People have been running social platforms and media companies for literal decades, after all, all while Musk was busy with cars and spaceships and whatnot. A fair number of lessons have been learned! But Musk — so resolutely convinced of his own genius — has dedicated himself to making old mistakes new again, compressing a lifetime of bad ideas into six short months.1 It’s his most reliable pattern: announce a crazy new policy, preferably on a weekend; face huge blowback from users; reverse the policy, claim you were misinterpreted all along or just pretend it never happened.

So when I saw this tweet on Saturday afternoon, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

Rolling out next month, this platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article basis with one click.

This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article.…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2023

Since embeds of his new longer-than-280-characters tweets don’t show the full text, here’s what it says:

Rolling out next month, this platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article basis with one click.

This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article.

Should be a major win-win for both media orgs & the public.

Fiiiiiiiiiinally, Elon turns his attention to micropayments. (Pretty sure this is in the Book of Revelation somewhere.)

The idea of news publishers charging readers by the article is not a new one. At least once an hour, someone tweets about “why hasn’t anyone figured out how to let me buy one article????” Literally dozens of micropayments-for-news startups have come and gone; dozens of publishers have run tests of various models; none have gained much traction.

Even today, well into the 2020s, you can find people saying the dream is an “iTunes for news” that — as the iTunes Store did 20 years ago — allows you to buy a single song (an article) rather than the full album (a subscription). (They say this despite the fact that approximately zero people still buy MP3s that way; instead, they pay a monthly subscription fee to Spotify or Apple.)

I’ve long been a micropayments skeptic. Not because I have any philosophical issue with the idea; I’m all for publishers making money and readers consuming news. My skepticism is driven by it being a strategy that sounds appealing but works poorly in practice. Others have written about the problems with micropayments at great length, but here are, to my mind, the most significant:

Friction at the story level.

What do people do when they hit a news site’s paywall? We have some data on that question, from a Gallup/Knight Foundation survey last fall. They asked American adults: “Suppose you were trying to access a news story online and had to pay to keep reading or watching it. Which ONE of the following would you be most likely to do?”

48% said they would “try to access the information elsewhere for free from a different news outlet.” 28% would “move on to something else or to a different news story.” 7% would “try to find information about the news story on social media.” 4% would “sign up for a free trial if available.” 3% would try to “get the story through friends or family who already have access.”

A measly 1% would “pay for access to the story or outlet.”

In the overwhelming majority of cases, a person faced with the need to pay a news site money will say “no, thank you.” You can view that as an artifact of subscription models, or you can view it as evidence of how transient most news stories are in people’s information lives. It’s hard to evaluate how much an individual article is “worth” before you’ve actually consumed it — and there is always free competition available, either on the same topic or in the broader universe of “things to click on in my feed.”

Friction at the payment level.

If an individual publisher sets up their own micropayments system, getting money will require readers setting up an account, attaching a credit card, and all the usual stuff that moving money online requires. Not many people will do that to read a single news story.

So maybe they sign on to one of the many micropayment startups that want to create an industry-wide network of news sites using a common payment platform — either as part of a pan-publisher subscription or on a pay-per-article basis. Unfortunately, none of them have the scale to be appealing or the appeal to build scale. (“Just sign up with your NewzBux account!” isn’t much of a pitch to your readers if they’ve never heard of NewzBux, or InfoCents, or FactCoins, or whatever.) And the companies that might be able to start with scale (Google, Facebook) are not ones that publishers trust with their money. And whoever owns the pipes, they’ll want their 30% cut.

Most paywalls aren’t that hard.

In a digital universe where every news story is behind a hard paywall — one impenetrable to the non-paying reader — then a micropayments model might make sense. But that’s not the digital universe we live in. The number of completely paywalled sites is low and typically either hyperlocal (a county-seat weekly with no competition) or high-end (think The Information or Politico Pro). Nearly all news sites will let a random web user read a story (or two, or five) for free. It’s only after a given number of clicks that the wall goes up.

If you want to think of that as “news sites already offer micropayments for those first five articles — they’ve just set the price at $0,” be my guest. And for those times when someone really wants to read just one article, that free allotment allows all the paywall workarounds that the savvy digital news consumer knows about. (We’re all adults here; we can talk about incognito windows.) If most paywalls aren’t that hard, there’s little pressure for a paid product to get around them on a single story.

No one agrees on what micropayments are.

Is a micropayment 10 cents for one article? That was the number Elon Musk was thinking about in this video from November, when he complained that he should be able to pay 10 cents to read an especially good Philadelphia Inquirer story despite not living in Philadelphia.

.@elonmusk describes the issue of reading articles with paywalls. In clips never shown before in our interview he alludes to the value of what Twitter can bring. He also talks about how the media wants to own their subscribers. @kgee @EliBurton_ @klwtts pic.twitter.com/WsA2lUHo0S

— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) November 1, 2022

If there is a sustainable price for journalism, it isn’t 10 cents an article. A large scale data analysis from Medill found that digital news subscribers don’t even visit those news sites on most days. For small local news sites, the typical subscriber visits once every three days. At larger sites, it’s once every five days. Those visits can include consuming multiple articles, of course, but the point is 10 cents an article would be a radical price reduction for most subscribers — and thus a radical revenue reduction for most publishers. Price points will have to be higher — and thus less appealing to fly-by readers.

Publishers don’t want to cannibalize subscribers.

It’s not at all unusual for a business to insist on their product being purchased in a particular quantity. Try to go to the grocery store and buy one peanut M&M, or one tablespoon of ice cream, or a single Corn Flake. They’ll look at you funny, because the businesses that manufacture those consumer goods have been structured around selling bags, pints, and boxes of them, respectively. Go ask the people at Tesla if you can buy a Roadster that’s only for the weekends — at 2/7ths of the price. The economics of information goods (like news) aren’t identical to those of physical goods, but they both require sustainable business models, and for most quality news sites, that requires paid subscriptions.

And that’s the root problem, from publishers’ point of view: If you sell subscriptions for $15 a month, but you sell individual articles at 15 cents each, you’re telling any subscriber who reads less than 100 articles a month they’re an idiot and should give you less money. There aren’t enough payment-willing fly-by customers to make up the difference for even a few lost subscribers. You’re encouraging your best customers to think of you as an occasional treat rather than a service you pay for — and to pause before every headline they click to estimate its worth in cash. It shouldn’t be surprising than “we’ll charge you $10 a month until you tell us to stop” is more appealing than “we’ll charge you 10 cents now and maybe you’ll come back again someday.”

As Tony Haile once smartly put it, news subscriptions are like gym memberships. Imagine a gym that charges $50 a month for a membership — but also lets anyone pop in for a single workout for two bucks. Why would anyone pay for a membership again? “If you would take the micropayments version of a gym membership, it would be like, ‘I can turn up and I can pay a couple of quid, and I can go into the gym whenever I want to use it.’ No gym works like that.”

All that said — these problems are not insurmountable. Smart people might come up with solutions, even if they haven’t so far. Indeed, I’ve long believed that if anyone could create a micropayment system for news that worked, there were only two real possibilities: Apple and Twitter.

With iPhones, iPads, and Macs, Apple controls the devices that most paying digital news consumers use. They have hundreds of millions of users’ credit cards already on file and attached to your identity. And with Apple Pay, they have a nearly frictionless payment platform that has already been integrated into countless apps and websites. If they decided to offer a “Read With Apple Pay” button for news sites, the technical problems of micropayments would mostly go away. (Along with 30% of publishers’ revenue, no doubt.) And Apple News+ is the closest thing to an all=news subscription that currently exists.2

Twitter, meanwhile, is the center of the digital news universe. There is no place online with more news-curious users clicking links to new-to-them news sites. And it showed interest in the subject, buying Tony Haile’s Scroll and integrating its network of ad-free news sites into Twitter Blue and teasing some sort of paywall integration on the way.

But that was the old Twitter. One of Musk’s first decisions after taking charge was killing off the remnants of Scroll — the closest thing to a foundation for a pan-publisher revenue model anyone had.

Unless you are one of the few Twitter Blue subscribers, Twitter doesn’t have your credit card number. It has no ready payment platform for publishers to integrate into their sites. Twitter would likely only be interested in a payment system that goes through Twitter, not via links that go to a publisher site from Facebook, Google, or elsewhere.

But let’s be honest: The biggest problem is Elon. What mainstream publisher would trust Elon Musk with their money right now? The guy who refuses to pay the rent on his corporate HQ? The guy who has spent the past six months dumping on the media, banning reporters, declaring their work a “relentless hatestream” from “media puppet-masters” that you “cannot rely on…for truth“? This is the guy who says he has a “major win-win” for publishers? The same guy that complains “media is a click-machine, not a truth-machine” thinks the answer is tempting people to pay with a single headline?

(Not to mention that Musk has no deadline cred remaining, and saying that micropayments will “roll out” later this month could mean this summer, late 2024, or never.)

Maybe someone will figure out micropayments for news someday. I think it’s unlikely at scale — but I could be wrong! But I am quite confident the man who has spent the past half-year destroying the news media’s favorite online space won’t be the one to do it.

1. I believe it was Techdirt’s Mike Masnick I first saw using this metaphor for Musk, specifically around content moderation.
2. Pro tip: Apple News+ now includes, along with roughly all the magazines, The Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, The Times of London, The Globe and Mail, and the metro dailies in Charlotte, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Kansas City, Miami, Raleigh, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, plus a few more. If you run into a random local-news paywall, there’s a pretty decent chance that searching for the headline in Apple News might find it. It’s now a much better product for newspapers than it was at launch.

The first coattail perk arrived in November, when Apple announced that smaller publishers — those with less than $1 million a year in App Store sales — would now be able to hand only 15% of their subscription dollars to Apple instead of 30%.

Yesterday brought a second bump. Apple announced a set of changes to its App Store policies as part of a negotiated settlement of a class-action suit brought by developers. (Most important is probably giving developers more leeway to let customers know they can pay outside Apple’s in-app payment system.) But it also announced a new program aimed just at news publishers:

Apple today introduced the News Partner Program, a new slate of initiatives to expand Apple’s work with and support for journalism. The News Partner Program aims to ensure Apple News customers maintain access to trusted news and information from many of the world’s top publishers, while supporting publishers’ financial stability and advancing efforts to further media literacy and diversity in news coverage and newsrooms.

The News Partner Program is designed for subscription news publications that provide their content to Apple News in Apple News Format (ANF). ANF enables an exceptional reading experience on Apple News and unlocks the full benefit of the platform for publishers, and empowers publishers to create brand-forward stories, immersive issues, and audio stories, with designs that scale seamlessly across Apple devices. ANF also supports advertising, and publishers keep 100 percent of the revenue from advertising they sell within Apple News.

To support publishers who optimize more of their content in ANF, Apple News is offering a commission rate of 15 percent on qualifying in-app purchase subscriptions from day one.

In other words, if you commit to publishing “a robust Apple News channel,” you can now get access to that lower 15% revenue share. (There are two ways to publish to Apple News. One is to use Apple’s special formatting standard that publishes the full text of stories in the app and allows all sorts of design tweaks. The other is to drop it an RSS feed. To be appropriately “robust” here, you’ll need to be using the first way.)

So, to recap, these are the revenue share options currently available for a news publisher:

• The standard deal: When someone first subscribes in your app, you give Apple 30% of their money. If, after 12 months, that user is still subscribed, Apple’s cut drops to 15%. Available to: Anyone.
• The small-publisher deal: When someone first subscribes in your app, you give Apple 15% of their money. That rate is flat for however long the user stays subscribed. Available to: App publishers who make less than $1 million per year in App Store sales.
• The new News Partner deal: When someone first subscribes in your app, you give Apple 15% of their money. That rate is flat for however long the user stays subscribed. Available to: News publishers who publish a “robust” channel in Apple News.

The careful reader will note that the small-publisher deal and News Partner deal are identical in terms of its benefits. Only the eligibility rules are different: sales under $1 million for the former, being in Apple News for the latter. So, in practice, the News Partner Program only matters for publishers who already make more than $1 million in annual App Store sales.

Which is a lot for a news publisher! Remember, the vast majority of news consumption on phones doesn’t happen inside publisher news apps, which are still an acquired taste reserved for a publisher’s super fans. It happens on the web — either in standalone browsers like Safari or Chrome or in social apps like Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp.

The one-tap ease of use of subscribing via Apple is excellent, but that 30% share has disincentivized publishers from pushing that option too hard to potential subscribers. To generate $1 million a year in App Store sales, you’d need to sell 10,000 in-app subscriptions at $100/year — and I doubt there are very many news publishers who can do that. Probably the national daily newspapers and some big national magazines.

I’ve never seen any hard data on what share of news subscriptions go through the App Store, but I always knew it was very low. Mike Orren, chief product officer for The Dallas Morning News, says it’s a rounding error for them.

Anecdotally, I’d think it pretty low. It’s probably less than 1% for us.

— Mike Orren (@mikeorren) August 27, 2021

And most of the few publishers who probably do hit that number — think The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Time — are either already part of the Apple News+ upsell package or already “robust” Apple News publishers. They’ll appreciate the extra bucks, no doubt, but their behavior won’t change.

So who is a big news publisher that generates a lot of money from in-app subscriptions but isn’t currently in Apple News? There’s one answer that keeps coming to mind.

Last year, The New York Times pulled its content from Apple News:

The Times is one of the first media organizations to pull out of Apple News. The Times, which has made adding new subscribers a key business goal, said Apple had given it little in the way of direct relationships with readers and little control over the business. It said it hoped to instead drive readers directly to its own website and mobile app so that it could “fund quality journalism.”

“Core to a healthy model between The Times and the platforms is a direct path for sending those readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers and the nature of our business rules,” Meredith Kopit Levien, chief operating officer, wrote in a memo to employees. “Our relationship with Apple News does not fit within these parameters.”

I totally believe that line of reasoning; owning the customer relationship is critical to a subscription business. But that said…money is also nice.

Let’s imagine — and to be clear, this is some real back-of-the-envelope stuff here — that 2% of Times subscribers pay via Apple. The going rate for an annual sub in the Times iPhone app right now is $129.99 a year. As of June 30, the Times had 5.334 million digital news subscriptions. That would mean something like 106,000 people are currently paying through Apple.

Let’s say half of those are in their first year of subscribing — meaning the Times is currently paying Apple 30% of the revenue they produce. That would mean the Times is paying Apple more than $3 million a year out of its subscription revenues. Joining the News Partner Program would slice $1 million off of that — in exchange for rejoining Apple News.

Now, The New York Times doesn’t even get out of bed in the morning for $1 million. If they think Apple News is a bad strategic fit (and I believe they have good reason to), $1 million isn’t going to be tempting enough to change their mind.

But…cutting new-sub rates in half could mean some existing publishers see less of a reason to pull out of Apple News. Or, more importantly, it could mean that publishers get more comfortable directing more of its customers into Apple. It is, after all, a really smooth and easy way to subscribe — a lot easier than creating an account, typing your credit card number and address on a phone screen, checking for a confirmation email, et cetera, et cetera.

As Mike put it, one reason so few news subscriptions go through Apple is that publishers spend a surprising amount of energy trying to convince customers not to.

Although, it would be higher under better terms. We go through a lot of gymnastics to try to avoid selling through App Store. I assume others are similar.

— Mike Orren (@mikeorren) August 27, 2021

Publishers are very hesitant to pay 30% of their sales to a middleman. But 15%…that’s within shouting distance of an acceptable finder’s fee/processing charge in many minds. We’ll see if any of those minds get changed.

This year, Apple announced two big changes that could well make life more difficult for publishers, along with quite a few welcome features, reasonable tweaks, and interesting side experiments. All in all, while the news business was nowhere near center stage Monday, I think this will end up being one of the more impactful Apple events in a while for publishers.

These are the highlights; read straight through or skip ahead to whatever interests you.

• Meaningful changes to notifications that could bury your breaking news alerts on users’ screens
• Some tighter rules on privacy, one of which will change the newsletter industry forever
• A couple of interesting new ways to share news articles with friends
• A long list of changes that could make you more productive at work
• System-wide text recognition in images, opening up lots of possibilities for research
• A few improvements that could make your videos sound and look better

More focused notifications

Apple spent a lot of time pushing a new set of features around focus — about better separating the important stuff you want to focus on from the junk you don’t want to. The biggest, er, focus of that work is in push notifications.

If you’re anything like me, you get a gazillion push notifications on your phone a day. Not to get all Eisenhower Matrix on you, but some of those are important and urgent, some are important or urgent, and some are neither. But on your home screen, they’re all mixed together in reverse chronological order, and it’s easy for the dumb stuff to push the important stuff several screens down.

Apple’s tried to improve notification triage before; think of those “You don’t seem to be tapping on these DumbApp notifications; should I stop showing them to you?” notices you’ve probably seen. But it’s now going significantly further — and in a way that is risky for news outlets that rely on those push notifications for traffic.

• You’ll now be able to create a Focus mode that determines which notifications get through and which don’t: “Customers can set their device to help them be in the moment by creating a custom Focus or selecting a suggested Focus, which uses on-device intelligence to suggest which people and apps are allowed to notify them. Focus suggestions are based on users’ context, like during their work hours or while they’re winding down for bed…Users can create Home Screen pages with apps and widgets that apply to moments of focus to only display relevant apps and reduce temptation.”
• You’ll now be able to have your lower-priority notifications all bunched together and delivered just once a day, in a “notifications summary” delivered “at a more opportune time.”
• If you’re wearing AirPods, Siri can now automatically speak to you when you get an “important, time-sensitive” notification — while staying silent for all the other ones.

These all sound appealing as a user — but they’re worrisome as a news publisher. How, exactly, will the “priority” level of an app be determined? There will be ways for users to manually adjust those settings, but the main work is done by Apple’s machine learning, based on how you interact with the apps on your device each day.

Will my iPhone’s algorithms decide that a breaking news story from Bloomberg is “urgent,” “important,” or “time-sensitive”? How about something more feature-y pushed by The Atlantic, or a game score notification from ESPN?

Maybe the algorithms will make only wise judgments — or maybe they’ll be like every other algorithm in the world and sometimes be a little off. As a commenter here noted, the example given on Apple’s site for the “top” message in a notification summary is…a very ad-like push from Yelp recommending a Thai restaurant.

Given that news apps send a healthy number of pushes per day — and that the value of those notifications often doesn’t require a tap to launch the app, which might make your phone think you’re not paying attention to them — I worry that these changes will make it harder for news to get noticed. At a minimum, it’ll be something for publisher tech teams to monitor, and likely to optimize for. Once you get away from straight reverse-chronological order, you’ve created SEO for push notifications.

It reminds me most of back in 2013, when Google introduced tabbed inboxes for Gmail — you know, the little sections that separate out your important emails from “Social,” “Promotions,” “Updates,” and “Forums” emails. As a user: helpful! But publishers know that having their newsletter or breaking news email buried in Promotions or Updates means it’s less likely to be opened. Gmail users can adjust the algorithm’s decisions — but most will always just stick with the default behavior. This change is worth watching.

Privacy, for better and for worse

Apple has spent the past few years leaning into its reputation for respecting user privacy, using its market position to influence how industries like ad tech operate. Just last month, it made every app that tracks your activities across other apps explicitly ask for your permission to do so. Turns out, people don’t want to be tracked, putting a big crimp in the ad models of Facebook and others.

The OS updates include a number of privacy and security features. Safari will now push you to the HTTPS version of a website if available. If someone steals your phone, you’ll now be able to track its location even after it’s been wiped clean. If some rogue app is using the microphone on your Mac to record you, a little notification will appear to let you know, as it does in iOS.

For paying iCloud customers, it’s offering something called Private Relay, which functions a bit like a VPN for web traffic, encrypting your data and splitting it into two intercept relays, allegedly making it impossible for your device to be connected to your web activity.1 And Hide My Email will make it easy to create (and later delete) burner emails that forward to your real one, building on last year’s Sign in with Apple. (Interesting that those last two are paid features; Apple’s previously opened its privacy features to all users to buff up its brand aura.)

But these updates also add a new battle to Apple’s war against the digital ad business. One of the few bright spots in the news business in recent years has been this little boomlet in newsletters — maybe you’ve heard about it? Newsletter advertising is hardly the data-hoarding beast a Facebook ad is, but it does rely heavily on one little tracker: the tiny tracking pixels embedded in many emails that tell the sender whether their email has been opened, and often by whom and how many times. (Those little images are fetched live from a server, and the URL the email uses to grab it can contain some limited information, like the email address it was sent to.)

These images are the only way newsletter senders know if their emails are actually being opened. And that open rate is an important part of how newsletter publishers sell ads — as well as how they judge the relative success or failure of the email.

Along comes something called Mail Privacy Protection, a new feature that “helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.”

There are very legitimate concerns about some distant server being notified whenever you open their email. But on the other hand, it’s kind of the bedrock of the newsletter industry.

There have long been ways to block tracking pixels, but they were mostly only used by nerds like me; this is Apple Mail, the dominant platform for email in the U.S. and elsewhere. According to the most recent market-share numbers from Litmus, for May 2021, 93.5% of all email opens on mobile come in Apple Mail on iPhones or iPads. On desktop, Apple Mail on Mac is responsible for 58.4% of all email opens.

Those numbers are crazy high — much higher than Apple’s device market share because Apple users spend a lot more time receiving and reading email than users on Android, Windows, or Linux. Overall, 61.7% of all emails are opened in Apple Mail, on one device or another.2 So even a small change in how it handles email has a huge impact on the newsletter industry writ large.

Maybe Apple will bury Mail Privacy Protection in some settings menu two levels down or something, and people won’t find it! Nope — this is apparently the first thing you see when you open Mail on iOS 15.

iOS 15: First launch of Mail app. pic.twitter.com/W4ewu9XFCk

— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) June 7, 2021

As with the cross-app tracking permissions Apple started requiring last month, this is a very in-your-face feature. I’m certain the overwhelming majority of people will tap “Protect Mail activity,” because of course they will. And if you somehow don’t see that screen, it’s turned on by default.

Privacy protection in Mail is a setting that’s pre-selected. Don’t really see anyone turning that off. pic.twitter.com/noOrzwIdJk

— (@alexcwilliams) June 7, 2021

This 85-second video from one of Apple’s WWDC developer sessions makes it clear: Open rates will now officially be useless. Mail Privacy Protection will fetch those tracking pixels not just anonymously, but also automatically — meaning that every email you send to an Apple Mail user will appear as if it’s been opened, whether or not it actually has been.

here’s a video from Apple explaining in-detail how their upcoming “Mail Privacy Protection” feature works

tl;dr – email open rates & tracking data will continue their descent into irrelevancy pic.twitter.com/bBjg6dvILw

— Dame.eth (@jacksondame) June 8, 2021

(There’s also some good detail on the importance of tracking pixels to newsletter publishers in this thread from ConvertKit’s Nathan Berry.)

Creators will have to choose between taking extreme list cleaning measures where healthy, engaged subscribers get removed because they aren’t clicking emails.

Or they won’t do any list cleaning which will likely lead to spam filtering for both engaged and unengaged subscribers. pic.twitter.com/iSKPaMgLAK

— Nathan Barry (@nathanbarry) June 8, 2021

Matt Taylor, a product manager at the Financial Times, calls Apple’s new policy “lazy” and says it hurts small publishers most:

…much like generally-sensible-in-theory provision like the GDPR, moves like this from Apple are going to most hurt the solo publishers with their Substack newsletters.

A major publisher will be hurt, sure. They’ll lose a lot of data on which they sold their newsletter sponsorships. They’ll be less able to confidently purge subscribers who haven’t opened their newsletter in months (what if they’re iPhone users?)…

A smaller publisher, a local newspaper, a solo freelancer, a small blog; all these will lose data on a significant part of their audience. A likely valuable part of their audience. And it may stifle or slow their growth or opportunities.

Where previously you could unsubscribe readers who hadn’t opened your newsletter to save money, now you don’t know if they’re loyal or not. You’ll have to find other ways to entice them to let you know they are reading. A larger publisher can afford to keep 20,000 recipients on a list that never open an email. A smaller outfit cannot…

Apple’s fight for privacy is really a fight against the web. In signing up for a newsletter, a publisher or marketer already has a more valuable piece of PII: your email address. By focusing on IP addresses, and blocking trackers rather than proxying them on a fuzzy delay (which would provide the same useful publisher data without any PII leak of location or time), Apple are not really fighting for their users so much as they are fighting against email.

I’m sure newsletter publishers will adjust, somehow. If open rates are gone, they’re gone — you’ll have to find some other way to convince advertisers you have an attentive audience, and some other way to see how your email performed and keep your list clean. (Clickthrough rates live on, at least for now. Should we expect stripping URL parameters to be a feature in iOS 17?) But this is another sign that Apple’s war against targeted advertising isn’t just about screwing Facebook — they’re also coming for your Substack.

More ways to share news

I don’t expect either of these to be earth-shatteringly important, but Apple showed two interesting new tools for sharing news.

In Apple News, macOS and iOS will now have a tab called Shared With You. (There’ll be similar tabs in Music and Photos.) If someone texts you a link to a Washington Post story, the Messages app should notice that and ship it off to that Shared With You tab — so it’ll be there for you to see the next time you’re checking out the News app.

How much people will use this is unclear to me; Apple News has a ton of users, but most of them fall on the relatively casual end of the news consumption spectrum, and I don’t know how many will find these time-shifted stories useful. One other question I don’t know the answer to: Will Shared With You will bring in any news article someone texts you, or only articles that already live inside Apple News? I’d assume the former, but that would mean, for example, articles from The New York Times (which isn’t in Apple News) would just not show up where users expect them to.

The second sharing feature isn’t even designed for news: SharePlay will make it easier for multiple people to consume the same content — like watch the same video or listen to the same songs — simultaneously during a FaceTime call. The most obvious use case here is for watching a movie or a baseball game with a friend who lives a few states away — while being able to chat as if you’re sitting next to each other on the couch. But I did notice that a number of streaming platforms that include news video to varying degrees — Hulu (which simulcasts ABC News), Paramount+ (CBS News), ESPN+, Pluto TV — are on board for SharePlay.

I wouldn’t expect many people to actually use SharePlay for news, but this is an interesting concept for watching it together. On Election Night, you and your politics-junkie friends could all get on a call and watch the returns coming in together. Or Oscars night, or the NFL Draft, or a presidential debate. Or, more depressingly, a hurricane hitting your hometown, or a terror attack, or a mass shooting. News recommendations get shared on social a bazillion times a minute, but news consumption is a pretty solitary experience on digital — more solitary, even, than the old network newscasts the whole family might sit in the living room for. Nice to see some efforts to bridge that gap.

Tools for reporters

A lot of journalists spend most of their days staring at an Apple-made screen, whether a Mac, iPad, or iPhone, and there are a few updates here that will be welcome for getting your work done.

iOS Safari can now install desktop Safari extensions — and those extensions can now include a ton of Chrome and Firefox extensions that Safari has lacked. And Safari’s new Tab Groups seem like a surprisingly decent solution to tab triage and organizing. (It looks better to me than Chrome’s clunky tab groups or Edge’s Collections, but of course no one’s actually used it yet.)

If you juggle devices all day, Universal Control — which lets you use the same keyboard and mouse/trackpad across up to three Macs and iPads at the same time — is a little mind-blowing, letting you treat multiple devices as three different screens for the same device.

Macs can now use Shortcuts, the iOS platform for scripting a series of actions across multiple apps; it could let you reduce some multi-step workflows to one click. (It’s more user-friendly in my experience than the old Automator app.)

Quick Note makes it easier to jot down a quick note on your iPad or Mac. Most interesting to me is that if you take a Quick Note while, say, you’re looking at a webpage in Safari, apparently the next time you visit that site again, the note should pop up and be accessible. Notes also has some tagging features that might make it full-featured enough for some to use it as their main scrap-text app.

If you use an iPad for work, multitasking looks a little better, but still nowhere near as intuitive as tapping command-tab to switch apps. There are still a lot of hurdles in the way of bringing the iPad to laptop quality for the sort of writing/editing/researching tasks reporters do all day.

Finally — and perhaps most importantly, at least at certain moments! — Macs will now have a Low Power Mode that’ll let you extend your battery. So if you’re tight on deadline and watching your battery tick down to 0%, Low Power Mode might just save the day.

System-wide OCR with Live Text

Four years ago, Apple introduced Vision, a framework for developers that lets apps perform a number of camera-driven tasks, like detecting a face in a photo or scanning a barcode. Two years ago, it added VisionKit, which made it easy to scan an image for text. That led to a small little explosion for instant-OCR (optical character recognition) apps for both Mac and iOS. Basically, OCR used to be a resource-intensive and complicated process to add to an app. It isn’t anymore.

I have to say: Easy instant OCR has been one of the most transformative recent features on the Mac for me. I use a little $7 app called TextSniper that lets me, with one keystroke, copy all of the text on a particular part of my screen to the clipboard — even if it’s just a picture of text, not text itself. (There are other apps that do the same thing, but TextSniper’s been the more accurate and reliable one for me.)

This is amazing for things like an old scanned PDF or print newspaper article: If it’s on your screen, you can copy it into a text document — which makes it searchable in all the usual ways. If you take nothing else away from this article, go try out TextSniper or a similar app and be amazed how many times a day you were retyping some chunk of text you couldn’t just copy.

Anyway, in the new macOS and iOS, Apple’s put that OCR ability and essentially made it automatic and systemwide. Have you ever taken a screenshot of some text? Your device will now automatically scan every screenshot you take (and every photo you take — every image on the device, basically) for text and make it searchable. (On Macs, this is apparently limited to devices with Apple Silicon.)

Maybe you need to be a digital hoarder like me to find this extremely exciting. But for some historical research I’ve been doing, I now have thousands of image files that contain text that isn’t recognized as text. Scans of 150-year-old newspaper articles. Paragraphs from a Google Books preview. Handwritten notes on an old letter. Screenshot of video stills. As soon as all that text is searchable, finding needles in that haystack gets a lot easier. I’ll be very anxious to see how well it works.

Better sound in your videos

One thing the pandemic taught is the value of a good webcam, and the Mac’s (despite 18 years of practice) have been mediocre for years. (Weird, given that Apple makes some pretty amazing cameras for its iPhones.) The new M1 iMac it released in April showed the first real webcam quality improvements in a long time, and now macOS Monterey promises software improvements.

Probably most important for people recording video on their MacBooks is Voice Isolation, which promises to remove background noise from the room you’re recording in. (Sorry, Krisp.) The flipside is Wide Spectrum sound, which might improve your b-roll. Newer Macs can also use Portrait Mode in videos, which might look nice in a straight-to-camera news video. All three features will also be in iOS 15 for iPhones and iPads.

Apple announced all these as improvements specific to FaceTime, its video chat platform, but it appears they’ll also be available to other apps — so your Zoom calls or Instagram videos should also be able to benefit too, without any updates from the developer.

You’ll also now be able to join FaceTime calls from non-Apple devices like Windows PCs and Android phones. But they can still only be started on an Apple device, so your newsroom will probably stick to Zoom.

1. For that reason, Private Relay won’t be available in countries keen on monitoring their citizens’ web use: China, Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and the Philippines.
2. I should note here that email market share data is notoriously bad, so the error band around these numbers is substantial. But whether the true number is actually 52%, 63%, or 71%, it’s still a lot.

Parler will be nicer, but only on iOS. In March Apple blocked Parler, the “free speech” app that has become a haven for far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists, from the App Store after initially removing it in January following the Capitol riots. A letter that Apple sent to Parler at the time “included several screenshots to support the rejection,” Bloomberg reported, including “user profile pictures with swastikas and other white nationalist imagery, and user names and posts that are misogynistic, homophobic and racist.”

As of Monday, Parler’s app is back in the App Store, but what you’ll see on its iOS app is different from what you’ll see on its website or other smartphones (Parler is still banned from Google Play, but can be side-loaded onto Android phones from Parler’s site). From The Washington Post’s Kevin Randall:

Posts that are labeled “hate” by Parler’s new artificial intelligence moderation system won’t be visible on iPhones or iPads. There’s a different standard for people who look at Parler on other smartphones or on the Web: They will be able to see posts marked as “hate,” which includes racial slurs, by clicking through to see them.

Parler has resisted placing limits on what appears on its social network, and its leaders have equated blocking hate speech to totalitarian censorship, according to Amy Peikoff, chief policy officer. But Peikoff, who leads Parler’s content moderation, says she recognizes the importance of the Apple relationship to Parler’s future and seeks to find common ground between them. […]

Parler is still pressing Apple to allow a function where users can see a warning label for hate speech, then click through to see it on iPhones. But the banning of hate speech was a condition for reinstatement on the App Store.

Parler will block hate speech on iphones, but not other phones or the web.

Increasingly thinking this is the future of the internet: we'll all be looking at different things in the same place. More echo chambers, not less.https://t.co/p7upN7Em5b

— evelyn douek (@evelyndouek) May 17, 2021

Really interesting type of granularity emerging here: automated moderation at an infrastructure level. There have been localized speech limitations (ie Twitter’s “Nazi bit” for certain regions) but I think this is the first to differentiate like this? https://t.co/UImFS9ifhQ

— Renee DiResta (@noUpside) May 17, 2021

Also, Parler is getting trending topics.

The nypost again “fake news”. They have a story on peacocks today and say I have sixteen on my farm I actually have 21 of these glorious birds whose house is impeccable. They do not smell. They are so clean! Their voices are loud but such fun to hear. They are so friendly

— Martha Stewart (@MarthaStewart) May 16, 2021

Christian Staal Bruun Overgaard and Natalie (Talia) Jomini Stroud surveyed 1,010 U.S. adults in August 2020. They found that “Americans’ perceptions of hot-button issues are largely driven by partisanship.”

Respondents were presented with four statements and asked to rate whether each one was “Definitely true,” “probably true,” “unsure,” “possibly false,” or definitely false. Here are the statements and correct answers:

— Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. (True)
— Since February 2020, the flu has resulted in more deaths than the coronavirus. (False)
— Trump failed to send U.S. health experts to China to investigate coronavirus. (False)
— It is illegal to mail ballots to every registered voter. (True)

Age and education levels were correlated with giving correct answers to some of the questions — older people and people with at least a bachelor’s degree were more likely to correctly asses the statements about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and flu deaths. But “partisanship turned out to be the strongest predictor of Americans’ knowledge, even surpassing education.” Democrats were more likely to rate statements favoring their political party as true; Republicans were more likely to rate statements favoring their political party as true.

When evaluating the statement — mostly congenial to Democrats — regarding Russia’s interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, almost nine in ten (87.4%) Democrats correctly said it was “probably true” or “definitely true,” whereas fewer than half (48.5%) of Republicans said so.

For the two false statements, partisans’ responses were closely related to their political preferences. For the statement claiming that the flu had resulted in more deaths since February than the coronavirus, close to seven in ten (65.8%) Democrats correctly labeled it as “probably false” or “definitely false,” whereas fewer than four in ten (34.6%) Republicans did so.

Conversely, for the statement asserting that Trump had failed to send U.S. health experts to China to investigate the coronavirus, almost half (49.5%) of the Republicans correctly labeled the statement as “probably false” or “definitely false,” whereas fewer than one in ten (6.9%) Democrats gave these responses.

When evaluating a true statement — congenial to Republicans — which correctly said that it is illegal to mail ballots to every registered voter in the U.S., fewer than one in ten (7.7%) Democrats answered “probably true” or “definitely true,” whereas just over a quarter (25.8%) of Republicans gave these answers.

The study is here.

How news organizations fought misinformation during the pandemic. As part of a larger American Press Institute report called “How local news organizations are taking steps to recover from a year of trauma,” a report for the American Press Institute, Jane Elizabeth takes a look at news orgs’ efforts to fight misinformation during the pandemic — locally:

Mahoning Matters in Ohio wanted to debunk a viral conspiracy about antifa groups looting the local Wal-Mart, so they actually went to the Wal-Mart and showed on Facebook Live that there was no antifa, no looting. “Instead of just reporting about this as a misinformation trend, we went out there and dispelled the rumors,” says former publisher Mandy Jenkins. “We can do that with every story. We’re local.”

Back in March 2020, when there was only one confirmed coronavirus case in Arizona, The Tucson Sentinel decided to jump proactively into a potential pit of conspiracies and lies: Facebook. “It’s important to challenge [misinformation] right where it happens,” says Dylan Smith, the Sentinel’s editor and publisher, so the Tucson Coronavirus Updates Facebook group was launched …

The Sentinel team set up guidelines and rules for participating in its Facebook group, and designated administrators and monitors — comprised of volunteers from the community as well as Sentinel staff — to keep the conversations in check. “Too many newsrooms try to fix social media disasters after the train’s already run off the trestle and exploded on the rocks below,” says Smith. “That never works.”

Importantly, the Sentinel set a limit on participation in the Facebook group: Users must be local residents. “By restricting membership to those people who actually live in the Tucson area, we’ve eliminated a lot of drive-by trolls, and while we haven’t had to ban too many people or even mute them, we don’t hesitate if there’s someone who’s not there to participate in good faith,” says Smith.

[In] West Virginia, Black by God, a local startup for Black residents, recognized that the lack of trustworthy information in the community left it wide open for misinformation — an issue examined in a project supported by the Lenfest Institute and a study published by the Harvard Kennedy School in January. Journalist Crystal Good of Charleston, W.Va., launched the Black by God Substack newsletter and a website in part to help improve “political literacy” and the lack of access to COVID-19 data in diverse communities.

A majority said they expected Facebook to track their activity within Facebook, as well as within sibling apps like Instagram and WhatsApp. But 61% said they would not “expect Facebook to track a person’s usage of apps that Facebook does not own in order to make ads more targeted.”

That was survey data, but now we have some real-world numbers — and they look quite a bit worse for Facebook and any other app or ad platform that tracks users across apps.

The latest version of iOS, 14.5, features something called App Tracking Transparency, which requires apps to specifically ask users for permission to track their activity across other companies’ apps and websites.

The app analytics company Flurry is tracking how many iPhone and iPad users are saying “Sure, I’d enjoy being tracked by a corporation across every aspect of my online life” rather than “Um, no.” The answer is: not very many!

Those charts show the percentage of people giving a thumbs-up to cross-app tracking whenever they’re prompted about it, both worldwide and in the United States. The numbers have been quite steady: Only about 4% of U.S. iOS users and about 11% of worldwide iOS users are saying yes to tracking.

That is…not a lot!

This is a problem for Facebook, given that (a) iPhone and iPad users have long been more valuable from a revenue point of view than Android users, (b) iOS users tend to update their phones quite rapidly compared to other platforms, and (c) all that cross-app data is a major part of how Facebook generates the targeting that makes its ads so valuable. (Facebook knows a lot of things about you — but it doesn’t know them all because you wrote a Facebook post about it in 2015 or something.) Some project this one change could cost Facebook 7% of its revenue.

(Which is why Facebook is trying to passive-aggressively “educate” its users into giving in to tracking.)

Facebook will still have a ton of first-party data to work with from all its apps. (So will its duopoly-mate Google, which has similar assets and vulnerabilities.) Indeed, this will hurt a bunch of anonymous adtech companies with odd names like Teramoat, Brangoh, Spongymind, Spercuity, and Quokka most.1

What’ll be the impact on publishers? In the short term, there’ll probably be a revenue hit; news sites fill ad space with targeted ads too, and those will now be a little worse. In the longer term, this increases the chance there’ll be a cleansing flood of adtech middlemen, which is probably a necessary condition for any eventual recovery in publisher-sold advertising. Facebook and Google became the big dog of online advertising by having the best targeting data; now their data will be a bit worse.

The most important takeaway for publishers: Get better and smarter at gathering your own first–party data. Quality publishers tend to have a more substantial relationship with their readers than Some­Random­Site­On­The­Web.com; take advantage.

1. I think I made all those up. Well, quokkas are a thing.

Well, that isn’t the only good news out of Cupertino for media companies. On Tuesday, Apple made a little-noticed announcement that app publishers could now offer special offers via discount codes.

You can now create subscription offer codes to acquire, retain, and win back subscribers. Offer codes are unique, alphanumeric codes that provide auto-renewable subscriptions at a discounted price or for free for a specific duration. Provide your one-time use codes digitally or offline at physical events, alongside products, and more. Users on iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 and later can redeem offer codes on the App Store through a one-time code redemption URL, or within your app if you’ve implemented the presentCodeRedemptionSheet API. Sales and Trends reports will be updated later this year to include information on the performance of your subscription offer codes.

That might not seem like a big deal, but it helps address one of publishers’ most common complaints about the App Store: that its pricing wasn’t flexible enough for an industry that’s found targeted discounting essential to a successful digital subscription strategy.

For example, just from clicking around various links on Twitter, I found all of these live subscription pitches from The Washington Post:

• Try one year for $100 $29
• Try 4 weeks for $1
• Subscribe for $10 $1 a month
• Try 12 weeks for $1

Each with its own marketing copy and target audience. Could I tell you how, exactly, the Post determines that you get the 4-weeks-for-$1 offer while you get the 12-weeks-for-$1 offer? Nope. But the Post has its reasons, which could be the result of deep data crunching or just an A/B test. Either way, the success of each individual offer will be tracked and used to optimize the Post’s overall subscription strategy. Maybe one offer does well with TikTok users, another is a hit with working moms, and another does well with college grads living in Sun Belt suburbs.

Similarly, if you spend any time on The Wall Street Journal’s website, you are generating a propensity-to-subscribe score, based on your activity: the articles you’ve read, the frequency of your visits, whether you’ve signed up for a newsletter, and dozens of other signals. The Journal uses that number to move its paywall around — give you fewer or more or different free articles — and to figure out what sort of offer to show you whenever you do finally hit it.

Publishers have found this level of customer intel useful because digital news subscriptions are competing with the endless stream of free news online. With zero-cost competitors always a click away, getting someone to hand over their credit card number can be a big lift. The Post, the Journal, and other papers can have those kinds of personalized offers because they have some level of control over their subscription backends — and the capacity to gather and analyze the behavioral data that informs them.

The same hasn’t been true in Apple’s App Store. When in-app subscriptions debuted in 2011, pricing was one-size-fits-all. It wasn’t until 2017 that publishers could offer introductory pricing to lure new subscribers. In 2019, it added promotional pricing that could be offered to existing or former subscribers. But targeting pricing to individual customers is limited with those options. And what little targeting is available is tied to bare-bones in-app behavior (like whether someone has canceled their subscription).

That changes with these new offer codes. An in-app subscription can have up to 10 different offers active at any one time — each with its own price point and duration. (Try one year for $29! Try 4 weeks for $1! Subscribe for $1 a month! Try 12 weeks for $1!) They can be limited by country. At the end of the introductory period, they can then be charged the normal full rate or some other price. Here’s an example of what it looks like from the developer’s perspective:

That’s all great — but the real gain is that now publishers can target these offers however they want, online or off. A newspaper could, for example, make distinct offers to:

• People who get its morning email newsletter, open it at least 50% of the time, and click through at least 20% of the time, but who still haven’t bought a subscription
• Attendees at an event it’s co-sponsoring
• Longtime print subscribers who’ve just canceled home delivery
• Shoppers at an advertiser’s store
• People who just won a contest you’ve run
• Local students and educators
• Football fans who only read your sports articles
• People who visit your website regularly but don’t live in your city
• iPhone users who have just hit the monthly-article-limit paywall for the third consecutive month
• People who follow your Instagram account or your star columnist’s TikTok
• Existing subscribers who just had a bad customer-service experience of some kind and to whom you’d like to give a discount for three months
• Twitter followers who have tweeted your articles at least four times this week

…ad infinitum. There really is no limit on how narrow you can get. (You are limited to 10 offers per subscription at any one time — but that limit is for the number of distinct pricing/duration levels you can set. You can target and distribute those 10 offers in an infinite number of ways. An app can generate 150,000 unique offer codes each calendar quarter.) And they can be distributed either as traditional offer codes (of the “enter JUSTCANCELEDPRINT at checkout” variety) or embedded in a URL, like the one in the “GET THIS OFFER NOW” button at the bottom of a marketing email. Apple also says it will give you data to track each offer’s performance.

Let’s be real: There are a lot of publishers who will have neither the data capacity nor a large-enough addressable audience for this sort of targeting to make a meaningful difference in subscriptions. Last week’s rev-share cut mostly helps smaller publishers; offer codes mostly help bigger ones. But this nonetheless means that, however sophisticated your subscription logic can be on yournewssite.com, it can be just as sophisticated in your iPhone or iPad app. That’s another win for publishers.

In-app subscriptions have always been a no-brainer for games, productivity apps, and other apps that exist only within Apple’s ecosystem. Publishers have been a harder sell, since the lion’s share of their subscriptions (print or digital) come from outside the App Store.

Nearly all news publishers have become more invested in digital subscription revenue in recent years. Apple, meanwhile, has also put more energy into subscriptions, which make up a big share of the services revenue that the company has been focused on growing the past couple of years. If that correlation means Apple will keep addressing publisher complaints and making the iPhone a more hospitable place for publishers, I don’t think they’ll hear many complaints.

1. Terms and conditions apply, as always in life! The biggest being that it only applies to publishers who generate less than $1 million a year in App Store revenue and that companies must apply for the new rate — your rev share won’t change if you don’t ask Apple for it.

At issue, really, was whether or not Apple’s 30% tax on everything flowing through its payment system was an abuse of its monopoly over installing software on iPhones and iPads. (The same, roughly speaking, applies to Google’s control of its Android app store.) The two tech giants were suddenly under increased pressure — from developers, regulators, and potentially courts — to seem less, er, extractive.

At the time, I wrote that one beneficiary of this contretemps could be news outlets. Publishers don’t produce games (usually), but they do sell plenty of monthly and annual subscriptions. And many of them do so through Apple’s payment system — often jacking up the price a few bucks to make up for Apple’s vig.

Well, well:

Apple on Wednesday announced a reduction to its longstanding App Store commission rate — one of the most substantial changes to how iOS developers earn money in the history of the iPhone maker’s digital app marketplace — as part of a new program for small businesses.

The new App Store Small Business Program, as it’s called, will allow any developer who earns less than $1 million in annual sales per year from all of their apps to qualify for a reduced App Store cut of 15 percent, half of Apple’s standard 30 percent fee, on all paid app revenue and in-app purchases.

The company says the “vast majority” of iOS app developers should be able to access the program, but Apple declined to say what percentage of its more than 28 million registered app makers would qualify. Apple also declined to specify how much of its App Store revenue would be affected by the reduced commission.

Until now, news publishers selling a subscription via the App Store have paid Apple 30% for the first year and 15% for an individual subscriber’s years after that. But, of course, every subscriber has a first year, but not all of them have a second. For a publisher who qualifies for this program, it should boost take-home revenue for a new subscriber by [launches Calculator app] a little more than 21%.

(N.B.: Complete details for eligibility are set to arrive “in early December,” so there might end up being qualifications that go beyond the $1 million number. That cutoff is for App Store revenue only, not your total revenue, so all but the largest news companies will likely be eligible. You might suddenly see companies like Gannett — which currently has 97 different apps on the App Store — redefine those apps’ “publisher” as the local daily in order to get under that $1 million bar.)

What does all this mean for publishers? Well, they’ve got a few options to consider.

• If they currently sell subscriptions in the App Store, they can just…take the money! Send Tim Cook a nice holiday card, tweet something nice about Ted Lasso, and enjoy the revenue boost.

  The Arizona Republic, for example, charges $9.99 a month for a subscription via Apple. That has meant it only got $6.99 a month, after Apple’s cut, for new subscribers. Now it’ll get $8.49.1

• If they’re currently charging more in the App Store than they do for direct subs, they can choose to narrow that gap and lower the price. For instance, The Washington Post will happily sell you a digital subscription for $10 a month directly — but if you buy it via Apple, they’ll charge you $14.99. $14.99 minus Apple’s 30% cut is $10.49; essentially, the Post is passing on Apple’s cut to the reader.

  If the Post thought it would get a lot more App Store subscribers by charging, say, $12.99, it could lower the price and end up ahead on both subscribers and revenue. (A 15% Apple cut of $12.99 would still net $11.04, more than what they were getting before.)

• If they haven’t yet offered subscriptions through Apple, the idea is now more appealing. Ever since Apple debuted iOS subscriptions in 2011, publishers have had to weigh the pros and cons.

  Pro: Subscribing to something on your iPhone is ridiculously simple — no forms to fill out, no credit card to enter, just a couple of taps. Virtually frictionless. Pro: Most of American news outlets’ best customers use iPhones.

  Con: Apple takes that cut — meaning you either just lose that revenue for the length of their subscription or you jack up the price to cover it, making it less appealing to readers. Con: You’d rather own the customer relationship yourself — so you have the knowledge of the customer in order to tailor marketing and offers, not Apple.

  Five or six years ago, most American newspapers seemed to think the cons outweighed the pros and stayed away from App Store subs. Over the past few years, as digital circulation revenue has become crucial to publishers, more have decided to dive in, if with some reluctance.

  This cut will likely convince a few more execs it’s worth the hassle to dance with Cupertino. And for those publications already in the App Store, they’ll probably feel more comfortable directing marketing toward it as a subscription option — rather than treating it as a suboptimal sidedoor they’d rather you not discover.

Whichever choice a publisher makes, this is good news. Let’s hope Google follows suit for Android.

Look at this case. Epic — by virtue of publishing the most popular and top-grossing game in the world — had about as much power as an App Store publisher can conceivably have. But Apple still wouldn’t reduce its cut of Fortnite revenues — to the point that it was willing instead to let the situation blow up into a huge public mess. And now that that mess is increasing its regulatory risk, it’s willing to do something much more systemic, like cut the rate to 15% for small app publishers. It would rather cut the rate for hundreds of thousands of publishers in half than set the precedent that one pulling a “give us a side deal or we’ll pull our content” routine gets rewarded.

Congratulations to Epic for prompting this change — even if, as a giant game publisher, it won’t directly benefit from it. The Fortnite fracas raised the broader issue of App Store monopoly in the public’s mind, and Apple responded in order to build some goodwill, get a few headlines about how it supports the little guy, and hopefully stave off regulators a little longer. That’s good for news publishers. But it should also remind them that the power relationship between the tech giants and newspapers is awfully one-sided.

1. Note: These are hypothetical examples. It may be that the Republic or the Post are above the $1 million in App Store revenue and thus won’t be eligible for this new cut. I would certainly hope the Post is there, at least.

Now: Can it do the same for podcasts?

Spotify is reportedly considering a subscription service just for its podcasts, a segment it’s invested in heavily the past couple of years. It was originally spotted by Variety’s Andrew Wallenstein

Looks like the premium podcast plan would be ad-free and some mix of exclusive extra content at price points somewhere between $3-$8. pic.twitter.com/ArK8xYg0CM

— Andrew Wallenstein (@awallenstein) November 6, 2020

The various options being subjected to Qualtricsification range from $2.99 to $7.99 a month. They all involve access to some variety of exclusive content — with or without ads, with or without early access.

Will it work? It’s hard to bet against Spotify, which has played the game very well in its growth from Stockholm startup to 144 million paying subscribers in 92 countries. But there are a number of things that make a podcast subscription service a significantly tougher sell than music was.

You’re competing with free and easy.

Music has been for sale for more than a century, dating back to sheet music and player piano rolls. When Napster & Co. came along, free music was thrilling, but also confusing and unreliable to many. More importantly, music companies were highly motivated to sue P2P file-sharing services into the ground, which they accomplished with Napster and most of its peers. A few high-profile, high-dollar lawsuits against random schmoes who downloaded a samizdat copy of The Bodyguard: Original Soundtrack Album went a long way toward discouraging P2P. So when Steve Jobs and Apple came along with 99-cent downloads — straightforward, legal, tied to the explosive growth of the iPod — the market was ready for it.

Podcasts are different. Podcasts have been free by default for as long as they’ve existed. There are plenty of apps that make the acts of subscribing, downloading, and listening to podcasts straightforward. That’s hard to compete with. Imagine if, when Spotify first launched, there was already a free product that gave you access to all the world’s music — but Spotify said that, for $9.99 a month, you could also get this super-good tier of premium, exclusive music. If the choices are “98% of the world’s music for free” and “100% of the world’s music for $9.99/month,” most people are going to be happy with the free option.

You know who else thought they had content that was awesome enough to get subscribers, despite an endless sea of free competition? Quibi.

Previous attempts haven’t gone too well.

The poster child for paid podcasting is Luminary, which launched to much excitement (and then much annoyance) last spring. It hasn’t taken off: Despite raising at least $130 million from investors, Luminary had only 80,000 paying subscribers one year in, Bloomberg reported.

But others have tried, too. Audible Channels, launched in 2016 and backed by both the might of Amazon and Audible’s audiobook dominance, never got very far. Stitcher Premium has been around for nearly four years and hasn’t set the world on fire. (It was recently bought by SiriusXM, which has its own established paid model.)

Things can change, of course. There wasn’t much of a market for paid digital news until The New York Times put up a paywall, after all, and it took the better part of a decade to really get that business whirring. But at this point, there’s been very little evidence of a market that’s just itching to pay for podcasts.

Podcasts don’t play well with each other in a subscription.

People need to be at least somewhat passionate about a podcast to want to pay for it. They need to think that its absence from their lives would be bad enough to merit 2 or 5 or 10 bucks a month. But those passions are hard to stretch across a broad-based subscription. If Spotify’s premium package includes, say, 40 shows, what share of them is any individual user going to be passionate about? HBO had to establish a reputation for quality and exclusivity — the idea that an “HBO show” was a thing — to get subscribers. Netflix had to have a huge library of existing TV shows and movies that weren’t easily available elsewhere, and then its own catalog of exclusives. A package of premium podcasts is likely to be less coherent editorially than, say, the package of premium stories you get with a subscription to The New York Times.

The subscription model is less congruent with the ad model than in other media formats.

In the digital news business, most smart publishers know not to be too reliant on a single revenue type. If you’re all about advertising, you’re subject to the vagaries of the ad market and constantly worried about attracting new audience. If you’re all about subscriptions, you risk dropping out of the public conversation and making it harder for people to sample your wares.

But news sites can generally pull this off because the two types of revenue come from two different audiences. At most, the majority of pageviews they get — and thus the majority of ad impressions they serve — come from users who click on one or two stories a month. They’re unlikely to be candidates for a subscription, but you can monetize them in this other way. Your subscribers, meanwhile, are your superfans — the 2% or 3% of your uniques who come back all the time and consume dozens or hundreds of stories a month.

What lets these two models coexist? The metered paywall. If you don’t put up a “Subscribe Now!” until someone’s fifth article, you’re letting the grazers be while serving them ads. And you’re identifying your potential superfans — those who hit 5 or 10 or however many articles.

It’s not clear how well that sort of model can work with podcasts. Limiting someone to, say, two premium episodes a month is a higher bar, technologically and in terms of marketing, that a clear free/paid split. And podcast audiences tend to be more loyal than news site readers: They subscribe to individual shows and listen to a large share of the episodes that get delivered to them, which is a level of commitment far greater than clicking a random link on Twitter.

All of that means, I think, that a podcast subscription model would make it very hard to successfully monetize those shows with advertising — which is the way nearly all podcasts are monetized. News sites could work both angles; podcasts will find that tougher.

Spotify, of course, would enter this business with a ton of advantages. It has a massive existing userbase to market to. It already charges more than 100 million credit cards every month. It’s spent a ton of money buying up high-value content, whether that’s The Ringer, Gimlet, or its exclusive distribution deal with The Joe Rogan Show.

Those are all advantages, and betting against Spotify has not typically been a good call over the past decade. But it’s still not clear the market’s there — whether at Spotify’s scale or even something smaller.

The iPhone 12 represents Apple’s first major foray into 5G cellular technologies. Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg was on hand during the event to announce the nationwide launch of the carrier’s sub-6 5G network. Apple says it has designed the iPhone 12 lineup to achieve ideal network performance while balancing battery life. A “smart data mode” uses LTE when your current activity doesn’t demand 5G speeds. Apple says it has tested 5G performance with 100 carriers across 30 countries to ensure a smooth launch.

“So far, we’ve seen amazing real-world speeds, along with improved call quality, battery life, and coverage around the world,” Apple’s marketing says. “This is 5G, iPhone style.”

Apple isn’t the first company to release a 5G phone, of course, but market uptake has been relatively slow. It’s growing, though: In January, 3% of phones sold in the U.S. had 5G; by August, that was up to 14%.

But nothing will do more to increase that share than a 5G iPhone; about half of the phones in Americans’ pockets have Apple logos on the back. 5G devices are projected to make up about 48% of phones in North America by 2025, more than Europe (34%) or worldwide (20%).

What does 5G do? It makes data a lot faster. What does that do for journalism? Last year, I sketched out some of the possibilities.

Things that are possible but suboptimal on middling connections now — say, livestreamed video — should become much more reliable.

Things that are on the edge of possibility now — like decent-quality AR and VR — should become much more mainstream.

And there can just be…more, of everything. An AR experience that today places an object into 3D space might be able to handle an entire roomful of objects tomorrow. One live video stream going to a device might become three or four simultaneous streams, with users able to move seamlessly between them without a stutter or glitch and with less compression required all around.

On the flip side, things that have justified primarily because they improve end-user performance will become less appealing over time. Publishers have adopted Google’s AMP at a large scale because it offers much faster speeds for users on mobile.1 Don’t misinterpret this as blasphemy against the webperf gods — but as data gets faster, the reasons to accept the tradeoff of AMP’s flaws get weaker. (Just as things like web fonts, background video, and larger images are all more acceptable today than they were a decade ago.)

It’s all interesting stuff! But let’s be realistic: The apps that benefit most from 5G won’t be the ones from news publishers. They’ll be the other apps competing for our audiences’ attention: games, entertainment, and other new data-heavy ideas that haven’t been thought of yet.

Think about it: News stories are indeed better on today’s faster 4G connections than they were on 3G a few years ago. But Netflix is a lot better on 4G than on 3G. Call of Duty is a lot better on 4G than on 3G. Houseparty is a lot better on 4G than on 3G. News — text-based news especially, but video news too — just isn’t as well-positioned to take advantage of greater bandwidth as the other icons on our home screens.

1. And, let’s be honest, because Google put its thumb on the scale.

And…yeah, that happened. But I don’t think there’s any reason to change my expectation that these bundles won’t do much to increase the number of Apple News+ subscribers.

The key unanswered question going into today’s Apple event was how the bundles — which are all branded as Apple One — would be structured and priced. And here’s how it breaks down, along with the price you’d pay for each service individually:

Apple One Individual: $14.95/month
Apple Music (normally $9.99)
Apple TV+ ($4.99)
Apple Arcade ($4.99)
50GB of iCloud storage ($0.99)
Total without bundling: $20.96
Bundle savings: $6.01

Apple One Family: $19.95/month
Apple Music ($14.99)
Apple TV+ ($4.99)
Apple Arcade ($4.99)
200GB of iCloud storage ($2.99)
…all for up to five people
Total without bundling: $27.96
Bundle savings: $8.01

Apple One Premier: $29.95/month
Apple Music ($14.99)
Apple TV+ ($4.99)
Apple Arcade ($4.99)
Apple Fitness+ ($9.99)
Apple News+ ($9.99)
2TB of iCloud storage ($9.99)
…all for up to five people
Total without bundling: $54.94
Bundle savings: $24.99

Twenty-five bucks a month is a real savings! But even within Apple’s generally upmarket customer base, the number of people who’ll be attracted to a $30/month price point is much smaller than at $15/month. And that smaller, richer group is the only one who might be drawn into News+ by Apple One. (Think about it: A year of Apple One Premier would run you $360. A year of Amazon Prime — which offers a distinct but philosophically similar bundle of services — is just $119.)

The best news for News+ today was the launch of Apple Fitness+, a Peleton-like service for workouts at home, but without the pricey bike — $1,895 and up — and at a lower price point. I suspect it’ll be an appealing pandemic-era product — and if it draws people up to Premier, News+ can come along for the ride.

Something left unsaid, understandably, at today’s event is how these bundles will affect how much money that gets passed along to non-Apple content producers — record labels for Apple Music and, of most interest to us here, publishers for News+. Right now, publishers collectively get about $5/month for each Apple News+ subscriber; Apple keeps the other $5. How much will publishers get from each Apple One Premier subscriber? Presumably something less.

On the other hand, for most of these services, Apple’s cost structure is relatively fixed. Each additional TV+ or Arcade or Fitness+ subscription is basically pure profit, because Apple’s already paid for the cost of making Ted Lasso or licensing Grindstone. Apple Music and Apple News+ are the services where (more subscribers) = (higher payouts to outside media companies). Apple could decide to eat more of the bundling cost on its owned-and-operated services.

Then again, multitrillion-dollar companies rarely get there through their generosity to suppliers.

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.

It seems unlikely that most people would say yes. But that sort of tracking, in digital form, lies at the heart of the online advertising industry. It’s just that, by and large, advertisers and developers haven’t been required to ask you whether you’re cool with it. They signed your name on your behalf.

Apple has announced plans to change that. And after much uproar, today the company announced it was hitting pause on those plans. Here’s Bloomberg’s Apple oracle, Mark Gurman:

Apple Inc. is delaying a change to its upcoming iOS 14 iPhone software that Facebook Inc. and other developers have warned would hurt their advertising businesses.

The move, announced in June, requires users to give explicit permission before letting apps track them for advertising purposes. This was due to be implemented this fall with the rollout of iOS 14. It is now being delayed until early next year, Apple said on Thursday.

“We want to give developers the time they need to make the necessary changes, and as a result, the requirement to use this tracking permission will go into effect early next year,” Apple said in a statement.

The company added that the feature will still be implemented when iOS 14 is released, but the delay means it won’t enforce the rule and require developers to adopt it. Apple said it will release more details on implementing the feature later this year.

At issue is a unique code that’s attached to every iPhone and iPad called its IDFA. At its June developers conference, Apple announced that iOS would soon start asking users to allow that sort of tracking — in every app and website whose adtech stack uses it. Few expect most iPhone users to agree happily. With this one move, Apple — whose software runs on roughly half of American phones — slices up the network of data that connects you to your online history. (That Apple is the largest tech company with essentially zero reliance on ad dollars gives it a strategy credit here.)

Facebook, for one, is not a fan of the move, but says the impact will be felt more by the game and app developers who use its ad network than by Facebook itself. (The sprawl of Facebook properties across your homescreen leaves it plenty of ways to track you within its walls.)

But publishers are bracing for an impact too. As the Journal’s Lukas I. Alpert and Patience Haggin put it:

Some publishers worry that most users will opt out, hobbling their ability to show personalized ads in apps and dealing them a blow at a time when the industry is trying to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. “When every publisher is fighting for every last advertising cent, this couldn’t come at a worse time,” said Martin Clarke, publisher of DMG Media, operator of the Daily Mail and MailOnline…

Sheri Bachstein, the global head of consumer business at the Weather Co., which operates weather.com, estimated that the price advertisers are willing to pay to advertise within iPhone apps could decline by as much as 40% as a result of the change. That is because advertisers generally pay a premium for ads targeted based on users’ interests and behavior on the web. Apple says it doesn’t plan to prohibit tracking, but will simply require app makers to obtain permission from their users to do so.

Apple’s new policy was set to go into force with the release of the next version of its mobile operating system, iOS 14, which is expected in the coming weeks. (iOS updated usually come out in September along a new batch of iPhones, but Covid-related factors will likely push that into October this year.) With today’s announcement of a delay, though, D-Day will now come in 2021.

Many news publishers will struggle to adapt; few have the sort of robust data systems that would allow them to create something like the ad targeting Apple would be limiting. Publishers who sell most of their own advertising directly will have an edge over those who rely on programmatic ad networks. In the long run, that’s probably a healthy tradeoff for publishers — but there’ll be pain in the meantime.

One likely winner: The New York Times, which decided months ago to phase out all third-party ad tools in favor of its own inhouse data stack. The Times will let advertisers target 45 or more audience segments, defined by its own data. That’s great for the Times and other big dogs, like The Washington Post and Vox Media, who have the tech capacity to pull this off. But it’ll be harder for smaller fry.

One impact I’d expect to see from this: more news sites tightening their registration walls, requiring drive-by readers to create and log into an account to see even a single news story. The Times and McClatchy, among others, have moved in this direction in the past year; it’s awfully hard to gather good targeting data as a publisher without having your readers logged in and identified. (Sorry, incognito-window fans: Your paywall-evading days may be numbered.)

In case you haven’t heard: Last week, Epic tried to get around Apple’s in-app purchasing system — in which Apple takes a 30 percent cut of sales — by adding its own purchasing system to Fortnite on iOS. That’s against Apple’s rules for the App Store — so Apple kicked Fortnite out. Epic, having gotten the response it expected, immediately sued Apple (and Google, which had followed the same playbook on Android), saying that the two giants’ app store policies are unfair monopolies when it comes to software distribution on mobile devices.

Which…isn’t a bad argument.

The past couple of years have been filled with complaints about the aggregated power of Google, Apple, and a few other tech titans. For app stores, though, the imbalance of power has been too big to prompt any real change. Apple took a 30 percent cut of App Store purchases when it launched in 2008; it still does today.

But it’s one thing for small developers to complain; it’s another for Netflix, Epic, Spotify, or Sonos — much less Amazon or Facebook — to raise a fuss, legal or otherwise. Apple cut a special deal to quiet its most potent opponent on that list, Amazon. Epic, though, seems prepared to push this to some sort of legal conclusion.

Different outlets have responded to Apple’s setup (which Google roughly mirrors) in various ways. The Financial Times famously pulled its mobile app from the App Store in 2011 over both data and rev-share concerns. (It returned in 2017.)

Some raise their subscription rates 30 percent to both (a) cover Apple’s cut and (b) hopefully push some would-be subscribers back to a direct subscription. (Though Apple’s rules don’t even let you tell the user they can get a better deal over at your dot-com.)

And some — most, from what I can tell — simply eat the difference. Want to subscribe to The New York Times on your iPhone? If you’re looking at NYTimes.com in your browser, you might get one of any number of offers the Times is testing and thinks might work for you. (In a logged-out window, I just got offered $1/week for the first year, then the full $4.25/week standard rate after that.) But if you’re in the Times’ iOS app, you get a rigid offer for $16.99 a month.

So on the website, the Times will get $52 for a new subscriber’s first year, then $221/year every year thereafter. On the App Store, the Times will get $142 for a subscriber’s first year, accounting for Apple’s cut, even though it would like to charge less to hook in new subscribers. And ever year thereafter, the Times gets $173 — $48 less than it would like. (Apple reduces its cut from 30 percent to 15 percent after the first year of a subscription.)

Apple’s rigid policies also make it harder to test different kinds of subscription offers — a free one-month trial versus 99¢/week for the first three months versus a discount rate for the first year, and so on. Propensity-driven paywalls are a real source of growth in digital subs for publishers, and they’re just about impossible to pull off in the App Store.

The explosion of SaaS has meant there are a ton of companies selling subscriptions on the App Store. But the vast majority of them were born in the iPhone era and have set up a cost structure attuned to the distribution costs they expect. But most subscription publishers existed long before the iPhone and have large fixed costs — like a newsroom that produces new content everyday — and a subscriber base that is still mostly not using app store purchasing. All that means the pricing crunch can be even more severe for them.

It’s even more galling knowing that Apple only applies its restrictions to digital content — a print subscription doesn’t face the same cut — and that Apple has a separate payment system, Apple Pay, that takes a traditional, credit-card-processor-sized cut. (So if I pay my neighborhood sushi place to bring me dinner, Apple only charges 0.15 percent through Apple Pay. But if I subscribe to SushiNewsToday.com on my iPhone, Apple gets 30 percent?)

How is this all going end? Who knows — Epic seems determined, and you get the sense this could be the moment in which a decade of frustration finally turns into action, either by the tech giants voluntarily or by regulators, Congress, or the courts. An easy, secure one-tap subscription was a huge deal a decade ago, when screens were tiny and people were nervous about entering credit card numbers. But today, any number of tools and vendors have made buying an online sub pretty darn straightforward.

I see three potential outcomes. One, Apple and Google stand their ground and Epic can’t convince a judge that it’s an antitrust violation.

Two, Apple and Google agree to cut their shares under some set of cases, as Apple did in 2016 when it dropped to 15 percent after the first year of a subscription. Maybe it exempts certain categories. (I hear robust news organizations are important to democracy.) Maybe the cut drops to zero after a certain length of time. Or maybe they just try to reduce their share to, say, 20 percent and hope that quiets the crowd.

Three — the one I consider the most likely — is that a court or regulator eventually agrees with Epic that Apple and Google’s functional monopolies on mobile software distribution are a constraint on trade and a violation of antitrust law. (That court or regulator could be in the United States; it would more likely be in the EU.) The likely outcome would be a ruling that Apple and Google have to allow alternate in-app payment systems on their devices — the way Microsoft was ordered to allow other default web browsers or AT&T was forced to allow other long-distance companies access to the phone network it built.

But I suspect that would still be years away, and you haven’t made too much money betting against the tech giants in recent years. These monopolies generate huge revenues — about $29 billion over the past year — and neither Google nor Apple is likely to give them up lightly. After all, just this morning, Apple became the first company in the history of the world to be worth $2 trillion — only two years after it became the first to hit $1 trillion.

On its own, that may seem like just one more move in the chess game between major news companies and the platforms. But it could also be an indication of a more geologic movement. Will the rest of 2020 bring tectonic shifts in platforms’ power over news — or just a few more small tremors?

The growing ad boycott of Facebook by global marketers is another indication that the shaking may bring more of a jolt this time. So are the state attorneys generals’ actions and the soon-to-come Department of Justice antitrust move.

“It’s time to re-examine all of our relationships with the big platforms,” New York Times COO Meredith Levien told me. “And we’re reexamining them on three axes that are all interrelated, but different with each of the players.”

Levien’s three questions:

• “What role does the company play in helping bring audiences to the Times? Or said more technically, what role do they play in that funnel?”
• “What role does this company play in helping us do the main thing we’re trying to do? Which is scale direct relationships with people and get them to form a habit and ultimately pay.”
• What’s the value equation — “recognizing that these companies get substantial value from our investment in original journalism”?

“All three of those things really matter,” says Levien, who came to the Times in 2013 as head of advertising and moved into the COO job, Mark Thompson’s second-in-command, three years ago. She’s widely considered a prime contender for Thompson’s job whenever the 62-year-old CEO exits.

“At this moment, it doesn’t make sense for us to participate in Apple News anymore.”

This likely won’t be the only adjustment the Times makes in the coming months on its platform relationships. “In the last year, 18 months, we’re thinking really hard about all of our relationships in this context,” she said. “We’re really trying to deeply calibrate how do we cut our own top through that ecosystem in a way that accounts for its reality? That’s really what I’m describing to you. We get a little better with every passing year at how we do that. So that’s why you see us making a change like this.”

In short, the Times audience machine is proving more able to move towards its goal — 10 million subscribers in 2025 — on its own.

“This has been a moment where something like 250 million — somewhere between 250 and 300 million people — used The New York Times at the height of the COVID crisis,” Levien said. “When something like 6 in 10 American adults used The New York Times in March. And that’s a bigger opportunity than we’ve had before to drive relationships with people.

“Ultimately the thing we’re trying to do is play a bigger role in many more people’s lives. And I think with each passing year, we’re getting better and better at doing that ourselves. That doesn’t mean we don’t need distribution partners — we certainly do. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to find the outlets for our content that help us build audience. But I think that the equation for how we evaluate them changes.”

So this isn’t The New York Times cutting off all its platform relationships. But it’s not a minor tremor, either.

The publisher/platform dance

Think of this as the next starting point for negotiation — the sort of negotiation common when players are on a more even playing field, reassessing their mutual value.

But of course this still isn’t close to being an even playing field. The absolute dominance of the big platforms in business life is hard to overestimate. The Times, for instance, will still work closely with Apple on podcasts — considering the increasing value of its flagship franchist The Daily — and via its App Store, where the Times mobile app has proved key to building its strong subscriber engagement times.

Thompson hasn’t been shy about talking about the dangerous dance publishers still feel compelled to do with the huge platforms. Just a year ago, he spoke about why the Times, like The Washington Post, didn’t join in the launch of Apple News+, Apple’s fledgling, magazine-heavy paid offering. He said then that Apple News+ “jumbled different news sources into these superficially attractive mixtures.”

It can be tough to understand the questions in these complex news company/aggregator relationships. In many ways, it comes down to how consumers understand what they’re getting from whom.

Ask people and many will tell you they’re getting news “from their phones.” And they are. But The New York Times — like all other news publishers who see reader revenue as the only route forward — wants them to know they’re getting that news from them. The Times want a direct reader relationship — one that can hopefully be converted to subscription.

Of course, that publisher–aggregator push–pull conflict goes back to the early web. Yahoo News — and debates among publishers about whether and how they should participate in it — dates back more than two decades. (As an executive at Knight Ridder Digital, I recall negotiating a 1999-era aggregation deal with CNET’s Snap news aggregation product and debating the same questions: Who is getting what value here?)

The Times has been holding back what it gives to Apple News for a long time. “We’ve been doing a limited number of stories a day — it went from a lot of stories at the beginning, broadly, to a smaller number,” Levien said. In return, the Times gets to promote its newsletters, subscription offers, and other calls-to-action, and it gets Comscore credit for its audience reading there. Basically, it gets branding and reach — but no direct revenue stream.

Even some of its users may be confused about what Apple News is, exactly. For many, it’s just generic “news on my phone,” a set of notifications or a curation that pops up if they purposely (or accidentally) swipe or touch something. But it reaches a big audience — 125 million users a month as of April, up from 100 million three months earlier. It’s one of several platform news aggregation plays: Google and Facebook compete directly worldwide, and Axel Springer’s Upday competes in Europe. It’s distinct from Apple News+, which is mainly a magazine product plus three strong news players, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and The Toronto Star.

Apple News says the Times is one of the few publishers to opt out of its baseline product.

“The New York Times has only offered Apple News a few stories per day,” Apple spokesperson Fay Sliger said in a statement. “We are committed to providing the more than 125 million people who use Apple News with the most trusted information and will continue to do so through our collaboration with thousands of publishers, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Miami Herald, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and we will continue to add great new outlets for readers.

“We are also committed to supporting quality journalism through the proven business models of advertising, subscriptions, and commerce.”

How the Times did its calculation

The Times’ decision is all about the power of the direct publisher–journalist–reader relationship — the core of the reader revenue proposition — and the only way forward for news companies these days.

The Times’ move could be highly specific to the Times and not a harbinger of shifts to come. After all, no one else has been able to accomplish what the Times has: 6 million total subscribers, more than triple the number it had at the height of print, and on pace to reach its goal of 10 million in 2025.

The farther it finds itself along that road, the more confidence it has in its own capabilities. And the more readers and subscribers it has, the more data it can analyze to see what works with what sorts of readers. And that analysis proved this to the Times: Apple News was not a net plus.

How did its analysis work? There are two calculations. First is the question of how the Times itself can convert its more of its current readers into subscribers.

“We’re getting increasingly confident in our ability to build and scale direct relationships on our own platforms,” Levien said. “Therefore, we’re very focused on: What does the funnel look like? What does the distribution partner bring to us? We’re just getting sort of clearer and sharper about it. And then as we think about any of these relationships, we’re also asking ourselves: Is this a product that is mostly, or purely, about bringing audience to the Times?”

Second, there’s this intriguing calculation — partly quantitative and, I’d suspect, deeply intuitive as well: Is Apple News (or any platform that want the Times content) a substitute — the dreaded good-enough alternative for busy news readers?

“There are plenty of people in the world that say, “I get my news from the internet.” Which is something that isn’t a news destination,” she said. “We think very hard about if something is likely to be, in whole or in part, a substitutional product. It makes us think hard about value exchange. Are we getting enough in terms of value exchange? And that might be economics, that might be audience sent our way. It might be something that makes it easier for us to drive a direct relationship. That’s the calculator.”

The shift?

Is this indeed part of a wider shift in the relationship of major news providers and Google and Facebook?

Consider the latest datapoint: Google announced Friday a new program to “license” news from publishers, put into perspective well by the Lab’s Joshua Benton. Google and Facebook have been ramping up programs to aid publishers. Some of these programs have real value, in training, in funding, or in a few cases — quite selectively — in actually paying for news articles. To date, regional publishers tell me they’ve heard little to nothing about direct payment for news content. That could change, or the Google program — which noted Germany’s Der Spiegel, Australia’s InQueensland and InDaily, and Brazil’s Diarios Associados in its initial release — may well just focus very selectively in its choice of titles and geography.

It’s no coincidence that these pay programs are ramping up in lockstep with pressures on the platforms mounting across at least three continents. In Australia, in Canada and in Europe, legislators and regulators have raised their voices and leveled new threats. The mantra around the news media world: Pay us.

We could see this coming, even before the added COVID-driven pressures on publishers, as I pointed out in January. And there’s no doubt we’ll see more of it. Given the state of generalized global angst, of populist reaction, and of tech backlash — not to mention the oh-so-convenient target Big Tech offers, Google and Facebook in particular, but also Apple, Amazon, and Twitter — these companies know they have to give in, at least a little.

So they act as any intelligent profit-maximizing corporations would do: calculate how much they can “voluntarily” give in order to stave off more draconian actions, whether regulatory, antitrust, or tax-based.

I asked Levien if the Times’ ability to step away from Apple News was unique, given its digital success and position in the news marketplace. Her answer was circumspect.

“I would say many publishers’ businesses look different, from one another and from ours. So I’m not going to speak for other publishers,” she said. “What I would say though, is I do think that the economics for any publisher should be such that they can support the work, the extensive work of all the original, independent journalists.

“Our investment in journalism is only going up. It will go up this year — even this year, it’s only going up. We are still hiring engineers and data scientists and product managers and product designers, in relatively large number.”

(Indeed, it currently lists 128 U.S.-based job openings, including for 20 editors, 17 in audio, 10 reporters, 7 data analysts, and more than a dozen developers.)

“Even in a year where our ad business is under as much pressure as it is. So, the thing that we are trying to do is going to require constant investment. And at The New York Times, in good times and in harder times, the first dollar goes to the journalism in the investment.”

Many different metrics count in the digital news business — but all of them are built on the foundation of large volumes of high-quality original news reporting and analysis. That’s the key metric: How many journalists and people with associated skill sets in product and audience can a news organization support? And how does each and every platform deal support that — or not?

So, is it working? Some interesting new data from Germany seems to indicate yes — and gives us a reminder that platforms aren’t just neutral vessels for all kinds of content.

The data is from German podcast network zebra-audio.net and hosting and analytics provider Podigee, which looked at anonymized data on how and where Germans consumed more than 6,000 podcasts across 2019. (If you read German, you can find the full results here.)

Two points jumped out at me:

Spotify has been quite successful at capturing podcast listening, quickly.

In January 2019, according to that hosting data, Apple Podcasts accounted for 45 percent of all podcast episodes streamed or downloaded in Germany. Spotify was well behind at 20 percent.

But by December? The score was a lot closer: Apple 36 percent, Spotify 34 percent. Nearly all of that movement came in the second half of 2019; from July to December, the percentage point gap between the two went from 25 to 27 to 15 to 11 to 7 to 2.

It should be noted that Germany is a core market for Europe-born Spotify in a way it’s not for Apple. Apple Music, for instance, has more subscribers in the U.S. than Spotify, but it’s well behind in the rest of the world. As of 2017, Spotify had nearly three times as many paying subscribers in Germany as Apple Music did. About three-quarters of German smartphones run Android, not iOS; it’s more like 50/50 in the U.S.

But still, that’s a lot of movement in a short period of time — movement that should be of some concern in Cupertino.

For years, podcasters have worried about “the discovery problem”: Podcasts are great, but they’re hard to discover. There are probably 20 shows out there right now that you would absolutely love — but you have no idea they even exist. Not everyone can get featured in Apple Podcasts; a huge amount of podcast discovery is just word of mouth.

This study has no data on it, but I’d wager Spotify is growing because it’s solving that discovery problem for some people. In other words, I doubt this movement is a bunch of dedicated Apple Podcasts listeners switching over to Spotify. It’s more likely that it’s about regular Spotify music listeners being presented with interesting podcasts right in the app they’re already using every day — just for a different purpose. Incumbency is fun.

Which leads to…

Spotify listeners don’t seem to be nearly as into news podcasts as Apple listeners are.

The zebra-audio.net/Podigee analysis identifies the top genres of podcasts consumed through Apple and Spotify. (And Deezer too, if that’s your jam.) There’s quite a bit of variety!

Apple:

1. News: 23.35%
2. Society & culture: 15.67%
3. Comedy: 13.39%
4. Business: 12.04%
5. Sports: 7.45%

Spotify:

1. Comedy: 23.51%
2. Sports: 15.55%
3. Business: 10.44%
4. Society & culture: 10.13%
5. News: 8.36%

Deezer:

1. Health & fitness: 17.93%
2. Society & culture: 15.14%
3. Music: 14.88%
4. Arts: 14.64%
5. Comedy: 14.21%

Quite a difference, right? News is No. 1 among Apple Podcasts listeners, with 23 percent of all downloads and streams. But on Spotify, it’s a straggler at No. 5, with only 8 percent. It’s not even Top 5 for Deezerists.

Meanwhile, Spotify users seem to like comedy (24 vs. 13 percent) and sports (16 vs. 7 percent) podcasts substantially more than Apple users do. Deezerists apparently only listen at the gym.

(Spotify’s strength in sports would seem to support its purchase of The Ringer. As Bill Simmons said at the time, Spotify’s goal here is to “build the world’s flagship sports audio network.”)

With a very few exceptions, all the same podcasts are available for listening on each of these platforms. So why would Apple users seem to like news podcasts so much more than Spotify users? Some theories:

• People launching Spotify are looking for entertainment, not the latest headlines. Apple Podcasts has, for nearly a decade, been its own discrete app on iPhones and iPads. If you launch Apple Podcasts, your motivation is obvious: You want to listen to a podcast! Spotify, however, is still overwhelmingly used for music, which means people’s motivations could be “you want to relax,” “you want to dance,” “you want something on in the background,” or any of the many other reasons one might listen to music.

  But I think we can safely say that people launching Spotify are broadly looking for entertainment, and to a greater degree than Apple Podcasts users are. In that context, Spotify leading in comedy and sports and trailing in news makes perfect sense.

• People who own Apple devices just consume more news, in all forms. Take a look at your site’s web traffic. Chances are, if you’re in the U.S., your iOS visits are higher than your Android visits, despite their market share among smartphones being roughly 50/50.

  You can debate the causes — Apple users are generally richer and have more leisure time — but whatever the reason, Apple users overindex for news consumption around the world. Apple Podcasts is only available on Apple’s devices; Spotify’s available on iOS and Android. So it’s not shocking that Apple users consume more news podcasts.

• Spotify is incentivized to promote podcasts that keep its users happy. Spotify’s whole business is based on people using its streaming service; anything that makes someone want to stop using it is a bad thing. Apple’s business is based on selling people phones and tablets and computers; it makes roughly $0 from Apple Podcasts directly. If you hate-quit Apple Podcasts and go launch Twitter instead , Apple fundamentally doesn’t care all that much.

  News content is more likely to leave someone angry, depressed, helpless, or a range of other less-than-perfect emotions. More likely than comedy or sports talk, at least.

  I just launched Spotify and went to its podcasts section. The top recommendation? A daily horoscope podcast.

Anyway, those are my theories — you may have your own. But either way, the Spotify/Apple news podcasts gap is an excellent reminder that all platforms favor some kinds of content over others — even ones as comparatively open as podcast apps.

You can consume news on both Twitter and Facebook. But fundamental elements of both platforms tend to favor news more on Twitter than on Facebook. (Twitter: the real-time nature of stream; the focus on linking out; one-way following; the headline-length brevity. Facebook: a highly algorithmic feed that takes you away from anything “live”; the weirdness of having many different kinds of people all in a single mass of “friends”; you don’t want to discuss politics with your uncle.)

You can consume news on both Instagram and TikTok. But Instagram is optimized for pretty pictures in the feed, so publishers share lots of beautiful photojournalism; TikTok is optimized for short-form video humor so The Washington Post tells jokes there.

You can consume news podcasts on both Apple Podcasts and Spotify. But the structures of both incentivize some kinds of content over others. And it’s possible that Spotify’s ongoing growth here might leave podcasters with a larger but more news-averse audience.

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!

It’s being called Streaming Ad Insertion (SAI) — a conspicuous echo of Dynamic Ad Insertion — and at the outset, the ad technology will only be applied to Spotify’s original programming and shows that are exclusive to the platform.

Here’s how the tech is described in the company blog post:

With a direct connection to millions of podcast listeners, best-in-class content, and a robust monetization platform, Spotify is uniquely positioned to make podcasts addressable for digital advertisers. Spotify Podcast Ads are powered by Streaming Ad Insertion (SAI), which leverages streaming to deliver Spotify’s full digital suite of planning, reporting, and measurement capabilities. Spotify Podcast Ads offer the intimacy and quality of traditional podcast ads with the precision and transparency of modern-day digital marketing…

In 2016, the IAB unified measurement of “ad delivery” across the industry, but due to the distributed, downloaded nature of podcasting, the new guidelines could not tell advertisers whether listeners actually heard their ads. Spotify Podcast Ads measure real impressions as they occur, reporting on the age, gender, device type, and listening behavior of the audience reached.

The company says this is the first time this granularity of listening data is being made available for advertisers (and creators) within the podcast context. “With the launch of SAI, Spotify is the only place where podcasts are getting reach at scale that’s supported by advertising,” said Joel Withrow, senior product manager of podcast monetization at Spotify (and formerly of Megaphone).

Puma was among the first to try out the offering, with the global footwear brand running host-read ads into Jemele Hill is Unbothered. The blog post noted that the campaign “drove ad recall lift of 18 points.”

Spotify’s push into podcast ad tech should surprise practically nobody. You can trace this thread at least as far back to a TechCrunch report from January 2019, which reported that Spotify had been selling ads on its own podcasts since mid-2018 and was then deciding how to approach ad tech. In June, the company announced that brands can now target ads to the platform’s free-tier listeners based on podcasts they consume, an expression of how podcasting inventory can be further relevant to its broader advertising infrastructure.

That the technology will initially be limited to the platform’s original and exclusive shows is also unsurprising, since any application to third-party podcasts would probably require Spotify to strike deals with those creators and publishers. I imagine the longer-term goal is to open SAI up to everybody, though the company chose to be vague on this point for now. When I raised the question, they emphasized that SAI is currently in a test phase.

In accordance with that, it should be noted that key execution details are still being worked out, like the standards of the ad unit format and how ad creative production ends up being handled at the end of the day. The host-read ad is expected to be the major format, of course, but the team also discussed alternative producer-created advertising experiences that “feel like it comes from the world of the show” (à la the narrative-ish pseudo-docu-style ads you get in some Gimlet shows). That design pursuit would involve considerable attention around volume level, ad loads, production quality, and so on for listeners not to feel much difference from the podcast advertising experiences they’ve been getting — other than the fact that they’re being served ads (theoretically) more relevant to them.

“We’re bringing podcast advertising up to par with what marketers expect from digital advertising in general, and we’re working to do that while preserving what’s unique and good and effective about podcast advertising,” said Matt Lieber, Gimlet co-founder and now Spotify’s head of podcast operations. “We’re not trying to facilitate a radio advertising-style world.”

For now, Spotify will be handling the creation of advertising experiences that will be funneled to the SAI product. Not to be that guy, but this has the approximate — if not completely matching — shape of a tinfoil-hat theory I was kicking around back when I was writing about the Gimlet acquisition:

[Spotify has] been trying to become the monetization layer for musicians straight-up. I imagine they would want to do the same for podcasts.

But of course, podcast advertising is a completely different animal from digital audio advertising as they would know it. (For now, anyway.) Which brings me to my tinfoil-hat theory: One possible future sees the Gimlet Creative team being diverted to focus on developing new-age advertising experiences for Spotify to inject into its original programs and to supply its future podcast monetization tools.

Anyway, when I asked whether we would eventually see outside ad agencies — like, I don’t know, Wieden+Kennedy or something — supplying ad creatives for SAI in the future, Lieber acknowledged the possibility. “But what we’re saying at this point is that we’re not going to accept just any kind of advertising,” he added. “Whatever comes from out-of-house would still have to go through our standards.”

Okay — so, with all the details laid out: What does all of this mean?

The fact that Spotify is focused on building its own proprietary podcast ad tech — and meeting the needs of brands still wary about the relative bespoke/classical nature of podcast advertising re: targeting, audience segmentation, and so on — means it’s motivated to realize a significant leap in podcast ad dollars. To close the gap (as Lieber has consistently framed the problem in the past) between podcast listening and podcast monetization.

“We still think the industry as a whole is vastly under-monetized — year over year, the level of podcast creation and consumption continues to outpace monetization,” Withrow said. “We believe that SAI will pull more revenue into the industry, which will allow more people to make more content, which in turn will lead to more revenue. It’s a virtuous cycle.”

But one risk is that Spotify becomes a dominant facilitator of all podcast advertising dollars — eventually assuming a YouTube-like position and incurring all the associated complications for creator power and autonomy that come with that configuration. Another possible concern is blurring the conceptual lines between podcasts and streaming music — two very different kinds of experiences and engagement — from the perspective of brands buying ads on Spotify. That could lead to some sort of warping in podcast advertising value.

Spotify, of course, believes this won’t happen, and that any value created for podcasting on Spotify will trickle outward into the broader ecosystem — rising tides, all boats, that kind of thing. “What we’re hoping is that SAI will help more advertisers become more comfortable with podcasts,” Withrow said. “And we hope they’ll like the results to the point where more brands will want to come into the medium and even drive their investment outside of Spotify and within the industry as a whole.”

We shall see. For now, SAI is in a test phase, as they say, and we’ll be paying very close attention to what happens within and without.

The third ripple effect has to do with Apple. Yep, took me over a thousand words to get to my first mention of Apple in this year-end column, and that’s kind of the point. By doing what it did, Spotify has fundamentally redefined the story we’ve been telling all this time. I think it’s safe to say that podcasting, once a community that owed its health to Apple’s impartial stewardship, is now distinctly a two-horse race. (Or, depending on your disposition, a community stuck between a rock and a hard place.)

Despite everything, it’s remarkable (yet, weirdly, still unsurprising) that we haven’t seen any overt or direct response from Apple with regard to the increased Swedish competition over podcast listening. There is, of course, the Bloomberg report from the summer stating that Apple has begun meeting with various podcast publishers to discuss exclusive content deals, which I have consistently been told is something that is indeed happening, but I’m still struck by a lack of…oh, I don’t know, hunger.

I’m going to hold my position on this until we get to see the full shape of whatever Apple Podcasts’ official next move is supposed to be. If the Bloomberg report is right (again, I haven’t been told otherwise), what kinds of publishers is Apple approaching? What is the driving strategy and how will it differentiate Apple’s new podcast order from the podcast world Spotify wants to build? More to the point, what will Apple stand for? To state the blindingly banal Silicon Valley truism: execution matters, and there are more than a few ways that a potential Apple Originals/Exclusives strategy could succeed or fail.

Not that the prospect of Apple matching Spotify pound for pound with an exclusives/originals strategy is something that should be universally embraced, of course. There are more than a few podcast folk who feel weary about a Balkanized future, given podcasting’s historical relationship with openness. I, for one, am one such weary-wort. For what it’s worth, I subscribe to the perspective that Apple doesn’t have to match Spotify pound for pound in order to preserve its influence over the space. (To the extent that it wants to, which still seems like an open question.) Apple can, and should, match Spotify on other stuff — like being accessible on smart speakers or, you know, improving on its horrendous app — but I do sincerely believe there is a future where Apple can maintain its commitment to the open ecosystem and hold the line against Spotify.

However things shake out, it seems that the road ahead will be a rocky one for independents. The year ahead is rich with unknowns, but the one thing we do know is that there will be more money and corporate-owned entities flowing into the ecosystem, which will translate to more competition and almost certainly a more difficult operating environment for podcasters who’d rather not align with anybody right out of the gate.

On the flip side, my sense is that Spotify truly believes that it will have positive impacts on both big publishers and independent podcasters, the idea being that the company’s various exclusive programs are meant to get its users through the podcasting door after which they can discover the wider universe of shows, from big and small providers, via the numerous recommendation features that will be thrown their way. And sure, there remains the possibility that Apple will, indeed, muster up the interest to double down on open podcasting and consciously facilitate a space where big publishers and independents can exist on equal footing.

But if I were a podcaster intent on preserving independent self-ownership, I don’t think I’d be confident enough to bet on either of those outcomes. There’s just too much power in caprice. I’d probably be better off betting on myself, which would mean betting on various tools, partners, and philosophies that could help me bet on myself, whether it’s an alternative/non-advertising business model (Patreon, Supporting Cast, etc. etc.) or an operating ideology that focuses on being small and niche.

I don’t want this column to sound entirely skeptical about the way things are going, because that isn’t completely accurate. I’m not so much of an ideologue that I dismiss the upsides of the changes we’ve seen over the past year or so, whether it’s the fact there’s more money now that can potentially be spent on producers and native talent, or whether it’s the fact that the growing participation of older media companies in the space means more stable jobs for those who’d rather not live with the instabilities of running their own shop. But I still burn the candle for indie podcasts and media, because independence is one of podcasting’s original promises.

For what it’s worth, I’m still the type of idealistic dolt who believes the trend toward a certain kind of big-ness — accelerated by Spotify, deepened by corporate interest, potentially tempered by a matching Apple response — opens up a gap that can be filled by nonprofit entities, in particular the public media system. As it stands, there’s a slice of public radio that’s responded to the podcast boom by building analogous businesses able to tap into the financial value that’s being created here. (Quick reminder that NPR’s podcast sponsorship revenue is projected to beat broadcast sponsorship next year.) But there’s an opportunity for the public radio system as a whole to fashion itself as the home, and advocate, for independent and open podcasting. This would be a public media system that sees itself only partly as a content publisher, and more holistically as the facilitator of a wider system of publishing.

That’s all pie in the sky stuff for now. I bring up that possibility, though, to raise a broader point: Spotify may be at the center of the podcasting narrative right now, but it isn’t the whole story. That’s still being written.

2019 in Review: Choice and the Year of Freaking Out [by Caroline Crampton]. When I think back over the past twelve months, it’s the freakouts that stand out to me. A lot has happened this year, between the acquisitions and the consolidations and the sheer volume of new episodes cascading into feeds. But it’s not the actual happenings themselves that I remember most clearly — it’s the messages piling up in my inbox afterward. That feeling that there’s a wave of nerves headed in my direction that I can’t stave off.

This was the year of anxiety. Both in the world more broadly, but also in our little corner that’s concerned with podcasts. To give you an example of what I mean: for everyone who wasn’t directly involved in Spotify’s acquisition of Gimlet — which is to say, almost everyone — the seemingly out-of-the-blue movement of a big corporation to acquire a major player in a small industry came as a brutal shock.

Whether you work with audio at a broadcaster, an independent production company, a sales house, a network, or completely by yourself, the inevitable next question is: “What does this mean for me and my work?” And there weren’t many definitive answers in the months that followed. In an uncertain environment, it’s natural and reasonable to feel unsettled. “Let’s wait and see” isn’t a very comfortable position to be in.

The nature of the podcasting space to date has also contributed to this atmosphere of unease. There are so many overlapping and competing interests involved, from public radio to venture-backed studios to ambitious networks, and each has a different set of priorities. Entities slide into a greater involvement with audio, entering sideways or stopping and restarting their efforts. Sometimes it feels wrong even to talk about “a podcast industry,” since we’re not all facing in the same direction most of the time, but I’m not really sure how else we can do this.

Overwhelmingly, it was the smaller providers and individuals who reached out to express their anxiety this year. Creators who aren’t inking big advertising deals but who are making a living (or some of one) from their audio, now concerned about how the models they have painstakingly constructed will be buffeted by the new norms…whatever those turn out to be.

It began to feel cyclical to me. Every few weeks, Spotify or another big corporation would make a big announcement concerning podcasting, and the “what does this all mean?” posts and messages would start to appear. While I do think that many of the developments we’ve seen this year will change podcasting in the long term, I also think that our chances of accurately unpacking what that will look like in the first 24 or 48 hours are very low. Which isn’t very helpful when you’re freaking out, I know.

The trend toward greater corporatization in podcasting is undoubtedly here to stay. But is there hope, or are we stuck in this cycle of anxiety forever? I’m not going to pretend that we’re all headed for the sunlit uplands in 2020 and beyond. But there is one trend from 2019 that I want to mention in relation to this, and that is the expanding choice on offer to podcasters working on all scales.

An individual or a team with a great idea for a show now has more alternatives than ever for where they can take it. There are more networks and platforms to pitch, with more money to spend. Direct monetization options are opening up all over the place too — I’ve written about some of them this year already.

If you don’t want to explore advertising, it’s no longer the case that you just have to stick a PayPal “donate” button in the sidebar of your website and hope for the best. Products like Supporting Cast, Glow, and others open up premium feeds and payment processing mechanisms beyond just large publishers. There’s still a long way to go in this area (there’s too much friction for podcasts wanting to offer paying listeners paywalled or bonus material) but substantial progress has been made already.

However, just because there is more choice of how to monetize a podcast, it doesn’t necessarily follow that more people can be properly compensated for their work. There are more contracts floating around, but also more potential for creators without the means to pay for legal advice on risk. For every amply Patreon-supported show out there, there are a dozen pages where goals aren’t met and the pledges aren’t into three figures. There are podcatchers that now allow you to accept donations directly, but that doesn’t mean the money will come flooding in.

All of which is to say, I think more choice for podcasters is an excellent thing, but I’ll never stop being skeptical about how much money it might make them. The freakouts won’t stop; things are changing and it won’t all be for the better, because nothing ever is. But if I could leave anything behind in 2019, it would be that background hum of anxiety about the state of podcasting I’ve felt for most of the year. An attitude of inquisitive curiosity is what I’m going for instead. Asking the right questions will matter more than ever, as this thing shifts and changes again in the months to come.

Et Cetera

Before we wrap things up for the year — with respect to the Tuesday newsletter, anyway — I’d like to highlight three more 2019 stories I thought were interesting, plus a couple more.

(1) The apocalyptic launch. I walked into 2019 thinking that we’re going to have to do a ton of reckoning with Luminary, the spendy paid podcast platform. Turned out, not so much. Instead, we saw one of the more bizarre roll-outs in the business, which also happened to catalyze a clear-cut case of an industry flexing its collective power to enforce its norms.

On paper, Luminary had a lot going for it…well, maybe it just had the one thing: money, and lots of it. That resource afforded the company the opportunity to get into a position where it could set up a pipeline of deals that could potentially reshape the on-demand audio business as we knew it. As it turns out, though, money can only get you so much.

Luminary’s April rollout was ultimately derailed by miscommunication, miscomprehension, and misalignment. Also: the app simply isn’t good, which, you know, table stakes. The whole episode displayed a fundamental lack of understanding of how the ecosystem works, how to build goodwill in a community (let’s not even talk about the Sign Bunny fracas), and how to create a market with tangible value. In November, the company reshuffled its executive ranks, bringing in a new CEO — a former president of HBO — while benching its founder.

What should we make of Luminary’s grand misadventure? Is it some proof that people don’t actually want to pay for podcasts? Nope. The biggest lesson from this debacle is simple: if you’re going to do something, do it right.

(2) The rise of the West. In the summer of 2017, the New York City Mayor’s Office for Media and Entertainment published a report declaring the city to be “podcasting capital of the world,” pointing to the growth of podcasting businesses within city limits. And for a while, the claim may have been somewhat true, given the prominence of long-standing New York-based audio giants (WNYC, This American Life, etc.) and the seeding of several companies that would become the face of this podcast phase (Gimlet Media, Panoply, etc.).

But by the end of 2019, there has been enough movement to suggest that the focal point of the podcast ~industry~ has swung westward, toward Los Angeles. I’m almost completely basing this on the fact that podcasting’s larger-scale business activities are now increasingly intertwined with the broader entertainment industry clustered around LA.

(3) Dialectic consolidation. Three subplots from the year that collectively amount to a trend: Entercom’s acquisition of Cadence13 and Pineapple Street, iHeartMedia’s ongoing efforts to bill itself as a notable podcasting concern, and Sony Music’s investments in Three Uncanny Four, Broccoli Content, and most recently, Neon Hum Media. If you can’t build ‘em, buy ‘em.

(4) Some other stories we’re still thinking about:

• Caroline’s three-part series on burnout. Here, here, and here.
• The unionization effort at Gimlet. Here.
• Sketchy contracts. Here.
• I will friggin’ die on my little “let’s technologically invert NPR” hill. Here.
• The push for global podcasting businesses, between Podfront UK and all the international stuff Spotify is cooking up.
• Podcasting in China isn’t what you think it is. Here.

All right. That’s all folks. Just one last quick note of gratitude — thank you so much for reading Hot Pod. See you next year.

Or…both? We’ve got a new breakout of platformitis, as news companies try to figure out their complicated relationships with the dominant digital companies of our day.

As Mark Zuckerberg and News Corp CEO Robert Thomson finished up their conversation at New York City’s Paley Center Friday afternoon, announcing the new Facebook News tab, we can take five big points out of this week in Facebookology. For Zuckerberg, it was the culmination of a week from hell. Just within the past week, he had to juggle: (1) advancing its controversial cryptocurrency, (2) taking down “fake” editorial content, and (3) allowing politicians’ ads with falsehoods to remain. As Thomson said to him in what came across as a fairly softball on-stage talk, “It’s unusual when the amuse-bouche comes at the end of the meal.”

This is a milestone in publishers’ quest to get paid for content.

No doubt, the numbers in this deal get attention.  News Corp, of course, most likely does the best (see “Rupert always rises to the top,” below), with millions in new revenue. These two- and three-year deals (guaranteed, I understand, even if Facebook nixes the program earlier) will send low millions to some national publishers, maybe half a million a year to a relative few local ones, but only the promise of traffic-generating links to many of the 200 or so other (almost all U.S.) publishers in the initial rollout.

Only the Facebook Live payments are at all comparable in terms of cash payments to publishers for content. And those required lots of original work by publishers; these deals don’t.

And that’s potentially a big milestone here. News publishers will now say that when it comes to paying for content, it’s no longer “whether” but “how much.” (Of course they’d like hundreds of millions or billions to soothe their advertising losses to digital disruption.) They also like doing deals where the dollar amounts are relatively transparent, in which the platforms don’t have to bet on revenue shares of subscriptions or ads sold. This is the big story to watch into the next couple of years.

Zuckerberg is already trying to get out ahead of that in multiple ways. “I don’t pretend that any of these steps will be enough,” he told Thomson, saying Facebook itself couldn’t solve publishers’ problem. But with more than $7 billion in profit, that may be a bit of an overstatement. “Can” may be the wrong verb here.

Curiously, though, Facebook isn’t actually “licensing content.” The experience, as we so far understand it, includes a headline and precis linking back to publishers’ sites, all presented in a stream in Facebook’s new News tab. Isn’t that fair use, what aggregators and platforms have been claiming for two decades?

It’s fairly clear that it’s the currency that motivates the publishers, but what’s the value here for Facebook? It may be more than meets the immediate eye. There’s an engagement value, to be sure; news comes from that simple root “new,” and it drives lots of eyeballs. That’s why Facebook and its platform peers all keep taking new tries at the news biz. Eyeballs are good and lead to monetization.

Then, there’s the softer, behind-the-scenes reasons. “It strikes me that they are front-running the European ‘snippet’ idea,” says one savvy newspaper insider.  “We all know that most people are only going to consume the headlines and the snippets, and they’re buying the goodwill of the publishers to participate in the effort.”

Yes, the EU’s taking on of the platforms’ power is starting to inform U.S. behavior. That takes into the political dimension of this agreement, one that somehow got little mention in the Zuckerberg/Thomson conversation.

What looks like an oasis could be political quicksand for Facebook.

Call it a shotgun marriage of convenience, perhaps. The news industry needs money — badly. Facebook needs a better story.

It’s under the gun across the U.S. and in Europe. It just agreed to pay a $5 billion fine for its data privacy violations, and it’s just about impossible to even list all the other fronts of questions. And Elizabeth Warren’s break-them-up campaign has sent a new chill through Silicon Valley.  All the big platforms, the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) named years ago,  find themselves in the crosshairs. But given Facebook’s role in the 2016 election and its more complicated “social” nature, Zuckerberg’s company has gotten a greater share of attack.

So this is part PR. Don’t look at the cesspool over there, which we’re cleaning up, says Facebook. Look at all the high-quality news we now proudly pay for. Here’s the new shiny object.

Of course, there could also be this calculation: Publishers may be less inclined to focus on reporting Facebook’s bad side if they see its good one up close and personal. Editors and reporters, of course, would recoil at such a thought, but we can see how Facebook could see it that way — and how it might be right around the edges.

But does Facebook risk marching into new political quicksand Facebook? Remember just three years ago, when Facebook fired its editors who, guess what, curated the news, after Republican House members went ape on them in hearings?

“200 publishers” sounds good. But which 200? The inclusion of Breitbart as a partner (along with the much larger and Murdoch-owned Fox News) has already gotten some on the left fuming. What about preference and placement in the feed? Who decides? Human editors? Algos? Who trains the algos? Round and round we go. It’s a question that a Facebook or any other aggregator can’t answer — unless it’s a journalism company. Which it isn’t.

This is a battle for phone-centric news.

Swipe right? Tap the G icon? Find the new Facebook news tab and touch it? Launch a news app, scroll through Twitter, wait for a news alert? The options for news on our phones can be dizzying. Whose story is this again? How did I get here? Whatever, we think — let’s just read.

That’s the attention battle newly joined by Facebook. Google and Apple both have led with different flavors of news aggregation. While Facebook’s two major competitors here both own most of the hardware, they must still fight their way into readers’ attention. Will the News tab do it, or will it go the way of other Facebook news products, fading away slowly or quickly?

To the degree that any or all of the newest news aggregators — a practice that goes back to Yahoo at the end of the last century — succeed, to what degree are publishers trading their destination businesses for distribution businesses? That’s much more than a monetary question; it’s an existential one. If reader relationship is the gold into the 2020s, what does this new phone-centric aggregation world really portend?

Local remains a stepchild, but a taller one.

“I do think local news has been hit the hardest by these changes,” Zuckerberg said, acknowledging reality. A number of local providers — McClatchy and broadcaster Graham Holdings among them — are in the new News Tab program. Those are largely in Top 10 markets. “Working with the top 200 news organizations in the world” has been Facebook’s first priority. “Figuring out how to work with all the little ones is going to be critical.”

That’s been true for a while and is universally true among platforms. Executing many small agreements does take a lot of time; integrating more feeds of lesser volumes of content is less economical. Especially for companies who like to start their counting of anything — money, metrics — in the billions. Local content may be high value, but it’s low reach. An alert out of D.C. these days can catch everyone’s attention, but local stories are useful to far fewer. That’s where personalization will come in, hopefully.

Rupert always rises to the top.

Rupert Murdoch and Robert Thomson deserve credit for their early and continued drumbeat calling for platforms and aggregators to pay for the valuable journalistic content they use.  And Murdoch, as always, manages to combine wider objectives — like helping lead the industry to get money out of those who have more of it than even he does — with enriching his own company. By most reckoning, his News Corp and Wall Street Journal are receiving the sweetest deal, the greatest payment, from Facebook for this news tab deal. (And the Journal secured one of two top spots in the earlier launched Apple News+.)

Who else are Rupert and Robert talking to, and what may those conversations yield — for them and the industry?

With a new spinoff movie now out on Netflix, someone had the bright idea to change Los Pollos Hermanos from a plot detail into an actual chicken restaurant. Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to open up the Uber Eats app on your phone and order real food from the once-fake restaurant: Pollos Tenders, Fring Fries, or the ABQ Hot Chicken Sandwich, which sounds delicious even before you get to the side of Slaw Goodman it comes with.

(Well, you’ll be able to do it in Los Angeles, with expansion coming to elsewhere in California, Nevada, and Illinois soon. No word on when it might be available in To’hajiilee, Abiquiu, or New Hampshire.)

The twist here, though, is that Los Pollos Hermanos won’t be a normal fast-food restaurant, the kind with locations at high-traffic intersections, a drive-thru, and plenty of parking. It’ll be a ghost kitchen — a delivery-only brand affectation that connects hungry people using an app to an anonymous kitchen frying chicken.

“Little did I realize this could be accomplished without building an actual brick-and-mortar restaurant,” show creator Vince Gilligan told The Hollywood Reporter or, more likely, whoever was typing the press release. “Yay, technology! Smart phones actually are good for something!”

I thought about Los Pollos Hermanos when I read this piece in The Information: “CNN to Launch Digital News Service to Compete With Facebook, Apple.”

First there was Knewz, now there is “NewsCo.” Media companies are ramping up their efforts to take on Facebook and Apple with digital news services.

Just a few months after Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. announced it was developing Knewz.com, a news aggregation service offering articles from a wide range of outlets, CNN is jumping in with its own offering. Not yet named, but referred to internally as “NewsCo,” CNN is discussing paying news organizations to feature their content on the platform, which will likely be a mix of subscription-based and advertising-based content, according to CNN digital chief Andrew Morse.

In other words, CNN desperately wants to avoid becoming Los Pollos Hermanos — a valuable brand that, instead of engaging directly with consumers, gets reduced to being just a tiny icon in someone else’s app, the place where all the money gets made.

In the food business, the aggregators are apps like DoorDash, Uber Eats, Postmates, and Grubhub. In the news business, they’re Apple News, Google News, Facebook News (set to be unveiled Friday), and all the other tech giants’ efforts to package publishers’ stories for users.

Despite all the variation between them, each of those apps offers some version of a new front door for news: a bunch of different stories from a bunch of different outlets, assembled through some combination of human editing and algorithmic personalization, and optimized in whatever way most aligns with the company doing the optimizing. For each, the brand equity of the publisher — “Did you read that story on The New York Times?” “Did you see that on CNN?” — is sublimated to the brand of the tech company. And publishers don’t like that — switching from news outlets to wire services, from restaurants on every corner to anonymous kitchens in the warehouse district.

So why is the Los Pollos Hermanos scenario so bad for a CNN or a News Corp? After all, the potential benefits for chicken-slingers are clear: Finding land for and building out dozens or hundreds of restaurants is super expensive, and renting space in an industrial kitchen isn’t. Just as buying a giant printing press, hiring a newsroom, dealing with advertisers, and distributing tons of newsprint every morning was super expensive — and just as starting a news site isn’t.

Today, a wave of ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants are betting that keeping production costs low and riding on delivery apps’ distribution can build a great business. A few years ago, a wave of content mills, aggregators, and other digital-native publishers made the same bet, lowering the cost of output and counting on Facebook shares and Google searches to provide the distribution.

For an awful lot of them, that bet didn’t work out. Google could change its algorithms; Facebook could turn the traffic dial up or down as it pleased. Emphasis shifted from cheap scale to something smaller, higher quality, and more direct, as seen primarily through the wave of paywalls we’ve seen go up.

Into this situation walks CNN, or News Corp, or any other news company that has a high-cost model of production and fears becoming that icon in someone else’s app. They don’t want to become mere suppliers to the tech titans. They want to own the customer relationship. And hence NewsCo and Knewz. Check out this podcast interview with CNN’s Morse from just a month ago:

CNN is also proceeding cautiously in its partnerships with social media giants like Facebook, which Morse regards as competitors as much as they are collaborators.

“It’s pretty hard to look at them and not see a media company, and the same with Apple,” he said of Facebook. “And the reality is I don’t think we should cede the ground in the news business to Facebook or Apple. I think the stakes are too high. I think they’ve let down audiences, I think they’ve let down advertisers, I think they’ve let down journalism. And no matter how many task forces and how many reporters they hire, it doesn’t change the fact that’s not their core business.”

To get my prediction on the record: I don’t think NewsCo and Knewz are going to work. Dumb names aside — at least NewsCo is clearly a working title, can’t say the same for Knewz — it is going to be very hard to get large numbers of people to create new app habits for news on their phones without the cachet of a prominent news brand. Even the most prominent and premium of publishers have found that their app users are their superusers, the most dedicated consumers of their work. The people who specifically seek out news on phones — not the ones who let news occasionally bump into them via alerts or a random Facebook post — tend to be people who have preexisting opinions about where they want to get it from. Knews and NewsCo are much more about satisfying the strategic needs of their corporate owners than about satisfying the information needs of actual users. For them, the value proposition — “a bunch of news stories, but in a different app than the one that comes preinstalled on your phone or the one where you choose all the sources to follow or the one all your friends are on” — is pretty muddled. Maybe they’ll surprise us all with a brilliant angle; probably not.

But you can see the frustration that leads to attempts like this. As Walter White himself could have told you, it’s not just about having the best product — it’s also about controlling distribution. Your meth could be the best in the West, but you still need someone to get it to market and to your best, er, users.

He proposes switching the default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo — unlikely given that Google pays Apple $12 billion a year for that position — and adding some user-friendly tips for those new to Apple’s apps. Fine enough. But he also mentions one idea that, while perhaps of marginal importance for end users, would be significant for publishers:

Apple News headlines

Apple News is a crucial part of the macOS and iOS experience now. I have some issues with the paid subscription version, but the entire app experience is great overall. As it continues to expand to more countries, Apple could include vetted articles from prominent sources on its Apple Start Page. As all publishers continue to fight against fake news spreading, Apple could be a key player in informing the public of what’s happening around the world every time they load Safari.

Yadda yadda fake news yadda — to heck with the health of our democracy, let’s just generate some pageviews!

What kind of an impact would Apple putting headlines, taken from Apple News, on the Safari new tab page have? Well, we have some data on that, from when Google did the same thing last year in its mobile version of Chrome. The spike in traffic to publishers was real and significant. Here’s some information from Chartbeat data:

If you use Chrome on your phone or tablet, you’re probably familiar with the article suggestions that you see when you open a new tab in your browser. However, if you’re a publishing executive, you may not be thinking of them as a meaningful traffic source. Well, we have news for you: Research by Chartbeat’s data science team reveals that Google Chrome’s Articles for You (also known as “Chrome Content Suggestions” or “Chrome Suggestions”) is one of the fastest growing sources of publisher traffic on the internet…

This speaks to the incredible power and influence that Google has over a user’s browsing behavior and, consequently, publisher traffic. Once a user has chosen Chrome as her browser, Articles for You is almost unavoidable. It is placed prominently within a user’s mobile experience, personalized with the immense knowledge that Google has about one’s browsing behavior and interests and frequently boosted by the speed of AMP.

In a year’s time, those article suggestions in Chrome went from being a nothingburger to driving more traffic to news sites than all of Twitter. And they kept increasing: By the end of 2018, Parse.ly data found “Google (other)” referrals (which is traffic from Google that isn’t search or Google News — a proxy for these browser recommendations) were up 67 percent year over year. And it’s still a force: Parse.ly’s Google (other) category is today the No. 4 traffic source in its network of news sites, behind Google Search, Facebook, and Google News, but ahead of Twitter, Flipboard, Bing, and well, everything else.

The Safari new tab page on iPhone currently defaults to showing your bookmarks and frequently visited pages. Put up some top headlines from Apple News — using its mix of editorially selected and customized to your interests — and you’d be directing a lot of human attention toward news.

How much? Headlines in Safari would have only a limited impact on desktop, where Safari has a roughly 9 percent share of the market in the United States. But the story is different on mobile, where Safari’s U.S. market share jumps to 52 percent on phones and 73 percent on tablets. (Those numbers all decrease once you leave the U.S.; worldwide, Safari’s shares are 7, 20, and 66 percent across desktop, phones, and tablets, respectively.)

Given that this is a mobile-dominant play for audience, pushing headlines in Safari could be an even bigger deal than in Chrome in the U.S. And — not to be accused of Apple snobbery, but — publishers, especially premium publishers, are generally more interested in iOS users than Android ones because they tend to better customers — higher income, higher education, more news consumption.

Apple News has turned itself into a very significant source of traffic (if not usually revenue) for publishers, with some ranking it their third-most-important traffic driver behind Google and Facebook. Apple’s most recent muddled stab at it, Apple News+, hasn’t connected with readers or publishers. The most important path for users to reach Apple News now is push notifications, but those come at the individual story level, which can make it hard to promote the “premium” content Apple would like to upsell you to. But if Safari was regularly showing you five or six top headlines, it wouldn’t be too hard for it to throw in a “premium” headline now and then to give you a reason to pay $10 a month.

There are a lot of things to fret about when it comes to news in 2019, but one I’ve become increasingly concerned about the past couple of years is the number of people who are withdrawing from news consumption altogether. Or at least from purposeful news consumption; you can’t be online for all the hours we all are without having news bump into you now and then. But an increasing number of people — their attention sated by the infinite distractions on their phone, their interest dulled by poisonous politics — are just checking out of news. I’m increasingly convinced that, at scale, this is a problem that only two companies — Google and Apple, the people who control the mobile operating systems through which we interact with the world — can truly address. Even if a Safari user never taps on a headline, simply being confronted with them a few times a day or week could have a prophylactic effect, giving them some ambient awareness of the world around them and protecting them at least a bit from misinformation and disinformation.

Apple is a company that likes to consider itself a force for good in the world; this would be a nice way to show it.

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.

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.

Full Fact research manager Amy Sippett reviewed seven studies that have explored the backfire effect and found that “cases where backfire effects were found tended to be particularly contentious topics, or where the factual claim being asked about was ambiguous.” The studies where a backfire effect was not found also tended to be larger than the studies where it was found. Full Fact cautions that most of the research on the backfire effect has been done in the U.S., and “we still need more evidence to understand how fact-checking content can be most effective.”

Our worldview may still affect the extent to which a debunk might be effective. There's also lots more to understand about what makes factchecking content particularly effective, e.g. with tone and language, and the formats we use – and how to ensure they have lasting effects.

— Amy Sippitt (@asippi) March 20, 2019

The current conventional wisdom is that checking backfires. The best research shows that’s completely wrong. https://t.co/aqeTlxjbo5

— Solomon Messing (@SolomonMg) March 20, 2019

2/ This comic strip, for instance, was wildly shared by otherwise smart people after the 2016 election, despite perpetuating bad science: https://t.co/mb5Keq4haU

— Rex Sorgatz (@fimoculous) March 20, 2019

“Instagram can serve as an entry point into the internet’s darkest corners.” Taylor Lorenz, the queen of Instagram reporting, reports on how even the Internet’s well-lit corners contain plenty of darkness:

Instagram is teeming with…conspiracy theories, viral misinformation, and extremist memes, all daisy-chained together via a network of accounts with incredible algorithmic reach and millions of collective followers — many of whom, like Alex [a high school senior who “runs his own Gen Z–focused QAnon Instagram account”], are very young. These accounts intersperse TikTok videos and nostalgia memes with anti-vaccination rhetoric, conspiracy theories about George Soros and the Clinton family, and jokes about killing women, Jews, Muslims, and liberals.

Even just following The Typical Liberal makes you a target for conspiracy theorist follow requests as they try to growth hack their accts to the masses. https://t.co/9smucVfJNo pic.twitter.com/WaT7dLpQUV

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) March 21, 2019

FB/Instagram promised to throttle the reach of anti-vaxx content, but here's an example of how following just one anti-vaxx page prompts their own algo to feed you more. Following one mommy blogger prompted the same result https://t.co/9smucVfJNo pic.twitter.com/ntYM5wcHeA

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) March 21, 2019

Jonathan Albright, director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, did research in 2017 showing how Instagram was a major source of Russian propaganda. But he told Lorenz “he would be unable to carry out similar research today due to the [Instagram’s 2018] API restrictions. ‘The ability for me to do a network analysis or look at how accounts are connected has basically gone away,’ he says.”

Apple is providing funding for media literacy. Ahead of the Monday event where it is expected to announce a streaming TV product and an Apple News premium tier, Apple this week announced that it’s providing funding to three media literacy organizations: The News Literacy Project and Common Sense in the U.S., and Osservatorio Permanente Giovani-Editori in Italy. “Apple’s investment in our work represents the largest corporate contribution in our history,” wrote Alan Miller, founder and CEO of the News Literacy Project, but the actual funding amounts weren’t disclosed. Apple CEO Tim Cook also joined Osservatorio’s international board.

Surprisingly little information is presented in this press release about the media literacy initiative from @apple @commonsense @NewsLitProject @opge What are the goals? What actions will be taken? How much money was granted? Who will benefit? https://t.co/ygECCOqSjW

— Renee Hobbs (@reneehobbs) March 20, 2019

“The eerie absence of viral fakes.” If last week’s New Zealand mosque attacks had followed what has become the standard pattern for terror attacks, it would have been followed by a swarm of faked information — years-old images resurfaced as new, fraudulent social media accounts, and imaginary suspects. But not so much this time, as noted by BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman and Jane Lytvynenko, perhaps because the killer’s own media strategy took up all the crime’s oxygen:

Friday’s attack at two mosques in New Zealand was committed by a shooter who deployed a social media strategy to go with his actions. He live-streamed on Facebook, he posted on Twitter about his plans, and he released a manifesto boobytrapped with references to online subcultures, memes, and influencers designed to trigger backlash — and even more coverage. Just as he stockpiled ammunition and guns, he made sure his phone was charged, his GoPro was broadcasting live, and his trail of breadcrumbs in the form of social media accounts were there to be found…

We don’t see high-profile fakes of the suspect or the victim, and even the reliably vocal conspiracy theorists aren’t touting the usual “this shooting was staged by the government” fake. The absence of a disinformation onslaught stands out. The reason seems to be that the shooter’s media plan was so comprehensive, and his content spread so quickly, that there was little room for fakes to fill the void. We knew who he was immediately because he designed it that way. We had his name, his manifesto, his sickening live-stream as immediate evidence and attribution.

…right now, in the first hours, what we see is a killer who created the equivalent of a multiplatform content strategy to maximize his reach, push his message, and force the media and social platforms to navigate a minefield of coded messages aimed at helping push his agenda even after he was captured or killed. By eliminating the usual vacuum of disinformation, he created a situation where one of the most important jobs of journalists and others is to think about how not to give him the platform he so meticulously planned for.

But note that even the killer’s media plan couldn’t stop all irresponsible misinformation:

Rush Limbaugh suggests Christchurch shootings might be a false flag

"There's an ongoing theory that the shooter himself may in fact be a leftist who writes the manifesto and then goes out and performs the deed purposely to smear his political enemies" https://t.co/3ja4K0wOUj pic.twitter.com/G4CAXczAhf

— Media Matters (@mmfa) March 15, 2019

Apple’s analytics: One year later. Seventeen months ago, at its annual developer conference WWDC, Apple announced that it would finally be launching something many in the podcast industry had desired for a long time: better podcast analytics. Or, more accurately, better audience analytics from the historically impartial steward of the podcast ecosystem that’s still believed to facilitate the majority of all podcast listening. (For now, anyway.)

“It may look obscure,” tweeted Gimlet’s Matt Lieber at the time, “But this is the biggest thing to happen to the podcast business since Serial first went nuclear.”

Apple’s new in-episode analytics rolled out that December, six months after the initial announcement. At multiple points during those opening months, I tried to report on how the new data was impacting the podcast business. But those early inquiries were premature and produced nothing particularly useful. A really smart person would later advise me that these things, like culture shifts, take time, and I’d be better off waiting a year.

So. It’s been almost 12 full months. Did Apple’s new analytics fundamentally change anything for publishers and the podcast business? After checking in with over a dozen sources throughout various corners of the podcast ecosystem, there seems to be a general consensus around the answer: No, not really. But it has brought some positives.

Let’s pause and recall why we’re here for a second. The narrative of the podcast business has long been defined by its crude analytics, relative to other digital media channels. Podcast advertising campaigns are still bought and sold on the basis of the download, a rudimentary metric that more effectively conveys whether an episode has been shipped off to a consumer’s listening app rather than whether that consumer actually heard the episode — and therefore the ad. Compared to the broader digital media environment — where audience behavior is measurable to the nanosecond and where close user targeting is table stakes for advertisers — the podcast analytics universe is virtually prehistoric. (Nevermind, of course, the prevalence of ad fraud, the Google–Facebook–Amazon digital advertising oligopoly, and the undermining of user privacy that afflicts the broader modern digital media environment. Modernity remains desired, with all its attendant tumors.)

That prehistoric perception is a precarious problem, because the industry (broadly speaking) covets brand advertising dollars, which promise greater growth (bigger amounts), stability (longer campaigns), and, in theory, power. (Growth + stability = more capacity to impose will, probably?)

Nowadays, brand advertisers are thought to be accustomed to the taste of granular analytics to measure campaign effectiveness, and conventional wisdom argues that they probably won’t fully commit advertising dollars to podcasting unless publishers can provide them similar levels of measurement granularity — or, at the very least, something markedly better than the rudimentary analytics universe they have now.

The premise and promise of Apple Podcasts’ upgraded analytics, therefore, was a straightforward one: It could take the podcast ecosystem a step closer towards an analytics universe that can engender the same kind of advertiser confidence as any other digital media channel — thus increasing the possibility of brand advertisers meaningfully committing more podcasting dollars.

Of course, there were concerns. Some worried the new analytics would reveal podcast consumption to be less engaged than previously thought, or that it would trigger an apocalyptic, CPM-cratering scenario. Others thought the new data’s revelations would cause considerable shakeups or resizing in the podcast industry, as some publishers learned they weren’t as big and healthy as they thought they were. Others still, like Edison’s Tom Webster, posited that Apple’s new podcast analytics could create a feedback loop in which publishers are more motivated to play towards Apple’s platform, thus further narrowing the community’s focus on the finite world of Apple users — what he called “the optimization trap.” Meanwhile, direct-response advertisers, whose dollars have historically helped grown the podcast ecosystem without granular analytics, began expressing concerns about having to compete with brand advertising dollars in the future. (A totally understandable position.)

When the new analytics layer finally rolled out last December, the feature was described as in beta. And what it offered seemed incremental but nonetheless helpful: Publishers could now see aggregate in-episode listening analytics, which meant that they could now know whether anybody made it to that third midroll or the late-game twist in the narrative. Put it another way: The podcast episode, as distributed through Apple Podcasts, was no longer a “black box.” (User data was kept anonymized, true to Apple’s practices.) During those early months, the general response seemed largely hopeful.

As the months rolled on, those initial concerns…didn’t come to pass. Podcast consumption turned out to be as engaged as everyone thought they would be. CPM rates didn’t crater, suggesting that this particular version of the apocalypse isn’t nigh (for now, at least). There were eye-catching shakeups in various corners of the community, but the impacts felt localized, and while the new analytics may have played some direct role in those shifts, they were more likely the results of broader trends. It remains unclear if Webster’s optimization trap ensnared any significant chunk of publishers, but whatever the case, the Apple Podcasts platform continues to be gamed in other ways. Meanwhile, direct-response advertisers are still expressing concerns about having to compete with brand dollars, most recently at the last IAB Podcast Upfronts, according to this Digiday writeup.

But 12 months in, the legacy and impact of Apple’s new analytics is still very much a work in progress: trending positive, but complicated. The data has certainly proved useful, helping some publishers to better understand things like unlistened downloads, ad skipping, and episode retention rates. But based on the exchanges I’ve had, the general feeling seems to be that the data hasn’t fundamentally changed podcasting’s prehistoric perception among advertisers. Many argued that as long as the podcast business remains pegged to the download, trouble is afoot.

This isn’t to say that publishers weren’t able to secure more brand advertisers over the past year. (As many were quick to assure me.) Rather, some sources argue that until measurement actually shifts away from the download, the podcast ecosystem will never structurally unlock brand advertising dollars. One argued the nature of the problem has only worsened over the past year, given the increase in participation from competing platforms — Google, Pandora, iHeart, Spotify, and so on — that could, with their respective user bases and expertise in data and targeting, potentially end up assuming gatekeeper control between brand advertisers and podcast publishers, should any of them gain real traction against Apple.

Some argued that things can only really change if the industry is able to successfully shift its analytics paradigm towards a “true” listening metric — that is, a universe in which publishers can sell advertising based on actual consumption, not episode delivery. And while there is some optimism around NPR’s Remote Audio Data (RAD) initiative (which, I’m told, might finally be widely deployed in the coming months), the prevailing suspicion is the publisher-led shift won’t come quickly enough. “We’re still pretty far from where we need to be,” one podcasting executive told me.

We remain in the universe of downloads, though, and while we’re here: Most people I spoke with believe that the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s podcast measurement standards were a lot more influential over the past year than the new Apple analytics. “IAB V2 created a more even playing field,” National Public Media’s Bryan Moffett told me. “There’s a common definition of a download, and we can all speak the same language.” There continues to be some debate over the nuances of the standards, but the podcast industry appears to have broadly aligned with the IAB on download measurements, so at least that hurdle seems to have been cleared. (Previously, the concern was the lack of apples-to-apples comparison between how different companies counted downloads.)

Still, as mentioned, there were some concrete ways in which Apple’s in-episode analytics have helped publishers. For one thing, the new data allowed teams to better capture, understand, and convey listener engagement, and that contribution shouldn’t be downplayed. “I think the greatest benefit is knowing that the vast majority of people aren’t skipping the ads on our shows — especially when the hosts do a really engaging job with their reads,” said Alyssa Martino, Macmillan’s associate director of podcasts. “It’s hard to connect that specifically to spends, since our shows sell well, but it’s great to have the data now to back up what we’ve known and said anecdotally for years.”

The new data also helped some publishers to build and improve new advertising products. Dave Shaw, the executive producer of podcasts at Politico, told me that they’ve successfully sold postroll ad slots on the Politico Playbook Audio Briefing after being able to show that listeners stick around to the end. Anna Phelan, the editorial program manager at TED, said the new analytics have helped them evaluate some longer ad experiences that they’ve been integrating into WorkLife with Adam Grant. “We didn’t know how listeners would respond to the length or content, but we felt confident enough in the appeal of the content to take the risk,” Phelan said. “The high consumption rates that we saw, with almost no drop-off during the ad break, reassured us that the approach resonates with our audience and gives us permission to continue to develop other formats in this style.”

There is another way in which Apple’s in-episode analytics unambiguously proved useful — as editorial data. Almost every publisher I contacted talked about how they’ve been able to learn about episodes and experiments that worked (and didn’t), and how the data has helped them feel more confident when shifting around resources or making structural adjustments to shows (cutting or expanding publishing schedules, shortening or lengthening episodes).

Those editorial benefits are important, but ultimately, they’re secondary to our advertising concerns here. And on that front, a good deal (though not all) of the sources I spoke with generally want more from Apple. Some expressed frustration over what feels like slow product iteration on the part of Apple’s new analytics dashboard. “I know it’s still supposed to be a beta, but let’s go already!” one executive told me. Several want Apple to make more data available through an API, so publishers can more effectively integrate listening data — which, despite Apple’s dominance, only represent one chunk of a show’s overall audience at the end of the day — into their central measurement dashboards, thus helping them paint better pictures of their audiences for advertisers to peruse.

There is still, it seems, a long way to go. One year after being rolled out, its impacts seem to be somewhat muted — or, at least, nowhere near as revolutionary as many had hoped. As such, there’s a certain sameness between the way this year is ending and the way it began. Maybe these things take longer than a year — or maybe those changes need to take different shapes. In any case, if there is to be some revolution, it isn’t quite here yet.

In the meantime, the podcast industry will continue to grow in the way that it’s always been growing.

BBC podcasting in 2018 [by Caroline Crampton]. I think of the BBC as a huge, old-fashioned ocean liner. The analogy works a few ways. The ship is beautifully made, and it makes going somewhere really worthwhile — but the journey itself can get a bit rough sometimes. Across the sprawling structure, there are so many different teams on different decks doing different things that they don’t always necessarily know what everyone else above and below is doing. It’s big, and as such, it can be a violent force of momentum and inertia. Even after a decision to change course has been made, the ship will travel quite a lot further in the prior direction before it turns.

It’s this last aspect that I’ve been most conscious of in 2018. Until the spring of last year, the corporation’s involvement in podcasting was largely hands-off, with radio shows repackaged for download and a very small number of original podcast-first commissions that were tied closely to existing formats. Then a shift began, with some new shows appearing that attempted to do something different compared to its existing radio output, such as the drama box set Tracks and the pop culture deep dive series Unpopped.

Part of this shift came from an increasing recognition internally that younger U.K. listeners were choosing to go elsewhere for their audio content — to Apple Music and Spotify, and to the feeds of independent podcasts like My Dad Wrote a Porno and The Receipts. The regulator Ofcom ruled this year in its annual report that the BBC must do “more and more quickly” to reach these audiences if the corporation is to keep up its remit as a national public service broadcaster. The ship was turning, slowly.

Then, all of a sudden, everything seemed to speed up. In March, it was announced that the BBC had appointed its first commissioner for podcasts, Jason Phipps. He started work in May, and over the next few months, we saw more evidence of this internal shift towards more original podcasting. I’ve written a lot about it since I started with Hot Pod in September; from the youth-focused Xtrachat showcase feed to this new political podcast from Scotland, there’s been a lot to say.

The biggest moment for the BBC in 2018 was the launch of the BBC Sounds app at the end of  October. It had been in beta since late June, with mixed reviews from those trying to use it and reports of internal confusion over its mission. Was it an attempt to make an alternative podcatcher, which indexed non-BBC podcasts as a way of luring listeners away from their current tech, or a walled garden of purely BBC content, trying to offer a premium content experience like Spotify or Audible? In a move that felt inevitable for those of us who have been observing the BBC for a while now, they did something that looks a bit like both options — sort of. BBC Sounds consists almost entirely of BBC podcasts, radio shows, playlists, and archive material, with a very small number of independent shows in there too (I could find six, let me know if you can see more). I’m unclear of the long-term rationale behind this hybrid model, but execs seem bullish about the numbers so far, which of course they would.

In one sense, BBC Sounds has been a success already, because it’s given the BBC a way to properly talk about podcasting. A consistent message has been rolled out across all stations and programmes: Presenters who never used to refer to online downloads are now routinely saying “if you want to hear more like this, try X podcast on BBC Sounds.” I remain unconvinced that it will be a silver bullet for the younger audience problem, but I do think it could help to convert some radio listeners who have never tried digital audio before into podcast listeners, which can only be a good thing.

The app itself still has a few glaring omissions to my eyes, chief among them a sharing functionality, although I’m sure that’ll be on the way at some point. I still find it difficult to find shows I know must be there, and the algorithmic recommendations are a bit…hit or miss. The same goes for the first slate of original programming. There are some really interesting and innovative ideas in there, such as the spinoff audio dramas for the TV soap Eastenders, the podcast-spoofing scripted horror serial I wrote about last week, and music documentary series Live Lounge Uncovered, which takes a popular radio session slot and goes deeper on it. Then there’s also some other stuff that I’m less convinced is worth the BBC’s time, such as the supposedly youth-orientated daily news podcast Beyond Today (that I’m still skipping in favor of the old-fashioned news bulletins on the radio), the Duvet Days interview show (which sounds a lot like the many, many other interview shows that already exist), and The Disrupters (yet another interview show focused around entrepreneurship that has yet to wow me with either its guests or approach).

Although on the surface it looks as if it’s full steam ahead for the BBC and podcasts, I’m still picking up some internal confusions. There is now a full-time podcast commissioner up at the top in Phipps, but new podcasts are also being made by existing radio stations as well as by journalists in the local and regional divisions. The messaging about where podcasts come from doesn’t always feel cohesive, and I sense the heat of internal politics and wrangling about who is getting the credit for which podcasts, rather than everyone pulling in the same direction under the same structure and focusing on the external competition instead. There are still unanswered questions about analytics, as well — I understand from various sources that producers don’t get very regular updates about how many people are actually listening to their episodes, and those they do get are on a long lag. There’s also no external verification or publication schedule for these numbers, so when an exec chooses to announce a “record month”, we have nothing to benchmark that against.

At the end of the year, it’s still no clearer to me than at the start what the BBC’s responsibilities are to the rest of the U.K. podcast market. Obviously, their entry into original programming puts them into direct competition with shows made by commercial and independent outlets, but it’s even less obvious if there should be any controls on what they can and can’t make in order to prevent their state-funded advantage cutting others out of the market. I also haven’t seen the BBC use its new podcast commissions to make much meaningful headway on the issue of diversity, which was another problem point in the Ofcom annual report. The vast majority of the new shows we’ve had so far are written and/or hosted by existing BBC talent or suppliers, with all of the existing structural problems around pay and inclusion that brings.

In conclusion: The BBC is fully on board with podcasting now, which is not a phrase I thought I’d be writing back in January. This new direction is likely going to have some really positive outcomes, and a few negative ones too if the corporation doesn’t actively guard against them. There’s a lot we still don’t know.

Tracking:

• Serial’s third season was its biggest ever. The season surpassed 50 million downloads after just two months to become the show’s biggest to date — and all three seasons have brought in 420 million downloads collectively. I dug into the numbers for Vulture.
• Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg’s Pushkin Industries has signed an exclusive representation partnership with Cadence13. According to the press release, the deal was brokered by WME, and it seems that the upcoming Michael Lewis podcast, previously developed at Slate, have followed Gladwell and Weisberg to their new company.
• Voxnest, the parent organization of the hosting platform Spreaker, struck up a distribution partnership with Deezer. The move is being pitched as part of the latter’s international efforts, particularly in Latin America.
• ICYMI: Anchor launched an in-platform advertising marketplace called Anchor Sponsorships, finally giving itself a business model. I gave my analysis in last Thursday’s Insider.
• The Verge published a look at the Apple Podcast charts scam story, and there’s an incremental finding in the mix: The tech giant “monitors its international and domestic charts and relies on a combination of humans and software to detect signs of fraud. It bans shows after they’re caught attempting fraud multiple times, Apple confirmed to The Verge.”
• Just a reminder: The Washington Post’s daily news podcast, Post Reports, debuted yesterday.
• If you, like me, have been keeping an eye on the issue of podcasting and platform bans on hate speech, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard’s Cyberlaw Clinic published a nifty memo on content regulation policy for the podcasting community last week.
• On a related note: “Rep. Steve King appeared on podcast frequented by white nationalists.” (CNN)
• Exactly Right, the new podcast imprint cultivated by My Favorite Murder’s Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark in partnership with Stitcher, officially launched last week with four shows in the starting portfolio.
• Meanwhile, iHeartRadio and Funny or Die are co-producing a podcast featuring Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrell’s fictional anchorman from the wildly popular (and meme-generating) 2004 comedy known as, well, Anchorman. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but you know I’d love to find out how much iHeartRadio paid for the project. One assumes it’s quite a bit.
• Fun fact: Love+Radio has a cameo in Steve McQueen and Gillian Flynn’s Widows, which hit movie theaters last month.

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.

Pandora’s Podcast Genome Project enters the wild. Sydney Pollack had a great line in Michael Clayton where he wags his finger at George Clooney’s down-in-the-dumps fixer protagonist saying: “Fer chrissakes, Michael, you’ve got something everybody wants! You have a niche!”

That line popped into my head when I first heard that Pandora was planning to graft its famed Music Genome Project onto the podcast universe. I mean…it makes sense. If the company was going to start properly distributing podcasts, this would be the way in. It’s great to have a niche, a thing only you have in the world. If you were born with a hammer for an arm, why wouldn’t you smash everything?

This morning, Pandora’s podcast offering, powered by the “Podcast Genome Project,” begins rolling out beta access to select listeners on mobile devices. Chances are you won’t see it: The feature will first appear to about 1 percent of users before expanding out over time. But it’s coming, and you can find the landing page here.

The beta rollout comes shortly after Pandora hired its first podcast chief, the lawyer Lindsay Bowen, formerly of Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard LLP, and about two months after SiriusXM announced that it was going acquire the company. It also comes almost a full calendar year after Roger Lynch, who became Pandora’s CEO in September 2017, first signaled his intent for the streaming music platform to get seriously involved in the podcast ecosystem in an interview with Variety.

That intent doesn’t come out of the blue, of course. As some avid readers might remember, Pandora had deployed two significant experiments with spoken audio in the past: the first being a streaming partnership with Serial and This American Life and the second being an original production, the weekly podcast Questlove Supreme.

“The goal is to do something similar to what we’ve done for music over the years,” Chris Phillips, the company’s chief product officer, told me when we spoke last week. “To provide effortless discovery that’s also personalized.” Something similar, but not the same. Phillips tells me this isn’t a situation where existing technology is simply refashioned to fit a new context: “More like same concept, different tools.”

The Music Genome Project is a fairly well-documented Internet artifact, but to briefly explain the thing: It’s a technologically-facilitated effort to break songs down into their component elements and to then group them to create meaningful clusters of contiguous listening experiences — which allow for the discovery of similar new-to-you songs. Some of these elements are technical (tempo, musical families, etc.); others are more conceptual (genre, “female singer-songwriters,” etc.). Creating those clusters is a mostly automated process, but Pandora also houses a team of musicologists tasked with helping to form better epistemological rubrics. The team is “small but mighty” (or at least that’s how Phillips describes them) and the arrangement illustrates the marriage of technology and human expertise in pursuit of an edge in user experience. Very utopian, but also, concordant with a suspiciously familiar philosophy underpinning the enterprise: the belief that you can quantify and codify something previously considered subjective to unlock some higher level of achievement. (Alternate hed: Moneyball, but for music. Musicball?)

On the surface, the Podcast Genome Project exhibits much the same skeleton. Podcast episodes will be ingested, transcribed, and analyzed for taxonomical elements that are then grouped into discovery clusters. In our conversation, Phillips talked about things like content topics, themes, energy level. (Two examples given: “true crime” and “animated conversations about cooking.”) But the podcast skeleton won’t feature the same heart: There’s no spoken audio equivalent of a small but mighty musicology team pumping blood and wisdom through the whole system. Instead, there will be a more conventional group of human beings tasked with providing curatorial guidance and quality assurance. (So, antibodies.) That absence of an expert “podcastology” team — oh god I’m so sorry — is noteworthy, and I think probably crucial: It may well be the determining factor in whether Pandora’s podcast discovery technology will be revolutionary or merely additive.

Nonetheless, I fancy the notion. I remain unconvinced that podcasting has an existential discovery problem (once again, I’m more of the unpopular opinion that it has an existential marketing problem), but having another vibrant space to learn about new podcasts is undeniably a good thing for both publishers and listeners. Plus, for a podcast publisher, accessing potential new audiences on Pandora would theoretically require little more than plug-and-play. Which is, you know, pretty dope.

Of course, the True Promise is for the listener, and all the unique consumer adventures that an effective Podcast Genome Project can potentially create. The platonic ideal of the Pandora experience is something that sits firmly between the paralyzing freedoms of on-demand and the punishing captivity of linear radio. Take music, for example — something I enjoy tremendously but simply don’t have much bandwidth to do my own research. My life on Spotify is perhaps best described as a complete failure of imagination: the same playlists, the same albums, the Top 40 charts, over and over again. On the other hand, commercial radio is a straight-up hellscape: more ads than music, and when you do get to the tunes, it’s the same ten songs ramming your eardrums, because that’s how you make stars, right? The promise with Pandora is essentially better radio, featuring a scalable human-machine cyborg curator instead of the more specific hit-or-miss taste of a mortal DJ. Or worse, the capitalist imperatives of the music industrial complex.

Forgive the fan fiction, but: In theory, with Pandora, you’d have a situation where a listening session of, say, The Woj Pod leads me to efficiently surface and sample other (weirder) hoops podcasts like Horse and Buckets — ones that I’d otherwise have to plumb the murky depths of Google search results to learn about. (As an aside, one potential metric for discovery gambits like this would be its ability to elevate “weird podcasting.” Note to self: Revisit this idea later.) Upon discovery, I’d be in a position to engage in two follow-ups: First, I can add them to my “collections” — which is Pandora’s way of functioning like a straightforward podcast app — and second, I can give it a little thumbs up to help Pandora learn more about the stuff I like. Table-stakes stuff, really, especially in the age of tech companies knowing more about me than my mother does. But given that podcasting is still an Internet mosquito preserved in amber in so many ways, it’ll be cool to see those standard tools applied to podcasts at scale.

All right, publishers, let’s talk brass tacks. There are a few important things to note.

First of all, there is some trickiness around what will be included in Pandora’s podcast offering, at least for now. The product enters public beta with a series of launch partners: APM, Gimlet, HeadGum, Maximum Fun, NPR, Parcast, PRX+PRI, reVolver, Slate, The New York Times, The Ramsey Network, The Ringer, WNYC Studios, Wondery, and Libsyn, plus This American Life and Serial. Which is to say, Pandora isn’t beginning with an open platform, and inclusion depends on a series of discussions and negotiations. For now, to be distributed through the platform, you need to either be part of the aforementioned list of publishers or be hosted on Libsyn. A spokesperson told me that not all content partners available on Pandora are listed in the press release, and that it’s still a dynamic process at the beginning of the beta launch. Definitely expect more inclusions over time, but for now, I’d check with my hosting provider to see what’s up if I were you.

Another front to watch: monetization. Pandora’s podcast product enters public beta without any advertising tools, which are still being developed with the intent of rolling out sometime next year. How would podcast advertising on Pandora work? The details are still being worked out, I’m told, but Phillips discussed a potential scenario where it comes down to whether a publisher has an advertising deal with the company. In this hypothetical future, if a publisher does have a deal with Pandora, then the platform will strip the midroll ads baked into their episodes and swap it out with whatever podcast advertising experience the company comes up with. (The company is currently building the necessary tools to allow for those strip-and-swaps.) If not, those midrolls will be preserved. Again, this is how advertising might work, and Phillips notes that the company is in close contact with various podcast companies to figure out the best way to execute these relationships.

Publishers will also get enhanced analytics of whatever listens happen on Pandora, including episode completions, audience demographics, and so on. Again, table-stakes stuff, mosquito in amber, etc. etc.

For good measure, I asked about how the platform will handle content policing. (I was thinking, specifically, of The Alex Jones Problem that popped up over the summer.) Phillips acknowledged that it’s a tricky issue. “We try to be thoughtful and balanced,” he said, when it comes to the broader issues of censorship and policies. They do, however, have strong policies around hate speech.

Finally: original content. I’m told that there are no immediate plans for more original Pandora podcasts beyond Questlove Supreme…for now. “Watch this space,” Phillips said when I raised the question. Which, you know, sounds like they’re definitely going to do more stuff at some point in the future. I mean, come on: Spotify’s doing it, Google did it at one point, iHeartMedia literally bought a whole podcast company to keep doing it.

So will Pandora’s Podcast Genome Project end up being a significant boost for the podcast industry? Or will be slow on the take, as Spotify was? Obviously, I have no idea. More broadly, it’s been a long time since I bought stock in any flashy narratives about new “inflection points” for podcasting. Every time I see something that makes a little voice in my head go “this could be big,” I try to take the voice out back and bury it beneath the shed. (It’s just good practice.)

Still, there’s something about Pandora’s Podcast Genome Project that strikes me as particularly interesting, if only because its approach seems genuinely untested within the context of podcasting. As such, it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the thing that could well bring podcasting to a new place, even if I won’t buy into the possibility right this second. But even if it doesn’t, I won’t be blaming Pandora for under-cooking the pursuit. They have a niche, a place in the world. And they’re leaning into it.

Tracking:

• Conan O’Brien’s podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, launches next Monday, and the production has circulated a star-studded guest list preview. Stitcher (née Midroll Media) is handling ad sales, and there’s an interesting connection there: Adam Sachs, the former CEO of Midroll, is now the COO of Team Coco, O’Brien’s production company.
• ICYMI: “Some podcasters are reporting that they are seeing a steep decline in listenership, specifically when using Apple’s Podcast Analytics tool,” per 9to5Mac. Apple is reportedly on it.
• The New Yorker published a pretty chunky piece on podcasts yesterday (titled “How Podcasts Became a Seductive — and Sometimes Slippery — Mode of Storytelling,” or “Binge Listen” in print). It’s a strange one, in that it could be read as a limited analysis of the kinds of shows New Yorker staffers typically listen to. But it also feels emotionally true, especially in its findings of entrepreneurial power (public radio “vow of poverty” be damned) and potential narrative pitfalls. The ending is superb.
• I don’t think I’ve mentioned the actual date yet, but: Post Reports, The Washington Post’s daily news podcast, officially drops December 3. Also, as host Martine Powers noted on Twitter, the team will be “managed, hosted, and majority-produced by women of color.”
• Found this Vulture interview with Homecoming creators Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg, on how the podcast was adapted to television, pretty interesting. Of note: The second season and the TV adaptation were written at the same time, and there will be no third season for the podcast. One swapped out for the other, it seems.
• Surviving Y2K, Dan Taberski’s followup to Missing Richard Simmons, dropped today. It’s really good.
• WNYC Studios tells me the new Jason Reitman film, The Front Runner, about Gary Hart’s 1987 campaign for Democratic presidential nomination that was taken down by a scandal, was apparently directly inspired by a Radiolab episode, “I Don’t Have To Answer That.” Wild.
• Who Weekly’s Lindsay Weber and Bobby Finger with the goods: “The Safe Space of the Celebrity-on-Celebrity Podcast.” Also, whoever gave Weber and Finger a column at Slate should be given a raise.
• You probably saw this, but in case you didn’t, here you go. Think it could’ve been a hundred times better? It’s SNL.

The case for transcription [by Caroline Crampton]. One thing about producing audio for the Internet that a lot of people I talk to really like is the relative tranquility of the whole experience, especially when contrasted with all other forms of online publishing. There’s no comments section, and audiences generally have to explicitly listen to a whole show to hear what’s actually said, rather than being able to Ctrl+F their way to outrage. As one female political podcast host told me, the comparative isolation really “cuts down on the number of drive-by haters.” (The flipside of this isolation, one might say, is podcasting’s infamous problems of shareability and discoverability. You can’t have everything, I suppose.)

But there are plenty of good reasons for expanding the publication of podcast transcripts. Chief among them is accessibility: having text alongside audio means that people who are hard of hearing or with auditory processing issues can still enjoy the show, as can those who aren’t fluent in the original broadcast language. (The regular English translations are how I enjoy the Spanish-language NPR podcast Radio Ambulante, for instance.) Increasing the accessibility of podcasting to these groups is innately the right to do; it’s a moral need as much as it is an audience growth tenet. And then there are the secondary considerations: notably, SEO and archiving. Plus it’s just good practice to preserve your stuff in several forms, as I’m sure the good people at the Preserve This Podcast project would tell you.

For some, transcriptions are baked into the DNA of the podcast’s goal. Amanda McLoughlin and Eric Silver, co-hosts of the Join the Party podcast and founding members of the podcast collective Multitude, told me that transcribing is foundational to their show. “In pre-production for Join the Party, we were designing the show to be more accessible than any other Dungeons & Dragons podcast out there — or any podcast in general,” they said. “We knew we had to have transcripts from Episode 1 to make our episodes accessible to people of all abilities, processing styles, and language backgrounds.” The transcripts were part of a broader effort to open up their subject (in this case, the playing of Dungeons & Dragons) to more people, no matter their background or subject knowledge. To this end, in addition to the transcriptions, they also purposefully introduced LGBTQ+ characters early on, cut down on the pop culture in-jokes, and released versions of their episodes that explained how to play.

However, producing accompanying transcripts isn’t yet a widespread practice in the podcast industry. Bigger publishers mostly don’t provide, or provide them sparingly. Sometimes, if you search long enough, it’s possible to find a listener who has done it for themselves (e.g. these transcripts for Dirty John) — but the majority of podcasts are simply left untranscribed. There’s an obvious reason: Producing transcriptions can be expensive and time consuming. I’ve seen rates of around £1.10 per minute ($1.50) for human transcription services; there are also various paid-for automated options that cost less, although they can be far less reliable. Even formatting and posting the final transcript can be onerous for already overworked producers.

The amount of work involved in producing useful transcripts also depends on the type of show. For narrative formats, it’s theoretically fairly easy to assemble a transcript that effectively serves as proper representation of the final episode, whereas for conversational podcasts with several speakers — in which the enjoyment occasionally comes from its chaotic cross-talk — it can take a lot longer. I’ve found these huge disparities in the show I’ve worked on. For Shedunnit, where the episodes are scripted and sub-20 minutes and the interviews are already transcribed for editing purposes, it’s a matter of a couple of hours — whereas for some of the roundtable shows I produce, creating a complete transcript can take all day, or even longer if I’m adding footnotes and links. When I’m in the middle of trying to untangle all the overtalking and track down precise sources, I can see why there are those who would rather not bother.

McLoughlin and Silver argue that just time and labor resource intensiveness is no reason to skimp on transcribing podcasts. “Accessibility is a right, not a privilege. Making great transcripts involves extra work for podcasters, but doing it demonstrates that you truly care about all of your listeners,” they said. They also pointed me towards this guide they published with the Bello Collective, which details some cheap and even free ways of doing it. (Private YouTube videos are great, the automatic caption service does most of the work for you!)

Counterintuitively, they posited, it’s actually the relative ease of taking a podcast from idea to final episode that has stopped transcripts going mainstream. “We all love that podcasting has such a low bar of entry for creators…Transcripts and other features that can improve accessibility, discovery, and potential audience growth are left by the wayside because they’re not required by your podcast host to launch a show.” They also feel strongly that transcripts are not to be released as paid-for extras to Patreon supporters or similar, writing in the aforementioned guide: “Accessibility should never depend on a listener’s income.”

Personally, I find podcast transcripts a great aid to memory — I frequently use them to track down something I half-remember from an episode before I pass it on to a friend. I think McLoughlin and Silver are right about the accessibility argument, too. Just as it is standard for TV to offer subtitles and cinemas to have signed screenings, maybe it’s about time the podcast industry took responsibility too.

Condé Nast is discontinuing its Snapchat channels for Vogue, Wired and GQ brands, and letting go of employees who were brought in to produce them, according to people familiar with the matter. The publishing company, which is also a Snapchat advertiser, is keeping its Teen Vogue and Self channels. Condé Nast declined to comment.

Snapchat’s user base is officially shrinking. The company again reported a decline in daily users, to 186 million, and said it predicts a decline in the fourth quarter too.
Q1: 191M
Q2: 188M
Q3: 186M
Q4: another decline predicted

— Sarah Frier (@sarahfrier) October 25, 2018

The same thing happened at Twitter (user base decline, revenue beat estimate) and that stock went way up and Snap stock is declining. Why? TWTR user decline is because the company is cleaning up bots, etc. Snap's is because fewer real people are signing in, especially on Android.

— Sarah Frier (@sarahfrier) October 25, 2018

Publishers have been nervous about Snapchat for awhile. The company redesigned its app earlier this year, causing at least one Snapchat Discover publisher partner’s views to drop by “more than half.” An unidentified publisher told Digiday earlier this year: “As we expand into more lucrative and better monetizable platforms, I think Snapchat will become less and less of a priority.”

What are those better and more monetizable platforms, by the way? I guess there’s always Apple News, which got a profile in The New York Times this week. The article is sadly free of juicy tidbits (there were “extensive negotiations on the terms of the interviews”), but at least with Apple News you don’t have to hire/later fire a team to produce customize content for it. And as for the editorial decision making, Apple’s editors handle it:

Now Ms. [Lauren] Kern leads roughly 30 former journalists in Sydney, London, New York and Silicon Valley. They spend their days consuming news across the internet, fielding 100 to 200 pitches a day from publishers, and debating which stories get the top spots.

Ultimately, they select five stories to lead the app, with the top two also displayed in a prominent window to the left of the iPhone home screen. They also curate a magazine-style section of feature stories. The lineup typically shifts five or more times a day, depending on the news. A single editor in London typically chooses the first mix of stories for the East Coast’s morning commute before editors in New York and then Cupertino step in.

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)

Eh, maybe I’m not being generous enough here. In any case, there is one potential positive thing that I’m curious: I wonder how this technology will fit into the Post audio team’s various dabblings with smart-speaker programming.

Meanwhile, elsewhere. I filed two interviews for Vulture last week, one pegged to a beginning and the other pegged to an end.

(1) The first looks at You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth’s fantastic podcast on the secret histories of 20th-century Hollywood, which returned last week. This new season explores Hollywood Babylon, the infamous 1959 book by avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger that traded heavily in scandal and questionable gossip on early Hollywood celebrities, but which has since accrued a complicated legacy in which it is often construed as truth. (A timely topic, indeed.) It’s a pretty long interview, and in addition to discussing the season, Longworth was also kind enough to talk a bit about her process.

(2) The second interview was with Madeleine Baran of In The Dark, who spoke with me soon after the concluding episode of its spectacular sophomore season hit the feeds last week. Baran and her team will continue to cover the case of Curtis Flowers when the next development hits, and they’ll soon be in the hunt for their next story after taking a few weeks off.

I also filed the June update to my Best Podcasts of 2018 (So Far) list. You know what? I like this monthly update format. Good stuff, Vulture.

Maximum Fun broadens its horizons. Last month, Jesse Thorn’s Los Angeles-based podcast network rolled out its first foray into scripted programming. The show is called Bubble, an eight-episode scripted comedy series that — and I’m quoting the pitch I got for it, which is pretty succinct and effective — is “sort of a sci-fi/alternate-universe comedy about a group of friends who live in a town protected by a (literal) bubble.” Having listened to a few episodes, I guess you could also call it a cross between Portlandia and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s super zany, is what I’m saying, and if you like Maximum Fun stuff, you’re probably going to like this: It has all the warm, loving, and fun sensibilities that you’ve come to know and love from the network, plus it features a bunch of the MaxFun extended family like Eliza Skinner and the McElroy Brothers.

Anyway, the thing about Bubble that caught my attention was how it presents a case study of a particular challenge that more podcast companies are — and should be — facing: Let’s say you want to push your creative boundaries. How do you think through the business side of that effort? So, in pursuit of that question, I reached out to Maximum Fun’s managing director Bikram Chatterji, and he was kind enough to write at length. I like this interview quite a bit, as he really lays out a good deal of the strategic considerations he deems to be important when breaking a project like this.

• Like all of our shows, we envision Bubble to be paid for primarily by listeners. [Note: For more on Maximum Fun’s audience-supported model, read this column.] Unlike our other shows, it’s a limited-run series, so we’re not asking for ongoing monthly contributions, but listeners can (and have!) made one-time payments at maximumfun.org/bubble.
• We are talking with some folks about advertising as, midway through the run, we have a solid track record of downloads to pique advertisers’ interest.
• The show is especially suited to some other revenue channels — for instance, merchandise. So we’re exploring those as well.

MaxFun has always been different from other networks in that advertising is a secondary revenue source for us. We don’t have anything against ads — they help our creators get rewarded for their work, and we sincerely believe that if done correctly, they provide our listeners with a service. One thing we’ve always insisted on is having the option to forego ads if something doesn’t feel right — because, frankly, as listeners we have experienced ads that feel wrong (two common problems: they are so frequent as to disrupt the listener experience, or they’re so subtle as to blur the line between what is content and what’s an ad). We know that there are a bunch of smart folks working on the challenge of making advertising work in service of listeners, and we’re paying attention to that; practically, though, our approach has been to not make anything we do contingent on getting ad revenue, because it’s easy to see that forcing us into an uncomfortable position.

You can find Bubble…well, pretty much anywhere you’d find podcasts, aside from those pesky podcast platforms with a big paywall blocking out the sun.

Career Spotlight. You know I love running these. This week, I interviewed Stitcher’s John Asante, who spoke about moving through what seemed to be a “conventional” trajectory, having worked on radio with live elements, and the podcast industry being a producer’s market.

Thanks, John.

Bites:

• Pour one out for Current’s The Pub. The public media trade publication of choice is shuttering its podcast after 113 episodes and 3.5 years. Executive director Julie Drizin announced the move last Friday through a post on the Current website, citing lack of underwriting support as the main reason for the show’s termination. However, Drizin also noted that The Pub’s closing doesn’t necessarily mean that the publication won’t be dabbling podcasts anymore. She leaves open the possibility of future projects, provided they are able to “secure committed funding.”
• Filmspotting: Streaming Video Unit, the Alison Willmore and Matt Singer-led online movie-focused podcast in the Filmspotting family, has concluded its run. The long-running show released its final episode last Tuesday. As a longtime listener, I’m pouring another one out for this one too.
• This is really good: “Using true crime to teach Indigenous history: Reporter Connie Walker on ‘Finding Cleo,'” writes Elon Green for CJR. The CBC podcast wrapped the season last month, and yesterday, host Connie Walker tweeted that the season has now been downloaded over 10.5 million times across its ten episodes.
• James Cridland has a pretty interesting writeup on some RSS feed chicanery that seems to be going on with CastBox.
• What an angle: “Amazon Alexa may be better at selling you things, but Google is more likely to understand you, say ad industry insiders,” via CNBC.
• Tangentially-related, but worth keeping tabs: “Apple Music Just Surpassed Spotify’s U.S. Subscriber Count,” per Digital Music News.