In the last five years, newsletters have become essential for news outlets, writers, and anyone who wants to get their content out there. Some companies, like The Wall Street Journal, have dozens of newsletters; others, like The Skimm, base their whole business on one email. As information overload grows, newsletters have gained success. Emails synthesize […]
What Facebook’s latest attempt to court the media means
Just after Apple revealed its grand plan to ‘save’ the media with its News+ offering, Facebook returns to the fold. This week, The Wall Street Journal reported the tech company is in conversations with publishers to relaunch yet another Facebook News Tab. The Menlo Park-based company will pay publishers as much as $3 million to […]
The Internet has few winners; local papers are not them
The death of local journalism has made the news so many times it is no longer remarkable. Stories have gone national. Some people may read the local paper from time to time, but do they ever check their website? Moreover, if they do, do they pay for it? While a handful of newspapers have figured […]
Journalism is still male, but the tide is turning
In college, women fill journalism classes, while men remain a minority. But a few years later, when those students enter the workforce, the situation shifts. Men dominate newsrooms, outnumbering women on almost all occasions. Although the gap has decreased in recent years, women still lag in journalism—they represent only 41.7% of newsroom employees, according to […]
Luminary dreams of becoming the Netflix of podcasting
On a slow morning in the New York subway, you can read through the handful of billboards that decorate the wagon. This past month, we could only see the podcast startup Luminary’s advertising, covering New York City’s subways. With its bright yellow banners and its enticing slogan (“Original podcasts with original ideas for original people,”) […]
What the almost 3,000 journalism job cuts tell us about the media industry
The US economy is growing, companies are hiring, and the unemployment rate is the lowest since 1969—a meager 3.6%. It’s a party for almost everyone, except for journalists. In the first half of 2019, nearly 3,000 people were let go from newsrooms all over the country, traditional and digital media alike. The scarcity of revenues, […]
The Spanish-language podcast Radio Ambulante shows us a path to success
In 2012, the podcast industry was taking off in the United States, although mainly in English. It was hard to find long-form podcasts in what already was the second most spoken language in the country—Spanish— until Radio Ambulante came along. Radio Ambulante, a weekly 30-60 minute podcast in Spanish covering Latin American stories, has garnered […]
No more subscriptions, please
In 2019, subscriptions are everywhere. If you want to read the news, you may subscribe to a couple of outlets, like The New York Times and The New Yorker. If you are watching a show, you’ll get one or two streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu. And if you listen to music, you’ll probably have […]
The most critical success of the one-year-old GDPR is awareness
More than a year ago, the EU approved the most stringent online privacy regulation yet—the GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation. The GDPR seeks to protect the data of EU citizens and restrict how businesses can access information. However, as other EU regulations, the GDPR is still slowly been adopted by member states and thus […]
How The Guardian capitalized its membership model
For most digital news outlets, advertisements are the business’ bedrock and for some others, paywalls (and thus, subscriptions) have become a significant revenue source. Yet for a few, donations through membership models, fuel the newsrooms. The Guardian belongs to this last group of outlets and has recently proved that memberships can be profitable—members donate whatever […]
