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

This is bizarre but also kind of cool: a large hospital system in New York is launching its own studio that will produce both scripted and unscripted content. [Hollywood Reporter] What’s the business logic behind this? Well, the well-known hospitals like the Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and Johns Hopkins not only attract the world’s best researchers and doctors, but they also bring in large donations and grants to fund their research. Brand clout goes a long way in the medical field.

Many cities across the globe are now attracting their own meme accounts that satirize local trends and subcultures. [New Yorker]

This is a great breakdown of how an outdoor adventure YouTuber structures and produces his videos. [Digital Spaghetti]

Legacy media brands rarely die. Instead, they're taken over by spammy marketers who then run AI-generated content farms that squeeze out all remaining SEO and brand juice from the outlet. Probably a major challenge for tech platforms moving forward is figuring out a way to quickly identify these zombie outlets so their article distribution can be cut off before it reaches unaware news consumers. [Wired]

Chinese factory owners are trying to create viral humor videos to attract foreign manufacturing clients. [Rest of World]

Libertarian tech executives have built their own media ecosystem that they use to push back against what they perceive as anti-tech news outlets and politicians. [Business Insider] I’ve seen a lot of claims that this undermines the kind of objective journalism that keeps large tech companies accountable, but I think this argument suffers from a misunderstanding of how journalism is done. Most tech companies have never made their CEOs available for interviews when a story is adversarial; instead, journalists often cultivate sources both within and outside the companies to get their stories. Theranos wasn’t taken down by an interview with Elizabeth Holmes, but rather from insiders who leaked damning information to the Wall Street Journal.

How the Geekout newsletter grew to 30,000 subscribers

Matt Navarra doesn’t have any secret growth hacks for Geekout, his newsletter geared toward marketers. He doesn’t spend massive amounts of money on paid acquisition or publish long Twitter threads. He doesn’t use a referral program.

Instead, he’s just incredibly consistent in curating valuable information, both for the newsletter and his social media accounts. This consistency has made him a go-to expert for every new development in the social media space, so much so that he regularly appears on mainstream news programs to comment on the world’s largest tech platforms.

In a recent interview, Matt walked through his weekly process for finding the most newsworthy information and packaging it in such a way that helps him grow his audience. The discussion touched on several topics, including how he’s often the first to discover new social media features, how he compiles the newsletter each week, how he optimizes each edition to drive people to the web version so it’s easier to share, and why he almost always agrees to interview requests from journalists:

It came about because I was getting told by people who followed me already on Twitter that they wanted me to curate everything that I was sharing all week long. I was posting so much content and news and information and leaks about social media platforms that, as much as people found that useful, it required them to keep checking my Twitter account, which wasn't always the most convenient thing. So I toyed with the idea of launching a newsletter, but I realized that it was going to take a lot of time to pull it all together every week, and that was going to have to somehow be monetized, because otherwise I couldn’t justify it since my business was really geared around consultancy.

More quick hits

A brief Apple glitch temporarily forced every newsletter writer to see their actual open rate — not the one that's padded by Apple Mail's privacy features — and it was terrifying. [Substack Writers]

We're already used to seeing betting markets plastered across all of our sports media. Are we about to see the same thing happen with political news websites? [Nieman Lab]

The podcast industry is in growth mode again as the largest shows continue to sign record-breaking deals. I think the WSJ headline — “A Few Blockbuster Podcasts Are Making All the Money” — is a little hyperbolic and isn't really supported within the article. While the largest shows are generating the bulk of podcast advertising revenue, there are lots of podcasts in the long tail that are seeing success with subscriptions and ancillary business models. [WSJ]

Content creators that specializes in left wing meme content saw a huge surge in engagement after Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris. [NYT]

TikTok seems to be the first major tech platform to prove that social shopping can work in the US. Seems like a major revenue opportunity for creators. [Business Insider] I think the danger TikTok faces is that it could end up alienating users who grow tired of commerce videos being force fed into their main feed. There are already people complaining that the “for you” page has become less relevant with the introduction of TikTok shopping.

After all the hand wringing over whether Hollywood's been completely taken over by big IP franchises, indie films are seeing a sudden surge in ticket sales. [Bloomberg]

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. )

Want a daily dose of media industry news?

I only send this newsletter out twice a week, but I curate industry news on a daily basis. Follow me on one of these social platforms if you want your daily fix:

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