Media Voices Podcast

This summer sees a packed sports calendar with the Euros in Germany and the Olympics and Paralympics in France. Adding these global events to the regular sports schedule amps up the demands on social media teams and it’s hard to imagine how they would cope without the help of automation.

For this special Conversations episode, we’re joined by Symran Cashyap, Vice President of Product at social media and email automation and optimisation specialists Echobox and Jan-Niklas Häuslein, head of social media at SPORT1, one of Germany’s leading free-to-air sports channels.

We discussed the demands of adding worldwide sporting events to already packed sports calendars, improving efficiency and productivity in a time where platforms are shifting to video content, building communities across multiple sports and leagues and of course, the role of AI in planning and testing.

Publishers of all sizes use Echobox to automate, optimize and customize the curation and distribution of their content. Today, over 2000 publishers in 100 countries rely on Echobox's artificial intelligence to increase performance while saving costs on social media, emails and newsletters.

You can download Echobox's latest Publishing Trends Report 2024 here.

Time magazine has called 2024 the ultimate election year, with people going to the polls from India to the UK and America. Rolling election coverage gives publishers the opportunity to keep audiences updated, but also include their opinions in reporting.

This is the latest in our Media Briefs series of short, sharp sponsored episodes – just 10 to 15 minutes – with a senior executive from a vendor working with publishers to make their businesses better.

In this episode, Peter speaks with Naomi Owusu, Co-Founder and CEO at Tickaroo, a leading supplier of news and sports media solutions which enable publishing organisations to engage with their audiences in real-time. We spoke about how live blogging can be used to engage audiences with election coverage, but also how it can be used to bring community voices into regular local reporting.

This Media Briefs episode is sponsored by Tickaroo, a leading supplier of news and sports media solutions. Tickaroo develops software and apps that enable organisations to engage with their audiences in real-time and reach their monetisation goals.

Its live blogging software is used by media houses, event organisers, and professional sports clubs and associations. The live content software combines professional digital storytelling and live reporting, with over 72,000 journalists relying on its digital publishing software, available as a native app and web application.

Learn more about Tickaroo’s media solutions on their website.

While the podcast is on a break we've been hard at work assembling the industry's best and brightest publishers to share the strategies and learnings behind their successful podcasts and newsletters, from top newsbrands launching paid podcasts to indie newsletters nailing their commercial strategies.

The Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summit - held on June 12th in London - will focus on sharing expertise and practical discussions that will help shape and refine your podcast and newsletter strategies, and set you up to take advantage of growing opportunities.

The event is suitable for editorial staff with responsibility for newsletters and/or podcasts, dedicated executives or senior managers with a strategic overview. For those who can't join on the day, there's a video-on-demand package available on the ticketing page.

Ahead of the final agenda reveal, Esther, Peter and Chris explain why Media Voices is running a dual-track Summit dedicated to podcasts and newsletters, and pick out which sessions they're most looking forward to.

In this bonus episode of Media Voices, we hear from Nicholas Thompson, CEO at The Atlantic. We first had Nicholas as a guest on the podcast back in 2019 when he was WIRED's Editor in Chief, about what he'd learned a year after introducing a paywall to the brand. 

Nicholas has since been credited with being a driving force behind The Atlantic's recent return to profitability and subscriber strategy success. So we were keen to invite him back on for a wide-ranging conversation about how he achieved the turnaround, as well as what happened to their paid newsletter scheme, Apple News+, and his thoughts on wider industry trends like AI.

Nicholas spoke about the experiments The Atlantic has run around its paywall strategy over the past few years, transforming the business holistically, and doing less but in much more depth. He also shares his outlook for the rest of 2024 - including the election effect - and how he's setting his next goals for the publication after meeting both the 1 million subscriber and profitability milestones earlier this month.

Find out more here about tickets and the agendas of the Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summits in London on 12th June.

Focusing on key digital advertising accounts makes sense for publishers, but there is huge revenue potential in the small and medium sized businesses that publishers once served as a matter of course in their print publications.

This is the latest in our Media Briefs series of short, sharp sponsored episodes – just 10 to 15 minutes – with a senior executive from a vendor working with publishers to make their businesses better.

In this episode, Peter speaks with Christian Scherbel, CEO of Smartico about what opportunities there are for publishers to service small-business accounts online, and restore local digital display advertising revenues.

This Media Briefs episode is sponsored by Smartico, enabling more than 500 publishers worldwide to access the untapped revenue potential in digital display advertising for small and medium sized businesses.

Combining the power of AI with human creativity, Smartico’s Smart Ads Solution builds high-impact ads from existing advertiser content. Using just a URL, print ad or social media post Smartico will create engaging ads including built-in instant landing pages for your advertisers.

Learn more about how Smartico can help grow SMB advertising revenues on their website or email Christian to request a free demo.

On this week's episode - the last of the season - we hear from James Cridland, Podnews editor and radio futurologist. Podnews is a daily email newsletter about everything podcasting, and is one of the smartest setups we’ve seen in terms of its supporter structure, monetisation and automations. 

James tells us how he’s found the sweet spot between his technical, editorial and audio skills, why classifieds were a surprising success story for him, and the balance between newsletter growth and revenue.

In the news roundup the team discusses the launch of the Guardian's dedicated cooking app Feast, and asks what adjacent apps like cooking or games platforms offer to the parent brand.

Sign up to our daily newsletter to stay in touch until we come back for the next season by heading to voices.media, or check out our Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summit agenda and tickets at publisherpodcasts.com.

On this week's episode Edward Hyatt, Director of Newsroom SEO at The Wall Street Journal takes us through staying abreast and ahead of changes to the SEO landscape. From personal experience he outlines the differences in SEO strategies between subscription and non-subscription publishers, the changes in the SEO landscape over the past decade, and the potential impact of AI on SEO for publishers.

In the news roundup the team discusses the news that Forbes has been using a made for advertising (MFA)  subdomain to game the digital advertising ecosystem. Since 2017, Forbes was using tactics that have long been condemned by anyone who cares about quality media - and we discuss the likelihood that they are the only ones. According to a US Association of National Advertisers (ANA) survey conducted last year, MFA sites received 21% of all ad impressions and 15% of digital adspend, despite being widely considered as a low-quality medium for advertising. So, what (if anything) can be done?

Sign up to our daily newsletter and community forum at voices.media.

This week we hear from Chris Minasians, Director and Editor at TotallyEV, an independent site dedicated to articles, reviews and interviews about electric vehicles. TotallyEV has recently hit 5 million views on YouTube, so he discusses building an audience through video reviews, and what it takes to run your own reviews site - including getting access to vehicles - as a solo publisher.

Minasians also explores the differences he's noticed between his electric vehicle coverage on TotallyEV, and his more consumer-focused tech reviews on his other YouTube channel TotallydubbedHD, from audience engagement to relative revenues.

In the news round-up, Chris (Sutcliffe!) and Esther run through a busy week in audio and podcast news. We ask where people listen to podcasts - not Google Podcasts any more - and whether podcasters are seeing any benefit from Apple's promotion of paid shows. There's also the first agenda sneak preview for the Publisher Podcast Summit...

This week we speak to The Telegraph’s Head of Newsletters Maire Bonheim, and Deputy Head of Newsletters David Alexander, about the publisher's newsletter portfolio. We talk about why The Telegraph and others are prioritising newsletters, how newsletters can be used at different stages of the subscriber funnel, and what they’ve learned from a community-focused approach to their Politics newsletter.

Marie and David also discuss building a live event from a newsletter brand, and the value of newsletters as a retention tool for the subscriptions-focused publisher.

In the news roundup we have a good chat about The Atlantic’s announcement that it is profitable and has hit the 1m subscriber milestone. We discuss the extent to which investing in high-quality content (longreads, mostly) creates a virtuous circle when it comes to growing subscriptions.

Sign up for our own daily newsletter and community forum at voices.media

On this week's episode we hear from Jane Ferguson, an award-winning journalist with a huge amount of experience covering wars and conflicts the world over. She tells us about how wars often bring the issues around modern journalism – mistrust, disinformation, lack of resources – into the starkest focus, and how the democratisation of tech is making the job of journalists covering war both easier and more difficult.

In the news roundup the team discusses the news that French authorities have levied a fine on Google for its unauthorised training of AI tools upon publisher content, and ask to what extent this is justified and its relationship to the ongoing acrimony between Google and publishers. Esther makes several excellent segues.

Sign up to our newsletter and community forum by going to voices.media.