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

Cable news anchor salaries are insane. Does Wolf Blitzer really have a large enough fanbase to justify $15 million a year? You could hire 150 journalists at $100,000 annual salaries for that same amount. [The Wrap]

This is a great deep dive into the rise and fall of Paramount. [Bloomberg]

With UMG removing its entire music library from TikTok, YouTube smells blood in the water and is making Shorts even better at promoting the work of music artists. [TechCrunch]

An interesting look at a podcast that obsessively researched each episode's topic and built a fervent fanbase as a result. [Cal Newport]

The head of NPR's podcast division: "I was really surprised to see that the overlap between podcast and broadcast is almost in single digits now. These audiences are really different. There’s a similar, almost generational gap in age now between the podcast and broadcast audiences." [Current]

DotDash continues to prove that it's really good at creating consumer-friendly content and monetizing it with ads. It's proof of concept that publishers can thrive with advertising alone, provided that they're operating in the right niches. [Mediapost]

Hollywood studios have had a pretty spotty history when it comes to developing their own games, but now they're all taking another stab at it. [Hollywood Reporter]

The NFL has been aggressively partnering with popular creators in order to attract a younger audience, and it seems to be paying off so far. [Rolling Stone]

New York Times reporters used to clamor to get their stories on the front page of the print paper. Today, they're much more likely to covet getting their work featured in its morning newsletter or daily podcast. [Vanity Fair]

Apparently, some indie music artists are seeing a huge surge in viewership on TikTok as a result of UMG pulling its catalog off the platform. [Passionfruit]

"The number of sports streaming options makes the balkanized sports viewing experience even more incomprehensible and annoying. In an effort to solve customers’ frustration, we’ve only made it more frustrating." [Puck] I'm not a sports watcher, but I've always found it amazing how many hoops you have to jump through just to watch all the games from a single sports league.

Why did Spotify lay off a guy who ran a website that was beloved by the platform's most hardcore users? Seems shortsighted. [TechCrunch]

"I have absolute confidence that by August we would have been profitable. If we raised the $20 million, we would have been absolutely profitable." [Axios] The Messenger reportedly brought in a grand total of $3 million during its entire existence. We're expected to believe that by August it would have increased its monthly revenue by a factor of 10?

"What Forbes understood earlier than most is that its days of deriving value from its publishing had mostly passed, and it had moved instead into a phase where publishing was just one spoke of the brand, alongside events, honorifics, licensing and awards. This is the future for many magazine brands." [The Rebooting]

How Riad Chikhani built GAMURS Group, one of the largest gaming media companies in the world

By the time Riad Chikhani was 16 years old, he had already built a hugely successful online community for gamers and then sold it for a healthy sum. Two years later, he founded the company that would eventually become GAMURS Group, and while it took far longer to gain traction, it eventually grew into one of the largest gaming media companies in the world, with outlets that include Dot Esports, Gamepur, and Gamer Journalist.

In my interview with Riad, we talked about his early business pivots, why he invested big in esports, and how he drives synergies between 17 different publications.

Watch our conversation in the interview embedded below:

If video embeds don’t work in your inbox, then watch it over here.

If you want to listen to an audio version of this interview, subscribe to The Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts: [Apple] [Spotify] [Amazon Music]

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. )

More local news outlets should lean into crowdsourcing

Longtime readers of this newsletter know that I’m probably more optimistic than the average person about the future of media, mostly because I subscribe to a very broad definition of what’s considered “media.” Most mainstream news outlets are extremely myopic and narrow in how they define media, hence why we see ridiculous claims that it’s headed for an “extinction” event.

The media pessimists are especially dour on the state of local news, and not for entirely unfounded reasons. There’s been a definite contraction in the space for the last 15 years, both in terms of the number of reporting jobs and the breadth of coverage. It’s hard to look at the number of local government meetings that now go uncovered by journalists and come away with the view that something important hasn’t been lost.

But still, I think the conversation around the state of local news is too pessimistic, mostly because it often ignores all the media startups that are rushing to fill in the gaps. In just the last few years alone, hundreds of small outlets have sprouted up to pick up the slack left by retrenched legacy media, and they’re building sustainable revenue models that are resilient to the vicissitudes of Big Tech. 

As the industry rebuilds itself from the ground up, we’re seeing some consistent trends in how these outlets structure themselves:

• They’re hyper-focused on local news: Gone are the days when local outlets would waste resources on syndicating national columns, reviewing movies, or employing Capitol Hill reporters. If there isn’t a strong local tie-in, they don’t bother covering it.

• They’re owned and operated locally:  Usually these outlets are launched by a longtime community member who grew frustrated with shrinking news coverage and decided to do something about it.

• They’re extremely lean: These outlets don’t waste money on expensive offices or printing presses. Most get by with just a handful of reporters and then maybe one or two business operators.

I’ve interviewed dozens of local news entrepreneurs for my newsletter and podcast, and nearly every single one fits the above description.  But there’s a fourth approach that I think nearly every local media outlet should optimize for: audience crowdsourcing.

What do I mean by that? Well, local audiences, because of their geographic proximity to each other, are uniquely primed to serve as the eyes and ears for any enterprising news team, and local media outlets should set up feedback loops that prime audiences into supplying those outlets with fresh news.

To give you a better understanding of what I mean, I’ll give you two examples of local news outlets that do this exceptionally well...