Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

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Let’s jump into it…

Quick hits

There were lots of things wrong with Vice, but I can't help but wonder if it'd be in a slightly better financial condition today if it hadn't made the bizarre decision to launch a cable channel. [FT] The company supposedly had its finger on the pulse of youth culture, so why did it embrace a medium that young people are abandoning in droves?

Jimmy Finkelstein responds to some of the criticisms of the newly-launched The Messenger. [Vanity Fair]

Axios co-founder Jim Vandehei has a mostly optimistic take on how AI will impact media —that low-quality content aggregators will be most hurt and the high quality publishers will be rewarded. This largely aligns with my own views. [Axios]

Lots of podcast studios launched with the ambition of producing big expensive narrative shows, but they're finding the less expensive conversational podcasts are needed to bring in more consistent revenue. [Bloomberg]

Twitter is sending less and less traffic to news orgs. Will this help journalists break their addiction to the platform? [ian bremmer]

I’m looking for more media entrepreneurs to feature in my tech stack series

For the last several weeks I’ve been publishing a new series called The Entrepreneur’s Tech Stack. It consists of interviews with media entrepreneurs about the tools they use to do their jobs. Here are a few examples:

1. The products that Jared Newman, the tech journalist behind Cord Cutter Weekly, can’t do without

2. The products that Jeremy Caplan, founder of the Wonder Tools newsletter, can’t do without

3. The products that Emanuel Cinca, founder of the Stacked Marketer newsletter, can’t do without

I’m looking for the next crop of creators and media entrepreneurs to feature in this series. Each interview is heavily featured in front of my 14,247 newsletter subscribers, and I share it out to my 70,472 social media subscribers. Go here if you’re interested.

How to sell your content business

If you run your own media business, then it’s probably crossed your mind that one day you might want to sell it off for a tidy sum. But who actually buys media businesses, and how do you find those people?

I hosted a Zoom call aimed at answering this question. I assembled a panel of experts that included:

• Terrell Johnson, who sold his website that focused on half marathons

• Joe Pulizzi, who sold the Content Marketing Institute

• Alexis Grant, who’s sold multiple media businesses and founded They Got Acquired

On our call, we discussed topics like:

• How to prep your company for sale

• How to settle on an asking price

• How to find potential buyers

• How to negotiate

It was a very informative session. You can watch the recording in the video embedded below:...