Niceguyappreviewer, who said The Rebooting Show is “such a valuable podcast for media entrepreneurs,” noting the “insightful, actionable and relevant information.” Thank you, Niceguyappreviewer.Politico’s model has long been an aspiration of many niche media companies, even before Axel Springer shelled out $1 billion to buy it. The reason: Politico was able to pull off the “prosumer” model of providing in-depth, insider coverage of a niche (politics) that straddled the line of consumer impact but with the advantages of a B2B business model that typically affords an opportunity for high-priced subscriptions.Stat, born out of the Boston Globe Media in 2015, wants to pull off the Politico model for life sciences. The site, which operates independently and has 70 people, had a breakout moment during the pandemic as the world’s attention by necessity turned to the issues that are squarely in Stat’s wheelhouse. Stat’s monthly traffic peaked at 23 million in March 2020 vs 4.7 million the prior month. The site’s revenue was up 40% in 2021 vs 2020, with subscription revenue up 24%.“Before Covid, when we’d talk to people at conferences or to advertisers, it was either we know Stat and love it or I never heard of it,” said Angus Macaulay, Stat’s COO. “We were still a new brand. There was still an awareness brand. When Covid exploded, people in the healthcare industry were also trying to keep up on all the breakthroughs, and many in the ecosystem relied on us as a source. Our awareness in the healthcare ecosystem went through the roof.”Here are five key takeaways from the conversation:Find a local story with global impactThe idea for Stat came out of a dinner Boston Globe Media owner John Henry had with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who noted that while Boston didn’t have the tech scene that Silicon Valley has “you have the life sciences and the entire infrastructure with the academia in Boston as well.” While the Globe is mostly a local news company, the opportunity was to build a niche publication with global impact from the position of Boston’s outsized role in life sciences as home to over 1,000 biotech companies. “If you lived in Boston and Cambridge over the last 25 years, you can’t miss how life sciences has changed this area, it’s just exploded,” said Macaulay.Use “stars” to establish credibilityMany news sites focus on keeping costs low, particularly early on. That often means hiring less experienced journalists who command lower salaries. With the backing of a larger media company, Stat was able to take a different path. Its founding executive editor was Rick Berke, a 27-year veteran of The New York Times, sending a signal of the ambitions Stat had, Macaulay said. “They didn’t find someone working at a niche B2B trade site. They wanted someone who understood high-end investigative journalism.” The site went on to hire several well-known reporters with deep experience in their fields, including

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyThanks for the notes following the debut of The Rebooting Show. You can subscribe now on both Apple and Spotify. We’re working hard to improve the audio quality, and I’m going to make sure the episodes get shorter. I’m always interested to hear your feedback. My email is bmorrissey@gmail.com. One request: If you like the podcast, please rate it and leave a review. This week’s episode features Julia Noran Johnston, founder and president of the Business of Home, a vertical media company focused on the interior design industry. I wanted to speak with Julia for a few reasons. I’m always interested in speaking to former journalists who are now running businesses, since I tend to think they build differently than those who come from the sales or operations side. The other reason is the category. B2B is often knocked as boring, but there are many areas that blend consumer elements. The home is one of those.Julia’s advice for those building new media businesses: “Find your community. There has to be a community to support what you’re doing. Find a place that’s relatively untapped because that gives you the advantage and opportunity for success.”Here are five key takeaways from the conversation: Finding your nicheBuilding a business media brand means finding an underserved audience, ideally one with buying power. In the 2000s, Julia had shifted from journalism to a marketing role at Condé Nast’s Veranda magazine. What she noticed was that many requests for proposals listed interior designers as their target. “They were the volume buyers of the product,” she said. “In some cases, they were 100% of the buying base. I started to realize they were very valuable and what a premium audience that was, and at Veranda we weren’t isolating that audience.”Community > audienceThe most sustainable media brands focus on communities that share an interest and want to connect with each other. That’s why some of the most successful media brands -- Complex (streetwear), Barstool (bros who gamble), Hodinkee (watch collectors) -- are built around communities. Going to many interior design events in New York, Julia recognized that designers were a real community. “I was hanging out with designers, it was a real community that existed and there wasn’t a publication serving that community at all. I saw the opportunity for the community to have a hub.”Be ready to pivotThe reality of most businesses is the path you plan to take isn’t usually the one you end up taking. For BoH, the initial business plan was built around assembling a database of designers with projects to match with product makers and bloggers covering the space. “It made a lot of sense on paper,” Julia said. But there was a problem: As BoH (then called Editor at Large) grew as a news source, the database business didn’t match since it was a PR play. Inevitably that would dent the credibility of the news content. In 2011, the company changed course. “We started to focus on that more because that’s what people wanted and where the demand was,” Julia said. “It’s much easier to meet demand than push something that people are resistant to.”Growing a sales teamGetting sales right is critical to any sustainable business. BoH has relied heavily on in-bound leads for advertising, but is now building out its sales team and breaking into new categories. But that comes at a price: The need to add more infrastructure and processes expected by advertis

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts — more platforms coming soon.After a year break from podcasting, I’ve finally started anew with The Rebooting Show, a weekly audio and video discussion that goes into the details of building sustainable media businesses with those building them. (The video is still in the works, and it will take a bit of time before the podcast feed is available on Apple and Spotify. Apologies.) The goal for the show is to focus on the mechanics and execution since I believe too much is generally made of “vision” in the media business. There aren’t a ton of secrets; those who succeed tend to simply excel at executing the details. My goal is to get beyond the PR spin that’s, unfortunately, a feature of most business podcasts. I always knew a podcast would likely suck if multiple PR people showed up with the guest. It was nearly guaranteed if the guest then took out a sheet of talking points. You’d be surprised how many big media executives feel uncomfortable simply answering questions about what, in theory, they’re responsible for doing.My plan is to break the podcast into mini-seasons of five episodes focused on a theme. This first season is focused on modern B2B media businesses, a topic near to my own experience. B2B has long been treated as something of a backwater, at best a stepping stone to consumer titles. That’s always sold B2B short. There are many terrible, old school B2B publishers and events companies, but there are a new crop of modern players emerging who are still focused on going deep on the ins and outs of their business areas but do so with a higher focus on in-depth reporting, slick packaging and diverse business models. In many ways, I think consumer media can learn more from B2B than vice versa since B2B has always focused on direct connections (often through email), communities and diverse business models that aren’t reliant on advertising.That’s why I wanted to talk to Adam White, the CEO of FOS, home to Front Office Sports and Sports Section. Adam started Front Office Sports while still a student at the University of Miami in 2014. His cobbled-together Wix site was meant as a foot into a sports marketing career but grew to the point where Adam made the plunge into starting a business out of it.I’ve always liked Front Office Sports and how Adam and his team have thoughtfully built the company and continued to execute. In our conversation, we discuss the origins of Front Office Sports, the white space they saw in the market, their approach to differentiation, and the decision to build off their B2B base with newsletters aimed at a wider consumer audience.Some highlights from our discussion:The importance of talking to your audienceFOS began as an informational interview project Adam did one summer during college. Putting them online seemed a no-brainer. There wasn’t a product roadmap or a business plan, but Adam listened to what he was being told. Many of the interviews veered toward career advice, giving him insight into needs in the market. “What they told me all the time was these young professionals that work in sports don’t get accolades.” That led to what in retrospect was FOS’s breakout moment: The Rising 25 awards in 2017. “It’s been the most impactful thing we’ve done,” he said.Not having money is a giftInvestment firm Steins backed FOS in 2018, but Front Office Sports took a bootstrapped path. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise in retrospect. “If we had the money before we did the informational interviews, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We would have never figured it out. They told us everything we should do.” That gave FOS a