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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Freelance journalism doesn’t pay very well

It's getting increasingly impossible to make a living as a freelance journalist — or at least one who only writes for traditional media outlets:

Typically, freelance journalists are paid around $0.50 to $1 a word, they told Digiday. But that rate hasn’t changed, despite rising inflation and cost of living. (The U.S. inflation rate from January 2020 to January 2024 increased by 22%, according to inflation tracker Truflation.)

“If I was paid $1,000 for a story in January 2020, I should be making almost $1,200 for that same story today. But I’m not. Rates aren’t rising at all to keep up with inflation,” said Kate Morgan, who has written for publications including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Her rates haven’t changed since she became a freelancer in 2015, she said.

Why print magazines are more resilient to digital disruption

Print magazines have been, on average, more resilient to digital disruption than newspapers, probably for the same reason that print books continue to endure: they're often consumed in a lean-back experience that's conducive to more intense concentration:

2021 saw the launch of 122 new print magazines in the United States alone. The number is smaller than some previous years, and this perhaps reflects the generally shrinking market for print media.

But given the accepted wisdom, it is remarkable there are any new periodicals at all.

In Australia, print magazines sales have risen 4.1% in 2023 and previously axed publications – such as Girlfriend – are now receiving one-off, nostalgic returns to print.

The market for print magazines isn’t exactly thriving. But they haven’t vanished as quickly as anticipated.

Newspapers, on the other hand, can be more easily consumed on a laptop or phone, reducing the utility of the print product.

Speaking of magazines, The New Yorker published a good piece in 2021 on their cultural impact throughout history:

At the peak of his buzzy celebrity, F. Scott Fitzgerald fed his bathtub-drain-like need for cash by writing short stories for The Saturday Evening Post, which paid him the contemporary equivalent of millions upon millions of dollars. Hemingway, too, wrote widely for magazines, and, as the Second World War wound down, struck an agreement to produce reports from Europe for Collier’s, a popular general-interest title. He was paid, by the most conservative equivalence, about thirteen dollars a word in today’s money, and, at the end of his excursions, asked to be reimbursed for the modern equivalent of about two hundred thousand dollars in expenses—including rides around Paris in horse-drawn carriages, which he described as essential to his work.

I’m looking for more media entrepreneurs to feature on my newsletter and podcast

One of the things I really pride myself on is that I don’t just focus this newsletter on covering the handful of mainstream media companies that every other industry outlet features. Instead, I go the extra mile to find and interview media entrepreneurs who have been quietly killing it behind the scenes. In most cases, the operators I feature have completely bootstrapped their outlets.

In that vein, I’m looking for even more entrepreneurs to feature. Specifically, I’m looking for people succeeding in these areas:

• Niche news sites

• Video channels like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels

• Podcasts

• Newsletters

• Affiliate/ecommerce

Interested in speaking to me? You can find my contact info over here. (please don’t simply hit reply to this newsletter because that’ll go to a different email address. )

The resurgence of local news

Poynter published a good overview of encouraging signs we’re seeing in the local news space as promising startups sprout up all across the country:

A 2021 report from Project Oasis, a collaborative effort charting the progress of local digital news publishers, found 704 digital-native local news outlets in the United States and Canada — a steep increase from a 2010 study that identified only 120 in total.

Membership at LION Publishers, a group for local independent online news publishers, has exploded in recent years. From the end of 2020 to September 2023, LION’s membership grew from 339 to 483 members, said Lisa Heyamoto, the organization’s director of programming for member education.

Amazon is being overrun with AI-generated slop

Wired covered the rise of scammy, AI-generated books that are tricking Amazon’s customers into buying them:

AI-generated summaries sold as ebooks have been “dramatically increasing in number, says publishing industry expert Jane Friedman—who was herself the target of a different AI-generated book scheme. That’s despite Amazon in September limiting authors to uploading a maximum of three books to its store each day. “It's common right now for a nonfiction author to celebrate the launch of their book, then within a few days discover one of these summaries for sale.”

The platforms need to figure out a better way to filter for AI-generated slop or else they're just going to be overrun with it in the coming years. Sure, imitating an already-existing book is a definite scam and it's an easy decision for Amazon to remove it, but my guess is the vast majority of AI-generated books aren't directly copying anyone else, yet they're still disappointing millions of unsuspecting buyers.

Want to pick my brain on your content strategy?

Are you contemplating a new content strategy and want someone to give you feedback? I’ve had more and more of my readers reach out and request consulting calls so they can pick my brain on a variety of issues including platform optimization, content strategy, and monetization.

You can now book a call with me directly through Substack. Use the link below to grab a time on my calendar:

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How Madison Avenue fueled the rise of programmatic ad tech

I’ve written repeatedly on this newsletter about how the rise of programmatic ad tech has been bad for both publishers and advertisers. One thing I always wondered: why did it get embraced in the first place?

Well, I was reading Digiday’s oral history of online advertising when I came across this interesting tidbit: programmatic advertising became popular, in part, because ad agencies were able to increase their profit margins considerably by pushing their clients onto it:

Through agency trading desks and the new wave of ad tech, agencies could rejuvenate their profit margins from single figures to as much as 20%, according to Triscari. “What they were doing was promoting this new channel and still be financially viable to their shareholders,” he adds.

Zach Rodgers, a journalist who has extensively covered this space, further explains how such entities operated. “Trading desks were effectively ad networks that sat inside the agency,” he says. “So, just like an ad network would use a DSP to buy ad impressions on an exchange, a Xaxis, Vivaki, or Accuen would then use them to acquire media for their clients.”

So that's why we had widespread embrace of a technology that was ultimately destructive to publishers and didn't produce much ROI for brands.

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