🗞️Context Collapse: Journalism Is A Flaming Money Pit. WTF Now? Part 3
Fortune favors the bold. Make sure your plan is bold. CC #282
In this issue: Old media’s gone, new media’s a mess. Now make a plan.
Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
Quick update notes before the article:
I just wrote about Effective Content Marketing On A Budget for the Small Agency Journal on LinkedIn. Work in marketing or PR? Check it out.
On the Kaplan AccelPro IP Law podcast, I interviewed Kristen Osenga about Predatory Infringement and Patent Law.
I have some slots available for March to work on ghostwriting, white paper, newsletter, video scripting and marketing/PR strategy projects. If you need freelance help, reply to this email or message me on LinkedIn and we’ll sort something out.
Now on with the article…
In our last two installments, we talked about some very dumb business decisions across the media industry and why creators are inheriting the media world.
Today, we’re going to talk about how journalism outlets can improve their financial situation.
Before we jump in, here’s my POV and where I’m coming from.
I worked as a journalist at Fast Company and as a freelancer at places like the Los Angeles Times and Wired for years and years. My work was on the editorial side but am also fascinated by the business side of the industry.
I’m a lower-middle-class kid from Staten Island who had to fight my way into the industry and who thinks making lots of money is a very good thing. I have no preciousness about the journalism industry or high ideals about journalism.
I started working in journalism in the early 2000s and had a ringside seat to watch media outlets make the jump from print to digital and make really dumb business decisions in the process.
Now let’s jump in.
1. People Don’t Like Paying For Content But They Will Grit Their Teeth And Do It
The original sin of digital journalism outlets was putting their content online for free and relying on digital ad revenue to fund their businesses. Because there is no limit to the number of pages online (compared to the hard limit of a physical newspaper or magazine), there is no limit to the hypothetical amount of ad inventory a journalism outlet can have. This means that digital ad inventory—even at the New York Times and Vanity Fairs of the world—isn’t worth all that much and won’t keep your journalists fed and your server bills paid.
Years of online behavioral training have primed the public to want content—all of it—for free. If your product has a paywall, they’ll opt for the free content even if it’s inferior. And sometimes creators on YouTube and TikTok might just make better product than the fancy people on cable TV or the pay streaming services.
There are three exceptions to this:
News that gives the reader a direct professional or personal benefit.
Prestige news.
News that taps into tribal identities.
News that gives the reader a direct professional or personal benefit: If I am in a leadership position at an advertising agency, I’m at a massive disadvantage if I’m not a subscriber to Ad Age or Adweek. If I own a business, I’m leaving money on the table if I’m not subscribing and reading to the trade publications for my field.
There are also personal benefits. If I live in a town or city where my local newspaper aggressively covers local news and events (a big if!), subscribing to it means I have an information advantage for things that directly benefit me vis a vis my neighbors. If I am a hobbyist in a niche field, subscribing to a creator’s Patreon, Substack or closed web portal means that I have access to content that directly benefits me.
Prestige News: For the majority of the public, subscribing to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Bloomberg or The Economist don’t get them direct professional or personal benefit (Story changes depending on your job or similar factors, of course).
However, they scratch the prestige itch. Printed editions look quite nice in the office. Reading the stories online means you’re able to discuss the right topics with the right people in the right venues.
Tribal Identities: Politics and sports, kids. Politics and sports. If you feel strongly enough about something and are invested in it enough, you’ll pay for even more content about it.
Leverage these three factors in order to get audiences to pay for content.
2. Make Those Paywalls Leaky
Getting audiences to pay for content isn’t just about appealing to their sense of value (hah!), public service, guilt, or anything like that. It’s also about psychology.
Recognize that audiences are fickle and have short attention spans. Embrace this.
Make your outlet’s paywalls leaky and give lots of opportunities for readers to read for free. Aggressive unlocking of content coming in via social traffic. Lots of email marketing to readers for unlocked days/weeks. Have your article text slowly fade out instead of cutting off or offer readers a superior ad-free experience when they subscribe.
You want your product to have a paywall and you want your audiences to pay up. However, your company will have the most benefits from appealing to psychology (free samples! positioning temporarily unlocked content as a value add! slowly hooking the audience!) instead of hard moats which only appeal to core believers.
3. Build Infrastructure Outside Of Platforms
Facebook, Twitter/X, TikTok, Threads and all the rest get you eyeballs that are mediated by an invisible, pay-to-play algorithm.
Substack, Patreon, YouTube, Mailchimp and their compatriots are printing presses that take a financial cut of everything that you publish. (I publish this on Substack, I know.)
Do what you can to get your audience’s email addresses or to have them sign up for a third party site and feed updates on new content to them automatically without a platform mediator.
Make sure that your news outlet has a CMS and web presence where you can control the fine tuning and not be locked into whatever bad business decisions your vendor embarks on.
Is media and journalism weird right now? Yes, it is. But chaos is an opportunity. Go out and seize it.