In recent years, unionizing newsrooms has given journalism-focused media companies a bit more say over how their workplaces are run. But Defector Media is something else entirely. The group of 18 former Deadspin employees — who quit the company after a bitter clash with management last year — have launched the company with a much more collective ownership structure. Like its predecessor, Defector Media focuses on sports and culture. With a two thirds majority, they have the power to vote out the...
Sep 29, 2020•37 min
BET+ launched a year ago this week, making Black Entertainment Television a competitor in the increasingly crowded video streaming race. "I think what BET means now to the younger generation is different than what it meant to me 25 years ago," Devin Griffin, the OTT service's general manager, said on the Digiday Podcast. "At the time I was plugged into BET, there were very few images of Black people on television outside of what was happening Thursday night on NBC, and besides sports," he said. ...
Sep 22, 2020•34 min
There is a finite number of CEOs who can tune into Fortune’s CEO Initiative virtual conference. And there are only 50 leaders who can be on Fortune’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders list. Those communities are limited. But communities drive revenue. And there is an entire untapped grouping of emerging and aspirational leaders that Fortune has identified who can benefit from the information it has cultivated over years of conferences and coverage — and would be willing to pay to gain access. "In the ...
Sep 15, 2020•37 min
Scroll through Apple's list of top podcasts and you'll see a lot of big names (including actual Hollywood celebrities). Within that landscape, Wonder Media Network has managed to make critically acclaimed podcasts without the A-listers. "That's kind of a silly media strategy, honestly. How are you supposed to build an audience with non-celebrity?" said company CMO Shira Atkins on the Digiday Podcast. "But we're just testing to see if this is viable." One way its managing that is by dedicating a ...
Sep 08, 2020•35 min
Paywalls and digital subscriptions may be on the rise at digital media companies around the U.S., but South Africa presents a different case. "Our competitors went behind paywalls, and they didn't have a good experience," said Branko Brkic, founder of the South African online news site Daily Maverick, which covers politics and business from their newsroom in Johannesburg. "You can't debate the issue that you need income from your readers to be part of your stream of income. But we really do not ...
Sep 01, 2020•37 min
Podcast's ad dollars may be growing, but Tenderfoot TV founder Donald Albright knows how cagey buyers can be. "Even though the numbers are steady, the advertisers are thinking: 'people aren't spending money, so I'm not going to spend money advertising to them," Albright said on the Digiday Podcast. Albright co-founded Tenderfoot TV —named before its pivot to audio — with filmmaker Payne Lindsey in 2016. The production company is behind true crime hits like Atlanta Monster and Up and Vanished. "F...
Aug 25, 2020•44 min
Substack is the newest savior for independent publishing, powering an array of subscription newsletters that give hope to the rise of a new class of journalist entrepreneurs. "On Substack there are people paying more for one individual newsletter than they pay for all of Netflix," CEO Chris Best said on the Digiday Podcast. "And it doesn't really make sense if you think about it just in terms of dollars per hour of entertainment or dollars per word that I read or something like that. There has t...
Aug 18, 2020•40 min
There's a cliche that tech industry founders are bent on reckless growth all because their aggressive entrepreneurial tendencies weren't tempered by any college coursework in the humanities. But Craig Newmark, who founded the eponymous Craigslist in 1995, learned some useful lessons in sociology even before he got to college. "In the 1970s, my high school U.S. history and civics teacher taught us about the importance of a free press," Newmark said on the Digiday Podcast. "A trustworthy press is ...
Aug 11, 2020•34 min
TikTok is coming of age in a post-techlash world. But unlike Facebook and Google, it has the added challenge of doubling as a political football in the Trump administration's clashes with China. Last Friday President Trump told reporters he was considering a ban on the video app, which is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. Over the weekend Reuters reported the company may be looking to divest from its U.S. operations completely — perhaps in a sale to Microsoft — in order to avoid such a ban....
Aug 04, 2020•53 min
The question of whether podcasts have hit the American mainstream is kind of like asking the same about Major League Soccer. Both have grown for more than 20 years, but remain smaller than their counterparts in media or sports. In the case of podcasts, advertising revenues grew by nearly 50% last year, to $708 million, according to an IAB/PwC report published this month. The figure is expected to grow by another 15% in 2020, despite the coronavirus crisis that temporarily put a dent in listeners...
Jul 28, 2020•42 min
The coronavirus recession hit the local news industry hard at a time when it hadn't even recovered from the previous crisis in 2008. "We're certainly coming up on or in the middle of something even bigger," Lion Publishers executive director Chris Krewson said on the Digiday Podcast. "So I don't see much hope of them recovering from this one either." Krewson obviously isn't rooting for a slow recovery, even as he predicts one. "That's what we've identified as the trend that we need to be ready t...
Jul 21, 2020•38 min
Hong Kong's South China Morning Post has covered the territory's role as a unique link between China and the rest of the world since the newspaper's founding in 1903. But that link has grown fraught as China continues to crack down on dissent and pro-democracy protests via the national security law it drafted and passed late last month. Gary Liu, the English-language newspaper's CEO since 2017, worries that its independence depends on that of the territory. "If the laws of this city and the judi...
Jul 14, 2020•40 min
These should be banner days for a Black media site that has long covered social injustice for a young audience. But Blavity CEO and founder Morgan DeBaun describes challenges that start at the initial difficulty of raising investment as a Black company. "For me, the systemic racism comes in the fact that I don't ever get the benefit of the doubt," DeBaun said at the Digiday Publishing Summit. As DeBaun sought funds in Silicon Valley, she recalls how investors didn't believe her site's strong org...
Jul 07, 2020•38 min
Subscriptions are gaining ground as a major source of revenue for Bloomberg. "We're seeing significant, significant growth and gains," Bloomberg Media Group CEO Justin Smith said at the Digiday Publishing Summit. And that growth in the first and second quarter has proven sticky, according to Smith. "Some of the churn rates are consistent with previous churn rates. This is not just a short-term thing," he said. His forecast is that subscriptions will make up a rising and significant part of Bloom...
Jun 30, 2020•35 min
With overlapping crises stretching across health, the economy and society, Fox News Digital editor-in-chief Porter Berry sees Fox bringing "the marketplace of ideas" to its audience. "You give them the news. You give them analysis from multiple perspectives, and they can make up their own mind. I mean, that's what freedom's all about," the Fox News Digital editor-in-chief said on the Digiday Podcast. According to Comscore, Fox News Digital had its best ever year in 2019, garnering 19.5 billion p...
Jun 23, 2020•44 min
The attention economy hasn't just proven to be a losing proposition for media businesses financially. It also encourages quick, outrage-based political coverage that thrives off of (and feeds) poor governance, according to Steve Hayes, CEO and co-founder of the Dispatch. "Everything we're seeing in our politics has an emphasis on performance," Hayes said on the Digiday Podcast. "The economic incentives and business models that everyone has pursued in this space in the past 10-15 years have contr...
Jun 16, 2020•34 min
Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner believes the time is now for change in media and fashion. "I want to see brands, publications, everyone in the industry commit to a long, sustainable change," Peoples Wagner said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. Peoples Wagner is a rarity in glossy media: A 29-year-old black woman from a small university in the Midwest, without connections or a rich family bankrolling her initial career. Instead, she worked her way up, moonlighting ...
Jun 09, 2020•34 min
Sports media and betting are on their way to being inextricably intertwined. "If you look at the traditional way sports betting has been launched in Europe and even in North America -- in the offshore and black markets -- how people bet is through betting apps," said to John Levy, CEO of theScore, a Canadian sports media company. Those apps aren't where betters get their actual score lines and injury updates; they're where gamblers turn to once they've watched the game or read about it elsewhere...
Jun 02, 2020•47 min
For Telemundo, shifting to streaming platforms -- everything from parent company Comcast's Peacock to Quibi -- is an obvious choice based on a simple fact: The median age for Latinos in the U.S. is 28, much lower than that of the country as a whole. For Telemundo SVP of Digital Romina Rosado, that means the network needs to be on every new platform it can be to reach the 60 million Hispanics in the U.S. "Hispanics actually over-index on a lot of social and digital platforms," Rosado said on the ...
May 26, 2020•36 min
McClatchy CEO Craig Forman describes the local news company as more relevant than ever. "The coronavirus crisis has been a reminder to all of us in our communities of just how important it is that our communities be strong and vital," Forman said on the Digiday Podcast. "We've never seen digital traffic or even demand of the scale that we've seen for McClatchy." McClatchy -- home to local papers like the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and The Sacramento Bee -- has seen digital traffic increa...
May 19, 2020•35 min
The news publishing industry may be getting squeezed by the pandemic economy, but for Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO Randall Rothenberg, it set itself up for failure long ago, by leaning too heavily on advertiser revenue. "When the United States became a national marketplace in the mid to late 19th century, that marketplace was so big, so vast and laden with opportunity that it just made much more economic sense to premise your revenues and growth as a publisher on advertising," Rothenberg s...
May 12, 2020•45 min
Verizon Media's value to Verizon itself isn't just as a media arm that can send user data or benefits back to the conglomerate. Rather, its base of 900 million monthly active users is significant enough to bring value just across Verizon Media's properties, including Yahoo, TechCrunch, AOL and HuffPost, according to CEO Guru Gowrappan. On the Digiday Podcast, Gowrappan set up the example of an article about meditation on the newly launched Yahoo Life. "You can start not just having content but t...
May 05, 2020•36 min
Growing a web publishing business from a small starter loan and your own profits "toughens you" in ways that are different than venture-backed media according to Digital Trends CEO Ian Bell. The bootstrapped tech publication has grown the old-fashioned way -- that is taking in more money than you spend -- since 2006. This year, Digital Trends expects $50 million in revenue. It has not laid off or furloughed any workers despite feeling the pain of the downturn. Digital Trends also will be profita...
Apr 28, 2020•37 min
The Guardian's pivot to paid has a unique twist: There's no paywall. Instead, The Guardian relies on reader contributions -- a model gaining believers in news organizations caught between making their coronavirus coverage free of charge and facing ad shortfalls at the same time. "There's absolutely no doubt that we're going to see a boost to our reader revenue during this period," said Guardian U.S. and Australia CEO Evelyn Webster on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "We are going to ...
Apr 21, 2020•42 min
About a third of the MIT Technology Review's revenue comes from events, according to CEO Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau. That piece of the pie is obviously under threat as activity in the United States remains frozen by the coronavirus pandemic. "We had to make a call on our largest event, called EmTech Digital, entirely on AI," Bramson-Boudreau said. "Our highest-yielding event." "What were we going to do? Were we going to reschedule it? Or were we going to move it to a virtual event?" A few weeks ...
Apr 14, 2020•39 min
Mel Magazine, a men's interest publication born from Dollar Shave Club, wants to be more than a case study in brand content. "The way we went around building the publication, it drew from a lot of the same DNA. But it's never been there just to push razors," founding editor Josh Schollmeyer said on the Digiday Podcast. "It's been there to be a thought leader on modern masculinity." As Mel Magazine launched in 2015, Schollmeyer recalled, "the core edict was 'go out there and try to do great work,...
Apr 07, 2020•31 min
For publishing companies to survive a global crisis like the one we're in, Complex Networks CEO Rich Antoniello's formula is "brand plus brain plus balance sheet." Antoniello is no stranger to tough times in media. He stewarded Complex through the 2008 financial crisis as CEO, the role he still holds now. But compared to that, the downturn brought about by the coronavirus pandemic is "infinitely more difficult," Antoniello said on the Digiday Podcast. "We have no idea when the virus is going to ...
Mar 31, 2020•39 min
The coronavirus pandemic brings uncertainty to the advertising business as much as anywhere else, but GroupM's Brian Wieser sees it as a chance for marketers to take action versus relying on slogans. "Every brand should be trying to figure out how they could be helpful," Wieser said on the Digiday Podcast. He pointed to GM's exploration of its capacity to build much-needed medical equipment and luxury brand LVMH's pivot to manufacturing hand sanitizer for hospitals. Or think back to the financia...
Mar 24, 2020•23 min
Much of the ad industry's ways of measuring eyeballs on the internet is flat-out wrong, according to Joe Marchese, co-founder and CEO of Attention Capital. "Every Q4, there's more ad impressions in the digital world," Marchese said on the Digiday Podcast. "Do you think more people are watching more ads in Q4, or do you think we're just trying to shove them in there?" Attention Capital sees an opportunity in all that bloat and fabrication. It's a holding company with a portfolio that so far inclu...
Mar 17, 2020•35 min
BuzzFeed is in the midst of change. A few years ago most of the company's revenue came from native advertising -- in 2020 that category will bring in just 20%. Other parts of the revenue pie -- commission on purchases driven by BuzzFeed content, as well as BuzzFeed's own branded products -- have grown enough for the company to bring in $320 million in 2019, and for BuzzFeed to forecast profitability. "Over the last three years we've really transformed the way BuzzFeed makes money," BuzzFeed CEO ...
Mar 10, 2020•41 min
