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The daily oss Oh, now it makes sense. Good morning, and welcome to a very special episode of the TDA podcast. It's Wednesday, the twelfth of March. I'm Sam, I'm Zara, and today's a huge milestone for us. TDA is turning eight years old.
Yay, Happy birthday to us.
Happy birthday to us.
I'm exciting.
So by school metrics, I think we're in about year two, year three.
Clearly it's been a long time since either of us were in school.
Yeah, we're starting to grow up, we're getting out, we're finding our feet a bit more, we're discovering who we are. Haven't hit puberty yet, so we're still we're still okay, but stay with us for that. It's been a long time.
It has been a long time. And you know, eight years today since we sat in a cafe said hey, why don't we give you this thing a shot? Little did we know where we would go.
And that was twenty nine and twenty two days ago. But we did actually quit our jobs until February of twenty twenty one, and that was when we started the podcast and newsletters. So that was one four hundred and ninety nine days ago. But that's a lot of time, and so today we thought we'd do something a little bit different.
Yeah, we wanted to take this opportunity. You know, we've both been told we potentially don't take enough time to reflect on the journey that we've beat on, and so we wanted to take this opportunity to do just that and to reflect on the eight lessons that we've learned over the last eight years.
I was thinking when writing this script with you about those early days of recording the podcast. The first couple of episodes, listenership of about four of which our mums were two of the four. We were under a washing line in my little sharehouse, covered in a doner to make it sound proof. Today we're in an awesome studio. We've got a team around us building a really epic media company telling the stories of young Australians for millions of people every month. So what's the first lesson?
Okay, so lesson number one, and I don't think we could have started this anywhere else, is that trust needs to be earned, not expected.
Amen.
This is such a big one. I mean it's important at any point, but especially in today's media landscape already. When we started TDA back in twenty seventeen, we suspected there was a big trust deficit, and since that time it's just gotten worse. People are becoming increasingly skeptical, especially as we see the rise in social media and influencers and everything that comes with that about new sources and
about where they're getting their information from. And so we realized pretty early on that we couldn't just expect people to trust us just because we said they should, or just because we positioned ourselves as a media company, didn't mean that they immediately had to trust us. We had to earn their trust day by day, podcast by podcast, newsletter by newsletter, Instagram by instagram post.
And I think one thing we can really make sure that we do to earn that trust in the place, but also keep it is own up to our mistakes and be transparent when we make them. I mean, the two big ones that come to mind would be Taylor Swift, just Taylor Swift or giving away tickets to a Tailor Swift concert without being allowed to give away tickets to a Tailor Swift concert.
Good lesson in always reading the fine.
Print, awesome lesson font gate yeap ya say more. We are very famous for choosing a fonch. I found a graphic design blog a couple of months ago that says what the Daily Ods can teach you about how to stuff up a rebrand.
It didn't go down too well, but we were transparent with our audience. We came back, we explained our thinking, we went on and obviously, you know there have been serious things that have happened too. You know, we are doing this for the very first time. We've learned a lot from our audience about language, about context, about storytelling,
and we're learning every single day. And I think it's about taking the audience on that journey and building that trust along the way and not expecting it to happen overnight. And just while we're on the topic of mistakes, I would just add that one day a couple of years ago, on a weekend, I uploaded a photo of my foot by accident to our Instagram, left it up there for approximately half an hour, and came back to my phone to hundreds of comments about my foot. And that's on
making mistakes and owning them. I've told everyone about it.
Yeah, well, I would love to know how much you're making from those at the moment, it's a really amazing line of revenue. Okay, lesson number two. You have to meet people where they're at. And I remember when we were starting out, a lot of traditional media had this attitude of if we build something, people will come to it, and if they told people on Instagram to go the link and bio click and read something else somewhere else, that that would just happen automatically. But that's not how
we saw young people behave. It's not how we behaved and our friends behaved. And we realized that if we wanted to reach young Aussies with news, we had to go to the platforms that they were already using and use them authentically.
Yeah exactly. I mean that's why we started on Instagram. We knew that's where everyone, or at least our cohort was at the time. We were certainly one of the first news pages in the country. I'd say probably.
The first, the first in the country and the first in the world.
We'll go with the fact. Definitely the first in the country to introduce the carousel format of providing news on carousels in Instagram. Obviously, now that's everywhere, that's a given that's no longer novel, but at the time, this idea of using social media, which at that point was about you know, avocado toast and a sunset and all of those like really typical things, and saying, no, we're going
to put news here when news doesn't belong. That was a really novel idea, and it was this attempt to bring news to our audience and meet them where they're at and not call them complacent if they didn't come to us.
And then we quickly learned though that we couldn't just build a whole business on that idea. I mean, these are still companies that are privately owned. You know you are at We had the meta scale last year, the med scale last year. We've talked about that in the pod. But also the algorithm changes one day to the next, and that's where we started developing out some of the other channels, like the one that you're listening to right now, a podcast. We've got our newsletters now. Newsletters now a
really huge part of our business. And so then the question becomes, how do we meet people where they're at, but also build a solid business that isn't at the mercy of the tech gods, and for us, that's really about making everything kind of fit together, so you shouldn't feel like you're being gay ecosystem exactly. You can kind of listen to something in the morning, read something in the afternoon, have a vote on an Instagram story, all of that, and that feels really kind of cohesive.
Yeah, exactly. And I think that that's a really good segue into lesson number three and one of my favorites and something that you will hear me talking about at every opportunity, which is young people really care about the news. And I think the way that we realize this was by talking across from them, not down to them.
Explain that for me.
Okay, So what I'm talking about there is what I think TDA secret sources, which is that we are young people talking to our peers. We know how to speak their language, we know what they care about, we know what they're talking about in their group WhatsApps, because our
whole office is made up of these people. And that's not to say that you have to have a certain lived experience to be a storyteller, but I do think that if we look around, so often we have people talking down to young people and telling them that they're complacent, telling them that they don't care about the world, or that they're apathetic, when in reality, they just haven't been spoken to in their language or on their platforms, you know,
the platforms that we have been conditioned to be present on.
And I think one thing that's really interesting for me on this lesson is I'm constantly surprised. But also our approach to all of this is affirmed by what podcast topics do well with our audience. I mean, a podcast topic on housing prices or interest rates will actually do really, really well.
And you go to of course because it matters to young people.
Yeah, but you go to anybody in kind of older generations of news businesses and they'll tell you young people don't care about economics.
Yeah. Well, I mean I think this is at the heart of it, right, which is that when you look across the landscape, traditionally we've seen pop culture dressed up as news for young people that young people can only consume,
you know, lighter, fluffier topics. And I think we've said this on the podcast before, and let the record reflect I love reality television as much as the next person, but that doesn't mean that I don't love the news and that I can't have both, and so I think that for us, it's so important to continue to deliver that really important hard news so that young people go
into things like elections being informed. And I mean this election coming up, I mean we don't know when it is, but when it does come, it's going to be the very first time that Gen Z and Millennials outnumber Baby boomers at the ballot box. And you know, an engage youth here has significant outcomes for democracy. And I think anyone that underestimates young people does so at their own peril.
The kids are all right, the kids are all right, Sara, Let's go to what I think might be your favorite lesson. Yeah, good news. News is compulsory. And this is actually something that did start eight years ago. We made these bulletins that went on Instagram stories.
That stories was this really new thing at the time, and we were like, wow, I's so ahead of the curve.
I reckon, it's changed dimensions like three hundred times in that years. But we had five Instagram stories that went up at eight o'clock every morning, four stories in the way to Know, and one good news at the end of that bulletin, and we have done a good news story every single day since, every single newsletter and every single Headlines podcast of TDA. And it's a really hard job to find good news every day, but it's absolutely worth it.
It is. I mean, there's so much both empirical evidence and then at least anecdotal evidence that people turn away from the news because it's too negative, because it's too dark, and so we need to keep people engaged with your news. We're not asking people to turn away, but what can
we do to lighten that load a bit? And so good news is the answer here, because if you're reading about all the doom and gloom in the world, but then you've put on a Saturday good news podcast or you read our good newsletter, you are reminded that there is more to the world than what meets the eye. And then what makes headlines. You know, I always say, if it bleeds, it leads. That's how traditional media has
always gone because they know those stories do well. But that's not how we can continue because we just know people are turning away on mass and that's not good for anyone.
And I think that the balance part of why we do good news is really important, and equally also highlighting stories that might not make it into a news bulletin. I mean, I hope that we've inspired people to pursue degrees in science or engineering because we have highlighted developments over the last eight years that wouldn't have made the cut if we've just done the kind of if it bleeds, it leads methodology. I remember somebody said to me, they
love our good news stuff. They love your newsletter on a Sunday because it makes them feel hopeful without feeling naive. And I love that.
I mean, that's all we can hope for. Really.
Yeah, all right. Number five consistency is king.
This is your favorite.
I love it.
I don't know that there's a day you haven't told me this.
It's so important just to show up every single day, and we make sure that we do the news regardless if it's a weekend, if it's a public holiday, if we're overseas. You know, in the early days, if you and I were hungover, we'd get up and do the I mean, there were some.
Tough times past ten, so we do that.
I'm just doing my lower backstretches now, but this has gotten obviously so much easier. As the team has grown, it's easier to do it every single day. But it's a really important part because one of our favorite sayings here is that things might not work in the first twelve weeks.
I mean, i've it's going to work for the first five years of this business exactly. Arguably, if you look back, we did the same thing every single day we built habit, but no one was watching. And those early days are the only reason that we have the success we have now that we have the trust, now that we know how to do what we're doing because we did it consistently, day in day out, regardless of being in other jobs, regardless of having notions to turn it into a business.
We knew what we had to do and that would show up.
I think the podcast has been probably the one that's tested us the most.
In this regards shout out to you guys.
I think we've had I mean, let's be honest, we've had discussions about not doing the pod because growth in those first days, months, and even years was so slow, and it's really been only the kind of last i'd say eighteen months that the podcast has really grown. But we've been doing it.
For four years and overnight success.
Overnight success favorite thing, but it's really important. And now if people have new ideas in the office and they bring it to us, we love experimenting. We love testing. You have to commit to it for twelve weeks because then you get data and you get to know whether it actually does work or not. And it's good for our character.
Touche character bility. Now let's move on to lessons six. This is a biggie for us. And that's while opinion sells, news is more important than ever Sam in the age of hot takes and social media influencers sharing political opinions left, right and center, it is more important than ever. I believe that we provide balance and nuance in those same spaces. And I want to be clear, there's absolutely nothing wrong
with opinion writing. I love consuming opinions, I love reading smart takes, and it can be really helpful to signpost ideas for people who are developing their own understanding and to read other opinions and then form their own. The problem that arises, though, is when people are reading opinion or activism whatever it is on Instagram, for example, and they aren't getting the objective facts that underpin those opinions.
It's kind of all of us working off the same base in another way. And if we take the upcoming election as an example, you're going to see a lot of influencers telling you how to vote, to vote one way or the other, how good or bad a policy is, how good or bad a leader is. If you don't have a balanced media diet sitting under that, it's pretty hard to make sense of why that criticism is being leveled at that person or party.
Yeah, and I mean even taking a step back to understand and to have that civics education of how do I vote, how does referential voting work? What is minority government? All of these sorts of questions. You can't assess whether or not minority government's going to be a good or bad thing if you don't have that level of knowledge.
And so I think that is why it's so important for us to show up every single day and to give people that baseline so that they can go out and read those opinions and fully understand the context in which those opinions are formed.
And people have said to us over the years, Sam and Zara, have you guys thought about doing opinion ye? Have you thought about doing really strong views because that will do a lot better. You'll go viral, quicker and all of that. I'm so glad we've held out. Yeah, I'm so glad that we have stuck to our guns on providing that strong base because I think that's the DNA of TDA.
One hundred percent.
Well, that's nice, and I'll put that in the poster. All right, let's get to number seven. It's a bit more of a business lesson than a lesson about the news, but it is one that we remind ourselves every day. If this was easy, if it was easy to build a news company, then everyone would be doing it. And I think our youthful enthusiasm of you know, how hard can it be?
Naivity would be what I call it.
Throw some news on a page, it'll grow, they'll make money.
I distinctly remember telling a room full of advertisers that no, we will never do advertising.
Yeah right, yeah, that's right.
Enjoy this podcast.
Okay, that's clearly not true today. But we've built a sustainable business on the back of it. You have to work around the clock, you have to make smart financial decisions, you have to hire the right people, and if you take all of those factors of making any business and realize how hard that is, and then add the news on top and all the complexities of news, you've got a very challenging environment.
Yeah, and I mean, especially in Australia. I feel like we've spoken about this time and time again. We've an extremely concentrated media market here. It's an extremely hard market to break into. We don't have new media often succeeding here because it's so concentrated and the ownership is so concentrated, and so building in this space is important, but it's really hard and if it were easy, Sam, we'd all be doing it exactly.
And finally, the eighth lesson brought to you by one of my favorite moments from Ted Lasso, who stole it from somebody else. Be curious, not judgmental.
What does that mean?
So this is about approaching stories, issues and people with genuine curiosity rather than just these preconceptions about how they're going to behave or what they're going to say. And we try and do that in every part of the business. It's about asking questions to understand ideas further rather than just looking for a way to confirm what you already think. And so whether it's asking the audience what they think through you know, putting up a poll to actually understand
a point of view. We're working on something really exciting that that goes a bit deeper into exactly what young Australians are thinking.
But excellent, I believe the kids call that easter eggs.
Yes, nice, you can throw that one in there. But the whole idea about being curious not judgmental is not pretending we're experts. Yeah, I mean we are learning alongside our audience. We're trying to figure this out. There is no such thing as a silly question that would make a good title for a book, and I think being curious and not judgmental makes for more honest and more helpful journalism.
Well, Sam, what a note to end on eight years eight lessons. What a journey it's been. We absolutely could not have done it without all of you, our listeners, the people that read us, the people that watch us. We couldn't have done this.
Without all of you, and especially on the back of us talking about some of the challenges that we face as a media company. It's a perfect day to give us a little birthday present and become a contributor of TDA. I really need to stress that this is not about giving a contribution if you can't afford it. If you can afford it and you're feeling like you're in a position to do so, that's a way to back our work, and we'll throw a link in the show notes for that.
We are so proud of how accessible TDA is for everybody, and we want to keep it that way.
We'll be back again later today with the headlines as usual, but until then, have a brilliant day.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Kalkutin woman from Gadigl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gatighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.