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Quick hits

A Business Insider reporter decided to test whether the Threads algorithm really was rewarding rage bait: "I made a handful of advice-seeking posts that purposely hit on subjects people feel strongly about: tipping, social etiquette, and parenting. Admittedly, my posts also veered into rage bait. I designed them to be so infuriating that people would be compelled to reply and tell me I was an idiot." [Business Insider]

TV deals used to incentivize success by rewarding producers/writers when their shows took off and became popular. These days, deals are structured so new show creators get paid more upfront, but there's far less of a payoff if their series becomes a huge success. [Puck] FROM THE ARTICLE: “For the studios and their profit participants, there are no strikeouts, but there are no home runs, either; just a steady stream of singles and (increasingly rarely) doubles. For these reasons and more, the cost-plus deal is not only the model on which Peak TV was built, it has also become one of the drivers of the industry’s decline.”

There's a whole crop of big TikTok stars who specialize in reviewing restaurant food while eating it in their cars. But the Washington Post's food critic argues this dynamic causes them to miss out on a full representation of the dish as it's meant to be consumed — especially while dining in at the restaurant. [WashPo]

Stripe facilitates upwards of $25 billion in payments within the Creator Economy every year, but it has to stay within the good graces of the major banks in order to continue operating. This could lead it to "beef up efforts, via tech and human reviewers, to weed out the creators that violate [its] policies." In other words this could impact creators that specialize in adult entertainment. [The Information]

Spotify really wants podcasters to start uploading their videos to its platform and is paying them to do so; these are non-exclusive deals, which means many of these podcasters can simply take the video they're already creating for YouTube and cross-post it to Spotify. Easy money! [Bloomberg] Not a surprising move considering how much market share YouTube has gobbled up in the podcast space.

The social media photo dump is coming back into fashion, this time on Instagram: "One precedent for the Instagram dump was the Facebook album of the late two-thousands, a time when online content was less carefully curated because it was still meant for a small audience of real-life friends." [New Yorker] That line certainly brought back memories of 2006-era Simon uploading a Facebook album of 20 photos from a previous night's party.

One of the many reasons I've always opposed pay-to-link legislation is because it'll inevitably leave out individual creators and small publishers while simultaneously funneling huge cash giveaways to media conglomerates, many of which have spent the last 10+ years gutting their newsrooms to pay off their private equity owners. [Nieman Lab]

How Mission Local spun off from UC Berkeley and became a self-sustaining news outlet

One of the great things about being a college journalism major today is that it’s incredibly easy for professors to build their own news sites and allow students to experience every aspect of the publishing process. Not that long ago, journalism students had few avenues for publication outside their college newspaper.

Lydia Chavez took advantage of this dynamic while teaching at UC Berkeley. In 2008, she and her colleagues launched Mission Local, a local news blog that covered San Francisco’s Mission District. It quickly gained traction within the community, and in 2014 Lydia spun it out into its own independent news organization. Today, it’s fully sustained by a mix of large and small donors.

In a recent interview, Lydia walked through how she incorporated the site into her journalism curriculum, why she spun it out from the university, and whether she thinks Mission Local’s model can be replicated across the US:

Chan Zuckerberg gave us a grant of $100,000. I mean, it just came over the transom. We would like to give you some money. And they did that for two years. And that was transformative for us because I saw how important it was to have a really strong data team. And we took that money and hired an excellent data person. And now we have two other people working on data. So we have three people, we do phenomenal projects. And that was really important. So our coverage of COVID drove that donation, and we used that entirely to improve a segment that we were lacking in and that has made us so much better.

More quick hits

The guy behind Your Barefoot Neighbor started posting TikTok videos of stuff he was cooking in 2022. Since then, he's amassed millions of social media followers and self-published two bestselling cookbooks. [Jane Friedman]

There are lots of popular food influencers on TikTok, but the challenge for editors who work at major cookbook publishers is finding the ones who can actually drive sales: "Do this person’s followers expect him or her to cook as opposed to eat?” [Publishers Weekly]

OnlyFans "is probably the most successful UK company founded since DeepMind in 2010, the most significant media platform founded since TikTok, and [the most] dedicated creator economy platform… ever" [Matthew Ball]

Jewish Currents has doubled its paid subscriber base in the past year by appealing to a young subsection of the Jewish diaspora that's extremely skeptical of Israel's policies: "Currents offers sanctuary and a place of instruction for a generation of Jews who love their parents but have split with them." [New Yorker]

For decades, Nielsen was the only trusted source for TV ratings despite many doubts raised about its methodology. But now it's operating in a world where many of the streamers have access to first party audience data, and Nielsen therefore has been forced to change its approach in an effort to retain relevance. [Puck]

ESPN is experimenting with AI-generated recaps of little-watched games. While they don't contain any gross inaccuracies, they're also failing to mention key aspects of the game that would be relevant to anyone interested in its outcome. [The Verge]

Don’t take my newsletter and podcast for granted

At least once a week, I get contacted by an organization that wants to hire me to work with them on a contract basis to improve some aspect of their content operations. I used to make a living with this type of consulting, but now I turn away almost 100% of these inquiries and refer them to someone else. 

Why? Because even though these types of engagements often pay well, they’re also pretty time consuming, which means they would subtract from the amount of time I spend on my newsletter and podcast.

But here’s the thing: the only way I can financially justify turning down this work is if I generate enough revenue through paid subscriptions. After all, I have an obligation to pay the mortgage and put food on my family’s table.

Which is to say that if you want to ensure that my newsletter and podcast remain an ongoing concern, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Seriously, it’s only $100 for a full year, and if you’re using insights from my content to improve your own business, then that $100 pays for itself. And if you use the link below, you get 20% off for the first year:

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