 |
Tuesday, August 8, 2017
 |
The podcast business playbook: What’s the best way for a podcast studio to raise money?Plus: How you become a podcast columnist, Radiotopia’s latest trick, Preet Bharara’s new podcast. By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
The Ringer / Sean Fennessey
The Ringer has left Medium and is now officially hosted on Vox →
“Our site has a new home, hosted on Vox Media's content management system, better known to those in the industry as Chorus.” The move was announced in May.
Buzzfeed / Craig Silverman, Jane Lytvynenko, Lam Thuy Vo, Jeremy Singer-Vine
How ideologues, opportunists, growth hackers, and internet marketers built a new universe of online partisan news →
“The interviews and data reveal a large, often interconnected world where Facebook plays kingmaker as much as it crushes dreams, where anger and stoking partisan hatred are core strategies on the right and left, and where the biggest players are working to secure dominance by partnering with, or acquiring, competitors and launching new sites to flood the market so new players can't gain a foothold.”
Billy Penn
Shannon Wink is now one of two women 30-or-younger leading Spirited Media newsrooms →
“Wink joins The Incline's Lexi Belculfine as two of the youngest female newsroom editors in major cities anywhere in the country. In 2017, Spirited Media added a third local site, Denverite, to the team, with plans to continue to grow the mobile-first local strategy into several markets in the coming years.”
Wall Street Journal / Lukas I. Alpert
YouTube network the Young Turks plans to double its newsroom size with $20 million in fundraising →
“Young Turks — which threw it support behind the candidacy of Bernie Sanders and has been sharply critical of Donald Trump's presidency — has enjoyed strong growth over the past year across many of its channels. Its primary channel saw 14% growth in subscribers and a 30% increase in views on YouTube compared to July 2016, according to Open Slate Data.”
The Atlantic / Franklin Foer
How the pursuit of digital readership broke the New Republic →
“We felt as if we carried the hopes of journalism, which was yearning for a dignified solution to all that ailed it. The effort was so grand as to be intoxicating. We blithely dismissed anyone who warned of how our little experiment might collapse onto itself—how instead of providing a model of a technologist rescuing journalism, we could become an object lesson in the dangers of journalism's ever greater reliance on Silicon Valley.”
AdWeek / David Cohen
Twitter commissioned studies by Nielsen to look at the impact of adding Twitter ads to TV campaigns →
“Despite inking livestreaming pact after livestreaming pact, Twitter is actually a friend to television when it comes to extending the reach of ad campaigns on that medium.”
Medium / Alex Laughlin
The results are in from an anonymous salary sharing project for audio producers →
“I realized that that radical transparency didn't translate to every corner of the business. Most of the companies I was interested in were either so new that they didn't have Glassdoor profiles, or they were audio production teams housed within larger media organization — so none of the numbers were standardized.”
Axios / Sara Fischer
Snap’s first original series, Good Luck America, grew 45% in 2 seasons →
“This is the first time Snapchat has released an episode average for a completed season of its own content. Of course, Snapchat uses its own measurement techniques that are different from television ratings (they measure a view as a video being opened), so a direct comparison cannot be made to TV, but the success of ‘Good Luck America’ as well as the launch of a daily news program on the app, demonstrate a major shift in how TV news will transition to mobile in the digital age.”
The Hollywood Reporter / Kim Masters
Time Warner does not plan to sell CNN, an incoming executive says →
“In his first interview since he was named as the executive to lead Time Warner — which will soon have a new name — Stankey tells The Hollywood Reporter that he considers news to be much like sports (which Time Warner delivers though its Turner Broadcasting channels) in terms of providing content that is urgent and watchable on a variety of devices. ‘It would be a strategically missed opportunity if we weren't in that business,’ he says.”
Recode / Cory Haik
Cory Haik: We’re in the early stages of a visual revolution in journalism →
“Viewers want to immerse themselves in a visual story that makes use of the full range of creative techniques afforded by the tiny little computer in their hand that's connected to the internet. And what that looks like is not exactly a ‘video’ — that's a new form of journalism.”