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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Quick hits

This is a cool story about several sports talk radio hosts who launched their own podcast after their station got shut down by the media conglomerate that owned it: "We were just going to take what we used to do on the radio, make it a podcast, sell some sponsors, and have it ready at the same time every day. Now, instead of people turning on their AM radio, they're just getting it on their Bluetooth." [The Score]

For decades, actors were subjected to traditional press tours whenever they had a new movie to promote. Now, the studios are increasingly asking those same actors to create internet meme content in the hope that it'll go viral in the lead-up to a film release. [Digiday]

Hollywood studios "used to develop most movies internally and cast filmmakers and stars. But they’ve largely stopped doing that on non-franchise projects. Instead, 90 percent of the films that got made had talent attached when the studio/streamer became involved." [Puck]

"By today’s standards of interminable podcast discussions, a nearly three-hour recording isn’t even particularly notable. Increasingly, podcasters are pushing the outer limits of episode length while stress testing the endurance of their audiences. Popular podcast gabfests can now run on for half a workday or longer." [Bloomberg]

The Threads algorithm regularly takes posts from small accounts and then boosts them to a huge audience via the For You page. This means that any post that goes even remotely viral will quickly start attracting comments from random people accusing you of "engagement bait," regardless of whether that was your original intention. [Weird I/O]

An employee at FT Strategies, the consulting arm of the Financial Times, says that general news, in the current economic environment, is an unprofitable endeavor: “If you’re in general news, you’re probably not making money anymore from your core product. The sector is at the point of marginal, if not negative, profitability generally.” [Press Gazette] This is why you keep hearing quips like "The New York Times is a gaming and recipes company that also happens to produce news." While I think that's a bit reductive — part of the reason its gaming and recipe properties are so popular is because it has such a strong news brand — it is true that general news outlets will struggle to generate much ad revenue in a world where advertisers are shying away from hard news content. This makes them extra reliant on reader revenue, but it can be hard to compete on that front when there’s so much general news available for free.

The former editor of WSJ's shuttered magazine has been hired by the art auction house Sotheby's to relaunch its glossy magazine: "The aim is to reach the auction house’s clients—and to attract new ones." [Puck]

A lot of other cable news personalities are going to look at Mehdi Hasan's success at building a $3 million subscription business in only four months and wonder if it's worth it to them to make the jump to independent media. [WashPo]

How The Future Party collaborates with the world's largest brands to host events

Over the past few years, nearly every major media outlet has ramped up its live events offerings in an effort to diversify revenues, but The Future Party has a distinct advantage over most of its competitors; it actually started as an LA events company all the way back in 2011 and only expanded into media several years later.

Today, The Future Party operates a newsletter that’s geared toward creative industry professionals and has over 200,000 subscribers, but it still generates most of its revenue from working with large brands to put on invite-only gatherings, often adjacent to much larger events like SXSW, Art Basel, and Coachella.

In a recent interview, co-founder Boye Akolade walked me through every aspect of The Future Party’s events strategy, including how it pitches brands, its method for curating guest lists, what KPIs clients often look for, and why the company prefers free, sponsored events instead of charging for admission:

It's always good to have a videographer and a photographer there. A videographer is not completely important. A photographer is completely important because lo-fi content is great, right? So we can take our iPhones and just put it on stories or create a reel. And that's great for video content. To me, the biggest and best asset, greater than PR, greater than IG, whatever, is being able to take those three to four key photos and put them in a deck and say we did this. As weird as it sounds, the case study is gold because we can now put it in our little archive of case studies and it's much easier now to win that money if it's a platform event, win that business if we're working with a branded company, or market to a ticketed audience because we have the proof, we have the receipts.

More quick hits

Hollywood studios are starting to place big bets on "faith-based entertainment" — basically films and TV series that are tied to Christian teachings. One of the biggest theatrical hits last summer, The Sound of Freedom, fit into this category. [WSJ] "The people behind this movement—call it the Heartlandia wave—claim to represent a vast but underserved audience turned off by the dystopian dramas and grim antiheroes that loom large in pop culture."

ESPN's transition into streaming will be one of the most high stakes moves in both media and sports history. It's benefited more from the cable bundle than just about any other company, and a botched app launch could threaten billions of dollars in revenue for both it and the sports leagues it partners with. [Hollywood Reporter]

For years, The Black List has provided a platform for screenwriters to get their unproduced scripts noticed by Hollywood producers. Now its founder wants to do the same for unpublished novelists who don't have literary agents. [NYT]

The Business of Fashion, which started out as a blog in 2007, now has over 100,000 paying subscribers. Some pay as much as $150 a month for the most premium tier. [CJR]

Outside Interactive has become an interesting media company to watch. It acquired/launched over a dozen verticals in the outdoor enthusiast space and drove synergies through a bundled subscription. Now it's increasingly moving into tech by launching/acquiring apps that cater to outdoor enthusiasts. [Axios]

The irony of Google's generative AI is that it may be killing off the very high quality content websites it relies on to fuel its answers. Unlike many product recommendation outlets, Reviewed actually performed rigorous testing on products, and now it's gone. How long will it be before Google's LLM is being trained solely on low-quality articles that do nothing but aggregate reviews from other websites? [Posting Nexus]

Sony has historically been one of the few major studios that didn't operate its own streaming service, instead choosing to license its content to the highest bidder. But in 2021 it purchased the anime streaming service Crunchyroll, and it's now doubling down on producing more anime content — over 200 shows in the last year. [FT] “It has become a movement. Some of our research shows that there are over 800mn anime fans globally, and there is going to be a billion over the next few years.”

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