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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We learned the wrong lessons from "the pivot to video"

Many media executives use the phrase “pivot to video” as a shorthand to refer to the industry’s tendencies to chase ephemeral business models that never quite live up to the hype. But as a new study from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism spells out, consumers actually are increasingly relying on digital video for everything ranging from entertainment to news:

Aggregate data from 47 countries shows all the growth in platform news use coming from video or video-led networks such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram while legacy networks such as Facebook are becoming less important. This is particularly the case in countries outside the U.S. and Europe, where video consumption is growing fastest amongst young populations as data charges fall. YouTube is used for news by almost 31% of our global sample weekly, and in countries such as India and South Africa around half our survey sample say use the platform for news.

I feel like many publishers took the wrong lesson from the "pivot to video" fiasco. It wasn't that audiences and advertisers don't value video more than text; the real problem was that most of the publishers weren't doing anything substantive with video —they were just doing the video equivalent of news aggregation. They'd slap together some text with some stock footage and then let the Facebook algorithm take care of the rest. The publishers that actually invested in longform, differentiated video did see returns on that investment.

How TPM pioneered digital journalism

This is a great profile of Josh Marshall, one of the first bloggers to prove that online-only media could have a profound impact on national politics:

It was December 2002. Strom Thurmond, the racist 1948 “Dixiecrat” candidate for president, turned 100 years old, and was astonishingly still a senator. At the birthday party, Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), then the Senate minority leader, declared, “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

The outrage was reported on ABC Radio, to little notice. Marshall, however, kept pushing the story day after day, finding new little tidbits to keep the controversy going, which kept snowballing until Lott yielded to pressure to resign from the Republican leadership.

Did Hollywood actors and writers actually win?

Remember last year when the unions representing both actors and screenwriters shut down all of Hollywood? Who doesn’t? And when those strikes finally ended, the union organizers patted themselves on the back with claims that they’d forced significant concessions from the studios.

But Scott Galloway recently went on The Town podcast with the spicy take that those concessions were a pyrrhic victory and that the strike only accelerated the consumer embrace of digital video;

The way I saw it, [the writers and actors] shouldn’t have been picketing Disney or Burbank, they should be picketing the house of a 17-year-old who is now spending more time on TikTok than on all other media combined. You have 1.7 billion people on TikTok, half of them are creators, so the entire Hollywood community—half a million people work in and around streaming—are competing against 850 million creators on TikTok who are not demanding that people contribute more to their healthcare plan. That is the dynamic here.

Not exactly how I would have phrased it, but it does align with my piece on why YouTube will continue out-competing Hollywood.

How The Ankler converts its free audience into paid subscribers

When Richard Rushfield launched his Hollywood industry newsletter The Ankler in 2017, he ran every aspect of the business, from the content creation to the customer service. Today, The Ankler resembles a more traditional trade magazine, with a seasoned editor-in-chief and multiple staff writers.

But even though Richard took on a small amount of VC investment, most of the company’s growth has been organic, fueled in large part by an extremely successful paid subscription model.

In a recent interview, Richard walked through The Ankler’s comprehensive strategy for converting its free audience into paid. The conversation included:

• How his staff determines which articles to place in front of and behind the paywall

• Why they diversified into multiple newsletters focused on specific niches

• How The Ankler uses teaser content to drive conversions

• Why he’s decided to stay with Substack as The Ankler evolved from a solo newsletter to a fully diversified media company

You can find the interview over here.

The advertisers are coming for Substack

Brands are getting increasingly interested in sponsoring Substack newsletters despite the fact the platform hasn't built out any ad-related tech:

As more writers flock to Substack, the channel is becoming ripe for advertising. More brands are seeking out newsletters with strong follower counts or a unique point of view for possible sponsorships. Many are targeting newsletters that are linked to influencers, mention their products or allow them to reach certain demographics, such as makeup lovers in their 20s and 30s.

Brands are also turning to Substack as a direct messaging tool. Users open Substack newsletters via email, meaning that they interact with content more actively than they might do on Instagram. For brands, that can mean a strong return on their investment.

The shifting role of the book launch

Authors published by major publishing houses are increasingly investing their own money into book promotion:

It’s not only the most successful writers who are looking beyond their publishers for help. Demand for help with promotional activity has grown sharply industry-wide.

“My particular company, we receive many more outreach requests for our services, probably 10 times more than we did 10 years ago,” says Kathie Bennett, founder of Magic Time Literary Publicity … “And we’ve never advertised. Everything that has ever happened is word of mouth, authors telling other authors.”

A new career path for entry level journalists

A few months ago I interviewed Gabe Fleisher, a Georgetown senior who grew his politics newsletter to over 40,000 subscribers.

Fleisher recently graduated from Georgetown and just announced he plans to run his newsletter full-time:

13 years later, I’m proud to have gone from writing for one subscriber (hi, mom!) to nearly 40,000. It turns out that that model of understandable, non-partisan reporting and analysis was helpful for all kinds of people: educators who use the newsletter as a teaching tool in their classrooms, congressional staffers who use it to brief their bosses, media executives who use it to catch up on the day’s news, Roy Wood, Jr., Doug Emhoff, and everyone in between.

And I’m just not ready to stop. So, I’m excited to share that my next step after graduation will be working on Wake Up To Politics full-time and pursuing avenues for expansion. Starting today, the newsletter is moving to a new home, Substack. I will still be independent as ever — no ads, no corporate sponsors, fueled only by your support — but I can’t wait to start using the many tools Substack offers (including audio and video options) to expand on the core newsletter.

It's pretty cool that we now operate in a media environment where a kid can graduate college and immediately begin a career as an independent journalist. When I graduated college in 2006, this would have been pretty much unthinkable.

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. )

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