Publishers were alerted to the coming change in December, and subscribers were notified last week. (If you have any of these subscriptions, you can see the timing for how they’ll be phased out; you won’t lose money.)

The Kindle was once seen as a possible savior for digital journalism (though Nieman Lab was always skeptical). In 2009, then–New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger appeared on stage with Jeff Bezos to introduce the larger-screened Kindle DX, saying, “We’ve known for more than a decade that one day an e-reader product would offer the same satisfying experience as the reading of a printed newspaper.” From 2011 until 2020, people who subscribed to the Times on the Kindle got free access to NYTimes.com, too.

Amazon hasn’t shared its exact reason for the change (the company’s statement to publishers is here), but one obvious explanation is that relatively few people are buying these subscriptions and it doesn’t make financial sense to continue to support them. Instead, Amazon wants publishers to add their content to its $9.99/month digital subscription program, Kindle Unlimited, which includes a bunch of magazines and access to one newspaper that I saw — USA TODAY.

Anyway, while this all feels very 2011, news publishers in particular should check out some of the comments on last week’s Reddit thread, where customers talk about why they liked reading newspapers on Kindle, and why they’re sorry to lose the subscriptions — and it still has to do with the “satisfying reading experience” Sulzberger talked about more than a decade ago.

Very disappointing. I had only recently discovered that I actually enjoy reading my local newspaper when it’s on the Kindle as opposed to the paper’s poorly designed website and frequently broken app.

In addition to the sheer legibility/readability of the Kindle screen display, I liked the Kindle editions for the Table of Contents feature and other navigational aids. These made it easy to skim, particularly in large issues of a pub like the daily New York Times…

I currently subscribe via Kindle Newsstand to the publications below. It will be a hassle to manage the subscriptions separately now, for each publisher, via their websites. This mirrors the mess that streaming television has become, fragmented into many different providers with their own payment schedules, subscriptions costs, log-in credentials, Terms of Service, etc. etc.

I have:

The New York Times – Daily Edition for Kindle
The New Yorker
Foreign Affairs
New Republic
The New York Review of Books
New York Magazine

Woke up to the email and I’m pretty pissed. Loved having a few magazines and newspapers on my Kindle. Much easier on the eyes than a phone/tablet, better battery life, and things just worked (some of the apps reload and you lose your place between sessions).

Very disappointing. I’ve subscribed to many newspapers and magazines via my kindle for many years and prefer its layout to most crappy apps. At this point, i have been only using my kindle to read newspapers and magazines (usually use the app for books).

This is hugely disappointing. I have been a NYT subscriber on the Kindle for so many years…more than 10. One of my fondest memories is on a trip to Greece, staying in a hotel on the side of a cliff, and barely getting enough 3G signal to download the Sunday Edition. During the summer, I wake up every day and sit on my deck and read the NYT while I drink a cup of coffee. I subscribe to the paper edition on the weekends but I actually prefer the Kindle edition in a lot of ways because it’s ad-free and easy to navigate.

I was mad enough about dropping support for 3G but this might be the end of my relationship with Kindle. I’ll switch brands to whatever I can get NYT on, or I’ll just skip the Kindle entirely. And I was hoping to upgrade soon… Kindle probably just lost a customer.

If you like reading news sites on Kindle, here’s a hack to keep you going.

Seven years later, “indefinitely” seems to be over: Post-subscribing Amazon Prime members who were paying that $3.99/month rate have been informed over the past couple of days that their monthly price will triple to $12. That’s the normal rate currently offered through the Post’s site. (Separately, and confusingly, you can also still buy a Washington Post Kindle subscription, which “includes unlimited access to all content from The Washington Post Company website and The Washington Post Company mobile apps,” for $7.99 per month via Amazon’s site. That price is up from $5.99 per month a year ago.)

The price increase comes as the Post’s digital business appears to have stalled: The New York Times recently reported that the Post has lost paying digital subscribers since 2020 and that its digital ad revenue has fallen. I’ve asked the Post for comment and will update this if I hear back. The change implies, though, that the Post no longer sees enough of a strategic advantage in introducing Prime members to the paper that it’s willing to subsidize them. (It still runs plenty of general pricing specials, though.)

Prime members might have let a $3.99 monthly charge slide even if they weren’t reading the Post much. Will that change when the price goes up to $12 a month, entering Spotify and Netflix territory? We’ll see. (Or maybe we won’t, since the Post doesn’t publicly release subscription numbers.)

Meanwhile, the price of an Amazon Prime subscription rose to $139 per year last spring.

In early May 2022, Meta announced that it was abruptly ending Facebook’s podcast integration less a year after it launched. Facebook had offered podcasters the ability to upload their shows to the social media site. Meanwhile, Spotify’s own expensive gamble on podcast integration within its music streaming service hasn’t resulted in the surge of new listeners that it had hoped.

And what about the emergence of social audio platforms like Clubhouse that promised to re-imagine podcasting as live audio chatrooms hosted by celebrities and public figures?

After its meteoric rise in 2021 during the height of the global pandemic, Clubhouse has seen major declines in app installs, in part because of the rise in competing services like Twitter Spaces and Spotify Live.

Amid all this corporate turmoil, it’s tempting to conclude that online tech companies are moving on from podcasting in search of higher profit margins elsewhere.

But these realignments belie a bigger truth: Platforms have already reshaped podcasting in fundamental ways, and they will play an outsized role in its future.

An open medium collides with Big Tech

Podcasting, which has been around for only two decades, has a unique, decentralized infrastructure.

Podcasting’s audio files are accessible via a simple 2000-era technology known as RSS, short for “Really Simple Syndication.” Thanks to the openness of RSS — it is a nonproprietary distribution mechanism that cannot be controlled by anyone — podcasting has remained a thriving creative ecosystem. Once you upload an audio file and connect it to an RSS feed, any podcatching software or app can find it and download it.

The first decade of podcasting’s existence was characterized by steady, if laconic, growth. In 2006, for example, only 22% of U.S. listeners had even heard of podcasting. That percentage sits at 79% today.

After 2014, however, this slow and steady rise has been turbocharged by a staggering wave of corporate takeovers.

In 2019 I argued in the academic journal Social Media & Society that podcasting was undergoing the process of “platformization,” thanks to the increasingly central role of digital platforms like Spotify, Google and Amazon in the medium’s development. Spotify alone has spent over US$1 billion on podcast acquisitions. Other big radio and tech companies have also made significant acquisitions in the past three years, reshaping the industry in the process.

Openness, however, is anathema to digital platforms, which are intentionally structured as walled gardens that restrict access. They make money when users pay for access to content and services — and that, of course, works only when the content isn’t available elsewhere.

One of the recent shifts in podcasting has been the introduction of paywalls and exclusive content. It has since become a standard feature of the medium.

Most notably, in May 2020 Spotify signed an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster, one that was reportedly valued at $200 million. All of Rogan’s new episodes — and even his entire back catalog — are now available only on Spotify, leading RSS and podcasting pioneer Dave Winer to argue that his show is in fact no longer a podcast.

Other eye-popping exclusivity deals have included Spotify’s 2021 $60 million deal for “Call Her Daddy,” the popular advice and comedy podcast created by Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn in 2018. Even podcast pioneer Roman Mars sold the exclusive rights to produce and distribute his longtime show “99% Invisible” to radio giant SiriusXM, though the podcast will remain freely available on all platforms for the time being.

The importance of podcast IP

For Spotify, securing popular podcasts to exclusive distribution deals is all about increasing the number of users on its platform. But podcasts with dedicated followings are also emerging as coveted forms of intellectual property.

Podcast production studio Wondery, for example, aggressively pursued cross-licensing deals for its original audio dramas, which include “Dr. Death,” “Dirty John” and “Gladiator.” All have or will appear as television series.

The value of these creative properties made Wondery an attractive acquisition target for Amazon, which paid $300 million for it in late 2020.

The content pipeline from podcasting to television and feature films is now well established, thanks in large part to the emerging centrality of traditional entertainment talent agencies into podcasting.

New podcasts with bankable Hollywood talent now launch as part of multimedia deals that include books, made-for-TV dramas or documentaries. Meanwhile, podcast networks are shifting their production strategies, aiming to land celebrities with built-in audiences for exclusive content licensing deals.

This is a marked shift from the DIY grassroots content that has been a hallmark of podcasting.

Ad tech is coming for podcasting

Platforms are also changing the way podcast audiences are measured. RSS was designed to efficiently and anonymously distribute audio files, but not to track who was downloading those files or if they were actually being listened to.

Digital platforms, on the other hand, function as sophisticated surveillance machines. They know who is listening to a podcast — which allows for specific demographic and psychographic targeting — and how much of that podcast is being consumed. Companies can also track their consumption of other media on the platform. Advertisers are coming to increasingly expect that their podcast ad buys will allow for accountability and attribution.

While it didn’t get that much media attention, Spotify’s recent acquisition of Chartable and PodSights — two important podcast analytics firms —are indicative of this arms race for user data.

There are broader issues at stake here, and not just the concentration of advertising revenue into the hands of the big platforms. The commodification of podcast listener data has privacy implications as well, which is something that the industry itself is beginning to acknowledge.

A tale of two media

What do these shifts portend for the podcasting’s third decade?

The story of podcasting has become really a story of two divergent media.

On the one hand, the traditional, scrappy, upstart version of podcasting will survive thanks to the open architecture of RSS. Podcasting still has relatively low barriers to entry compared with other media, and this will continue to encourage independent producers and amateurs to create new shows, often with hyperniche content. Crowdfunding sites like Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee allow creators to make money off their content on their own terms.

But grassroots podcasting will find itself competing with the professionalized, platform-dominated version of the medium that’s hit-driven and slickly produced, with cross-media tie-ins and big budgets.

As companies like Spotify, Amazon, NPR, SiriusXM and iHeartMedia aggressively monetize and market exclusive podcast content on their platforms, they’ve positioned themselves as the new gatekeepers with the keys to an ever-expanding global audience.

Independent podcasting isn’t going away. But with the promotional power concentrated in the hands of the very biggest tech firms, it will be increasingly challenging for those smaller players to find listeners.

Apple plans to change that by bundling its less successful subscription products — Apple News+, Apple Arcade, and Apple TV+, in roughly ascending order of success — with a product that has been a hit: Apple Music. Think of it as an all-inclusive Apple content tax, er, offering.

A bundle was first hinted at in June, and Bloomberg reported the first significant details about the bundle, apparently named Apple One, last month:

The bundles, dubbed “Apple One” inside the Cupertino, California-based technology giant, are planned to launch as early as October alongside the next iPhone line, the people said. The bundles are designed to encourage customers to subscribe to more Apple services, which will generate more recurring revenue.

There will be different tiers, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private plans. A basic package will include Apple Music and Apple TV+, while a more expensive variation will have those two services and the Apple Arcade gaming service. The next tier will add Apple News+, followed by a pricier bundle with extra iCloud storage for files and photos…

The initiative is a major bid by Apple to achieve the same loyalty that Amazon.com Inc. has won with its Prime program, which combines free shipping with video streaming and many other services for an annual or monthly fee. This bundle is the bedrock of Amazon’s success and has been mimicked by other companies before with mixed results.

Well, “as early as October” may actually be “as early as tomorrow,” according to new reports that seem to indicate Apple One is right around the corner.

Over the weekend, 9to5Mac found text strings that “appear in the localization files used for the iPhone’s Manage Subscriptions screen. The text has been added recently, which may further suggest that Apple One is going to be announced at Apple’s special event on Tuesday.” Similar verbiage was found a few days ago in Apple Music’s Android app. And MacRumors noted some related domain registrations. Apple has one of its signature product unveilings scheduled for tomorrow, Sept. 15.

Will a bundled subscription make a difference for Apple News+? It depends on the details, of course. But Bloomberg’s report that Apple News+ would be reserved for only the most expensive level of Apple One — for people who also want Apple Music, Apple TV+, and Apple Arcade — doesn’t suggest huge increases in customer interest. Even if a bundle functionally lowers the price of Apple News+ — say, from $10 to $5 a month — I wouldn’t expect a lot of takers.

If Bloomberg is correct, Apple News+ won’t be able to benefit from being one part of a single omnibus bundle — the way that, say, Amazon Prime Video benefits from being part of Amazon Prime. Lots of people want two-day shipping from Amazon; if they get it, they also get 60 episodes of “Bosch.” Imagine if you could save $20 a year off your Prime subscription if you, say, opted out of Prime Reading. A lot of people would, because it’s not a part of the bundle they’re particularly interested in.

As long as Apple News+ is a separate customer decision — not for all Apple One subscribers, just for the top tier — I suspect it’ll still struggle to gain a market, no matter how hard Apple pushes it on your iPhone. To do that, it’ll need to become a much more compelling product — and it still has a long way to go there.

Bookshop, which was founded to support independent bookstores, distributes earnings through a pooled fund and provides digital storefronts that let local stores keep the profits on any sales they generate. Launched in late January, Bookshop has served as a lifeline for indie booksellers during a pandemic that has forced many of them to shut up shop. Here in Massachusetts, for example, local favorites like Harvard Book Store, Brookline Booksmith, and Porter Square Books — not considered “essential businesses” — have closed and suspended curbside pickup. This could change after May 18, but until then, online orders are keeping them afloat.

There’s something in it for publications that cover books, too.

If a publication refers a sale to Bookshop, the site will kick back 10 percent of the book’s price. That’s more than twice the going rate — 4.5 percent for physical books — through Amazon’s affiliate program.

News organizations have seen ecommerce as an attractive way to diversify their revenue streams for a while now. The concept is straightforward (even if the ethical questions aren’t): An outlet publishes an affiliate link — in a review or gift guide, maybe — and earns a small percentage of any sales.

Back in 2016, The New York Times paid more than $30 million for the product review site Wirecutter, a major investment that now seems like a bargain. (The Times doesn’t break out affiliate revenue in its financial reports, but we noted a 20.9 percent increase in “other revenue” back in 2017 that was largely credited to referral revenue. That category has grown in the years since, though the latest earnings report credited revenue from The Weekly and Facebook licensing.) Wirecutter often points readers toward Amazon, which runs the largest, best-known affiliate revenue program. But, as the book publishing industry learned early on, it’s not smart to be overly dependent on the whims of a tech giant. Just last month, Amazon cut commission rates across several categories, which can’t have been welcome news for digital publications like BuzzFeed and New York magazine that regularly publish shopping guides to drive affiliate revenue. The company is also delaying shipping on some items — including books.

By providing an alternative, Bookshop offers an opportunity for publications that rely on ecommerce to diversify at least part of their payouts.

For all the galaxy-sized metaphors in the press, Bookshop isn’t trying to beat Amazon at its own game — just loosen its vice-like grip on bookselling. (More than 90 percent of ebook and audiobooks sales and about 42 to 45 percent of print book sales happen on Amazon, according to industry tracker BookStat.) Part of the solution, concluded Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter, was developing an affiliate program that worked for publishers but supported many independent stores instead of one trillion-dollar company.

“I want book coverage to exist and I want it to be supportable,” said Hunter, who is also the force behind the book-centric sites Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and Catapult. “But it’s a problem when every link is pointed to Amazon because it’s fueling this huge growth that is ultimately going to devastate the ecosystem around books by turning it into a one-player game.”

Bookshop overcame some of the most obvious challenges — like a small bookstore trying to compete with an inventory like Amazon’s — by partnering with a large wholesaler that will store, pack, and ship the books.

In just a few short months, a number of publishers have come aboard. The New Republic, BuzzFeed News, Vox, New York magazine, Outside, and Longreads, among others, now feature Bookshop links. The New York Times is including a link to buy from Bookshop — alongside a host of other sites, including Amazon — on some reviews and its bestseller lists. Hunter said Hearst, Meredith, and Condé Nast have all expressed interest and, pending some back-and-forth with their corporate legal departments, will be sending readers to Bookshop by June.

Convincing publishers to switch their affiliate links from Amazon to Bookshop became easier as sales increased and its conversion rate — which was 3 percent at launch — improved to a competitive 8 percent, Hunter said.

“We were relying on their social conscience to try to get them to link. We were totally unproven,” Hunter said. “In February, we sold $50,000 worth of books. We raised $10,000 for local bookstores. We thought that was a success — but that’s not going to mean a lot to a big company like Condé Nast. But now we’re selling almost $5 million worth of books a month.”

“That’s when it starts to become a really easy conversation because they don’t have to sacrifice revenue by linking to us,” Hunter said. “They get to feel good about themselves. They get to diversify the revenue. And they don’t have to take a financial hit because we’re able to deliver the sales that they want.”

Bookshop’s affiliate program is open to all — whether you’re a “Bookstagrammer” with a dozen followers or a magazine with a national audience. Hunter says the set-up is simple and that out of 5,000 affiliates, only around 100 have asked Bookshop for help with the process.

In addition to linking on their own sites, publishers can create “storefronts” to show recommended titles from across their coverage. BuzzFeed’s shop has its book club selections, reader favorites, and editors’ picks. Talking Points Memo features a social distancing reading list and books selected by opinion contributors. Electric Literature’s lists include the top novels of 2019, books about refugees, and books with “glamorous messes.”

“It’s a great way to earn extra revenue while curating a shop based on your editorial identity, giving your longtime readers and fans a way to support you and discover great books to read at the same time,” Hunter said.

But the L.A. Times may have reached a new high in combining its editorial products with its owner’s side gig: Last night, it released an eight-part video series on the science behind the novel coronavirus, starring its owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong. Soon-Shiong, who bought the Times in 2018, is a transplant surgeon, medical researcher (“more than 230 issued patents worldwide”), and owner of numerous medical companies and startups. In other words, you’d probably want his opinion on COVID-19 ahead of, say, A.G. Sulzberger’s or Sam Zell’s.

The videos, which add up to about 33 minutes in total, cover a pretty conventional set of topics (what is the coronavirus, how deadly is it, how contagious is it, how long will this last, and so on). Soon-Shiong sounds like the UCLA med school professor he once was more than a polished TV presenter; he’s the sole star here rather than someone being interviewed by a moderator or journalist. You can watch all the parts starting here; I’ve also embedded the video that combines them all into one piece below.

The Times sent out an email blast to readers last night under Soon-Shiong’s name:

Dear Readers,

I’m writing this letter to you not just as the executive chairman of the Los Angeles Times, but as a clinical scientist and surgeon. I hope to provide you with a scientific understanding of the coronavirus (COVID-19) and allay the fear this outbreak has caused.

This virus is certainly the pathogen of our times. It is precisely because it is a new virus, never before experienced by a human being, that it has become a pandemic — and has elicited the misinformation that spreads confusion and fear.

It is indeed a deadly virus and must be taken seriously. But we, as a society, have the power to mitigate the spread. More importantly, I am confident that the world’s community of scientists have the skills and supercomputing tools to win this war. And it is a war. Every day matters. Every hour matters.

Through a series of short videos, I explain how we can all do our part.

Interestingly, though the videos are hosted on YouTube, they’re unlisted there and don’t appear in its regular stream of uploads. (They are promoted in a playlist.) Instead, Soon-Shiong’s email and other Times promotion directs readers to go to the paper’s mobile app to watch them — an interesting way to push downloads. (They are also on latimes.com, but I don’t see them actively promoted on the site.)

This is utterly cool — scientist Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the @latimes owner, did a 7-part video series to explain how COVID-19 may be combatted. Download the LAT app and hit “Media” for access to this and more. pic.twitter.com/l3aEJyW1K7

— Andrea Nguyen (@aqnguyen) March 18, 2020

We as a society, have the power to mitigate the spread. More importantly, I am confident that the world’s community of scientists have the tools to win this war. And it is a war. Every day matters. Every hour matters. #coronavirus https://t.co/R33Tc3ZT2d

— Dr. Pat Soon-Shiong (@DrPatSoonShiong) March 18, 2020

The videos were produced as part of a special episode of L.A. Times Today, the paper’s local cable show on Spectrum 1 News, which included some additional conversation with host Lisa McRee.

“Los Angeles Times presents The Science Behind the Coronavirus,” with Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, airing at 7:00 P.M. PST, Monday, March 16, 2020, view at: Spectrum News 1 or LA Times, download the Los Angeles Times Mobile App.”

— Joseph White (@JosephW57325287) March 16, 2020

Having watched it, I think this is an interesting video summary of some of the scientific details behind the coronavirus and potential paths to fighting it. There’s nothing in here to suggest anything other than a civic-minded intent. Indeed, as McKee puts it at one point in the Spectrum episode:

McKee: You had a very specific reason for wanting to produce this hour.

Soon-Shiong: Well, what we wanted to do is accomplish peace of mind, positive action, based on the informed science, to win this war against this coronavirus.

All that said…

I don’t need to point out all the potential conflicts that could arise whenever a newspaper owner decides to use its brand to broadcast his own views, no matter how well intended. (Thank heavens we were spared the 19-part Chicago Tribune series, “Michael Ferro: How I’d Fix the Bears’ Offense.”) And Soon-Shiong isn’t just a doctor — he’s also an entrepreneur and investor, and coronavirus is both a news story and a business opportunity.

For instance, just eight days ago, one of Soon-Shiong’s companies, ImmunityBio, included this in a press release:

In the field of infectious disease, ImmunityBio’s goal is to develop therapies, including vaccines, for the prevention and treatment of HIV, influenza, and the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

Soon-Shiong is ImmunityBio’s chairman and CEO.

It’s entirely possible I missed it — please let me know if I did — but I didn’t see any sort of disclosure or disclaimer of this potential conflict of interest, either in the TV show or the videos. It’s the sort of thing that a good L.A. Times reporter would be sure to mention in a story that looked at a local physician/businessman’s views on the pandemic — that the expert being interviewed also owns a company that is actively working on a treatment.

(Then again, if Soon-Shiong was just a local expert on infection disease, it’s highly unlikely he’d be given a blank-check hour of TV airtime. Or a special eight-part video series in the L.A. Times app.)

The closest I saw to the issue being raised was this question from Spectrum’s McRee:

McRee: And finally, Dr. Patrick: Private industry, there’s lots of money to be made globally by this. But you think that there is something greater happening.

Soon-Shiong: I don’t think anybody — everybody who we’ve been interacting with as both the private and the public level — considers the financial return on this in any way whatsoever. This is a pandemic that’s how affecting humanity. And what I’m proud to say is that everybody we’ve spoken to — whether it be Fortune 5 companies that are working to supply supercomputing support, such as Microsoft, or even Nvidia, we’re using these supercomputers, GPU clouds for eSports gaming — are completely opened to allow this. The scientists themselves are publishing their work on a daily basis. So I’m pleased to say that the global community, both public and private are really coming together to try and solve this problem.

As far as I can tell, the L.A. Times hasn’t written about ImmunityBio, regarding its coronavirus work or anything else.

Soon-Shiong’s efforts in health care have been controversial before. In particular, investigations by Stat and Politico have criticized him for making grand civic pronouncements about his philanthropy that ended up funneling money back into his own businesses. For instance, a $12 million gift to the University of Utah that required $10 million be sent right back to one of his companies. Or his foundation, where “the majority of its expenditures flow to businesses and not-for-profits controlled by Soon-Shiong himself, and the majority of its grants have gone to entities that have business deals with his for-profit firms.” One Stat story described his reputation as “a self-promoting showman flaunting more hype than substance.”

Perhaps that’s a completely unfair reputation — I don’t know! It’s important to note that Soon-Shiong has strongly disputed many of these criticisms, complaining about “all this false reporting.” And I claim no particular expertise in evaluating the claims of his critics or of the investigative reporters who’ve written about him.

But I do claim some expertise in how a news organization should act in a situation where its owner has outside business interests that come into conflict — or even just contact — with its editorial mission. And I think it requires a bit more editorial distance than this series seems to provide. At a minimum, these videos should note that Soon-Shiong is CEO and owner of a private company that is actively working on creating a coronavirus treatment. That’s true even though I don’t think there’s anything objectionable in the videos’ content, and even though I don’t think there’s any particular reason to think Soon-Shiong is anything other than sincere in his desire to fight the coronavirus.

Imagine if Jeff Bezos decided tomorrow that he wanted to do an eight-part video series for his Washington Post about “The Challenge of 21st-Century Retail.” I bet it would be absolutely fascinating! But even if every word Bezos said in it was accurate and civic-minded, the Post would still obviously feel obliged to note that Bezos runs Amazon and is a very interested party here. (And that’s if Post editors decided to run it under the paper’s banner at all. I would imagine you’d see some very public resignations from the masthead if it ever came down to that.)

Or say Sheldon Adelson decided he wanted his Las Vegas Review-Journal to run a 30-minute video of him opining on the topic “Why Sports Gambling Should Only Be Legal in Nevada.” One would hope someone would make sure to mention that Adelson owns Las Vegas Sands and The Venetian.

This coronavirus series isn’t quite that. As I said, the content seems unobjectionable. But there’s a reason people have raised concerns over the past decade about “what happens when billionaires buy up all the news organizations.”

For the most part (Adelson being a very big exception), I think the billionaire buyers have generally done okay at recognizing their civic duty and not abusing their new toys as tools for their other interests. But the concern is a legitimate one. I hope the Times will think disclosure of your owner’s conflicts is important even when it’s about a subject as universally agreeable as “we should find a cure for the coronavirus.”

When I spoke at state newspaper conferences five or ten years ago, people would say: “It’ll come back. It’s cyclical.” No one tells me that anymore. The old business is plainly rotting away, even as I find myself still documenting the scavengers who turn detritus into gold.

The surviving — growing, even — national news business is now profoundly and proudly digital. All the wonders of the medium — extraordinary storytelling interactives and multimedia, unprecedented reader-journalist connection, infinitely searchable knowledge, manifold reader revenue — illuminate those companies’ business as much as digital disruption has darkened the wider news landscape.

What is this world we’ve created? That’s the big-picture view I’m aiming to offer here today.

Those of us who care about journalism were happy to see the 2010s go. We want a better decade ahead for a burning world, a frayed America, and a news business that many of us still believe should be at the root of solving those other crises.

I call what follows below my epiphanies — honed over time in conversations around the world, with everyone from seen-it-all execs to young reporters asking how things came to be the way they are in this business. These are principles that help me make sense of the booming, buzzing confusion that can appear to envelop us. Think of it as an update to my book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get, now a decade old.

Here I’ve distilled all my own concerns and my understandings. I’ve taken a big-picture, multiyear view, knowing that like it or not, we’re defining a new decade. You’ll see my optimism here — both as a longtime observer and as a later-stage entrepreneur trying to build out a new model for local news. (I wrote about that back in October.) I do believe that we can make the 2020s, if not quite the Soaring ’20s, something better than what we just went through. But I balance my optimism with my journalism-embued realism. In many ways, 2020 stands at the intersection of optimism and realism — a space that’s shrinking.

So much has gone off the rails in the news industry (and in the wider society) over the past decade. Amid all the fin-de-la-décennie thinking, I think Michiko Kakutani best described the country’s 10-year experience: “the indigenous American berserk,” a borrowing from Phillip Roth.

So much of what happened can be attributed to (if not too easily dismissed as) “unintended consequences.” Oops, we didn’t mean to turn over the 2016 election to Putin. Gosh, we didn’t mean to alter life on earth forever — we just really wanted that truck. We just wanted to connect up the whole world through the Internet — we didn’t mean to destroy the institutions that sort through the facts and fictions of civic life.

As billions have disappeared from the U.S. newspaper industry, the words “collateral damage” served to explain the revolution that led digital to become the leading medium for advertising. That damage is now reaching its endgame.

The Terrible Tens almost precisely match the period I’ve been writing here at Nieman Lab. In that time, I’ve written enough to fill several more books — 934,800 words before this piece. Almost a million words somehow accepted by our loyal readers, who still, remarkably, laugh and tell me: “Keep writing long.”

Let’s then start the 2020s off right. With one eye on the last decade and another on the one to come, let me put forward 20 understandings of where we are and how we build from here.

That felt like huge news — but what if it really only represents the beginning of a greater rollup? Last month, I sketched out how five of the largest chains could become two this year.

And yet there are even worse potential outcomes for those of us who care about a vibrant, independent press. What if a Sinclair, bent on regional domination and with a political agenda, were to buy a rollup, and keep rolling?

In a way, GateHouse’s builder Mike Reed has done a lot of the heavy lifting already. From a financial point of view, the CEO of New Gannett has already done a lot of rationalization. GateHouse bought up a motley collection of newspaper properties, many out of long-time family ownership, and brought some standard operating principles and efficiencies to them. We can ask whether his big gamble of borrowing $1.8 billion (at 11.5 percent interest) from Apollo Global Management will prove out over the next few years. Or we can think of that megamerger as just prologue.

After all, the same logic that drove the GateHouse/Gannett deal pervades the near-uniform thinking of executives at all of the chains. Job No. 1: Find large cost savings to maintain profitability in light of revenue declines, in the high single digits per year, that show no sign of stopping. And the easiest way to do that is merging. A merger can massively — if only once — cut out a lot of HQ and other “redundant” costs.

It buys some time. And newspaper operators are craving more time. “Ugly” is the simple description of the 2020 newspaper business offered to me by one high-ranking news executive. Revenue declines aren’t improving, so the logic remains. The only questions are: How much consolidation will there be, and how soon will it happen?

Heath Freeman, head of journalistic antihero Alden Global Capital, has already begun to answer that question. The hedge-fund barbarians aren’t just inside Tribune Publishing’s gates — they’re settled in around the corporate conference table. Alden’s cost-cutting influence drives the first drama of the year: Can Chicago Tribune employees fend off the bloodletting long enough to find a new buyer for their newspaper before it’s too late? They know that, despite a national upswell in public support for the gutted Denver Post in 2018, Alden was able to remain above the fray and stick to its oblivious-to-the-public-interest position.

Meanwhile, McClatchy is trying to thread a needle of financial reorganization. Then there’s Lee, operator of 46 largely smaller dailies. All of them are subject (and object) of the same financial logic.

While financing remains tough to get, at any price, there remains an undeniable financial propulsion to bring many more titles under fewer operations.

There’s no law preventing one company from owning half of the American daily press. And no law prevents a political player like a Sinclair — known for its noxious enforcement of company politics at its local broadcast properties — from buying or tomorrow’s MergedCo — or orchestrating the rollup itself.

After a decade where we’ve seen the rotten fruit of political fact-bending, what could be more effective than simply buying up the remaining sources of local news and shading or shilling their coverage? Purple states, beware! Further, the price would be relatively cheap: Only a couple billion dollars could buy a substantial swatch of the U.S.’s local press.

Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry.

It sometimes seems like we’ll run out of epithets — “the Thanos of the newspaper business,” “the face of bloodless strip-mining of American newspapers and their communities,” “industry vulture,” “the newspaper industry’s comic-book villain” — for Alden Global Capital. Then someone helps us out.

“Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry,” one very well-connected (and quite even-keeled) industry executive told me dispassionately. “It just destroys the story we try to tell of the great local journalism we need to preserve.”

Think about the big picture. The industry is flailing; behind closed doors, it’s throwing a Hail Mary, trying to win an antitrust exemption from Congress. It argues that in the public interest, it should be allowed to negotiate together (rather than as individual companies) with the platforms. It wants the big payoff they’ve dreamed of since the turn of the century: billions in licensing from Google, Facebook, and Co.

It pines for and makes comparison to the kinds of licensing revenue that both TV broadcasters and music publishers have been able to snag. But thus far, that’s been a heavy lift in terms of negotiation or public policy. But Alden adds more weight, letting governments or platforms say: “Wait, you want us to help them?”

Which leads to…

Can a duopoly licensing deal be the “retrans” savior of the local news business?

In 1992, local TV companies were in a bind. Cable and satellite companies had to pay the ESPNs and CNNs of the world to air their programming. But local TV stations — available for free on the public airwaves — got nothing for having their signal distributed to cable customers.

But that year, federal legislation allowed local TV stations to demand compensation from cable and satellite systems — retransmission fees. Essentially, distributors paid stations for the right to their programming, including local news — despite the fact that anyone with an antenna could get their signal for free.

What started out as a small supplemental revenue stream now amounts to about 40 percent of all local TV station revenue, according to Bob Papper, the TV industry’s keen observer and data/trend collector through his annual RTDNA survey. “Retrans money is skyrocketing, and that should continue until it levels off in 2023-24.” This year, it will likely add up to $12 billion or more.

Advertising revenue has been fairly flat for local TV companies (setting aside for a moment the two-year cycle in which election years pump them full of political cash). Digital revenue hasn’t been much better, accounting for only six or seven percent of station income, Papper says — way less than newspaper companies earn.

And yet these local TV businesses are stable, profitable, and facing nothing like what’s happened to newspaper newsrooms. Papper notes the wide variance across stations in the depth and breadth of their news products. While many still stick with the tried-and-tired formulas, his surveys of station managers list “investigative reporting” as their No. 1 priority. When it’s funded, it’s a differentiator in crowded TV markets.

It’s that retrans money that makes all the difference.

Clearly, the news industry is a major supplier of high-engagement material to the platforms — a supply that helps energizes their dominant ad businesses. While both Google and Facebook have deployed a motley fleet of news industry-supporting initiatives, they’ve steadfastly refused any large-scale “licensing” arrangements.

If there’s increased public pressures on the platforms as the society’s digital high turns part-bummer, and if the political environment were to change (a President Elizabeth Warren, for example), it’s not hard to imagine the tech giants ponying up a billion here or there for democracy-serving news, right? (Both Google and Apple count more than $100 billion in cash reserves, net of debt, with Facebook holding more than $50 billion.)

Google, when asked over the years why it doesn’t pay license fees, talks about the complexity of the news market, among other objections. Expect a new argument: You want us to pay an Alden, or a Fortress Investment Group?

The financialization of the press may indeed makes the daily newspaper “public service” argument more difficult to make. While still true — though now wildly uneven in its actual daily delivery — it might be an artifact of a bygone age. The question may turn from “Will platforms finally pay license fees?” to “Who can make a good argument that they deserve them?”

The first metric that matters is content capacity.

In our digital world, just about everything can be counted. So many numbers adding up to so few results for so many.

Look forward and we can see that content capacity is and will be among the biggest differentiators between the winners and losers of the news wars. In fact, I’d call it a gating factor. Publishers who can offer up a sufficient volume of unique, differentiated content can win, assuming they’ve figured out ways for their business to benefit from it.

People aren’t the problem, no matter what the headcount-chopping Aldens of the world have preached. People — the right journalists and the right digital-savvy business people — are the solution.

In models as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Athletic, The Information, the Star Tribune, and The Boston Globe, we see this truism play out.

Certainly, having more skilled journalists better serves the public’s news needs. But the logic here is fundamentally a business one. In businesses increasingly dependent on reader revenue, content capacity drives the value proposition itself.

Rather than reducing headcount — and thus spinning the downward spiral more swiftly — increasing headcount can lead to a magic word: growth.

The news business will only rebound when it seeks growth.

Across America’s widening expanse of news deserts, we don’t hear many whispers of that word, growth. The conversation among owners and executives is pretty consistent: Where do we cut? How do we hold on?

That’s meant more M&A. More cutting print days. More cutting of business operations. More cutting of newsrooms. All in an effort to preserve a diminishing business — whether the underlying mission is to maintain even a semblance of a news mission or just to milk the remaining profits of an obsolescent industry.

Of course, local news publishers poke at new revenue streams to try to make up for print ad revenues that will likely drop in the high single digits for the fourth year in a row. But the digital ad wars have been lost to Google and Facebook. Marketing services, a revenue stream pursued with much optimism a few years ago, has proven to be a tough, low-margin business. Digital subscription sales are stalled around the country, not least because of all that cutting’s impact on the product. Most see no path to a real “replacement” revenue stream. (Maybe CBD-infused newsprint?)

Cutting ain’t working. Decline feeds decline.

Only an orientation toward growth — with strategies that grab the future optimistically and are funded appropriately — can awaken us from this nightmare. Replace “replacement” strategies with growth strategies and these businesses look different.

Happily, we do have growth models to look at. Take, most essentially to the current republic, our two leading “newspapers.”

Today, The New York Times pays 1,700 journalists. That’s almost twice as many as a decade ago. The Washington Post pays 850, up from 580 when Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013.

The result: More unique, high-quality content has driven both publishers to new heights of subscription success, the Times how with three times as many paying customers as it had at its print apex. Readers have rewarded the investment, and those rewards have in turn allowed further investment.

It’s a flywheel of growth — recognizable to anyone who’s ever built a business, large or small. What it requires is a long-term view and patience. And, of course, capital in some form — which shouldn’t be a problem in a rich country awash in cash. But what it also demands is a belief in the mission of the business, an in-part seemingly irrational belief that the future of the news business can, and must, be robust.

Some big numbers tell the big story.

• We may have underestimated the dominance of the New Gannett. According to Dirks, Van Essen, Murray & April, the leading newspaper broker, the new Gannett now owns:
  • 20.4 percent of all U.S. daily newspapers
  • 26.3 percent of all U.S. daily print circulation
  • 24.8 percent of all U.S. Sunday print circulation

  So in rough terms, it controls a quarter of our daily press. The chart below, produced by the brokerage, compares the megamerger to the industry’s previous big deals on the basis of percentage of newspapers owned and percentage of circulation controlled. It should send a chill down every American spine.



• There are probably fewer than 20,000 journalists working in U.S. daily newspaper newsrooms. There’s not even a semi-official tally anymore, but that’s a good extrapolation from years past, given all the cutting since. That compares to 56,900 in 1990 — when the country had 77 million fewer people than today.
• The daily press still depends on the print newspaper for 70 percent or more of its revenue. That’s after 20 years of “digital transition.”
• The daily newspaper industry today takes in more than $30 billion less per year than it did at its height.
• $1 trillion: The market value reached by Alphabet (Google) last week.

The brain drain is real.

What’s the biggest problem in the news business? The collapse of ad revenue? Facebook? Dis- and misinformation? Aging print subscribers?

Surprisingly, over the last year numerous publishers and CEOs have confided what troubles them most: talent.

It’s hard enough to take on all the issues of business and social disruption with a staff that can meet the challenge. Increasingly, though, it’s hard for news companies to attract and retain the talent they need, especially in the business, product, and technology areas that will determine their very survival.

Who wants to work in an industry on its deathbed? Especially in an already tight job market.

What do the people who could make a difference in the future of news want? Fair compensation, for sure, and local news companies often pay below-market wages, on the TV side as much as in newspapers. Perhaps more important, they want a sense of a positive future — one their bosses believe in and act on every day. That’s a commodity scarcer than money in this business.

No industry has a future without a pipeline of vital, young, diverse talent eager to shape the future. And that’s especially true in the live-or-die arts of digital business. As the just-released Reuters Institute for Journalism 2020 trends report notes, “Lack of diversity may also be a factor in bringing new talent into the industry. Publishers have very low confidence that they can attract and retain talent in technology (24%) and data science (24%) as well as product management (39%). There was more confidence in editorial areas (76%).”

At the same time, we’ll be watching the flow of experienced talent as it moves around the industry. As Atlantic Media continues to grow and morph under the Emerson Collective, a number of its top alumni are moving into new positions elsewhere. Longtime Atlantic president Bob Cohn now takes over as president of The Economist — an early digital subscription leader, the storied “newspaper” now seeks growth. Meanwhile, Kevin Delaney, co-founder of Atlantic Media’s innovative Quartz, has taken on a so-far-unannounced big project at The New York Times’ Opinion section, where the appetite for impact has grown appreciably.

Finally, as The Guardian ended the decade with happy reader revenue success, Annette Thomas becomes CEO. Thomas has earned accolades for her innovative work in science publishing. These three, plus numerous others moving into new jobs as 2020 begins, can now bring their decades of digital experience to the job of getting news right in the ’20s.

Print is a growing sore spot; expect more daycutting.

Just for a moment, forget the thinned-out newsrooms and consider a fundamental truth: The physical distribution system that long supported the daily business is falling apart.

The paperboys and papergirls of mid-20th-century America have faded into Norman Rockwell canvases. As Amazon’s distribution machine and Uber and Lyft suck up available delivery people across the country, publishers say it’s increasingly hard to find paper throwers. (And why not? Paper-throwing sounds like a sport from another age.)

Why not just throw in with the logistics geniuses of the day, and partner with them to deliver the papers? The newspaper industry has indeed had talks with Amazon, buyer of 30,000 last-mile delivery trucks over the past two years. We’ll probably see some local efforts to converge delivery. But think about who still gets that package of increasingly day-old news delivered to their doorstep? Seniors — who want the paper bright and early, complicating delivery partnerships.

Not to mention that, with print subscribers declining in the high single digits every year, deliverers now need to cover a wider geography to deliver the same number of papers — and that problem will only get worse.

To add an almost comic complication to the challenge of dead-tree delivery: California’s AB5 just went into effect. Its admirable aim is to bring fairer benefits to those in the gig economy. But its many unintended consequences are now cascading throughout the state — spelling millions more in costs to daily publishers while wreaking havoc among freelancers.

Is seven-day home delivery now a luxury good? Or just a profit-squeezing artifact? Either way, it’s become clear that publishers’ years of price increases for seven-day aren’t sustainable. One of my trusty correspondents reported this last week that he’s now paying $900 a year for the Gannett-owned Louisville Courier-Journal. There are Alden-owned papers charging more than $600 a year for ghost titles, produced by a bare handful — sometimes two — journalists.

As print subscriptions have declined, publishers have continued to price up. That’s death-spiral pricing, with a clear end in sight and boatloads of money to be made on the way out the door.

Earlier this year, I wrote about “the end of seven-day print” and how publishers have been modeling and noodling its timeline. There’s been lots of trimming around the edges, mainly at smaller papers; McClatchy’s decision to fully end Saturday print is a harbinger of what’s to come. The company planned the end of Saturdays meticulously, with a keen eye toward customer communication, and proved to both itself and the industry that it can be done.

(Let’s allow time here for a brief chuckle by European publishers who have been successfully publishing “weekend” papers for decades.)

But cutting Saturday alone doesn’t save you a lot of money. Those twin pressures — on one hand, needing ever-larger cost savings, on the other, the collapsing distribution system — mean we’ll see more ambitious and adventurous cutting in the year to come. They’ll do while swallowing the existential fear one CEO shared: “They are scared to death this will end the habit.”

How big a deal is all this — the declining mechanics of print distribution? Very big.

Consider that The New York Times — the most successfully transitioned of newspaper companies — still only earns only 43 percent of its revenue from digital. Most regional dailies still rely on print for 75 to 90 percent of their overall revenue. If the physical distribution system starts failing faster, how much of that print-based revenue — circulation and advertising — can be converted to digital?

At a national level, the direct connection between readers and journalists has never been stronger.

Listen to the commercial breaks of The New York Times’ breakaway hit The Daily. A lot of them aren’t commercial spots, but what we used to call house ads in the print business. Maggie Haberman talking about Times’ reporting in the era of press vilification; Rukmini Callimachi sharing the danger and cost of reporting from terror-stricken parts of the world.

These ads aren’t about making the newsroom feel better — they work. The Times now has more than three times the total paying customers than it did at the height of print, with 3.9 million digital news subscribers paying the Times. Why? The journalists and the journalism.

In the halcyon days of print, advertising drove 75 percent of the Times’ revenue, a number that often hit 80 percent for local dailies. Now the digital world has forced — but also enabled — the Times to forge a very direct connection between its journalists and readers. Readers understand much more clearly that they are paying for high-quality news and analysis. They value expertise and increasingly get to know these journalists individually, whether through podcasts or other digital extensions.

Journalists believe more than ever that they are working for the reader, with the Times the trustworthy intermediary. The new more direct relationship between reader and journalist fosters growth. And the same is true similarly for The Washington Post, The Athletic, and The Information, in different forms.

If the local news world had followed suit, we’d say that the age of digital disruption has been a boon for journalism overall. Clearly, it hasn’t. This lesson is a guidepost for the decade ahead.

Advertising remains a vital — but secondary — source of revenue for news publishers.

The war’s over; the platforms won. With Google and Facebook maintaining a 60 percent share of the digital ad market (and 70 percent of local digital ads), publishers no longer expect to grab a bigger slice of the pie. The drama drawing the most attention: How much will Amazon eat into The Duopoly, as Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise summed up “the five trends that threaten the Google/Facebook duopoly” at AdAge.

Contrary to some of the conventional wisdom of the moment, that doesn’t mean advertising is no longer a part of publishers’ diversified revenue streams. Yes, reader revenue is clearly the driver for successful publishers of the ’20s, but advertising — best when sold and presented in ways that don’t compete directly with the platforms — will be in the passenger seat.

The evolving formula of the early ’20s is a mix of 65 to 70 percent reader revenue, 20 to 30 percent in advertising, and then an “other” that includes things like events. While this model may be more diversified, it’s not made of discrete parts. The better publishers get at profiling their reader-revenue-paying customers, with increasingly better-used first-party data, the better they can help advertisers sell. At this point, it’s a wobbly virtuous circle of money and data, and the successful publishers will find ways to round it.

A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension.

The word of the moment in almost every conversation about local news is “nonprofit.” At so many conferences and un-conferences about the news emergency, the notion that there’s a commercial answer to rebuilding the local business seems almost out of bounds.

What created this anti-profit sensibility? Acknowledging the power of the duopoly, to be sure. But that’s not the only rationale. For generations, many journalists considered themselves proudly unaware or uncaring about the business. Now the ascendance of Google and Facebook has given too many permission to eschew advertising as a significant, if secondary, support of reporting.

Secondly, the industry’s Heath Freemans and Michael Ferros, among too many others, have stained a local news business that was once both proudly profitable and mission-driven. Profiteering is now associated by many with local news.

Nonprofit news, too, though requires capital — just like any kind of growing service or product. Somebody has to actually pay journalists. So those advocating nonprofit news as the new future have turned to philanthropy. They look to foundations, national and local, to finance this vision. Nationally, more than $40 million has now flowed into the American Journalism Project, headed by Elizabeth Green and John Thornton. Most of that’s come from national foundations. The AJP announced its first grants in December, a down payment on what it envisions as a fund of up to $1 billion.

Now we’ll see if AJP can significantly move the needle on what is plainly needed: replacement journalism. As it tries to catalyze a movement, it hopes to multiply the philanthropic response to the news crisis. It’s a hope we can share. AJP’s pitch is straightforward: Communities should support news the same way they support public goods like the ballet and the opera, things that in many cities plainly couldn’t sustain themselves as creatures of the market.

That’s a worthy thought, but with two big issues attached.

One: There’s not much of a tradition of such support. Newspapers made so much money for so many years that they were the ones who started foundations, not the ones asking them for money. Relatively few communities’ foundations are oriented in that direction — and foundations don’t change direction or priorities speedily.

Two: Scale. So much local news coverage has been lost that it would take substantial and ongoing philanthropy to even begin to resupply community news. There’s not a lot of evidence yet of a readiness to do that.

To be sure, hundreds of dedicated journalists have build smaller operations in cities across the country. LION Publishers and the Institute for Nonprofit News are looking for new and better ways to support and nurture them. But the old world is disappearing far faster than a new one is being created.

Ace industry researchers Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb recently laid out their thinking, which should serve as a reality check for all who care about the next decade of local news.

Yet even with a game-changing funding renaissance in local news (which would require the significant participation of community foundations), it probably won’t be fast enough or big enough to refill the bucket as local newspaper talent and jobs continue to drain away. There may not be enough philanthropic capital, even on the sidelines, to support the scope and depth of local news-gathering that our democracy requires.

But it was the concluding paragraph of their Nieman Lab prediction that really best summed up this epiphany looking ahead to the end of this decade.

A New(s) Deal for the 21st century: If all forms of philanthropic support for local news are truly not enough, we predict that by the end of 2030, we’ll be seeing large-scale policy changes to publicly support more sources of local news. It may not seem like we’re that close on this one, but trust us, it could happen.

I know Hansen and Holcomb are trying to spark a note of optimism, but their realistic reading of the landscape should strike terror: A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension. Imagine this struggling country 10 years from now if the news vacuum has become the new normal and our communities are democratically impoverished.

My own view: All good journalism is good. Support it by philanthropy, advertising, events, reader revenue, or by winning lottery ticket. Given the peril, we all need to look more widely for support, not more narrowly.

The free press needs to be a better advocate of free peoples in the 21st century.

The Wall Street Journal has long proclaimed itself the paper of free people and free markets. That formulation has made a lot of sense over time in the face of state-run economies of various flavors. But it’s insufficient to meet the demands of today.

Free peoples — those able to speak, write, assemble, vote, and retain some dignity of privacy — make up an uneasy minority of the world’s population. Now the twin dangers of growing strongman despotism and tech-based surveillance societies threaten us all.

Most recently, The New York Times’ investigative report on facial recognition painted a deeply disturbing dystopian portrait. The piece came on the heels of many beginning to describe China’s “surveillance state,” an ominous system intend to enable lifelong tracking and rewarding of state-approved citizen behavior.

We’re moving from a decade of cookies gone wild to what until recently seemed to be Orwellian fiction.

Combine the tech with the spreading rash of authoritarianism afflicting the globe. From Russia to Hungary to Turkey to Brazil to the Philippines to, yes, our current White House, the 2010s produced strongmen who we thought had been relegated to the history books.

Who best to represent free people in the coverage of would-be despots and in the tech-driven threats to several centuries of hard-earned Western rights? A free and strong press.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Czech novelist Milan Kundera memorably told us in his 1980 book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. (John Updike’s masterful review of it is here).

Memory. Our job as journalists is to remember. To connect yesterday to today to tomorrow.

Like the climate crisis, the threat of a surveillance society registers only haphazardly among the American populace, even as California’s government and others begin to take it on.

We’ve seen the beginnings of a backlash against tech run amok, with Facebook’s role in the 2016 election a seeming turning point. But here we are again, as Emily Bell points out, going into another election with the same issues — and huge questions that go well beyond the social behemoth.

If news companies are, at their base, advocates for the public good, news companies must lead in securing a free society in the face of technological adventurism. Media needs to get beyond its self-interest — ah, first-party data! — and focus on the bigger picture.

Who better to take that stand than those who’ve long advocated free peoples and free thinking? Who better to do that — and perhaps be rewarded for it in reader support — than mission-oriented news media?

The press’ business revival is part and parcel of its advocacy for the people it serves.

Australia is burning, and Murdoch’s newsprint provided the kindling.

For years, Australian press watchers have pointed to the dangerous slanting of environmental news by much of the nation’s press. A majority of that press is controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s empire. And those papers, joined too often by other media, have long skewed the facts of climate change. The result is a society ill-prepared for the nightmare that’s befallen it.

While this month has seen more complaints about Murdoch publications’ coverage, they’re in line with what that coverage has looked like for years. Now even scion James Murdoch has spoken out, as have some of Murdoch’s employees, seeing the heartbreaking, country-changing toll the fires have taken on Australia.

History will record Rupert Murdoch’s three-continent toll on Western civilization. The Foxification of U.S. news, Brexit support, and Australia’s inferno serve as only three of the major impacts Murdoch’s press power has had around the world. It is a press power weaponized and then turned on the very societies it is supposed to serve.

And don’t let the whirl of events let you forget the odious phone hacking scandal. “The BBC reported last year that the Murdoch titles had paid out an astonishing £400m in damages and calculated that the total bill for the two companies could eventually reach £1bn,” former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger reminded us this week in discussing the British press’ tawdry history with the royals.

Disney, for one, has recognized the toxicity of Murdoch’s remaining brand. Fox Corporation now owns the Fox broadcast network, Fox News, and 28 local Fox television stations, among other media assets. But “Fox” is no longer part of Twentieth Century Fox, the storied studio, and related assets that Disney bought from Murdoch last year. Now it’s only out of sync when it comes to time: 20th Century Studios. (Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton offered up a wonderful history of the Fox brand in the U.S., beginning with a third of a Brooklyn nickleodeon 115 years ago, on Twitter.)

The Murdoch empire has generated plenty of good entertainment outside of its own brands — witness the Emmy-winning “Succession” and last month’s Bombshell. But we haven’t yet come to grips with how his publications’ fact-slanting has literally changed the faces of free societies.

Expertise rises to the top.

The end of the print era is killing off the generalist. Every daily newsroom has its legend of the reporter who could cover anything. Wake him up from a drunken stupor, point him (almost always him) out the door, and you’d get your story.

Great stories there sometimes were, but the legend exceeded the truth: Too much news reporting was a mile wide and an inch deep.

Flash forward to today: Ruthless digital disruption — of both reading and advertising — means that inch-deep stories have less and less value. (Remember back at the start of the last decade, the content farms — Demand Media, Contently, Associated Content — that were going to revolutionize journalism?)

If commodity journalism and sheer volume are out, one the most refreshing trends into the 2020s is single-subject journalism. It needs a better name, but the results have been profound. In topic after topic, the focus on expertise — in reporting, writing and increasingly presentation and storytelling — have produced their own revolution.

In health, we see Kaiser Health News excelling and expanding. In education, Chalkbeat (with its new five-year plan) and the Hechinger Report drill into the real issues of the field. They’re now being joined by the university/college-focused OpenCampus.org, seeking to bring the same level of experienced, knowledgeable journalism to the often-cloistered academy.

The Marshall Project squarely meets the many mushrooming questions around criminal justice in our society. InsideClimate News is growing to try to meet the interest, and panic, around a warming earth. More-than-single-subject-oriented ProPublica’s investigations, often done with partners, have done what great work is supposed to do: set and reset agendas. There are many more, including at the regional and state level, led by The Texas Tribune and CALmatters.

All together, they may add up to fewer than a thousand journalists at this point. But their impact is great, and I believe it will become greater as awareness and distribution increase.

As Google and Facebook have won the ad wars, pageview-thirsty commodity journalism has largely (and thankfully) met its demise. Now we’ll see how much the market — not just those foundations — will support real expertise in reporting.

Free media has better tech skills than state media.

While Iran’s state media was spending days denying any possibility its military had shot down the Ukranian airliner, The New York Times found the likely truth early on. It assembled its own small group of experts. It used the best tech available. And it could report (under an increasingly common four-person byline) that an Iranian missile had in fact likely done the deed.

It wasn’t about suspicions, guesses, or bombast. It was about finding a truth in plain sight — given the human and technological resources to do it.

At first, Iranians believed their own media, as NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reported from Tehran, that the downing was U.S. propaganda. But then, amazingly and overnight, Iranian citizens responded to the American-driven truth. They piled into the streets, seeing the mistake and its coverup for what it was: another sign that their government, without its own checks and balances, couldn’t be trusted.

Watch what privately owned newspapers do.

By necessity, we pay a lot of attention to the industry’s M&A mating games. These largely involve the dwindling number of publicly owned newspaper companies, which struggle both with operating realities and the need to convince shareholders to hang on through short-term earnings and dividends. They’re the biggest players, the most riddled by financialization, and the ones who have to report numbers publicly.

But given today’s realities, the stock market really isn’t the place for newspaper companies to be. Only long-term, strategic, capital-backed, and for the most part private or family-controlled businesses can make it successfully to 2030.

In the middle part of the 2010s, those papers got more focus. John Henry with The Boston Globe. The Taylor family with the Star Tribune. Frank Blethen, fighting the long fight in Seattle. And then they were joined by Patrick Soon-Shiong with the L.A. Times and San Diego Union-Tribune.

For the most part, we don’t hear much news out of these enterprises. They don’t have to report to markets quarterly, and they’ve taken more of a no-drama-Obama approach to the tough business. They are also, not incidentally, the leaders in digital subscription among local dailies. They remain important to watch.

Just as importantly, consider two newspaper chains that keep their heads down: Hearst and Advance. In the early 2010s, Advance made lots of news by cutting print days at its papers in New Orleans, Portland, Cleveland, and elsewhere. It will likely soon get a fresher look: Long-time Advance Local CEO Randy Siegel announced last week that he’s stepping down. No successor has yet been named.

Hearst also remains intriguing. A very private company — and one now that now generates less than 10 percent of its revenue from newspapers — its very name bespeaks a long commitment. But the top two executives of what now is a profoundly diversified media company both grew outside of the news trade. Will it stand pat in its markets? Will it look for acquisitions? (The old GateHouse was its nemesis outbidding Hearst for the Austin and Palm Beach papers in 2018, but the Gannett deal should keep it out of the buying game for a while.) With antitrust enforcement apparently on the wane, will it try to build a cluster in the Bay Area around its San Francisco Chronicle? Or complete a Texas big-city triangle by adding The Dallas Morning News to its Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News?

Bankruptcy is nothing new in the newspaper industry.

McClatchy’s pension-led financial crisis in November surprised many. The words “potential bankruptcy” tend to focus the mind.

But consider this: By one close observer’s account, more than 20 daily newspaper companies have visited the bankruptcy courts since the Great Recession a decade ago.

Ironically, two of the ones that emerged became acquisitive consolidators. Today’s MNG Enterprises, driven by Alden’s in-court and out-of-court strategy, in fact declared bankruptcy twice in its various corporate iterations. GateHouse, re-birthed by Fortress Investment Group in 2013, was able to restructure debt totalling $1.4 billion — double what McClatchy now owes — and has gone to become the biggest newspaper company in the land, even able to buy the better-known Gannett name in the process.

So if McClatchy does indeed go into a pre-pack bankruptcy, the news won’t be that filing. It’ll be what the company does — as a business and journalistically — afterward.

We have to find a way to keep trillion-dollar stories in the public eye.

Through a year full of remarkable stories, perhaps the most remarkable was one that’s gotten little continuing attention.

In December, The Washington Post published “At War With The Truth.” It took the paper three years to pry loose the trove of documents through Freedom of Information requests. It is remarkable reporting, and one that put a price tag on our ignorance.

Here’s the lede: “A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

The eerie parallels to the Pentagon Papers — a previous generation’s documentation of enormous waste, financial and human — were obvious. And yet it seems to have caused only small ripples in public discourse.

Politicians drive the daily news cycle, wielding wedge attacks on those — disabled, immigrant, poor — already falling through the now-purposely cut safety net. They say they do this in the name of saving taxpayer dollars. And yet this literal waste of $1 trillion pops in and out of the news in a politician’s second. This isn’t a question of politics; it’s a question of the public purse, and performing that watchdog role is our birthright as journalists.

As we reform and rebuild the journalism of the 2020s, we need to use the digital and moral tools of the day to hold power accountable and keep big stories alive over time. So far, we’ve barely touched the surface in connecting the latest happening to its deep historical context, making readers realize how a story connects to a larger issue or narrative, in ways both intuitive and knowledge-building.

I have confidence we’ll figure out how to do that in the 2020s.

“Mediatech” may be the new “convergence.”

There’s a new word taking hold out there: “mediatech”.

That’s how German behemoth Axel Springer is rebranding itself. CEO Mathias Dopfner and his team have rigorously pursued a transition away from print for more than a decade. “Mediatech” tells us both what they’ve learned and where they are going. In August, Dopfner’s new partner KKR bought out a minority interest in the company, taking it private and preparing it to be a bigger player this decade.

Springer, like its sometime partner Schibsted, will be one the big survivors in the brutal media game. Both have learned that modern journalism is now driven by both journalists and by technology. It’s the melding of the two — in audience definition, targeting, and service, and in product creation and delivery — that will determine the winners ahead.

Springer’s question for the ’20s: How much will the company keep investing in journalism itself, as it also pursues other digital business byways? Dopfner laid out the strategy, in friendly but direct sparring with Mark Zuckerberg, here.

Ah, life remains better in Perugia!

Travel coincidentally brought me to the doorstep of the most you-gotta-go-there journalism conference a couple of years ago. The name says most of it: the Perugia International Journalism Festival. Not a conference, or even an un- one, but a festival, inviting, of course, allusions to Nero fiddling. The truffled pasta and the views can’t be beat. The Sagrantino was magnificent.

The conference’s agenda and its exhibitor halls said it all. Walk into the main hall and Google and Facebook offered dueling expanses, with many enthusiastic company-clad representatives touting their latest and greatest. And half the agenda seemed to be, in apparently unintentional self-parody, sessions on how to work with…Facebook and Google. It’s the very best setting for platformitis.

In the time since, we’ve seen an even greater proliferation of news-aiding initiatives out of both companies. The new Reuters Institute study corroborates my own reporting, among publishers, of how that work is going and how it’s seen:

Google’s higher score [in the Institute’s own surveying] reflects the large number of publishers in our survey who are current or past recipients of Google’s innovation funds (DNI or GNI), and who collaborate with the company on various news-related products. Facebook’s lower score may reflect historic distrust from publishers after a series of changes of product strategy which left some publishers financially exposed.

The overall sense from our survey, however, is that publishers do not want hand-outs from platforms but would prefer a level playing field where they can compete fairly and get proper compensation for the value their content brings.

Short of that business-changing historic payout — see above — it’s unlikely that platform aid to publishers will itself significantly alter any of the trendlines in place.

There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscriptions.

Imagine if Reed Hastings has gone with advice of management consultants in the early 2000s, who might have “sized” the market for “on-demand” video and likely found it negligible. Netflix, nurtured on red envelopes, instead created a whole new category of customer demand — and willingness to pay.

As the company has grown, analysts have consistently undershot its growth potential, in the U.S. and globally. The company that was once asked “Will people really subscribe to on-demand movies?” reported on Tuesday that it now counts 167.1 million subscribers, and added 8.8 million in Q4 2019.

Upstart Disney (two words that don’t seem to pair) has already had its Disney+ app downloaded 40 million times. Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Apple TV+, CBS All Access, Peacock, and more are all opening wallets.

What’s instructive to the future of the news business here? There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscription, though media reporters love to ask me that question. Create a value proposition that works and consumers will pay. Obviously, national and global scale — what the Internet provides — are hugely helpful. It is though the product proposition that drives payment.

For a moment, consider all the digital subscription success stories in news: The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Athletic, The Boston Globe, the Star Tribune, and more. What if this is just prologue? Could better products — with more and more useful content, priced, sliced, and diced smartly — reproduce some of the scale success of streaming?

In a word, yes. And that’s our best hope for the decade ahead. Into the 2020s, bravely!

As background, I’m a professor of communication and journalism, which means I study how people make meaning through media. This is broad, but this focus on meaning and media poses an intellectual challenge that is tightly tied to practices like journalism, technology design, and policy making. These are the professions that often create the conditions under which people make meaning through media, so they matter to public life.

By “making meaning through media,” I mean this: how people who will never meet face-to-face discover, argue about, and manage collective life, and the stakes involved in our interconnections — how communication make publics.

Publics are not natural. They don’t exist in the wild. We make public life through:

• what we watch or read or post online, and what’s available to us;
• what stories journalists choose to tell, and are incentivized to tell;
• which speech and ideas advertising markets reward and make more likely;
• how regulations govern speech, media monopolies, and political communication.

I could go on. The point is this: How well we govern ourselves — learn about each other, discover shared concerns, encourage or sanction behavior — all of this governance depends on how well our communication systems work.

Today, these systems of communication — these systems of self-governance that make publics — increasingly live within privately controlled infrastructures. These infrastructures create the conditions under which people make meaning. They make some publics more likely than others. These infrastructures are often called platforms.

Platform makers often say that they don’t create information, that they’re neutral. But we know that they make important decisions about how information is gathered, circulated, analyzed, and sold. They make images of the world with our information. Following José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal, we can distinguish between two kinds of platforms. The first is “sectoral platforms” — think Airbnb, Spotify, Netflix, Uber. They connect people who have something with people who want something — and they are typically focused in domains, like housing, entertainment, transportation, or news.

But there is a second, more powerful kind of platform I want to focus on: “infrastructural platforms.” These platforms make the often invisible web through which almost all data today are captured, processed, stored, circulated, and sold. They are typically created by the “Big Five” technology companies: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon. They are most obviously search engines, browsers, email clients, advertising markets, social networking sites, geolocation and navigation systems.

But they also make and apply rules about what content is allowed to exist and circulate online. They direct vast global workforces of contractors and private algorithms that moderate speech. Facebook is creating its own “Supreme Court” to judge appeals. Google has tried to create its own artificial intelligence ethics board. Platforms sometimes talk about themselves as governments and, indeed, the government of Denmark has an official “ambassador of technology.”

They are building a complete stack of experience through custom hardware, software, server farms, data warehouses, private internet networks, undersea cables, and even entire city neighborhoods like Google’s Sidewalk project in Toronto. Instead of thinking about platform companies as the next generation of newspapers, radio stations, or TV channels, we should see them as entirely new entities that shapeshift constantly. Sometimes they are like cities, newsrooms, post offices, libraries, or utilities — but they are always like advertising firms. Do not forget this: They earn the vast majority of their revenue through advertising. They are primarily driven by advertising priorities.

The scope and scale of these platforms is unprecedented, moving far faster than governments and civil society, often outpacing the very idea of governance. We are usually left anticipating and reacting — imagining what these companies might do and coping with what they have done. We and they are now trying to figure out whether we should simply apply existing rules or invent entirely new ones.

In trying to understand public life in these platform societies, I think there are at least 5 ways to see platform power. (There are likely many more but these seem like the most currently pressing.)

• Image of the public. Platforms are often motivated by their own vision of public life. They often use words like “community,” “connection,” and “public,” but without much precision. Governments can question platforms’ assumptions. What does “community” mean? Why are “connections” almost always good? Do not accept platforms’ starting points — know your vision of public life and demand precision from platforms.
• Scale. Platforms want large-scale networks. They need big data, rich connections, constant surveillance. This is so their advertising profiles can be targeted, their algorithms trained, their predictive models improved. This type of scale is not necessarily the scale that works for good public life. Question platforms’ desires for scale.
• Categories and terms. Platforms have rapidly changed the popular meanings of words like “friend,” “share,” “like,” “private,” “speech,” “trusted,” and “popular.” They have co-opted many of these words. Civil society and government can make and defend their own definitions of these and other words that matter for public life. Deep understandings of these and other words are one of the many reasons that the humanities and the arts matter. Don’t uncritically accept platforms’ definitions of the words we need to describe ourselves.
• Transparency, accountability, and explainability are not the same thing. Seeing inside a system is not the same as knowing its power or how it works. Transparency does not automatically create understanding or accountability. Governments and civil society should question what platforms mean by transparency and demand better knowledge of platforms, even when they say that such knowledge is proprietary. If companies cannot explain their systems, then those systems should be seen as uncontrolled and harmful by default. Many platforms cannot explain exactly how their artificial intelligence systems work.
• Use controversies as opportunities. Whenever a controversy arises, governments and civil societies can use it to clarify types of power and images of the public. Crises are fights over something — harm, trust, difference, identity, freedom. Rapidly frame controversies in terms of the public values at stake, the image of the public in question. Crises teach us how platforms understand harm, trust, freedom — they are always cases of something.

Note that I haven’t asked: “What’s the impact of technology on society?” That’s the wrong question. Platforms are societies of intertwined people and machines. There is no such thing as “online life” versus “real life.” We give massive ground if we pretend that these companies are simply having an “effect” or “impact” on some separate society.

I think self-regulation is proving insufficient, and even platforms’ own requests for regulation need to be viewed skeptically. It would certainly be easier for them to apply global speech standards rather than fuss with different geographies and cultures, but their desires for simplicity and large-scale standards cannot be allowed to collapse human differences. We should lead with public principles grounded in democratic legitimacy and accountability, not let platforms define for themselves the terms of their own regulation.

Flawed as they are (and they often are), we have courts, we have parliaments, we have elections, we have civil societies — we have traditions of democratic legitimacy. And let’s not forget: Platforms need us — our content, out labor, our attention, our money. They are ours to control — if we can figure out how to do it.

Now, attorneys for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette — where Frye used to be a reporter, and the publication that published and copyrighted her original Kacie Woody series — have sent a cease-and-desist order to Crime Junkie co-host and creator Ashley Flowers. The order asserts that the publication “owns all the rights, title, and interest in and to its copyrights, including but not limited to the copyrights to the archival stories and photographs published in its daily print publication or through its digital properties” and that any unauthorized use of such material is a copyright infringement.

Further, the order requests that Crime Junkie “fully and unequivocally credit ADG’s copyright and Cathy Frye’s reporting at the beginning of the podcast.” On August 23, Crime Junkie reinstated several episodes to its feed that had been removed when the allegations first began to circulate (including the one about the Kacie Woody case) and noted in a Facebook post that all sources were now “comprehensively cited on the blog,” and that all new episodes would have “thorough citations” going forward. No mention was made of whether in-episode audio credits would be added.

Crime Junkie has until September 12 to respond to the ADG’s cease and desist, which says that the publication “may take further action including but not limited to filing a lawsuit” if the conditions (i.e., that the original reporting be credited at the start of the episode or the episode be removed) aren’t met.

Nick wrote last week hat this incident seemed like “the beginning of a tipping point, one in which there will be more debt payments to come,” and this legal escalation seems to support this argument. Podcasters, especially in the true crime space, who rely heavily on sources that go uncredited will be looking nervously at their own feeds, and publications with grievances to pursue will be buoyed by the ADG’s approach. There’s certainly a momentum to these kinds of accusations; where there is one, more will follow as other parties take stock and consider their options.

One aspect of this that I’m interested in keeping tabs on — as the Digital Wild West of second-hand sourced true crime podcasting begins to be tamed a little — is what routes, if any, to reputational rehabilitation are out there. It is, of course, too soon to say what will happen in the case of Crime Junkie, but if, hypothetically, a podcaster chooses to apologize for any previous infractions, comply with any retrospective requests for credit, pay any penalties incurred, and tighten up their process going forward, how will that be received by their audience and the wider community?

True crime as a podcasting ecosystem has attracted some big money deals in the recent past, from Spotify’s acquisition of Parcast to numerous TV adaptation deals. Those eyeing similar arrangements in the future may be incentivized to keep their slate clean, depending on whether this becomes an issue where people have long memories.

Spotify appears to be testing an in-app “create a podcast” button… Sort of. Kinda. Maybe? The feature was first spotted by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, and according to her tweets, tapping the button sends you to the Anchor app, the podcast hosting company that Spotify acquired back in February. And if you don’t have Anchor on your phone, it leads you to a page recommending that you download the app instead.

In other words, it sounds like an in-app house ad. But a really fancy one!

The Open Source podcast joins Hub & Spoke… Open Source with Christopher Lydon is, depending on how you look at it, the world’s first podcast, and even if you dispute that, it’s technically the longest-running one. Whatever you believe and however you argue the point, the show is joining Hub & Spoke as the Boston collective’s seventh show.

Shout-out to the Relay FM crew… “Relay FM Plans Podcast Fundraiser for St. Jude.” Details here.

Conference watch. The Sound Education Conference, which targets “educational podcasters, producers, and listeners,” returns for its second iteration October 9-12 in Cambridge, MA. Meanwhile, if you’re in London later this month, Martin Zaltz Austwick tells me that this year’s iteration of the Podcast Maker Weekend will be held on September 14 and 15, as part of the London Podcast Festival, which will feature an array of podcasting workshops and talks.

PodPass is a simple, open protocol that uses RSS and HTML to enable both existing and new authenticated interactions for podcasts across platforms.

As podcasting develops new services that require direct relationships with listeners — such as exclusive content, membership, and private feeds — we believe there’s a need for a new protocol that provides a better listener experience, more control for podcasters, and a standardized method for apps to offer access to their users.

Imagine a listener wants to hear bonus content from her favorite show as a benefit of being a supporter. The podcaster’s hosting provider offers access to extended versions of episodes, appearing in the same podcast feed for logged-in members.

Today, this scenario requires separate feeds, copying and pasting URLs, logging into separate websites, and losing your listening history when membership lapses. But it’s possible in a PodPass future. Podpass is an open protocol that enables listener identity management to support publishers’ diverse business needs.

There is an industry trend toward more direct listener monetization and engagement. This includes crowdfunding, membership, tipping, and donations, as well as exclusive and premium content.

This is a healthy development — expanding the range of touch points with listeners beyond the ad impression and helping publishers diversify their revenue and business models. The trend speaks to the depth of experience that spoken-word audio elicits, and it encompasses other podcast engagement strategies such as live shows, email newsletters, fan clubs, surveys, and experiments with personalization and interactivity.

A common need across all of these developments is to authenticate or change permissions based on the listener’s level of access. The listener usually needs to sign in to participate, and often the podcaster seeks more of the listener’s information to develop a more valuable relationship.

To clarify: When we talk about “identity,” we are not necessarily talking about personally identifiable information. In the world of access control, the responsibilities are broken into authentication, identification, and authorization.

Authentication is the job of ensuring someone is who they say they are. Authorization is the job of determining what a given person (or pseudo-anonymous user id) should and should not have access to. Identification is like the glue between these steps, allowing an authenticated person to make a request which requires authorization.

PodPass offers a way for apps to trigger both the authentication and authorization steps — controlled by the podcast host — with the apps offering the identity “glue” over time.

This crucial authentication step introduces obstacles and opportunities for the industry. There’s a risk that podcast listening apps become the default brokers of identity verification and authenticated access in podcasting. In other words, as a listener you may find yourself having to install five different apps to get all your favorite shows exclusive to a platform, and copying/pasting private feed URLs to access others.

More problematic, podcasters may find themselves locked out of a direct relationship with their truest fans, relegated to the role of a content supplier to platforms that control their experience. Ultimately, listeners are being asked to trade control and privacy for access and participation.

This can be an intentional strategy for apps to gain adoption — most visibly playing out at Luminary. Some podcasters are clearly comfortable making this tradeoff. Others, not so much.

Meanwhile, more podcasters are turning to third-party hosting and payment solutions that help support bonus, exclusive, or private content, such as Patreon, Supporting Cast, Acast Access, Glow.fm, RedCircle, Substack, and Memberful. But these services are constrained by available user experiences (primarily, providing a link to a fan who then has to copy and paste it into their listening app) and can face significant friction pursuing app-by-app integrations.

Apple, Google, Spotify, and perhaps other new entrants could “solve” this at scale by driving a dominant platform-based identity layer and monetization approach of their own, as they have done in other markets (alongside Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix). Even in that scenario, there may still be room to sustain a handful of smaller vertical or community-focused paywalled apps.

But at the logical extreme, app-based identity results in either winner-take-all platform hegemony or further fragmentation of podcast distribution, discovery, and monetization. At a moment when podcasting is still reaching new audiences and diversifying its business models, that kind of bundling comes at a cost to growth in podcasting.

Right now, it’s important to recognize that these choices and tradeoffs are still in play, and podcast publishers retain significant leverage in shaping the outcomes.

To recap: Authenticated podcasting is coming, and current approaches face a set of problems.

• Listeners need to manage multiple feeds for the same show, such as “free” and “paid.”
• Listeners don’t have a way to keep track of heard episodes as they transition from unauthenticated (public) feeds to authenticated (private) ones.
• Publishers need to initiate authentication and have no standard methodology, while interested listeners want to provide authentication wherever they already listen to podcasts.
• Publishers have to maintain multiple feeds.
• Publishers can’t monetize exclusive content cross-platform.
• Podcasts can’t be easily personalized in their production or distribution (for example, a personal fitness podcast tailored to your specific goals).
• Apps and platforms can’t offer simple access to exclusive/member content from multiple publishers without negotiating separate deals/integrations or building and offering their own vertical solution.

To be clear, we are not suggesting that, short of PodPass adoption, podcasting is in imminent danger. The vast majority of current listening and monetization via advertising remains untouched by these new needs and opportunities. But the trend towards authenticated podcasting is unstoppable and PodPass can help ensure it leads to more shared value and growth and avoids a tragedy of the commons.

PodPass is a simple protocol that uses RSS and HTML to enable both existing and new identity-based interactions for podcasting across platforms. It provides two main elements:

1. A simple set of rules to manage user identity implemented by podcast hosts and listening apps. This entails a method of indicating support, a one-way message-passing API allowing web pages to send (and client apps to receive) updates to a podcast subscription, and a standard way for client apps to request feeds and enclosures with a bearer token. (Here’s the tech spec for more detail.)
2. A consistent user experience framework for listeners to interact with in any client app. (Here’s an example of a possible listener experience.)

The introduction of a lightweight, web-like identity layer to podcast subscriptions on an opt-in basis can support new and better options where identity can enhance the experience for listeners and align with publishers’ business needs.

Imagine:

• A loyal listener opens her podcast app and sees a new member-only show from her favorite network. She listens to the free pilot episode, and is prompted to activate her account to hear the rest of the season. She logs in and keeps listening.
• A podcaster decides to offer an ad-free version of her show to paying fans. Her hosting company offers special access without ads injected for logged-in backers.
• A new podcast app wants to provide a universal catalog of podcasts, including private, member-only, and premium feeds from podcasters.
• An organization decides to offer a staff-only podcast. After a quick verification, the employee gains access to the private feed.

PodPass makes these and many other scenarios possible. You have probably encountered something similar already: PodPass is akin to activating your cable or HBO account on Hulu or Amazon Video — or storing your credentials in your web browser for sites you sign into frequently.

Here’s how it works:

There is understandable confusion about the evolution of standards in podcasting and the competing efforts to advance the medium. It is important to clarify what PodPass is not.

• PodPass is not a new product from any one company.
• PodPass is not a replacement for existing third-party membership/payment services like Patreon.
• PodPass is not a CRM or payment system.
• PodPass is not limited to paid-access use cases.

What’s next?

PodPass emerged from a series of conversations that the RadioPublic team has been having with stakeholders in podcasting across publishers, hosting providers, and platforms, and apps. (Chris Quamme Rhoden, RadioPublic’s cofounder and CTO, is responsible for the core PodPass idea and the technical insights behind it.) There is widespread agreement that the concept is compelling, along with the caveats and hesitation that comes with any bold idea at a moment of change.

We believe that the PodPass concept can spur industry dialogue, lead to immediate prototyping and testing, and that the protocol has the potential to gain adoption as the gains of managing listener relationships in a more effective and decentralized way becomes clear.

We have posted an open draft technical specification, and we welcome comments and feedback. We also welcome direct communication about PodPass through email: Jake Shapiro (jake.shapiro@radiopublic.com), Matt MacDonald (matt.macdonald@radiopublic.com), and Chris Quamme Rhoden (chris.rhoden@radiopublic.com).

Ultimately, we hope that a critical mass of podcasters, hosting providers, and apps/platforms will help shape and adopt PodPass as a generative strategy to expand podcasting — creating more value for listeners and creators alike.

From Kafka’s piece:

Amazon already pays internet publishers that refer shoppers to the company via “affiliate links” embedded on their site, but it thinks that business could grow significantly if US publishers had more readers outside of America.

Right now, publishers are paid when a shopper clicks on a link on their site, heads to Amazon, and eventually buys something. But sources say Amazon has been proposing various deals that would give publishers money up front in order to expand their international sites or open up new markets.

This would seem to be a relatively rare instance of the goals of a platform actually aligning with the goals of a publisher. The New York Times, which acquired The Wirecutter for a reported $30 million in 2016, is gaining international subscribers faster than U.S. subscribers, and Australia, Canada, and the UK are its largest international markets; it could conceivably create buying guides for those markets without the additional complication of a language barrier.

And while BuzzFeed has retrenched internationally, some kind of deal with Amazon might, just possibly, keep some international staff employed a little longer (though it wouldn’t necessarily rebuild the investigative forces that BuzzFeed has lost abroad). New York Magazine, with its Strategist, seems like a bit of a different case — it is after all called New York — but it too is reaching for a broader international audience. Last year, when it launched its $5/month membership program, the press release cited “a global audience of 45 million readers per month,” and then-EIC Adam Moss noted, “New York has expanded far beyond its namesake city, both in its scope of coverage and audience.”

That said, this is sure to raise ethical questions, as affiliate relationships often do for publishers. The main tension lies most typically between the editorial independence of reviewers — whose objective skill in evaluation is, after all, the value they’re adding — and the business side, which knows both that (a) positive reviews generate more sales (and thus more affiliate revenue) than negative ones, and that (b) some retailers give publishers a larger cut than others, potentially skewing the recommendations readers get.

Publishers have made pains to show they’re operating above board, with statements like this one from Wirecutter:

Our writers and editors are never made aware of which companies may have established affiliate relationships with our business team prior to making their picks. If readers choose to buy the products we recommend as a result of our research, analysis, interviews, and testing, our work is often (but not always) supported through an affiliate commission from the retailer when they make a purchase. If readers return their purchases because they’re dissatisfied or the recommendation is bad, we make nothing. There’s no incentive for us to pick inferior products or respond to pressure from manufacturers — in fact, it’s quite the opposite. We think that’s a pretty fair system that keeps us committed to serving our readers first.

Or this from New York’s The Strategist:

Our guiding principles are to be trustworthy and persuasive about what is worth spending your money on. If you purchase something through our links, we often earn an affiliate commission, but we never recommend anything we don’t fully stand behind.

Does that ethical equation change if a specific company — say, the largest online retailer in the world, 2.5× bigger than its closest global rival and 4.5× bigger than its closest American one — is funding the content upfront? It’s hard to say that the writers of a (let’s say) Wirecutter India won’t be “aware” of which company’s money pay their salaries. And a recommendation site typically features two different layers of editorial judgment: which products to recommend and which online retailers to link readers to in order to buy them. Would Amazon be okay with the reviewers it provided startup funding for linking to Jet if it has the cheapest price on the best waffle iron?

It also feels worth noting that Amazon’s search experience — when you are looking for a broad category of item rather than a specific one you already know the name of — seems to have gotten noticeably worse in recent months; it is, in a word, “sketchier” than it used to be. It is ridden with sponsored links and other ads, the core of what has become an $11 billion business for Amazon; unknown brands dominate; fake reviews are rampant.

(Want an example of what I’m talking about? Search Amazon for “steamer,” as I did recently. It is impossible from that page to tell what you should buy. I ended up going over to Wirecutter, and its recommendation didn’t even appear on Amazon’s first page of search results.)

This seems like something Amazon could fix on its end, but that would require it to give up on that sweet sponsored product revenue. So maybe it’s outsourcing the “reliable” recommendations to publishers instead.

A new paper from advocacy group Free Press (the same folks who are close to getting the New Jersey government to budget money for local news innovation) argues that tax revenue devoted to quality journalism could be a silver lining in the very tool that foreign states and sneaker companies use to spread disinformation and sell shoes based on an incredible amount of user information, respectively.

“Free Press believes a sound approach to addressing this dangerous system is an old one: taxes. In this case, a tax would be levied against targeted advertising to fund the kind of diverse, local, independent and noncommercial journalism that’s gone missing, and to support new news-distribution models, especially those that don’t rely on data harvesting for revenue,” write Timothy Karr and Craig Aaron, Free Press’s senior director of strategy and communications and the organization’s president/CEO.

In 2019, digital advertising businesses are officially overtaking traditional ad sales in TV, radio, and newspapers, a report from eMarketer predicted last week. Google, Facebook, and that scrappy underdog Amazon are set to take giant chunks of the $129 billion forecast for digital advertising budgets.

But the tech companies reaping ad dollars frequently skate by without paying much tax on those revenues. Between 2007 and 2015, as the companies were settling into their dominance, their corporate income tax contributions were not: Facebook only paid at a 4 percent rate, Amazon 13 percent, and Google 16 percent, Free Press writes. (And Amazon avoided paying any federal taxes last year.)

We don’t need to remind you about the financials of the journalism industry, which thrived across the 20th century primarily off of advertising revenue. Companies have tried to transfer that model to digital and sought scale via platform traffic, contributing to the clickbait that Facebook’s algorithm helped push. Free Press likens the pitch to the carbon tax in Canada and elsewhere. (An American version in Washington state faced resistance last year, as it has consistently at the federal level.)

Think of it like a carbon tax, which many countries impose on the oil industry to help clean up pollution. The United States should impose a similar mechanism on targeted advertising to counteract how the platforms amplify content that’s polluting our civic discourse.

Levying taxes on products like gasoline, cigarettes or lottery tickets, whose consumption may harm parties other than the user, isn’t new to U.S. policy. The resulting revenue has helped fund public health, infrastructure, education and welfare initiatives.

Unlike excise taxes on products, the tax on targeted advertising would be levied not against individual consumers but against enterprises that profit from targeted-ad sales. The revenues could be used to create a Public Interest Media Endowment, which would support production and distribution of content by diverse speakers — with an emphasis on local journalism, investigative reporting, media literacy, noncommercial social networks, civic-technology projects, and news and information for underserved communities.

Here are three ways the tax could work and how much money it could bring in:

Option 1: A 2 percent targeted-ad tax on all online enterprises that earn more than $200 million in annual digital-ad revenues would yield more than $1.8 billion for the endowment, based on 2018 ad sales. (See Table 2.) Commercial online publishers and platforms making $200 million or less in digital ad revenues would not be subject to the tax to avoid harming smaller to mid-sized online enterprises, especially those engaged in news production.

Option 2: A lower tax rate levied on all advertising revenues, including offline placements, which increasingly draw on similar data profiles gleaned from online activity. With projected U.S. advertising revenues for 2018 (both offline and on) at approximately $200 billion, a 1 percent tax rate would yield approximately $2 billion for the endowment.

Option 3: A tax equal to 1.5 percent of taxable income levied on any platform with an annual taxable income of $1 million or greater if more than 60 percent of such income is derived from the sale of advertisements presented to patrons or users. Based on 2018 revenues, this would yield close to $2 billion.

Columbia Journalism’s Emily Bell has called before for a “significant transfer of wealth” from Silicon Valley to independent journalism, suggesting “if, instead of scrapping over news initiatives, the four or five leading technology companies could donate $1 billion in endowment each for a new type of engine for independent journalism, it would be more significant a contribution than a thousand scattered initiatives put together.” This Free Press plan is an outline for a way the government could, in effect, mandate this.

The full paper, with more technical detail, is here.

Yes, the immense power of @Facebook and @Google is a problem.

But the solution lies in making the entire attention economy account for its harms.

Today @notaaroncraig and I map a plan forward. #BeyondFixingFacebookhttps://t.co/aVh6O0jk8L

— TimKarr (@TimKarr) February 26, 2019

So go the fortunes of four of the six largest U.S. daily newspaper companies. The journalists’ Twitter is alight with Game of Thrones metaphors, but I think that’s misplaced. The action seems more Bravo-esque, The Desperate Housewives of Main Street, perhaps. Or, more prosaically, as one newspaper company exec told me Wednesday, “The pressure for consolidating is only intensifying.”

Those aren’t the only digital media soaps in action. Consider the draconian, get-ahead-of-the-recession first-of-the-year layoffs at both BuzzFeed and Verizon, and Friday at Vice. Take that as one end-of-the-decade sign that the VC-driven, digital media hockey stick of near-infinite growth is badly bent, if not broken. Infinity, it turns out, isn’t infinite. Then, there’s Conde Nast’s suddenly getting paywall religion, announcing it will — after years of dithering — paywall them all, in some fashion. “I’m not sure what they are doing,” one magazine industry pro told me this week. “They’ll lose 90 percent of their traffic.” And so, as Condé has dispatched CEO Bob Sauerberg on the heels of a $120 million annual loss, there’s more potential M&A.

Is it all connected? And how much does it matter?

There’s Jill Lepore’s “Does journalism have a future?” Or Farhad Manjoo’s “Why the latest layoffs are devastating to democracy.” Jeff Israely’s “2009: The internet is killing (print) journalism. 2019: The internet is killing (internet) journalism.”. Or AP’s: “Loss of newspapers contributes to political polarization.”

CNN blared: “Media industry loses about 1,000 jobs as layoffs hit news organizations”.

And The Newseum, the temple of what-journalism-once-was, looks as if it could be sold off for parts.

All in two weeks.

Yes, it all matters, and it’s all connected.

The state of consolidation games

As January plummeted to a close, attended by those thousand or more journalism layoffs, where do we stand with all the huffing and puffing around newspaper company M&A? (The companies declined comment on their potential buying or selling strategies for this piece.)

At this writing, Gannett, having taken several weeks, will soon formally tell Alden Global Management a polite no to its “offer” to buy the company for about $1.5 billion on January 14. Though the Gannett board, which met Thursday, is suspicious that Alden doesn’t have the financing available to complete such a buy — and Alden, sources say, didn’t respond to its request to show Gannett its money — its public suiting has awoken Gannett anew. And that may have been its game plan all along, in making its “offer.” On Friday the Wall Street Journal reported that Alden’s DFM has hired a financial advisor to press its buying case. (See my best reporting-informed speculation, below.)

So what do we do know about Gannett today?

Expect the company to soon complete its process of hiring a banker to work alongside its long-time advisor Green Hill. That banker will help Gannett assess its market position. Another way to put it: America’s largest regional daily newspaper chain, the globe’s second largest given its ownership of UK’s Newsquest, is in play.

“Ask the banker” will tackle these questions: Should Gannett sell itself — and at what value and price? Should it buy? If so, what? The company experienced corporate indigestion in swallowing whole the Journal Media group in 2016. Then, it kneecapped itself in making a hostile effort to buy out Michael Ferro’s then-new trophy Tribune Publishing/Tronc, later that year. It was enough to make Gannett publicly swear off buying more newspapers — even as its merger negotiations with then-Tronc (now Tribune Publishing again) continued.

Instead, CEO Bob Dickey, who’s headed into retirement this spring and was told to focus more on “digital” by his board, re-targeted his efforts in buying digital media. In fact, it was Dickey’s buy of digital marketing companies that gave Alden a talking point, as it stalked Gannett.

Meanwhile, Gannett continues to reel internally. In January it laid off dozens of people. It’s cutting back on its heavily promoted program of placing USA Today national news inserts in many of its 109 dailies, multiple sources told me. Those inserts have largely been standalone sections; now they’ll become more integrated with local newspaper sections. That saves on newsprint cost, which ran as high as $20 million annually when the sections were introduced five years ago. One potential result: less space for local news. And, of course, fewer journalists to fill the pages anyhow.

“I am getting the feeling that Gannett, especially with the January cuts, has moved a lot closer to DFM news staffing than is generally recognized,” one veteran news manager told me. “I see the El Paso Times [with a metro population of 844,000] shows 13 people on its news staff. The editor there retired some months back…One person told me their goal is not more than one senior editor per state…This all just makes me wonder if Alden really knows what has been cut in recent years. They wouldn’t have had the detailed financials, given that it’s a hostile offer.”

As the company looks for anywhere to trim, like all public companies, it eyes the calendar. In February, Gannett, Tribune, McClatchy, Lee and the other public companies will have to report their fourth-quarter, 2018 and full-year financials. They will be ugly. The question: How ugly?

Gannett has already announced cutbacks — but it won’t be alone as companies trim ahead of the earnings reports to show their commitment to shareholder value.

Fast-declining revenues are a certainty. But how did these declines impact earnings, and what do the CEOs forecast for 2019? As wheeling and dealing among newspaper chains continues, the price of assets — the valuing of merging, acquiring or selling — gets adjusted. The weaker the results, the more vulnerable the company. The more vulnerable the company, the lower a potential sales price or valuation in a merger.

There’s also financing to worry about. Financing is tighter now than it was in mid-2018, though it has eased some from December. That isn’t only the case for the ailing newspaper trade (see Tuesday’s news that Gamestop’s buyers couldn’t get financing to complete an acquisition). But it is truer of newspaper companies, given how tough it is to forecast going-forward earnings in an industry declining so rapidly. Any of these potential deals faces tough financing standards. “Lenders now want to see any deal include some deleveraging,” said one financial observer. “If it doesn’t, it won’t fly.”

How long will the consolidation games go on?

There’s lots of action ahead. For its entire history, the U.S. daily newspaper industry has been a fragmented one. In the beginning, local printers became publishers.  Most were one-offs, single proprietors. In the seventies, eighties, and nineties, chains — Gannett, Tribune, Knight Ridder, Advance, Hearst, MediaNews, Lee, and more — grew. But they were still outnumbered by the number of family-owned concerns across America. Importantly, no single company dominated the landscape.

Today, Gatehouse (under New Media Investment Group) leads the pack with about 155 dailies. Amid all the would-be M&A hysteria, Gatehouse CEO Mike Reed has stuck to his knitting and his strategy of buying up remaining family-owned, smaller circulation titles, some in small chains, as well as individual properties. It is an approach characterized by greater precision and less rancor — and the need to incrementally grow topline revenues by acquisition. Although the company performs at the top end of regional chains, it still is losing about five percent of its same-store revenues year over year.

Just this week Gatehouse bought long-time independent Schurz Communications for $30 million, adding 10 dailies and 10 weeklies to its total. Reed’s value-oriented buying — backed by ready, lower-cost financing through Gatehouse’s operator, Fortress Investor Group — has been steady. It will likely continue to buy, as it can more easily raise money where others can’t.

All totaled, three companies — Gannett, Gatehouse, and Digital First Media — now control about a quarter of the remaining daily titles. That’s a significant concentration, historically. But in an industry where expense reduction is the prime strategy, much more consolidation is likely on the way. Little regulation prevents it, and the financials all favor it.

There remain some newspaper chain CEOs who still see a straight line between maintaining, if not growing, their title’s journalism capacity and the product quality, mainly digital, to deliver. They are a minority, unfortunately. For one, fewer and fewer would-be buys — at the prices the market still demands as of this moment — appear palatable.

“Yes, we could buy select properties, but the multiple would have to be low enough, considering the reinvestment needed to maintain EBITDA through recession,” said one of the savviest, speaking of the Tribune titles. “And we just can’t justify the reinvestment necessary in these papers to get them through the recession.”

Q: How much does the fear of recession drive M&A thinking?

A: A fair amount.

The next recession may not happen anytime soon, but in the words of economist Sam Khater, there’s a “mental recession.” Corporate chiefs, in newspapers and in other industries, now largely assume one. For many thriving industries, that just means a re-calibration. For a newspaper industry in such a distressed state, this driver carries more weight. Buying any newspaper property may require more reinvestment and for a longer period if both revenues and profits take a further hit in a 2019-2022 recession.

The fear of recession is one of at least two drivers connecting those dots from Gannett/DFM to Buzzfeed/Verizon and Conde Nast. Everyone in the media business believes it is going to get worse — before maybe getting better.

Q: What is the other common thread?

A: Google, Facebook, and increasingly Amazon dominate digital advertising and will likely will take more and more share, especially into a recession. The most recent estimate is that they control 61.9 percent of the digital ad market, worth $111 billion. (For every one percent, you could pay the salaries of over 10,000 journalists, but I digress.) (Digital disruption has wounded every legacy news and information industry in the Western world and now it’s turned on the digital news disrupters as well.

Q: What does Heath Freeman, Alden’s president and Digital First Media magnate, really want? Is Alden a buyer, or a seller, or a lemon-squeezer?

A: There’s a one-word answer: Money. To his credit, in the stories often told by his former management, Heath and DFM are really straight shooters. They’re just greedy in the “Wall Street” sense, although today’s newspaper industry is rapidly redefining the possibilities of looting sinking ships.

Four possible rationales have emerged for Alden’s bid for Gannett:

1) Alden looks at Gannett and truly sees lots of fat, despite all the skinnying Gannett management has done for good part of the decade. That’s why Alden’s bid freaked out so many Gannett employees: It could get worse.

2) Alden wants to juice Gannett’s share price so that its 7.5 percent stake, bought at about $9.68 a share, will increase. Alden cashes in and makes more money without actually having to strip any more parts from any new newspaper company. Alden’s $12 offer shot Gannett’s share price up from the $9 range, and it still rests at about $11. On paper, then, Alden’s got about $11 million.

3) Alden actually wants Gannett to buy it, as rumored recently. Would Heath Freeman sell anything? Yes — back to the single motivating principle, profit maximization. Is it likely that Gannett, which is stumbling its way into the new wilderness with a lame duck CEO, wants to buy DFM properties? No, and remember that CEO’s opinion above about how much any buyer would have to put into distressed properties. DFM properties are among the most distressed.

4) Alden wants to put Gannett into play. If someone else buys it, sending up the stock price, Alden wins. If Gannett is put into play along with Tribune, and with McClatchy eagerly seeking a deal, then maybe DFM could offload some or all of its properties as part of somebody’s roll-up strategy.

If you had to bet (don’t), you’d pick the fourth one. Alden does not appear to have the financing to make a $1.5 billion hostile takeover of Gannett possible, though its hiring of a financial advisor may tell us it’s more serious than some suspect. SEC law complicates the second option. The third one seems unlikely. Why not just cause more chaos in the flagging distressed industry and see what new hand Heath Freeman may have to play?

Q: Why is February 7 important?

A: That’s the date by which Alden would have to file an alternative slate of directors for a contested election at Gannett’s spring annual meeting. The maneuver would show Alden is serious. (Bonus points to readers who recall that Gannett CEO Bob Dickey fatally wounded his own hostile takeover of Tribune two years ago by missing the deadline to file an alternative slate in a Tribune board election.)

Q: What’s with these change-of-control clauses? Haven’t they played a major role in Tronc/Tribune Publishing’s directing of millions to a few top execs while whittling down their newsrooms?

A: Yes. Those with lots of experience in C-suite thinking say that “change of control” clauses actually carried some logic. The idea: Investors don’t want top management to reject a lucrative buy-the-company offer just to save their own jobs and incomes. Pay them well in the case of sale, and you’ve removed that disincentive.

In normal times in normal industries, that might make sense. In the newspaper industry of this wretched decade, it’s just been one more perverse incentive. As Howard Schultz gooped his intentions to run for president, journalists noted that he makes 1,049 times as much as the median Starbucks employee. I haven’t run the numbers in the newspaper industry, but it’s a number worth researching. These jobs should be well recompensed, but along the way some companies lost their ethical center.

Q: So what’s going to happen in February, or March?

A: The consolidation games push everyone into the pool.

Gannett will “assess its future.” That probably means rejecting Alden for now. Its likely next move will be to pick up the talks with Tribune that it abandoned in 2018. Now that Ferro lieutenant Justin Dearborn has been dispatched (deemed more likely to mess up a Tribune sale than help lead it), and Ferro himself has told people he would give up his long-time demand of a board seat, a deal is more likely. It would involve a stock swap, with the valuation of who gets what chunk of mergeco still the contentious issue. And who would lead? New Tribune CEO Tim Knight is the last man standing in those two companies right now, but is he “digital enough” for Gannett’s board?

Tribune badly wants to sell, but hasn’t closed the deal. It rejected a $16.50/share offer from McClatchy in December, and now trades at around $12. Suitors have included Will Wyatt’s Donerail Group and Jeremy Halbreich’s AIM Media. But in the wake of rejecting McClatchy, it couldn’t move on either of those deals. Price and financing are issues. It will likely turn to Gannett again. Importantly, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns 25 percent of Tribune, recently gave the Tribune board the ability to make its selling decision, giving up blocking rights. He wants out, and knows removing more obstacles to sale may finally seal some deal.

McClatchy was sorely disappointed that it failed to win Tribune. It would been more icing on CEO Craig Forman’s “deleveraging” cake, as he has pushed out the company’s big debt off into the 2020s. With Dearborn out, Soon-Shiong standing down, and Ferro’s interest maybe waning, could the deal be revived?

Or could Gannett solve its current identity problem by buying McClatchy? That would give Gannett an even bigger national footprint. But McClatchy’s $745 million debt (well down from what it borrowed to buy Knight Ridder 13 years ago) is a sticking point.

Still, financial analysts tell me that either the Gannett/Tribune deal or Tribune/McClatchy deal could result in $100 million or more of “synergies” — those cost savings that drive all of this action.

Finally, consider a few other players. Lee, a big chain of small dailies, could find a new partner. Gatehouse and Hearst will hang around the periphery, glad to pick up selected titles that may fall out of any big deals — if they can pencil them out to their satisfaction.

Use of the devices for music and weather is still far ahead of news use. And among consumers’ complaints about news briefings: They’re too long.

Luckily, there’s time for news publishers to catch up, finds Nic Newman, a senior research associate at RISJ, who did his research via in-home interviews and focus groups, online surveys, and publisher interviews. (He also tapped Amazon, Apple, and Google for whatever data they were willing to share — which, unsurprisingly, wasn’t a lot; none of the companies would share data on how many devices they’ve sold or discuss trends in how news is consumed on them.) Smart speakers are still devices for early adopters: 14 percent of U.S. adults are now using them, compared to 10 percent of U.K. adults and 5 percent of German adults; Juniper Research predicted last year that they’ll be found in 55 percent of U.S. households by 2022.

Here are some of Newman’s findings:

— News consumption on smart speakers is lower than one might expect. In the U.K., for instance, while 47 percent of smart speaker users said they use the device for news monthly and 21 percent use it daily, only 1 percent said news was the device’s most important function. In the U.S., 38 percent of smart speaker users use the device for news at least monthly and 18 percent at least daily.

— When it comes to which news brands people access on their smart speakers, the default matters a lot: In the U.K., for instance, the default news brand on Google Homes, Amazon Echos, and Apple HomePods is BBC News. In the U.S., there’s a more even split between brands in part because NPR is no longer the default on Alexa. (It is on Apple devices, however.)

Smart speaker news briefings didn’t get much love from users in this research. Here are some of the complaints Newman heard:

— Overlong updates — the typical duration is around five minutes, but many wanted something much shorter.

— They are not updated often enough. News and sports bulletins are sometimes hours or days out of date.

— Some bulletins still use synthesized voices (text to speech), which many find hard to listen to.

— Some updates have low production values or poor audio quality.

— Where bulletins from different providers run together, there is often duplication of stories.

— Some updates have intrusive jingles or adverts.

— There is no opportunity to skip or select stories.

Length in particular was an issue that arose. One American interviewee named Adam said, “When someone asks for an update on something, they are asking for a summary. Don’t give me something that is longer than a minute.” Right now, for instance, when you ask for news on a smart speaker from The New York Times, you get its podcast, The Daily, which is usually at least 15 minutes long.

The news organizations that Newman spoke with were aware of these complaints. The Washington Post, for instance, knows that audiences “appreciate brevity more than breadth.” The New York Times plans to replace its current news briefing — The Daily — with a shorter native briefing, with Dan Sanchez, the Times’ lead for voice, acknowledging that The Daily is “a great narrative deep dive but is not really a way to quickly get informed about what you need to know at the beginning of every day.”

Quibbles aside, users said that the news briefings made them feel more informed. In the U.S., for instance, “56 percent of news update users feel far or slightly more informed.”

— People do use smart speakers to play live radio, which of course can also include news. 19 percent “of all online listening to NPR’s member stations’ live radio streams now comes from smart speakers,” for instance, and NPR hasn’t seen declines on other platforms, Recode’s Rani Molla reported this week.

Podcast use on smart speakers, meanwhile, is still relatively low. One reason for that is that “podcasts are often niche and personal. They don’t always work within a shared space at home.”

“Podcasts are the sort of thing I would listen to on a train,” one focus group participant told Newman.

— People see smart speakers as a way of breaking free from screens. One theme Newman found was

the desire — almost universally expressed — to spend less time with screens. Respondents felt overwhelmed, assaulted by technology and often by news as well. Many spend all day at work on screens or looking at their smartphone. Some resent the way in which the internet can distract and waste time by taking people down “rabbit holes.” Part of the appeal for voice devices is they act differently.

People are starting and ending their days with smart speakers and “in this specific respect, it is the smartphone that is being displaced and that may have profound implications for media owners looking to distribute content,” Newman notes.

— Smart speakers provide yet another occasion for publishers to clash with platforms, and publishers are (rightfully) wary of creating more content specifically for big tech companies. For instance, users like to ask their smart speakers “everyday questions,” but when it comes to news this often doesn’t go smoothly:

As one example, we asked for “the number of people who died in the Grenfell Fire.” Google and Alexa gave slightly different numbers because they drew the result from two different news articles published at different times. One platform (Google) made clear what the source was (the Independent) and also gave the date. But this answer was also a rather complex and longwinded way of getting the number that we were after.

A few weeks later, the answers given to this query had changed. Alexa successfully and precisely returned the officially recognized number (72) — but with no additional information about the source. Google had changed its answer to select a relevant part of a Wikipedia entry that also contained the exact number (72).

News publishers could work with the platforms to create answers to questions like these — but what’s in it for them?

Publishers we interviewed were extremely wary of helping Google (or Amazon) build a huge global “answer engine,” without compensation — and it is difficult to see how advertising or sponsorship could work around such short pieces of content. Instead, one publisher suggested that “news answers” could be developed as premium service (e.g. bundled with Amazon Prime) in conjunction with a number of interested news organizations. Each would be paid in proportion to the number of queries that were considered most relevant and then read out.

— Privacy concerns aren’t (yet) paramount. “It’s not nice to know you’re being listened in on all day, but in the end I don’t give a shit,” one German user said.

The full report is here.

Digital advertising is a duopoly-dominated mess; any print or broadcast cross-subsidy you might have is declining at one speed or another. Your loyal core digital readers may be only a tiny fraction of that big “monthly uniques” number you put into press releases — but some of them are willing to pay for what you do. Reader revenue is relatively reliable, month to month or year to year, and it’s at the center of media company plans for 2019 and beyond.

But how many paywalls will people really pay to click past? It’s worked for The New York Times; it’s worked for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. But does it work for local newspapers? Metro dailies? Weekly or monthly magazines? Digital native sites?

The data thus far isn’t super encouraging, and that’s the world that New York magazine and Quartz walk into with their just-announced paywalls. New York’s was announced yesterday:

New York Media is now joining other publishing companies or individual publications that have recently added paywalls, including Bloomberg Media, The Atlantic and the Condé Nast magazines Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Wired.

Subscriptions for the New York Media sites will cost $5 a month or $50 annually. For $70 a year, the company will include a subscription to New York magazine, the onetime weekly that started publishing every other week in 2014.

The pay model, which will allow readers a number of stories free before shutting off access, will go into effect the last week of November, according to the company, which would not specify a date for the change.

Quartz, the business news outlet recently purchased by Japan’s Uzabase, made its move this morning:

The Quartz membership is an education in the global economy that’s written to equip you to make more informed decisions at work, in your investments, and in life. Each week, we take you outside of the news cycle to provide analysis, context, and insider insight about one of the players or phenomena that’s upending global markets and rewriting the rules of business. You can read the first installment on our race toward a cashless future (and who wins and loses in it) today. The exclusive new content published every day is designed to deepen the expertise of leaders, and help those aspiring to leadership get ahead in their careers without stepping out of them. Membership — which costs $14.99 per month, or $99.99 for the first year as a special limited-time founding offer — also brings you the ability to engage directly with Quartz’s journalists via conference calls, and join events with other members.

Even news omnivores won’t pay for everything

Both New York and Quartz have been real standouts in terms of digital strategy. New York has made content verticals work far better than most legacy media companies and built an agile editorial voice that really works for the web; Quartz has been a leader in mobile-first thinking, platform-specific strategy, and new interfaces for content discovery and consumption. Between the two, I’ve probably read 100 of their stories in the past month. They’re really good!

But are they $50 a year good? Or $100 a year good? To go alongside $120 a year for The Atlantic, $90 a year for The New Yorker, $420 a year for Bloomberg, $60 a year for Slate, $50 a year for Medium, debitum ad infinitum?

To be fair, these paid products offer substantially different value propositions, mixing content, membership, and experience. Quartz is keeping its main output free to read and making an interesting education-and-networking play that makes sense for a business site; New York is building a paywall that can flex open or closed depending on a reader’s predicted propensity to pay; The Atlantic is mostly offering a premium experience while leaving the main site open; The New Yorker and Bloomberg offer relatively traditional meters allowing a set number of articles a month.

But only 16 percent of Americans say they are willing to pay for any online news. If someone’s first digital subscription is to the Times or the Post — how many are willing to pay for a second, or a third, or a fourth news site? Especially if that second or third site costs as much or more than their favorite national daily?

To frame it another way: There’s a segment of the population that can grudgingly be convinced to pay for a news site, out of some mix of consumer reward, civic duty, and peer pressure. But that second or third subscription requires a level of devotion that can be hard to sustain in a digital environment where the links come at you from every direction.

Are you Netflix or Seeso?

Or allow me a metaphor: Netflix and Amazon have convinced many millions of people to pay for streaming video. But how many of those people think: That’s not enough, I need more? If The New York Times is Netflix and The Washington Post is Amazon (of course) — are these premium national publishers Seeso? Filmstruck? DramaFever?

One complicating factor is that the line between magazines and daily news used to be much more clearly drawn. What you got from a print subscription to The New Yorker or The Atlantic was distinctly different from what you got from the local daily — in timeframe, in editorial approach, in format. But premium magazines’ expansion online has typically been in a newsier direction. Real-time reactions to Mueller news; breaking news from Capitol Hill; columnizing off the latest outrage — these are things can now appear at any of a dozen quality domain names. Wired does great writing about technology, of course — but is it so distinct from what other sites offer that its value remains as clear as it used to be? The Atlantic had a lot of scoops in the last election cycle — but is breaking campaign news something it’s really going to be better at than the Post?

On one hand, it’s unfair to lump this class of premium paid products together — each will succeed or fail on its own merits, both editorial and strategic. A business publication like Quartz will likely have an easier time of it than a more general-interest outlet like New York. But I think it is a fair question to wonder how far down the Paywall Solution can filter through the editorial ecosystem. Local newspapers have already hit this roadblock: While the Times, Post, and Journal build subscriber bases in the millions, most metro dailies have struggled to go far into the five figures. Only two non-national papers — the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe — have more than 100,000 paying digital subscribers. Aggregation theory holds that, in a frictionless marketplace, the Internet tends to aggregate power in the hands of a few large players. That’s benefited Google and Facebook — and, on another scale, the Times and the Post. What about everyone else?

I mused about this idea on Twitter yesterday, and here are some the responses I got — keeping in mind that people who follow me on Twitter are necessarily Very Unusual News Consumers:

I’m sorry to hear about this. I read New York Mag at work; I adore The Atlantic. I already pay for WaPo. I don’t want to pay for every site I frequent online

— Lebanexican (@Lebanexican) November 12, 2018

This. There’s only so much I feel comfortable paying for services that are not essential like food/clothing/shelter is.

I news, but if I have to choose between my utility bill and the six subscriptions/recurring donations to news orgs I currently have…

— Wendi C. Thomas (@wendi_c_thomas) November 13, 2018

I think about this quite a bit from a consumer perspective. I do NYT but not WaPo, New Yorker but not Wired/Atlantic. ESPN but not The Athletic. If I let it, I could be nickel and dimed to death with subscriptions.

— Dan_Rowinski (@Dan_Rowinski) November 12, 2018

Especially if they all cover the same things/people/topics. There's a lot more value that can be unlocked when outlets selling subscriptions offer something truly unique & different. That's how the subscription model bring a host of new voices to the fore (IMO).

— Terrell Johnson (@terrellwrites) November 12, 2018

Icksnay on the aywall-pay. Will simply read other content sources — sorry NYM.

— Al Poochini (@alpoochini) November 13, 2018

I get to read ten articles a month on various news sites. Sometimes only one or two articles per month before I'm shut down. I'm not going to pay for news, but it does mean I don't get to check the primary source when I'm reading commentary about something.

— Missus Bennet (@poornerves) November 12, 2018

You can't subscribe to everything. I appreciate @NewYorker's version. There are occasional "must read" stories there that someone I follow links but not enough for me to replace one of my newspaper subscriptions when choosing what to buy.

— Jane (@Poeia) November 12, 2018

Or….it makes it harder for everyday people to discover the great words from the honkers of our time, I wouldn’t have read Ta-Nehisi Coates “Reperations” essay of a paywall had stopped me, or much Ta Nehisi at ALL. Pros and cons, happy to see some people getting some pay for wrk

— Elliott Troy (@AngloGyptian) November 12, 2018

Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, NYT, Economist, New Yorker, The Athletic, Spotify. I like Slate and NY Mag and VF but at a certain point it's enough. Rather go without than pay for more

— Daniel O (@DanOfromNYC) November 12, 2018

exactly. for me it just means i don't read the stories. they should just use ads to pay the bills. or i just reset my browser if I really feel like reading it

— The Count (@Alan87374847) November 12, 2018

Hmmm… I read a ton of content from all of these sources. But I only have subscriptions to @newyorker and @TheAtlantic. I have just been helping myself to free NYMag copy, just because I could. I fully expect to pay up now!

— Chris Daly (@profdaly) November 12, 2018

I'm happy to pay for WaPo and 7 other newspapers (not including the NYT) as well as The Atlantic and The New Yorker. I want to support the sites I rely upon. But I realize I may not be typical.

— Jeri Dansky (@JeriDansky) November 13, 2018

Huge shakeups at Audible Originals. I can confirm that the Amazon-owned audiobook giant announced internally last Thursday that it was eliminating a considerable number of roles within its original programming unit. Sources within the company tell me that the role eliminations span a number of different teams within the unit, but most notably, they include nearly the entire group responsible for Audible’s shorter-form podcast-style programming, like the critically acclaimed West Cork, The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson, and Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel. That group was previously led by former NPR executive Eric Nuzum and his deputy, the public radio veteran Jesse Baker.

NPR’s Neda Ulaby first reported the development in a newscast on Friday evening. In the spot, Ulaby noted that about a dozen employees were affected and that the changes came “with no warning.”

Yesterday, Nuzum, who held the title of SVP of original content development, circulated an email announcing that he will be leaving the company in the next few weeks. He also noted that he plans to engage in some consulting work in the short-term, before diving into a new venture by the year’s end.

These developments come as Audible reshapes its original programming strategy. A spokesperson for the company tells me: “As you may know, we’ve been evolving our content strategy for Audible Originals (including our theater initiative, narrative storytelling ‘written to the form’ as well as short-form programming). A related restructure of our teams resulted in the elimination of several roles and the transfer of some positions to other parts of the business.”

I briefly wrote about this shift last month, using the release of the author Michael Lewis’ audiobook-only project, The Coming Storm, as the news hook. In the piece, I posited a link between the strategic changes and recent shake-ups at the company’s executive level:

Audible has long been a horizontal curiosity for the podcast industry, given its hiring of former NPR programming VP Eric Nuzum in mid-2015 and subsequent rollout ofthe Audible Originals and “Channels” strategy in mid-2016, which saw the company releasing products that some, like myself, perceived as comparable to and competitive with the kinds of products you’d get from the podcast ecosystem.

This signing of authors like Michael Lewis to audiobook-first deals appears to be a ramping up of an alternate original programming strategy, one that sees Audible leaning more heavily into the preexisting nature of its core relationships with the book publishing industry and the book-buying audience. It might also be a consequence of a reshuffle at the executive decision-making level: in late 2017, the Hollywood Reporter broke news that chief content officer Andrew Gaies and chief revenue officer Will Lopes unexpectedly stepped down resigned from their posts. (Later reporting noted that the resignations happened in the midst of a harassment probe.) The ripple effects of that sudden shift in leadership is probably only hitting us now, and in this form.

So that’s the context. Here’s what I don’t know:

• What happens to all the podcast-style Audible Original programs that are still ongoing? What happens to their future seasons currently in production? And will those properties be given the opportunity to leave for other podcast companies — or will they be integrated into Audible’s new strategy in some form?
• What happens to the dozen or so producers that were affected by the role eliminations?

And then, of course, there’s the question of what this means for Audible. I’ll leave this for next week.

The Alex Jones problem. The past few months have seen a flurry of activity on the subject of internet platforms and their responsibilities around hateful content, harmful material, and the limits of free speech. The issue largely focused on high-volume media-distribution platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, but its scope actually extends much further than that: the e-commerce giant Amazon, as well, has faced scrutiny over some of the products it allows on its platform.

Last week, the ongoing saga reached podcasting shores, and it is there that the story proceeded to reverberate back outwards with significance.

Over the weekend, both Apple Podcasts and the Midroll-owned Stitcher removed podcasts by Infowars, the conspiracy theory-peddling media company led by Alex Jones, from their platforms. (If, for some reason, you are unfamiliar with Jones and Infowars, I highly recommend this profile by Charlie Warzel.)

Stitcher and Apple’s decisions came shortly after Spotify announced they were removing specific episodes from Alex Jones’ podcasts from its platform that were found to be in violation of its Hateful Content policy. At the time, the music streaming service was facing backlash for continuing to distribute the conspiracy theorist’s podcasts after Facebook and YouTube had temporarily suspended some of Jones’ programming for similar content policy violations. Spotify remained under pressure even after the selective removals, with critics continuing to raise questions on whether the platform had done nearly enough.

It’s worth noting that Stitcher was the first major podcast-distributing platform to delist Jones’ shows in their entirety. The company did so on Thursday evening, citing over Twitter that Jones had, on multiple occasions, violated its policies when he published episodes that “harassed or allowed harassment of private individuals and organizations, and that harassment has led listeners of the show to engage in similar harassment and other damaging activity.” Sources within the company told me last week that the decision to completely remove Jones’ programming, as opposed to just focusing on specific offending episodes (as in the case of Spotify), stemmed from its concluding judgment that the podcasts were likely to violate its policies on harassment and abuse in the future. Stitcher’s move attracted a fair bit of media attention, with writeups on Billboard, Engadget, BuzzFeed News, and TechCrunch.

Apple’s removal of Jones’ podcasts took place sometime during Sunday evening. I first noticed the delisting around 6:45 p.m. Pacific, and BuzzFeed News published the first official report on the matter shortly after. In the report, Apple similarly cited policy violations as the grounds for Jones’ removal. As a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News:

Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users…podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming. We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions.

Strangely, Apple’s decision only impacted five out of six Infowars podcasts. Real News With David Knight, Infowars’ daily news recap show, remains active on the platform. No explanation was given as to why. The BuzzFeed News report also highlighted the efforts by Sleeping Giants, a social media-based activism group, to lead pressure campaigns to get major internet platforms to cut ties with Jones.

Apple’s decision to delist Jones’ podcasts is noteworthy for its ripple effect within the podcast ecosystem. The Apple Podcasts platform does not actually host podcasts itself, functioning instead as an inventory to which you have to submit your RSS feeds to review for inclusion. Because of Apple Podcasts’ historical scale, infrastructure, and preexisting inventory map, a significant number of other podcast apps, including the public radio coalition-owned Pocket Casts, rely on Apple Podcasts’ inventory to determine their own offerings — sometimes to be efficient in populating their app, other times to lean on a larger authority for content policing. The removal is also noteworthy, obviously, for the fact that Apple Podcasts is believed to still be the most widely used podcast listening app in the market.

And it seems the ripple effect has extended outwards as well. Yesterday, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify all followed up by completely removing Alex Jones and Infowars programming from their platforms, all citing repeated violations around their hate speech and harassment policies.

As the bans from Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube trickled out on Monday, there emerged some debate about whether the bans were the result of separate processes that were all bound to end up at the same conclusion, or whether this was a situation where these gargantuan platforms were simply waiting for someone else to take the first step. Given the timeline and stutter-step nature of Monday’s Infowars bans, I can’t help but view this as the latter. When it comes to big internet platforms (or any huge organization with massive stakes, really), deeply complicated questions, and moral leadership, stories like these almost always crescendo to a point where everyone arrives at a holding pattern that waits for someone else to take the first step into the muck — and reveals the full ramifications of what happens on the other side.

In this case, the first one in was comparatively smaller Stitcher, and I can’t shake the feeling the company’s actions ended up attracting the right amount of attention and creating a permission structure that made it easier for the others to move in this direction. For what it’s worth, I hope they get the credit for it.

Show notes:

• James Andrew Miller’s oral history podcast with Cadence13, Origins, is returning with three new seasons — or “chapters,” in its parlance — on the horizon: one on college football coach Nick Saban, one on the upcoming season of Saturday Night Live, and one on the legendary HBO show Sex and the City.
• Tenderfoot’s Up and Vanished will kick off its second season on August 20. The podcast has now partnered with Cadence13 for distribution and monetization.
• Radiotopia’s new Showcase series, called The Great God of Depression, dropped in full last Friday. Pagan Kennedy, a coproducer on the project, also published an related op-ed in The New York Times over the weekend.

Existentialism. Last Thursday, Edison Research SVP Tom Webster — one of the principal frontmen for the measurement firm’s Infinite Dial study, which gives the podcast industry its benchmark numbers — published a Medium post titled “Podcasting’s Next Frontier: A Manifesto For Growth.” It is an adaptation of Webster’s keynote from the recent Podcast Movement conference, and it presents a data-supported argument around what he views as the fundamental challenge for the podcast ecosystem…and what, broadly speaking, may be the way through it.

Webster’s argument contains numerous moving parts and side-theses (be sure to clock the bit about music podcasts), and at the risk of oversimplifying his perspective, here’s the main thrust of the piece as I understand it:

(1) Contrary to aspects of its public narrative, podcasting isn’t actually growing that fast. As Webster outlines: “Since we started tracking podcasting in 2006, weekly consumption has gone from essentially zero to 17% of Americans 12+. That’s 0–17, in 13 years, or less than two percentage points per year. Now, it’s grown a bit faster over the past 5 years, but can anyone look at this graph and call podcasting a fast-growing medium? It’s actually one of the slowest-growing media we’ve ever tracked in the Infinite Dial.”

(2) Raising the possibility (or, indeed, probability) that there will soon come a day when its annual reporting will show a flattening or decrease in podcast listening growth, Webster highlights the principal metric that should be the center of our attention: “17% of Americans say they listen to a podcast at least once a week. 64% of Americans say they know the term. That means that about three-quarters of the people who say they know the term ‘podcasting’ are not weekly listeners.” To Webster, this data point suggests that the fundamental problem is as follows: lots of people have heard about podcasting, but they don’t actually know what it is.

(3) That knowledge gap is preventing those potential new listeners from either trying out or buying into the medium. Part of this has to do with simple under-education about some core aspects of the ecosystem — podcasts are generally free, the means to consume them are already pre-baked into your phone, and so on — but a bigger part, Webster gestures, has to do with podcasting ecosystem’s lack of collective messaging that elevates its public identity beyond being a mere technological curiosity. Which is to say: there hasn’t been a push to help podcast programming make sense within the context of the everyday non-podcast consumers, in part by evoking facsimiles of what they already know or channeling the things they are already comfortable with.

For Webster, this conundrum is best expressed through the podcast ecosystem still not having what he calls “The Show”: the one program whose innate draw simplifies, supersedes, or even renders irrelevant the entire narrative around the distribution platform. He writes:

There were once was a time when plenty of people didn’t think they had a Netflix app, didn’t know they needed one, and weren’t sure how to watch it without getting discs emailed in those red envelopes. So what did Netflix do? They didn’t spend a bunch of money on a “Got Netflix?” campaign. They spent a lot of money on Orange is the New Black and House of Cards. What gets people to discover Netflix is curiosity, and what drives curiosity is the show. The killer show.

Technology and gaming enthusiasts can probably broadly equate this argument with the notion of “killer apps” that move new devices and consoles. Same goes as well, I think, with SiriusXM and Howard Stern.

I had originally planned to present a much bigger discussion around Webster’s post, more or less agreeing with the broad strokes of his argument while at the same time looking to do a couple of things: identifying its limits, interrogating its assumptions, expanding the scope of the conversation. Forgive me, but I’m afraid I have to postpone that to next week, both for the reasons of space and because I got caught up digging deep into the Audible and the Alex Jones stories.

In the meantime, I leaned on Tom for this week’s Career Spotlight:

Career Spotlight. Since we have a huge chunk of Tom Webster’s writing to go through, what’s a little more? Let’s go.

Thanks, Tom.

Miscellaneous bites:

• “The Information has learned that only about 2% of the people with devices that use Amazon’s Alexa intelligent assistant — mostly Amazon’s own Echo line of speakers — have made a purchase with their voices so far in 2018, according to two people briefed on the company’s internal figures.” (The Information) As Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton pointed out over Twitter: “That’s despite survey data suggesting something more like 25%.”
• Breaker, the Y Combinator-accelerated podcast app, rolled out a new feature yesterday called Upstream that aims to help publishers to create and manage a “premium content” structure without having to rely on a non-podcast specific membership platform like Patreon. (Breaker)
• “Apple’s HomePod may have just doubled its share of the U.S. smart speaker market.” (Fast Company)
• “‘The Conservative Movement…Has Become a Racket’: Steve Schmidt Is Starting a Pod Save America for Never Trumpers.” (Vanity Fair)
• “Colleen Scriven’s ‘Lesser Gods’ Podcast in Development as HBO Comedy Series.” (Variety)
• “The Podcast Bros Want to Optimize Your Life.” (The New York Times)
• “Patreon creators scramble as payments are mistakenly flagged as fraud.” (The Verge)

Outside, the Trump-Putin meeting continues and children remain separated from their parents and the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings are still coming. And European Amazon workers are striking, but inside I am ordering a budget portable hammock and ecologically sound beach toys and a Crayola 60th Anniversary 64 Count Crayon Set with Collectible Tin and Vitamin C serum and a berry keeper and a tiny car vacuum and who even knows what the rest of the day will bring, but in a good way? At home, the yogurt I made overnight in the Instant Pot I bought on Prime Day last year is cooling in the fridge. On Prime Day 2016, I sat at my kitchen table 39 weeks pregnant refreshing the deals and waiting to go into labor; my son turns two this week and I’m buying him birthday presents today. Things have been scary and terrible and uncertain but here we are on our fourth-annual Prime Day and there’s some continuity in that, at least.

And news editors the country over (including at Nieman Lab) are just pleased to have an okay story to cover. No failure, no broken business model, no corruption, nothing really needs fixing here, no explainer required, just grab some links, obligatory nod to Wirecutter, and watch the traffic — and affiliate revenue — flow in. Prime Day has become a big traffic day for some publishers, NewsWhip shows for Facebook “engagements.”

Amazon Prime Day begins Monday. Here's a few of the deals that could be worth your money. https://t.co/ByIENLMmqL

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 16, 2018

Here are all the best Amazon Prime Day deals you can get right now

Here are the books you have been wanting to buy, but super cheap

All the best deals from Amazon Prime Day 2018 … will be right here

25 ofertas del Prime Day de Amazon que no vas a querer dejar escapar

My search for the spirit of Prime Day at an Ariana Grande concert in a giant Amazon box

Amazon’s Prime Day is set to be $1.2 billion bigger than last year, analyst says (AMZN)

It’s also a multi-day content affair that keeps on giving (ideas for #content throughout the week). NewsWhip notes that “Lists of User Generated Content also performed well, with lists of top tweets about the day performing well for a number of different outlets.”

“There is no retailer who wields this kind of focus in the typically sleepy summer months,” Lance Ulanoff wrote on Medium. “It’s like Amazon saw a dead space where other retailers were trying to excite you about Back to School deals (which, honestly, no one really wants to think about in July) and said, we can go bigger, broader, and do much better.” But this year it feels like more than that. It feels like the one national story that everyone can get in on (30-day free trial), that everyone can follow, and on July 18, when Amazon announces what will inevitably be the record-breaking sales of July 16 and July 17, we’ll be able to be like, ahhh, we made that happen.

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 154, published March 6, 2018.

Chomping at the bit. “Gimlet is a multimedia storytelling brand, not just a podcast network,” declared Jenny Wall, the company’s newly hired chief marketing officer, in a Fast Company piece in January. That identity refashioning is mostly tethered to Gimlet’s increasingly formalized dealings with Hollywood, but it’s beginning to rear its head in other intriguing ways as well.

Last Thursday, Gimlet announced its first offering for the Amazon Alexa platform: Chompers, a skill that takes the form of a twice-daily toothbrushing companion for young children. To produce the skill, the podcast company partnered with Volley, a San Francisco-based startup that specializes in building entertainment products for voice assistants. They’re also releasing Chompers as a vanilla podcast for those who have yet to join the smart speaker cult.

This is a shrewd piece of business for two reasons. The first is hunger: The kids, they really love those speaking computer tubes. According to Edison Research and NPR’s Smart Audio report, 88 percent of smart speaker owners whose households include children report that said children really, really enjoy Alexa. And while I’m not a fan of anecdotal evidence, I will say I’ve seen this myself and let me tell ya: The level of fervor is genuinely frightening. (Bigger picture: Health experts are apparently warily optimistic about the relationship between kids and smart speakers, though concerns about data privacy seem to be the more prominent thorn.)

The second reason is money: The first season of Chompers, we’re told, is sponsored by Oral-B and Crest Kids. With this move, Gimlet has made the choice to dive headfirst into the ethical hairiness of advertising to children, which is a can of worms commonly tossed about in discussions about kids podcasts. It’s also a notable attempt to grapple with an Alexa development environment that’s ambiguous about how it allows skill developers to monetize their efforts. More on that in a second.

The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Mullin picked up the story, which you should totally check out in full, but there are three nuggets in there you shouldn’t miss:

• Gimlet has hired a voice director to lead further content development for voice assistants: Wilson Standish, formerly the director of innovation at the marketing agency Hearts & Science.
• (Brand) money moves: “In 2017, more than half of Gimlet Media’s ad revenue came from brand advertisers, according to Anna Sullivan, vice president of brand partnerships for the company. Ms. Sullivan added that the company’s brand advertising revenue grew 134 percent in 2017 compared with 2016.”
• Gimlet president Matt Lieber re-emphasized the company’s commitment to audio: “The way I think about Gimlet is that we’re trying to build a new kind of modern media company where everything begins in audio.”

The company continues to sprawl into a myriad of directions, and it occurs to me that Gimlet’s narrative these days has mostly been about its meta-show developments and much less about the actual shows themselves. Anyway, I think they’re due to announce a spring slate soon, so maybe we’ll start getting more of that too.

Okay, back to making money off Alexa. So it’s a complicated situation. Chompers emerges against an Alexa development environment that happens to ban all third-party ads (with some exceptions for music and flash briefing apps). It’s also an environment that seems to encourage advertisers and brands to directly create or commission skills themselves; a sort of Alexa-skill equivalent of the branded podcast. For further consideration of this, I highly recommend this Wired piece, “Amazon’s Alexa Wants You To Talk To Your Ads,” from December.

All of this amounts to a deeply uncertain context for audio publishers thinking about investing time and resources in creating a presence on the platform. Even if the smart speaker category feels really exciting in general, it’s incredibly hard for publishers to figure out a decent way to yield returns — a problem exacerbated by Amazon’s total and often opaque governance of the Alexa platform. It’s a familiar conundrum: You want to be a part of something on the up and up before you miss it, but what are you really getting if the nature of the thing is so capricious and beyond your control?

With Chompers, Gimlet appears to have figured out a loose workaround. Oral-B and Crest Kids are indeed sponsors, but according to Amazon’s rules, the Chompers skill can’t convey the sponsorship of the two brands at all. However, the usual ad spots will be present on the podcast version, which will receive the usual cross-promotion treatment across its show portfolio. A spokesperson further told me:

We are also including P&G in all our marketing materials, including social, promotional boxes/kits with Oral-B and Crest Kids products, an Echo Dot, etc. to pediatric dentists in NY SF LA and Seattle, celebs, press and parenting influencers, etc.

P&G, by the way, refers to Procter & Gamble, the multinational consumer goods corporation that owns both Oral-B and Crest. The move with promotional materials leans onto a larger marketing theory: By virtue of its relative monopoly over dental hygiene products, P&G will likely benefit from any broader lift in general toothbrushing practices — which, you know, is both terrifying in its expression of corporate monopoly and also a value-creation hypothesis I’d totally explore if I were said corporate monopoly.

Again, these feel like cobbled-together workarounds, and the larger problem of how one can derive meaningful revenue through voice assistant platforms remains very much up in the air. Two more things to that point:

• I’m tempted to think that what we’ll see over the long run with the Echo is a media ecosystem akin to YouTube: a closed, centralized platform that largely leads to the creation of a content type unique to itself. As such, if you’re a purveyor of fine podcast products, the choice of developing programming for Alexa is ultimately an optional one — but one that requires its own infrastructures, teams, and playbooks. Which is probably why Gimlet hiring a dedicated director of voice makes sense.
• There’s something about the current demographics of smart speaker users that makes me think it’s a good tool for audio publishers to deepen their relationship with superfans. Drawing from the various Smart Audio reports, these users are highly engaged, display increased audio consumption behaviors, and appear inclined to use the device as a mechanism to make purchases. Seems like a ripe constellation of traits for an audio publisher looking to build out a subscription or freemium model.

But yeah, I don’t know. The more I think about it, the more unsettled I get. If I were a podcast publisher, I’d be incredibly wary of dedicating too much of myself to Alexa. I don’t know where this particular road goes, but it certainly reminds me of the many, many roads that have ended badly.

Chaser: Then again, maybe it’s not a good idea to build out a distribution presence on a sentient platform? “Amazon Alexa Devices Are Laughing Spontaneously And It’s ‘Bone Chillingly Creepy'” (BuzzFeed).

While we’re on the subject of kids podcasts: Gen-Z Media, which joined PRX’s portfolio of clients back in January, has announced a new slate of shows for the spring: The Mayan Crystal, Six Minutes, and a game show called Pants on Fire.

Of particular note is Gen-Z’s new website, dubbed Best Robot Ever, which functions as its new consumer-facing online home that also features programming from kids podcast publishers outside its network.

Clustering. Two months after wrapping Heaven’s Gate, Stitcher has rolled out another podcast that sticks with the theme of cults and cult-ish movements. The new show is called Dear Franklin Jones, and it’s by Jonathan Hirsch, most known for creating the independent podcast ARRVLS.

I liked the first episode enough (and loved the tinkly retro theme music), but what’s up with Stitcher and cults? This reminds me of the twin films phenomenon, except, of course, this isn’t an instance of semi-serendipitous cross-industry synchronicity, it’s just one publisher being fixated on a subject. Anyway, shouts to 1997, when Hollywood released both Volcano and Dante’s Peak within two months of each other, and to 1998, which saw Armageddon and Deep Impact come out within a similar chunk of time.

Anyway, I’d just like to flag that Dear Franklin Jones is another example of Stitcher working the windowing angle to drive more Stitcher Premium conversions through its original programming. The podcast debuted last week with new episodes weekly, but Jonesheads can access the whole run of episodes now if they signed up for Stitcher Premium.

For the record: I go back and forth debating the merits of windowing arrangements like this. I mean, I get it. By virtue of being a short-run series, Dear Franklin Jones is considerably harder to monetize than a longer-term recurring production, simply because there’s a much shorter runway to develop an active listenership and monetize the “head” of the production. As such, I completely empathize with the need to break out complementary channels for revenue.

But the tradeoff involves dampening the upside should it become a hit during its original run. The option to let listeners pay up and instantly access the rest of the show potentially diffuses the listenership and attention; you’d get two populations experiencing the show at different speeds, and are therefore less likely to participate in the same kinds of conversations. We see a version of this diffusion in the streaming vs. linear television context: Streaming platforms Netflix and Amazon Prime Video simply haven’t seemed capable of driving conversations with the same fervor and intensity that linear networks like HBO have consistently been able to do. I guess what I’m saying is: Scared money don’t make money, but I get it.

It’s a tough balance to strike, and I don’t envy podcast programming chiefs juggling the twin facts that (a) there seems to be genuine hunger for great, high-quality short-run podcasts and (b) they’re so much harder to monetize within the current system. And I imagine this will come to a head for Stitcher when the network rolls out its collaboration with Marvel, Wolverine: The Long Night. That show will debut exclusively on Stitcher Premium next Monday, before going wide in the fall.

The Big Listen ends. WAMU will cease production on the Lauren Ober-hosted broadcast about podcasts after “the program in its current format didn’t gain the traction with other NPR stations that we required to continue the investment in its weekly production,” the station announced Friday.

Keep an eye on Spotify. The Swedish music streaming service finally filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange last week, and the big story thread is how it will pursue a relatively unconventional (and consequently riskier) route to do so. Recode has a helpful summary of the move — Theodore Schleifer writes: “There are no bankers that will underwrite the listing, meaning no one is trying to make a market for shares. There are no institutional investors who will get first dibs at their shares who could prop up Spotify’s value. And a lot of the rules that are meant to keep a stock from soaring or crashing are out the window” — and I also found Andrew Flanagan’s writeup over at NPR helpful to grasp the bigger picture.

You should check out Flanagan’s entire piece, but here’s the money:

Let’s take [Spotify CEO Daniel] Ek at his word here and assume he truly, deeply would like to pay creators as much as humanly possible, enough to survive on their creativity, while at the same time continue to operate a globally dominant technology company. To do that, Ek and Spotify may need to remove other players from the equation — or as he puts it, “break free of their medium’s constraints.” Ek isn’t talking about the constraints of human hearing or the constraints of creating beautiful and challenging sounds. He’s talking about the constraints represented by an industry of fiefdoms. It sounds as though he’d like the job of king.

So why should we care about Spotify again? As a reminder, the platform has made various attempts — albeit in the form of tentative minor experiments — to build out programming alternatives to its core music offering, a good chunk of which revolves around podcasts and non-music audio content. These attempts are ongoing, and to this date they have manifested themselves in a few different ways including: basic third-party podcast distribution (both through manual submission and through new partnerships with Anchor and Spreaker), original content creation (some of which are produced by podcast shops like Panoply and Transmitter), exclusive windowing arrangements (e.g. Gimlet Media with Mogul and WNYC Studios with 2 Dope Queens), and a new multimedia initiative called Spotlight.

According to the F-1, the music streaming platform boasts 159 million monthly users and 71 million paid Premium subscribers as of December 31st, 2017. The document also spotlight’s the company’s apparent emphasis on expanding “non-music content and user experience,” listed within the growth strategy section. Note the following disclosure:

There were a total of 348 million podcast listeners across all platforms worldwide at the end of 2016 and the number of podcast listeners increased to an estimated 484 million in 2017 according to Ovum, representing growth of 39% year-over-year. This engagement presents a significant opportunity for Spotify as we believe we have the ability to enhance the podcast User experience with a better product that is focused on discovery.

I’m not sure how Ovum, the business intelligence service referenced here, counts a “podcast listener,” but the growth rate is notable nonetheless. For what it’s worth, I’m a heavy user of Spotify for podcast listening, mostly because it works better with my data plan and I often spend huge chunks of the day without Wifi. Then again, I’m the guy that hits Chipotle before 11 a.m. to beat the lunch rush. Which is to say, I’m no indicator of anybody.

Related story: iHeartMedia is preparing to file for bankruptcy, Bloomberg reports.

Career Spotlight. We’re back at it again. This week, I traded emails with Vanessa Lowe, the creator of Nocturne, an independent podcast that’s part of The Heard collective. She’s based in Berkeley, California, which I hear has a hoppin’ radio scene these days.

Bites:

• Emilie Aries, cohost of Stuff Your Mom Never Told You, has stepped down from the HowStuffWorks’ podcast after a year-long tenure and launched a new project: Bossed Up, a podcast that comes out of her award-winning career service and training company of the same name. Transmitter Media provided guidance on the project. This is the second instance of SYMNTY hosts leaving the show to start their projects in two years, the other being Cristen Conger and Caroline Ervin, who went on to start Unladylike.
• The team from CBC Original Podcasts reached out to flag a few updates: Its true crime show Someone Knows Something is now back with its fourth season, On Drugs returns for its second, and they welcomed a new show called Personal Best.
• ESPN has announced its third season of 30 for 30 Podcasts, which will mark a departure from its anthology structure to roll out a serialized story. The season will explore the “complicated world of Bikram Yoga — a community grappling with its own identity and survival in the wake of sexual assault allegations against its charismatic guru and founder.” The story is reported and produced by Julia Lowrie Henderson, who notably worked on the “Yankees Suck!” episode from the first season, and the whole season will drop at the same time on May 22.
• The music label Atlantic Records has launched its own in-house line of podcasts. (Variety) Agreed with Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton’s take on the matter: “It is interesting to see a record company like Atlantic invest in podcasts, but what they really should do is a regular show with actual Atlantic music on it. Benefit from the fact that other podcasters don’t have a music library at their disposal!”
• The New York Times welcomes a new show: Charles Duhigg’s Change Agent. (Apple Podcasts)
• Sort of adaptation in the opposite direction: The Osbournes now have a podcast. (Apple Podcasts)
• “Branded Podcasts Are The Ads People Actually Want To Listen To.” (Fast Company)
• Wild: “An Artificial Intelligence is Generating an ‘Infinite’ Podcast.” (Motherboard)
• “Florida teacher ‘removed from classroom’ after alleged white-nationalist podcast.” (ABC News)
• Marc Maron is moving garages, marking an end of an era. The New York Times produced a lovely package memorializing the storied production space.
• Goodness, Sunday’s This American Life was stunning.

Good morning, all. So, while not quite breaking news, the late-day publication of a piece on WNYC’s ongoing crisis narrative has led me to rewrite and restructure the newsletter a little bit. As such, this issue is a tad messier than usual. My apologies.

“The Troubles.” We’re three months into New York Public Radio’s reckoning with sexual harassment and an organizational culture that allowed for bullying and discriminatory behaviors that have especially hurt women and people of color. (See here, here, and here.) And it’s far from over.

Boris Kachka, writing for New York magazine’s The Cut (where the original John Hockenberry piece by journalist Suki Kim dropped on December 1), published a whopper Monday evening that provides one of the most detailed looks at the station’s troubling history with sexual harassment and where it stands today. There’s a lot packed into it, and the piece performs a wide range of functions, including, among others:

• Vividly illustrating the toxic nature of the culture that the station has cultivated over the decades;
• Capturing the historically persistent systematic failures of the station’s human resources infrastructure — along with its weaponization (“regarded by many as the organization’s spy and enforcer”);
• Providing additional details on the behavior of Hockenberry, Leonard Lopate, and Jonathan Schwartz;
• Filling in some of the blanks of what has been happening in the station over the past few months.

Kachka was also able to secure an interview CEO Laura Walker last week, and in doing so, creates a partial portrait of a station leader under heavy fire whose future remains deeply, utterly in question.

The piece is sprawling and remarkably dense, but also somewhat strange. I’ve read it a couple of times now, and the piece strikes me as a keyhole-sized window into the chaos gripping the institution in the current moment — there are dangling threads everywhere, and there are places where I’m not sure how they fit together. Anyway, go read the feature, which is illuminating, but here are some details you probably shouldn’t miss:

• Here’s what Dean Cappello has apparently been up to following his demotion to an advisory role: “While Walker made sure to be omnipresent around the office, Cappello traveled to London. According to two sources, he was negotiating with the BBC on a partnership to build a morning news podcast to rival the current market leader, the Times’ The Daily.” Hmm.
• Here’s Walker’s view of what happens next: “She described the future as a monumental but exciting challenge, and gave herself a window of roughly a year to produce results. In addition to [former NPR News executive editor Madhulika] Sikka’s work, Proskauer’s investigation, and several ‘working groups’ of employees, there was a forthcoming ‘integrated plan for change,’ based on a dissection of the workplace now being conducted pro bono by the prestigious Boston Consulting Group.” Not for nothing, though, it should be noted that Proskauer Rose, the law firm brought in to investigate the harassment complaint, is known for union-busting at universities and being on the other side of labor in the sports world.
• And here’s the kicker: “Cappello’s demotion left many relieved, others even more frustrated that both he and Walker are still in the building. But one thing is true, everyone agrees: Walker is trying. ‘I think she wants to save the company and save herself,’ says one WNYC reporter. ‘But my colleagues and I feel like if it doesn’t truly change, we are out of here.'”

Pocket ecosystem. This morning, RadioPublic, the podcast listening platform and PRX spinoff, announced a new revenue initiative primarily aimed at smaller podcasts that haven’t yet developed a big enough audience to secure advertisers. RadioPublic is calling it the Paid Listen program, with a hook that involves the company guaranteeing payments to participating podcast publishers. Here’s how CEO Jake Shapiro describes the basic premise in an introductory blog post:

Podcasters make ad-free episodes available in their feeds, we place ads on our platform that bookend each episode, and we pay participating podcasters $20 for every thousand listens on the RadioPublic apps for iOS and Android.

Those ads will be produced in-house by RadioPublic itself for now — hence, publishers should note that they’ll lose that bit of creative control and experience contiguity, should they indeed be concerned about such things — and producers must first submit their podcasts for screening approval to participate in the program. It’s worth noting that the compensation program is limited to listens that take place on the RadioPublic mobile apps, not its embed players scattered across the internet.

In his blog post, Shapiro situates the Paid Listen program within the broader vision he holds for RadioPublic, one that sees advertising as one-of-many pathways for creator compensation that the platform will ultimately support. “Soon we will support listeners who prefer to pay podcasters directly instead of hearing an ad; brands who pay users to opt-in for more info; podcasters who invite their true fans to become paying members,” he writes. But those alternative models will come some other day; today, we’re given advertising, the tried-and-true and still-sexy business model that still drives the bulk of business in the podcast ecosystem.

Viewed from a distance, the Paid Listen program can be understood as another variation on your standard marketplace-building gambit deployed by advertising-oriented content platforms — see: YouTube, Spotify, Facebook, early Stitcher, etc. — where incentives are created to attract more creators onto the platform, after which their capacity to draw attention and generate sellable impressions are bundled as attention commodities and sold to advertisers. The nexus of content platforms and digital advertising has come under increasing criticism over the years (not to mention the platformization of everything in general, but that’s a whole other story), and so the distinct challenge for RadioPublic here is how the company will integrate its Paid Listen gambit into its orientation as a public benefit corporation and its stated goal to assist smaller publishers. That challenge gives rise to a broader philosophical question: Do differences in the social consequences of digital advertising and its resultant content/platform dynamics come down to details, and RadioPublic’s long-term commitments to those details — or are the outcomes ingrained purely in the structural arrangement, never to be overcome?

Whatever the answer to that question, it’s useful to read this initiative as the latest step in what may well end up being RadioPublic’s endgame: building a pocket ecosystem specifically for small, independent, and upstart creators in anticipation of a future in which that creator class will be pushed out of the current iteration of the podcast ecosystem by bigger, more organized, and typically deeper-pocketed publishers. It’s a pathway towards relevance that I’ve previously suspected we would see from the rising cohort of user-generated content-oriented apps like Anchor and Bumpers, but it seems that RadioPublic is, and has always been, much more aligned with this particular vision of the future.

The Hollywood hustle. A preamble: Last week, a reader wrote me a particularly profane note complaining about all the adaptation, IP-harvesting, and Hollywood/podcast baby-making stories I’ve been publishing for quite some time now. “Why should we care?” the note asked. “It doesn’t apply to 95% of us.” Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve received such a complaint on this subject. But this week, I figure I should just at least acknowledge the question, and make explicit what has been implicit all along: I cover it because it’s happening, and it’s going to keep happening, and it’s likely going to impact the structures of money, power, and leverage that inform relationships throughout the podcast ecosystem. Which means that one way or another, it’s going to impact you, whether you like it or not — and whether you can see it or not, so you should probably be aware about it.

Anyway, here’s the news peg. Last week, Gimlet announced something that should surprise absolutely nobody: the formation of Gimlet Pictures, its official film and television unit. As Deadline emphasized, the new division will be led by Chris Giliberti, the Boston Consulting Group alum (and Forbes 30 Under 30 fella) who formerly held the amorphous “head of multiplatform” title. Giliberti originally joined the company in the summer of 2015 as chief of staff to Gimlet president Matt Lieber. His team includes Eli Horowitz, who initially joined the company as the head of its fiction division in the run-up to the launch of Homecoming, and another development executive who is yet to be hired, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Do read that THR piece on the matter, by the way, which also contains two noteworthy details:

• Messaging from Lieber insisting that the company remains committed to being audio-first;
• IMG Original Content, a division of WME, has hired Moses Soyoola, Panoply’s director business development and strategy, into its ranks.

That Gimlet moved to formalize its film and television unit isn’t particularly surprising; it is, after all, the logical end to much of what the company has been doing on the adaptation front. It’s also worth remembering that Gimlet’s adaptation pipeline — and the commoditization of its shows, episodes, and projects into intellectual property — was explicitly stated as one of its core growth pathways during its $15 million fundraising announcement last fall.

But what does putting up a shingle for a film and television development arm entail? What does having one actually mean? An industry insider tells me:

It’s all about what you do with it. The facade alone won’t open doors. Will you actually build out the resources and team? Will your deals be set up in such a way that you’re actually the production company and receiving real fees for it (a.k.a. will your agency do a good job). There is a layer of deals that are purely options and no real dollars come the way of the rights holders. They may look fancy but there is no serious financial value.

Gimlet’s announcement, together with the premiere of 2 Dope Queens’ standup specials on HBO over the weekend, kicked off a series of writeups formally documenting the ongoing podcast adaptation trend, from USA Today and Variety, along with the aforementioned Deadline and Hollywood Reporter pieces. Over at Vulture, I tried to contextualize this current wave of podcast adaptations within the sporadic podcast-to-TV attempts of the past.

On a related note: Chris Hardwick, the creator of the podcast-centric multimedia network Nerdist Industries, did not renew his contract with Legendary Entertainment, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Legendary acquired the company in 2012. Instead, Hardwick has branched off and rebranded his flagship Nerdist podcast as ID10T, which will be the basis of his new media company of the same name. That said, he remains the CEO of Nerdist Industries, but will not be involved in the day-to-day. Cadence13, formerly known as DGital Media, will support the new show on ad sales, and as such it’ll be hosted in Art19.

A note on last week’s issue. I’d like to revise an element of the writing in last Tuesday’s profile of Macmillan podcasts: in my introductory paragraph that sought to quickly establish the origin myth of the QDT–Macmillan relationship, I regrettably glossed over QDT’s pre-Macmillan history and Mignon Fogarty’s work therein. By the time she struck a licensing deal with Macmillan, Fogarty had already formally founded QDT and developed it into what she describes as a “thriving podcast network” spanning six podcasts. She remains involved in some high-level QDT decision-making to this day. The way the paragraph was originally written implies that QDT did not exist before the Macmillan deal, and that is patently not the case.

On a related note: Tor Teen, a Macmillan imprint, has brokered a three-book publishing deal with Lauren Shippen adapting her fiction podcast, The Bright Sessions. Paste Magazine has the exclusive.

Making your own shots. “If The Wire or Treme were a podcast and all the stories were true, this is what you’d get.” That’s how Robin Amer, the creator, host, and executive producer of The City, described her project in short-hand when she originally developed the concept for WNYC’s 2015 Podcast Accelerator. The City, described nowadays as a serialized longform investigative podcast exploring the “power structures of different American metropolises,” emerged as one of two winners of that accelerator competition, but WNYC Studios ultimately ended up passing on the project.

More than two years have elapsed since, and The City has now found a home in a unique situation: as the core of a big podcasting gambit by the USA Today Network, the Gannett-owned media group uniting USA Today and a wide array of local news operations. And last week, the podcast announced a number of key details: the first season will focus on the city of Chicago, the show is set to debut in the fall, and the project has pulled together a team of veteran journalists and public radio producers to build the show.

And what a team it is. Supporting Amer will be: reporter Wilson Sayre, formerly of WLRN; producer Jenny Casas, formerly of St. Louis Public Radio and City Bureau; consulting composer and sound designer Hannis Brown, formerly of NYPR’s Meet the Composer; story editor Ben Austen, former editor at Harper’s Magazine and current contributor to the New York Times Magazine; and editor Sam Greenspan, formerly the managing producer at 99% Invisible.

The City’s road to the USA Today Network was an unconventional one. After learning that WNYC wouldn’t be picking up the show in August 2016, Amer secured help from a literary agent, Danielle Svetcov, with whom she started shopping the pilot episode around in November 2016. “I knew I needed a large institutional partner to produce the show,” Amer, who is the former deputy editor at the Chicago Reader and a former WBEZ producer, told me over email. “Long-form investigative reporting isn’t the kind of thing you can do by yourself, unfunded, on nights and weekends.”

The process involved preliminary conversations with more than a few of, as Amer puts it, “the usual podcasting suspects,” but she was eventually connected with the USA Today Network through John Barth, the managing director of PRX and a mentor of Amer, who introduced her to Liz Nelson, the network’s vice president of strategic content development and one of the people in charge of expanding the organization’s budding podcasting efforts. One thing led to another, and last summer, Gannett ultimately agreed to buy The City, acquiring its intellectual property, and bring Amer on an as employee to build and run the project.

“They completely bought into my vision for the show,” Amer said. “The network comprises 109 local news outlets all across the country in addition to USA Today, and is extremely committed to investigative reporting, so my vision of focusing on a different city every season not only made sense to them but was actually feasible.” When asked about the budget that the network is granting the project, Amer described it as “comparable to others that have been launched by major media organizations,” though no specific details were given. For the USA Today Network, The City represents a big swing in a larger push to expand its on-demand audio operation. The network hopes to grow its podcast portfolio to over 60 shows this year. (Which is, uh, wild.)

I’m told that the team is currently deep in the reporting process. “Now that our staff is on board, we’re resuming the reporting that I’ve been doing on and off for the last two years. We’ll be reporting through May, then in scripting and production mode through the summer,” Amer said. They are also laying the groundwork for the second season, which they hope to roll out in the spring of next year.

With a vision to build out a whole new platform for investigative reporting, The City could well emerge as the latest entry in a growing lineage of substantively journalistic podcasts like Reveal or In The Dark — or, as Amer hopes, the broader tradition of investigative narrative works spanning so many other mediums, like those of Errol Morris, Matthew Desmond, and as alluded to in The City’s original shorthand, David Simon. “If we’re successful, I hope it will be one more piece of proof that you can both tell a gripping story and have meaningful impact,” she said. “And hopefully that will spur other media outlets to invest in this kind of work.”

But for now, Amer has already carved out another kind of legacy: of pushing past closed doors with grit, and realizing new ways to raise a project.

On a vaguely related note, because Chicago: Ellen Mayer, a former engagement consultant at Hearken, has launched a new local podcast project called IlliNoise, which is dedicated to “answering your questions about the Illinois state government, how it works, and how it impacts your community.” Not to be confused with Illinoise, the second album in Sufjan Stevens’ 50 States project — where the musician would’ve made 50 albums, each based on a different state — that he would dismiss in 2009 as “such a joke.” (Alas.)

Now if you excuse me, I’m going to make audio puns out of every state.

Career Spotlight. This week, I traded emails with Jayson De Leon, one of those young, energetic whipper-snappers.

Bites:

• Pandora is reorganizing its business — which is to say, it’s downsizing and engaging in cost-saving measures while placing bets on new gambles, like ad tech and further expanding into non-music content. The music streaming company is also working to grow its Atlanta office, situated in “a region with lower costs than the company’s headquarters in Oakland.” What finagling! (Press release)
• “Audible’s pursuit of more audiobook publishing rights could squeeze traditional book publishers in the fastest-growing segment of the market.” (The Wall Street Journal)
• Amazon has acquired Pulse Labs, a startup that aims to help voice app developers “test out new apps on a target audience before publicly launching.” (Recode)
• The Modern Love podcast celebrated its 100th episode last week. I asked the team to list out their favorite entries. (Vulture)
• The Onion binge-dropped a six-part true-crime spoof yesterday, titled “A Very Fatal Murder.” (Website)
• The ever-funny, always-delightful Glen Weldon with “The 6 Eminently Disprovable Rules For Roundtable Podcasting.” (NPR Monkey See)
• Are you reading Caroline Crampton? You absolutely should.

This week, the Philadelphia Media Network announced that it would be moving to Arc for all of Philly.com’s publishing needs, working directly with the Post team to test new Arc tools and features throughout the year-long transition process. The nonprofit Lenfest Institute, which owns PMN, will document the process in a series of white papers for the other metro news organizations participating in the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative, laying out details on why it chose to adopt Arc in the first place and how the transition worked, intended to guide other publishers that are considering a new CMS for their digital operations.

“Our transition from the system we use now to Arc coincides, and times, well with our current newsroom transformation overall, which is focused around digital change,” Tian Chen, chief product officer at PMN, said. Though PMN might’ve had the technical staff to pull off some website and backend improvements itself, “the amount of effort we’d have to invest into doing these things is completely outweighed by effort it would take for us to just do it with Arc.”

The newsroom will start by switching over core content creation tools first, such as ones for composing articles and scheduling, Chen told me, and by the fall of this year hopes to start using other tools in the Arc suite, such as its A/B testing feature and new digital advertising tools. Philly.com gets around 6.9 million unique visitors per month according to comScore — 5.8 million from mobile — and wants to grow the audience base, so improving user experience on its platforms is critical. The site also launched a metered paywall this past fall; the Arc team is building out a more easily customizable subscription tools for publishers, which PMN will also help test.

“The goal is to have a very productive and transparent commercial relationship, underpinned by a journalistic mission,” Jim Friedlich, the institute’s executive director, said. “It is also a harbinger of future such deals in local news — smart publishers playing at scale on strong platforms and no longer building their own.”

Friedlich recalls that he’d been in touch with both The Philadelphia Inquirer and Washington Post CIO Shailesh Prakash more than two years ago, before the formation of the Lenfest Institute, but that a very circumspect Arc team felt then it wasn’t ready to handle more widespread commercial usage. PMN’s transition efforts are supported by $400,000 from the Lenfest Institute to cover the one-time project costs of transitioning to the Arc publishing system, but PMN itself will take on the remaining continued operating costs of Arc after it’s switched over. (The initial funding comes out of the $1 million the Lenfest Institute gave last fall to PMN for technical overhauls and improving its reporting resources, as part of a large infusion of grants to local news projects).

Arc Publishing has “dozens” of other customers — the Post wouldn’t share an exact number — all of whom can work with the Arc team on site presentation technical transition, troubleshooting, and new features (the PMN arrangement is unique in that the Lenfest Institute will share lessons learned throughout the transition). Arc handles all the hosting through Amazon Web Services, and charges commercial clients based on each publisher’s site traffic. $10,000 per month is the publicly cited figure for the smallest Arc users, up to around $150,000 per month for the larger publishers. Most Arc clients so far have been medium to large-sized publishers, director of Arc Publishing Matt Monahan told me. (College newspapers such as Columbia’s Spectator and the University of Maryland’s Diamondback were the first to test Arc, for free.) The Post declined to share revenue figures for Arc’s business, but revenue “doubled year-over-year,” according to a November Fast Company article.

The Post has previously said Arc is moving towards being able to offer a completely automated, self-service option, though it’s not quite there yet (parts of deployment are starting to be automated, and certain developments, like a ticketing system for troubleshooting, set it on a path to scaling faster). In the past two or so years, Arc has been adding publishing clients at a fast trickle, but slowly enough that it can still be responsive to individual publishers’ requests.

The Argentina-based digital-only news site Infobae was among its earlier clients. Arc deals only with digital publishing, but can integrate with news organizations’ print systems. Canada’s Globe and Mail is a client. So are the Tronc papers, such as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. McClatchy, which is currently using a different CMS, has looked at adopting Arc for its papers (though “through our normal course of business we continuously look at a wide range of CMS solutions including Arc,” its VP for product and tech Scott Manuel told me over email). The Portland alt-weekly Willamette Week was Arc’s first commercial client, and its sister alt-weekly the Santa Fe Reporter flipped the switch on its new Arc-powered website last October. (Its other sibling, Raleigh Durham’s Indy Week, isn’t using Arc.)

Santa Fe Reporter is on the tiny side of the spectrum of Arc clients. Its New Mexico newsroom has a staff of 14 and the alt-weekly serves a market of around 90,000 people and gets around 30,000 pageviews to its site each week, about a quarter of it direct, according to publisher and editor Julie Ann Grimm. (It also distributes 15,000 free print issues every Wednesday.) It also doesn’t have any coding staff in-house to help speed along technical tweaks.

“When we started working in earnest with their team, we had very clear vision of our site,” Grimm said. “In the process, we had a lot of back-and-forth with their developers, helping them understand how we wanted their product to work for us, and looking at how far you could stretch certain tools and features. Early on, our art director drew up some wireframes of what our ideal website might look and feel like. If you look at those wireframes from two years ago now, I think we got there.”

Some styling and layout details Grimm said she wishes SF Reporter could have more control over. But transitioning to Arc has offered major benefits not necessarily visible to readers.

“Changing to the Arc system allowed us to reinvent our whole newsroom workflow. We were using various patched systems. Google Docs, Microsoft Word, our copyeditors were emailing things back to our reporters,” Grimm said. “Now we use their system for content generation, and use Arc to flow through the whole copyediting process. We can export to an RTF for InDesign for our print edition. That’s made a difference for us as well. It’s been a big change in our culture.”

She also credited the Arc team for the clean migration of the Reporter’s years of archives.

“They were helping us move all of our stories from when we first really went online, pulling all the data around the ways we built each story and feeding it into the new system,” she said. “So how the images show up, how the links to other stories would show up, how the subheads would display — all of these were problems we had to work through. Today, if you find an older article, you’ll see it pretty much has the same functionality our newer articles do, even though it came from an older system. That’s really worth something to us. Our stories that go back in time are just as valuable.” (The Reporter staff did its own tagging.)

Infobae adopted Arc systems 20 months ago when it was still “pretty experimental,” Infobae product director Pablo Mancini said. The 16-year-old site has more than 100 staff throughout Latin America, as well as correspondents across the U.S. Since moving to Arc systems, it’s doubled its audience to 42 million monthly unique visitors.

“I’ve been working in this field for 15 years, and I really think their CMS is a game changer,” he said. “We use Ellipsis, for multiple people creating and publishing stories. PageBuilder, their core tool for managing the homepage, is really impressive. They have templates for AMP. Goldfish, their video management system, we’ve used from the beginning, and it’s very powerful.

“They have a lot of tools that can help you grow your site, but in my view the value is in being able to work with their engineering team to implement features relatively quickly.”

The full Arc suite includes all the usual publishing tools, but also available to other publishers are many features first tested in the Post newsroom. The Post itself is in the final stages of transitioning entirely to using Arc, Monahan told me: “A lot of this was built here, for problems we saw inside our own business, so the goal is, by the time we get through this year, the way you see the system running at the Post will be indistinguishable from how our clients use it.”

Building up revenue-side tools are a top priority for the Arc team this year, including products around digital advertising, and importantly, a digital subscriptions platform for handling different types of paywalls (“we should be in place with beta partners for this in Q2,” Monahan said).

“You have clients like The Globe and Mail, which has a combination of metered access and restricted premium content. You see the paywall model we have at The Washington Post. We’ll have something that can support all these models — a configurable paywall where publishers can change a lot of the settings for,” Monahan said. “The learnings from what we’ve done with our own subscriptions business in the past year are informing features we’re building into this tool.”

Another big consideration for Arc will be how to handle its larger clients — particularly companies that own multiple distinct news sites.

“You’re seeing a lot of consolidation, with newspaper chains. There are specific capabilities you need when you’re running multiple sites, or even a single site with multiple different verticals, such as content restrictions, different permissions for staff,” Monahan said. “That’s another big thing for the next few months.”

“In the past we have been pretty secretive with sharing too many hard numbers about the company,” he said. “But we are really proud of what we achieved in 2017, so we’re ready to open up a little more than we have before.” (An echo of Slate editor-in-chief Julia Turner’s “happy numbers” quip from last week.)

Here are those digits:

• In 2017, Relay FM saw its revenue grow by 23 percent compared to the year before, beating its goal.
• The network enjoyed an average of 2 million downloads a month, which bundles up to about 24 million downloads for the whole year. That’s up from 18.3 million in 2016, and 12.4 million in 2015 (which was Relay FM’s first full calendar year of operation).
• If you’re crunching the numbers, it’s worth noting that RelayFM ended the year with 25 shows in active operation. The network launched four shows last year, three of which did not carry any advertising — they had planned for that — which means the revenue growth largely comes from increases in price and sell-throughs of existing inventory. For further context, the network launched in the summer of 2014 with five shows.

Hurley notes that Relay FM is sticking to a 20 percent revenue growth target for 2018, and that the network is already on track to beat it. New show launches are also on the docket, and I’m told the team intends to play around with new formats, configurations, and topic areas. To branch out, in other words, from the playbook that has served it so well.

“We feel pretty good about where we are, and we have a good runway to the year ahead,” Hurley said, when I asked about his perspective on the year ahead. “Of course, there’s always a worry that the bottom could fall out of the advertising market, but this doesn’t seem very likely, considering trends of the last few years. And we could lose our audiences somehow, but as long as we stay the course we’re on, that doesn’t seem likely either.” Relay FM will turn four years old in 2018 — a lifetime, in some circles — and across its existence, it’s established a strong operational foundation, figured out a formula that’s worked well for it, and slinked into each successive phase with confidence.

You could largely pin that confidence on the bullishness Hurley and Hackett feel about how podcast advertising has grown up to this point — and how they expect it change in the months to come. Hurley writes:

We have seen increased advertiser interest so far this year, and this is something that’s been scaling over time. I expect that in 2018 we will start to see even bigger companies try their hand at some branding campaigns, but I expect (especially for Relay FM) that our bread and butter will remain in the type of direct response advertising we are seeing right now.

I also expect to see a rise in more agencies trying to represent brands, attempting to sell spots to multiple podcast networks. We are seeing more and more companies that are trying to do this, but mostly they are attempting to represent the same advertisers we already work with. Podcasting is a hot commodity right now, and I don’t expect that to change any time soon, and if new agencies want to get off the ground, they need to branch out and try to convince more brands to give this a try.

I asked Hurley how he feels the industry has changed since he quit his job in 2014 to start the network, and more pointedly, whether it’s harder for independent podcast outfits to exist today. “There’s more of a focus on this industry than there has ever been,” Hurley said. This is, he goes on to note, a double-edged sword, and in his thinking, the increased attention has translated to more advertiser dollars and potential returns, but also a situation where the barriers to starting a sustainable podcast production business are greater than ever. “Trying to carve out your piece of that pie is getting harder as there are more people trying to grab it,” he said.

Hurley added: “We are established at this point, and luckily our path has ensured that we were there at just the right time…if we were starting out today I expect it would be harder for us.”

Joe Frank, the legendary radio producer-personality-artist, died last Monday at the age of 79. His considerable body of work — mind-bending, line-blurring, often surreal, always alluringly dark — deeply influenced a significant portion of the creative generations that currently define, challenge, and reshape radio aesthetics in this podcasting era. A small sample of those he influenced: Ira Glass, Jad Abumrad, Jonathan Goldstein, Glynn Washington, Kaitlin Prest, Andrea Silenzi, Joe Richman, and Scott Carrier, among so many others. Frank may have no heirs, as the writer Mark Oppenheimer observed in a recent profile, but his disciples are legion.

Do spend some time to sit down with that profile, by the way. The piece by Oppenheimer, who is also the host of Tablet’s Unorthodox podcast, went up on Slate last Friday, and it’s rich, fascinating, and lovely. It also doubles as the man’s final interviews before his death:

Frank was chagrined, even a little embarrassed, that he hadn’t made radio for the last couple of years. He knew that the podcast revolution is a big feast at a table he set. “There is something about all these podcasts, the kind of thing I think is, ‘They don’t even know that I started it! They don’t even know where this came from!'”

Again, don’t miss it. And when you’re done with the profile, here are some other things remembering Frank that you should check out:

• This On The Media segment, which brings on Oppenheimer to talk about the profile and later features Brooke Gladstone and Jad Abumrad listening to an old Frank piece.
• This note from Larry Josephson, a friend of Frank and president of The Radio Foundation.
• This remembrance at KCRW, where Frank spent the bulk of his career.
• This Fresh Air segment, which features a 1989 interview with Frank.

And then check out his website, where a good deal of his work can be found behind a paywall.

Career spotlight. This week, I traded emails with Whitney Simon, who covers business development — among many other responsibilities, I imagine — for the Los Angeles-based podcast network Headgum. I don’t think I’ve done one of these career spotlights with someone who’s working on the business side before. Given the general scope of interests in this newsletter, that’s pretty surprising to me. As an aside, I love spreadsheets.

Tell me about your current situation.

I’m currently the Business Development Executive at Headgum. Headgum was founded in 2015 by Jake Hurwitz, Amir Blumenfeld, and Marty Michael. I’ve been with them nearly two years now and was our first full-time employee.

In the big picture, Marty and I handle the business side of things. I spend most of my day selling advertisements against our show roster and investing in the client relations and brand partnerships that come along with that. I’m also responsible for our revenue tracking and financial analysis, running the invoicing and billing systems, and thinking strategically about our growth as a company. I transitioned into the biz dev role about a year ago and now manage our ad ops coordinator and any business interns we might have.

In addition, we’re constantly retooling the workflows and systems we use to better serve us, as Marty and I built them out ourselves. I’m grateful that the guys give me the freedom to really run with their vision in that sense. Because our staff is also still small, I get to dabble in a whole host of other things: UI design, talent acquisition, hiring practices, etc.

How did you get to this point? What does your career arc thus far look like?

When I was in college, I went through the admissions process for Green Corps (the field school for community organizing). The process is fairly intensive because they, and more than 100 other environmental and social justice organizations in the US, are part of one umbrella organization: The Public Interest Network (TPIN). Many of those organizations attract attention from opposition research firms, so TPIN has built out a great internal recommendation program. As a result, my application landed on the desk of the team that manages the grants operations for the entire organization. They offered me a position post-graduation and, after spending a summer working in Montana, I moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 2015 to join TPIN’s central staff.

In my role at TPIN, I was managing the (c)(3) and (c)(4) grants operations for Environment America and Green Corps and then consulting on writing and edits for a number of other organizations. The job was fascinating and intensely stressful. No matter if you made a mistake or did your job perfectly, kids’ school lunches or statewide environmental protections were always on the line. We were working 14-hour days at the office and to combat the risk of burn-out, I started listening to podcasts on my commute to give me a jolt of energy and inspiration. A few months in, I ran into a health issue, which led me to then decide to leave the position.

I gave myself three weeks to apply to any job in LA that had ever interested me, and it was during this time I shot off an email to Headgum. After not getting a response, I tracked down Marty’s assistant at the time and cold-emailed her. It turned out they had no open positions, but she called me two weeks later when she left for a different job and brought me in to meet the team. And that’s how I quickly transitioned from a large bureaucratic and historic organization to an incredibly fast-paced, relatively new one.

What does a career mean to you, at this point?

Thinking of a career today, I’d like to be useful in the world. When I look at people whose careers really impress me, they tend to be those who pull others up with them, are generous with their time and resources, and are genuinely excited by and curious about their work. We live in a time of such political, economic, and environmental uncertainty and that certainly affects people’s professional lives by the day. I’m always blown away by people who choose to bring attention or comfort to those who feel alone, oppressed, and/or unseen in the world. It’s going to be fascinating, and hopefully only mildly horrifying, in fifty years to look back on this time in America’s history. I’ve also been inspired by the #MeToo movement, because it’s helping us start to contextualize career paths and professional success in a way we haven’t before, and I hope the push to complicate the notion of a good career continues. I’d be remiss not to mention the people of color, and women of color in particular, who’ve led the movement to drive these conversations powerfully forward and into the open for years.

Not to be too trite but a good friend of mine was killed while we were in college — he was in Egypt teaching English to little kids and was one of those people with the potential to change the world. When work gets really stressful, I try to keep in mind that life is short and work is work. I want to do something with my life that I’m proud of and hopefully make life better for some people along the way.

When you started out, what did you think you wanted to do?

I found out fairly quickly that I like to be in a production role within a creative environment. On top of that, I love being able to think creatively within traditionally strict problems or environments. While my college was anti-vocational training, I’m grateful to professors who pushed me in the direction of applied studies. In general, I’ve always been fascinated by the way in which people move through the world. I toyed with going into architecture and urban design for a while, as well as into epidemiology or midwifery. I hope to always be able to draw a connection back to that sort of user-centered approach.

Bites:

• Pineapple Street Media has hired away Jonathan Menjivar from This American Life. (Twitter)
• This week sees a special series from Death, Sex & Money in partnership with BuzzFeed News called Opportunity Cost, about tradeoffs and choices when it comes to money, status, and class. This is the shit DSM was made to do! Damn, I’m excited. (WNYC Studios)
• WBEZ unveiled the subject of its post-Oprah “Making” season: former President Barack Obama. Which is cool! They should’ve retained the “O” in the podcast art, though. #JustWhatIBeThinking. (WBEZ)
• Mozilla, which has been producing a pretty solid podcast for a piece of #brandedcontent with IRL, is currently two episodes deep into its second season. (Mozilla Blog)
• Too Beautiful To Live, the cult Seattle-based daily podcast now distributed by American Public Media, is turning 10 this year, and it celebrated by doing “a 24-hour, live-stream episode recorded on a party bus driving around the state of Washington” last Saturday. In other news, the line between genius and insanity is thin, and hinges on fuel efficiency. (APM Podcasts)
• I reviewed Tenderfoot and HowStuffWorks’ Atlanta Monster last week. (Vulture) Something I forgot to mention: The show has near minimal transitions into ad breaks, and the result is smack dab at the bottom of the uncanny valley, folks.

(While the city that wins will obviously get a development boon, it seems borderline unfair to have raised the hopes of places that never had a chance. I love my home state of Louisiana, but I’m pretty sure the Lafayette–Baton Rouge corridor wasn’t going to be competitive no matter how good their PowerPoint was, barring a crawfish-specific ask in the RFP that I missed. I’m reminded of the time Tulsa tried to get the Summer Olympics: You want to applaud the chutzpah, but you also know some folks are wasting time at high hourly rates. Reminds me a bit of how The New York Times got 13,000 people to apply for a dream travel-writing job — and then picked a Yale grad who lives in Brooklyn and worked at New York magazine. But anyway.)

Apple also announced yesterday that it will open a new corporate campus somewhere in the United States, to be announced later this year. There must be something in the air, beyond even repatriation tax breaks.

Amazon and Apple are obviously operating from much more of a growth stance than most media companies are, but I’ve got a modest proposal for them: Follow Jeff Bezos’ and Tim Cook’s lead and open up an HQ2 of your own.

The shift from terrestrial distribution of news (newspaper trucks, TV signals) to digital has meant that an industry that was highly distributed geographically has become heavily concentrated in New York and Washington. (And, to a lesser extent, San Francisco and Los Angeles.) Of the digital job openings listed on JournalismJobs.com today, 54 percent are in New York or D.C. (Another 9 percent are in California.)

This raises a whole host of problems, for publishers, journalists, and audiences, all of which I’ve droned on about before. A major publisher picking up stakes and moving the whole operation from Midtown to Milwaukee seems unlikely. But maybe they could follow these tech giants’s example — keeping your main HQ at the industry’s center, but also setting up an HQ2…well, anywhere else.

Why might this be appealing?

— New York is expensive as hell for your staff! The high cost of living in Manhattan or Brooklyn leads media companies to go in two directions. On one hand, for the most sought-after employees in key executive positions, you have to pay them a lot more than you would elsewhere in order to keep or attract them. On the other, you still pay your cheap young talent dirt — which means that you narrow your potential pool of young staffers to people who can find a way to live in New York on dirt. (Usually with the financial support of Mom and Dad — which helps concentrate your staff with well-off Ivy kids, which is its own problem. Geographic diversity can lead to class diversity, something national media sorely needs.) Both of these facts lead to higher staff turnover, missed opportunities, and far too many “Why I’m Leaving New York” essays than the culture was designed to handle.

— New York is expensive as hell for you! Have you looked at what you’re paying for rent lately? It’s not a small number. One major promise of digital media was the ability to build an outlet on an asset-light model: You don’t need to buy a printing press or a broadcast tower anymore! Just some servers! So given that, why saddle yourselves with huge multiyear leases downtown that are as much about preening for investors as about finding a place to put your rows of iMacs?

— You are missing out on an enormous amount of talent. There are plenty of reasons one might not want to live in New York. Maybe you enjoy closets, or driving! Maybe you have family commitments that require you to live somewhere in the other 99.991977 percent of the American landmass. Maybe you just like cul-de-sacs, or good gumbo, or non-freezing winters. Many of the people in these situations are really talented journalists (or designers or developers), and if your jobs are all in New York, you’re either eliminating them from contention or requiring them to make a potentially miserable lifestyle choice to work for you. New York is such a singular place in America that, by placing your HQ2 nearly anywhere else, you’re opening up a big pool of potential talent.

— Advertisers aren’t as important as they used to be. Among the reasons media companies want to be in New York is that’s where the advertisers and agencies are. It’s easier to schmooze them up close than it is from two time zones away. That’s understandable, and it’s a reason not to leave New York entirely. But the hard truth of this digital age is that advertising matters less and less to media companies every day. It’s not unimportant — but Facebook and Google’s Jonah-style swallowing of the digital advertising business has made everyone more aware of the need for revenue from readers and users. That shift is happening. Your advertisers are in Manhattan, but the vast majority of your potential subscribers or members are not. Maybe go meet them sometime?

— There’s a cultural opening. You may have heard that some people don’t trust the media anymore — that they think we’re a bunch of New York Ivy League elites who couldn’t see Trump coming and don’t understand the lives of most Americans. Well…maybe stop being that! Or at least stop making it such an obvious vector of attack. People trust journalists who they believe understand their lives more than those they see, accurately or not, as Acela-riding snobs and weekend artisanal cheese shoppers.

— Your journalism will be better. The majority of attacks on the news produced by national journalists are unfair products of politically motivated smears and misconceptions about the diligent, civically important work that dedicated reporters do each and every day. But the post-Trump rush of journalists to West Virginia hollers and declining Ohio factory towns to find the “Real America” has, despite plenty of good intentions and a few positive moments, also included a lot of embarrassing moments where fellow Americans were viewed through the othering lens of bad foreign correspondence. It is undeniably true that being concentrated in two megarich East Coast metros leads to the production of a different corpus of journalism than would result from more geographic diversity. You’ll see different stories, meet different people, run in different circles.

Now, some portion of these goals can be met by being more open to remote work. And some media companies do embrace that idea, which lets people’s where-to-live decision detach from their where-to-work decision. That’s great! But many companies either reject the idea of remote work or reserve it for its biggest stars (who have the leverage to move to the country anyway) or for technologists who they feel can operate well at a distance. But some people don’t want the only alternative to a Manhattan high-rise to be their spare bedroom or the Starbucks downtown. People like having colleagues, and it’s hard for a spread-out collection of individual employees to serve as a significant counterweight to the culture of the New York office.

So don’t leave New York entirely. Keep your CEO there if he likes his commute from Montclair. But maybe think about offering some of your employees the chance to be somewhere else. Imagine The New York Times announcing it would be putting 100 staffers in some middle American city and asking for bids, Amazon-style. Or BuzzFeed declaring that it’ll start generating some portion of its LOLs from Kansas City next year. You’ve seen the kind of crazy tax deals cities offer big companies whenever they get a whiff of economic development — go get one! Let your writers move from a closet in Greenpoint to half an old Victorian in Louisville. The returns on your investment just might be worth it.

That’s not a typo in the Washington Post’s Reddit profile: The Washington Post account is an avid poster of some pretty good memes and gifs. It’s got jokes. It’s also a sharer of everything from polling stories to breaking national security stories to lifestyle columns to geeky features to fact-checks, and a facilitator of, and participant in, AMAs. The official publisher account has been live since April of this year, shortly after the platform began allowing public profiles, and appears to have broken through Reddit’s tough anti-brand, anti-paywall shell.

“This is a community that likes to talk and talk back,” Gene Park, the Washington Post’s social media editor, said. Park, himself a long-time Reddit user with a comment history fellow Redditors could look to for proof of authenticity, is the sole voice and moderator for /u/washingtonpost, and has spent significant effort bringing WaPo journalists onto Reddit to demystify the reporting process, participate in conversations without motive, and crafting jokes. “Reddit profiles were started because they wanted to encourage the creative community. There was no real place for artists and creators to push stuff on their own, because of previous self-promotion rules. That connected with me — I thought, what if the Washington Post was just another creator? We’re just there to talk about our work.” (Other Reddit publisher partners include AL.com and Time Magazine, which is doing formalized weekly roundups of Reddit content.)

One does not simply walk into Reddit and start pushing one’s own stories; the community has always had a serious allergy to self-promotion. Journalists have for years plumbed it for news stories (and other entertaining content), a practice Redditors haven’t looked upon fondly. Reddit is also home to 1 million-plus (and growing) subreddits; matching Post stories with the niche communities that would be receptive to them is yet another hurdle. And while some of the darkest subreddits such as r/Nazis or r/DylannRoofInnocent have been banned, trolling and viciousness remain.

“This isn’t a traffic play; it’s an engagement play,” Park said. “So the strategy includes inserting ourselves into comments under stories that are posted. The Washington Post is linked to quite often on Reddit. We want to find those conversations around our stories to see if we can provide more context or more answers. Sometimes we might’ve written a bunch of stories that relate to questions people are asking. I might use my knowledge and ties to get that information to people.”

"Every now and then (The Washington Post) don't seem quite so cucked." – from r/The_Donaldhttps://t.co/m0JYLQuHd3

— Gene Park (@GenePark) November 7, 2017

The not-so-revolutionary secret to the Post brand’s gradual acceptance by Reddit is its consistent transparency, including responding to unflattering accusations about the “Amazon Washington Post” and its ownership, or questions about how John Podesta has influenced the Post’s reporting since “he was brought on board” (he’s a contributing columnist, not an employee).

“Even people who’ve been critical of us, when I answer them honestly about how we do our journalism, they’ll respond and say, ‘I might not agree with everything you do, but I appreciate having you here in the comments section with us, and as a result you’ve gained a reader,” Park said. “It’s the only brand account we have where talking back to people on the platform is part of the regular activity.”

The Washington Post has a paywall but offers free-access deals through Amazon Prime (free for 6 months, then $3.99 a month for Prime members). Park, however, refrains from mentioning any of that himself, relying instead on other Redditors to offer subscription suggestions.

“I’ve been in subreddits where I don’t want to be dinged for self-promotion, so I’ll let other people say what our deals are. These are not shills. I have no idea who these people are,” he said. “I don’t even have to go in to tell people, here, we have a six-months-free Amazon Prime deal going on — other people will tell other people.” Park popped up on a thread to warn people that when the six months are up, the Prime deal auto-renews at $3.99 a month. “People were like, what are you doing, companies are not supposed to be telling us that. Just because you told us that, we’ll subscribe.”

Rollicking AMAs are Reddit’s bread and butter, and Park tries to get at least one going every week. David Fahrenthold has done one (user ‘PutinsMissingShirt‘: “Do you also feel that ‘nothing matters’ anymore?” Fahrenthold: “Great question. No”). Tokyo bureau chief Anna Fifield, who extensively covers North Korea, did one — it ended up being the Post’s most popular AMA, at 574 total comments. The Post’s Moscow Bureau did one, also topping 500 comments. But Park points out he’s also helped the Reddit community get access to AMAs with favorite figures totally unrelated to the Post.

“During the Hurricane season, an Alabama news weatherman was upvoted on the Reddit front page three times on a Friday. When I noticed he was going viral and that a lot of Redditors were asking for an AMA with him, I told everyone — as the Washington Post — that I didn’t think that TV station was familiar with Reddit AMAs, and I would try to get in touch with someone at the station to give them a nudge,” Park said. The knowledgeable local meteorologist’s AMA a few weeks later became the sixth most popular Reddit AMA ever. “I knew that people on Reddit would eat it up. I just wanted to do good by the community, who loved this guy. The feedback for us was just that people were confused: Here was this brand account, yet here they were elevating community interests.” (The Post got nothing more out of it other than a quick shoutout from the station.)

Best weatherman ever, very articulate and educational from videos

While they’re not primarily used as a driver of traffic, some of the Post’s Reddit efforts have resulted in new visitors. Working with the Tropical Weather subreddit during the Harvey-Irma week, the Post’s Capital Weather Gang offered updates in the live feed monitoring hurricane progress.

“I worked through the weekend with our Capital Weather Gang to make sure we were adding important context to some of the readings that were coming out. We were posting updates from our live blog. That paid off in traffic as well. There were upwards of 70,000 people watching that feed throughout that day,” Park said. “We were the only news organization deeply involved with that effort. It was a privilege that the moderators of r/tropicalweather allowed us in there.”

There’s no money involved in the Reddit-Post relationship, both sides confirm. Reddit keeps the Post in the loop about new features it’s launching — such as the ability to post native video — and helps identify active subreddits that might be interested in Post stories, according to Park, especially since breaking out of politics can be a challenge.

“Of our work on Reddit, one of the things I’m most proud of is that people tag us when they see an interesting news tip or story or something we need to know about. These are communities outside the politics subreddit. People are always tipping,” Park said. “They saw that we were part of the community and we were contributing, and that, for me, has been the most important thing.”

This summer, as a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard, I’ve been looking at another technology I think could lead to a similar step change in how publishers relate to their audiences: AI-driven voice interfaces, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Home and Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Apple’s upcoming HomePod. The more I’ve spoken to the editorial and technical leads building on these platforms in different news organizations, as well as the tech companies developing them, the more I’ve come to this view: This is potentially bigger than the impact of the iPhone. In fact, I’d describe these smart speakers and the associated AI and machine learning that they’ll interface with as the huge burning platform the news industry doesn’t even know it’s standing on.

This wasn’t how I planned to open this piece even a week before my Nieman fellowship ended. But as I tied together the research I’d done with the conversations I’d had with people across the industry, something became clear: As an industry, we’re far behind the thinking of the technology companies investing heavily in AI and machine learning. Over the past year, the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other global tech giants have all said, in different ways, that they now run “AI-first” companies. I can’t remember a single senior news exec ever mentioning AI and machine learning at any industry keynote address over the same period.

Of course, that’s not necessarily surprising. “We’re not technology companies” is a refrain I’ve heard a lot. And there are plenty of other important issues to occupy industry minds: the rise of fake news, continued uncertainty in digital advertising, new tech such as VR and AR, and the ongoing conundrum of responding to the latest strategic moves of Facebook.

But as a result of all these issues, AI is largely being missed as an industry priority; to switch analogies, it feels like we’re the frog being slowly boiled alive, not perceiving the danger to itself until it’s too late to jump out.

“In all the speeches and presentations I’ve made, I’ve been shouting about voice AI until I’m blue in the face. I don’t know to what extent any of the leaders in the news industry are listening,” futurist and author Amy Webb told me. As she put it in a piece she wrote for Nieman Reports recently:

Talking to machines, rather than typing on them, isn’t some temporary gimmick. Humans talking to machines — and eventually, machines talking to each other — represents the next major shift in our news information ecosystem. Voice is the next big threat for journalism.

My original goal for this piece was to share what I’d learned — examples of what different newsrooms are trying with smart speakers and where the challenges and opportunities lie. There’s more on all that below. But I first want to emphasize the critical and urgent nature of what the news industry is about to be confronted with, and how — if it’s not careful — it’ll miss the boat just as it did when the Internet first spread from its academic cocoon to the rest of the world. Later, I’ll share how I think the news industry can respond.

Talking to objects isn’t weird any more

In the latest version of her annual digital trends report, Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker revealed that 20 percent of all Google search was now happening through voice rather than typing. Sales of smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo were also increasing fast:

It’s becoming clear that users are finding it useful to interact with devices through voice. “We’re treating voice as the third wave of technology, following the point-and-click of PCs and touch interface of smartphones,” Francesco Marconi, a media strategist at Associated Press, told me. He recently coauthored AP’s report on how artificial intelligence will impact journalism. The report gives some excellent insights into the broader AI landscape, including automation of content creation, data journalism through machine learning, robotic cameras, and media monitoring systems. It highlighted smart speakers as a key gateway into the world of AI.

Since the release of the Echo, a number of outlets have tried to learn what content works (or doesn’t) on this class of devices. Radio broadcasters have been at an understandable advantage, being able to adapt their content relatively seamlessly.

In the U.S., NPR was among the first launch partners on these platforms. Ha-Hoa Hamano, a senior product manager at NPR working on voice AI, described its hourly newscast as “the gateway to NPR’s content.”

“We’re very bullish on the opportunity with voice,” Hamano said. She cited research showing 32 percent of people aged 18 to 34 don’t own a radio in their home — “which is a terrifying stat when you’re trying reach and grow audience. These technologies allow NPR to fit into their daily routine at home — or wherever they choose to listen.”

NPR was available at launch on the Echo and Google Home, and will be soon on Apple’s HomePod. “We think of the newscast as the gateway to the rest of NPR’s news and storytelling,” she said. “It’s a low lift for us to get the content we already produce onto these platforms. The challenge is finding the right content for this new way of listening.”

The API that drives NPR made it easy for Hamano’s team to integrate the network’s content into Amazon’s system. NPR’s skills — the voice-driven apps that Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa recognizes — can respond to requests like “Alexa, ask NPR One to recommend a podcast” or “Alexa, ask NPR One to play Hidden Brain.”

The Washington Post — owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — is also an early adopter in running a number of experiments on Amazon’s and Google’s smart speaker platforms. Senior product manager Joseph Price has been leading this work. “I think we’re at the early stages of what I’d call ambient computing — technology that reduces the ‘friction’ between what we want and actually getting it in terms of our digital activity,” he said. “It will actually mean we’ll spend less time being distracted by technology, as it effectively recedes into the background as soon as we are finished with it. That’s the starting point for us when we think about what voice experiences will work for users in this space.”

Not being a radio broadcaster, the Post has had to experiment with different forms of audio — from using Amazon’s Alexa automated voices on stories from its website to a Post reporter sharing a particular story in their own voice. Other experiments have included launching an Olympics skill, where users could ask the Post who had won medals during last year’s Olympics. That was an example of something that didn’t work, though — Amazon built the same capability into the main Alexa platform soon afterwards itself.

“That was a really useful lesson for us,” Price said. “We realized that in big public events like these, where there’s an open data set about who has won what, it made much more sense for a user to just ask Alexa who had won the most medals, rather than specifically asking The Washington Post on Alexa the same question.” That’s a broader lesson: “We have to think about what unique or exclusive information, content, or voice experience can The Washington Post specifically offer that the main Alexa interface can’t.”

One area that Price’s team is currently working on is the upcoming release of notifications on both Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home platforms. For instance, if there’s breaking news, the Post will be able to make a user’s Echo chime and flash green, at which point the user can ask “Alexa, what did I miss?” or “Alexa, what are my notifications?” Users will have to opt in before getting alerts to their device, and they’ll be able to disable alerts temporarily through a do-not-disturb mode.

Publishers like the Post that produce little or no native audio content have to work out the right way of presenting their text-based content on a voice-driven platform. One option is to allow Alexa to read stories that have been published; that’s easy to scale up. The other is getting journalists to voice articles or columns or create native audio for the platform. That’s much more difficult to scale, but several news organizations told me initial audience feedback suggests this is users’ preferred experience.

For TV broadcasters like CNN, early experiments have focused on trying to figure out when their users would most want to listen to a bulletin — as opposed to watching one — and how much time they might have specifically to do so via a smart speaker. Elizabeth Johnson, a senior editor at CNN Digital, has been leading the work on developing flash-briefing content for these platforms.

“We assumed some users would have their device in the kitchen,” she said. “This led us to ask, what are users probably doing in the kitchen in the morning? Making breakfast. How long does it take to make a bagel? Five minutes. So that’s probably the amount of time a user has to listen to us, so let’s make sure we can update them in less than five minutes. For other times of the day, we tried to understand what users might be doing: Are they doing the dishes? Are they watching a commercial break on TV or brushing their teeth? We know that we’re competing against a multitude of options, so what sets us apart?”

With Amazon’s recent release of the Echo Show — which has a built-in screen — CNN is taking the “bagel time” philosophy to developing a dedicated video news briefing at the same length as its audio equivalent.

CNN is also thinking hard about when notifications will and won’t work. “If you send a notification at noon, but the user doesn’t get home until 6 p.m., does it make sense for them to see that notification?” Johnson asked. “What do we want our users to hear when they come home? What content do we have that makes sense in that space, at that time? We already consider the CNN mobile app and Apple News alerts to be different, as are banners on CNN.com — they each serve different purposes. Now, we have to figure out how to best serve the audience alerts on these voice-activated platforms.”

What’s surprised many news organizations is how broad the age range of their audiences are on smart speakers. Early adopters in this space are very different from early adopters of other technologies. Many didn’t buy these smart speakers themselves, but were given them as gifts, particularly around Christmas. The fact there’s very little learning curve to use them means the technical bar is much lower. Speaking to the device is intuitive.

Edison Research was recently commissioned by NPR to find out more about what these users are doing with these devices. Music was unsurprisingly at the top of the reasons why they use these devices, but coming in second was to “ask questions without needing to type.” Also high up was an interest to listen to news and information — encouraging for news organizations.

While screens aren’t going away — people will always want to see and touch things — there’s no doubt that voice as an interface for devices is already becoming ingrained as a natural behavior among our audiences. If you’re not convinced, watch children interact with smart speakers: Just as we’ve seen the first Internet-connected generation grow up, we’re about to see the “voice generation” arrive feeling completely at ease with this way of engaging with technology.

The NPR–Edison research has also highlighted this trend. Households with kids that have smart speakers say engagement is high with these devices. Unlike phones or tablet, smart speakers are communal experiences — which also raises the likelihood of families spending time together, whether for education or entertainment purposes.

(It’s worth noting here that there have been some concerns raised about whether children asking for — or demanding — content from a device without saying “please” or “thank you” could have downsides. As San Francisco VC and dad Hunter Walk put it last year: “Amazon Echo is magical. It’s also turning my kid into an asshole.” To curb this, skills or apps for children could be designed in the future with voice responses requiring politeness.)

For the BBC, where I work, developing a voice-led digital product for children is an exciting possibility. It already has considerable experience of content for children on TV, radio, online and digital.

“Offering the ability to seamlessly navigate our rich content estate represents a great opportunity for us to forge a closer relationship with our audience and to serve them better,” Ben Rosenberg, senior distribution manager at the BBC, said. “The current use cases for voice suggest there is demand that sits squarely in the content areas where we consistently deliver on our ambitions — radio, news, and children’s genres.”

BBC News recently formed a working group to rapidly develop prototypes for new forms of digital audio using voice as the primary interface. Expect to hear more about this in the near future.

Rosenberg also highlights studies that have found voice AI interfaces appeared to significantly increase consumption of audio content. This is something that came out strongly in the NPR-Edison research too:

Owning a smart speaker can lead to a sizeable increase in consumption of music, news and talk content, podcasts, and audiobooks. Media organizations that have such content have a real opportunity if they can figure out how to make it as easily accessible through these devices as possible. That’s where we get to the tricky part.