How 8 journalists are revolutionising media

If you want another angle on the future of TV, go 35 miles north of San Francisco to the suburban wine-making town of Petaluma. Or just go to the web. There, you will find the TWiT (“the week in technology”) ‘netcasting network’, begun 10 years ago as a series of podcasts by longtime tech journalist and Emmy-winning broadcaster, Leo Laporte. He dropped out of Yale in the final year of a Chinese history degree and turned to radio. He began specialising in talks on technology in 1990 and then turned to Tech TV. He stumbled into podcasting, even now an overlooked corner of the media world, where more than 150,000 regular shows are dispensed by the iTunes store. In the US, almost 35% of  the population listen to podcasts, which became Laporte’s low-cost route to media ownership.

His webcasting empire looks like the future of so much narrowcast broadcasting. It has morphed from a podcast about technology into a round-the-clock, live-streaming online “network,” produced at a fraction of the cost of a cable channel. Within a few years, he was producing 30 hours of podcasts per week, with his flagship This Week in Tech notching up some 250,000 of downloads.

Now, the TWiT network’s 20 specialist shows, including This Week in Google, iPad Today, All About Android, and Windows Weekly, are downloaded more than 5million times a month. TWiT streams all-day video that captures Laporte’s podcasting and a weekend show on computers, ‘The Tech Guy”, which adds 500,000 more listeners through 140 radio stations across the US. Crucially, it has been able to monetise its highly lucrative, specialized audience through sponsorship and advertising.

It had all (seemingly) been nicely amateur with Laporte hosting TWiT from his old Californian wooden cottage. But there’s nothing make-shift about the audience – and the profits. Laporte started out by eschewing advertising and asked listeners instead for contributions of up to $10 a month. But, as his audience grew, so did his ambitions. He took on a business partner and started selling advertising.

Today, companies as diverse as Ford, Visa, Microsoft, and AOL, are paying a premium price (of some $80 per 1,000 viewers/listeners compared with the US average CPM of $15) to reach Laporte’s loyal, tech-savvy audience.  His revenue has doubled for each of the past five years. As one of the first people to tap into the business potential of podcasting, he has been able to market a niche audience that advertisers love, 30% of it outside the US. And it’s still growing fast. In 2013, his $7m revenues might have produced EBIT profits of some $2m.

In 2011, he established a purpose-built studio (called the Brick House, to distinguish it from his cottage down the road) and declared his goal of becoming “a 24-hour technology news network, the CNN of technology”. For broadcasters, including the UK’s regulators who have been looking closely at the low-cost Laporte operation, TWiT looks increasingly like the future of TV – or quite a lot of it.

Laporte told his ‘aw shucks’ story to a TED conference in Dubai a few years ago, where he spoke of  ”a little podcast network which I have built into an internet television and radio station in this little cottage in the middle of nowhere in Northern California. Now, we’ve decided to go with our 5million audience and develop it into a full broadcasting business, the CNN of tech.” If you doubt he has achieved that, look at the huge traffic volumes on TWiT as Apple’s Tim Cook unveiled his latest products this week.

TV professionals the world over have long talked about the way that their medium will weave itself through the web; and the latest internet-connected televisions point the way to computer integration straddling home screens and mobile devices. TV producers talk a good game of their future security based not on broadcast channels but on-demand content, pausing blissfully to say that consumers will pay for good content. But the TWiT network tells us something else about how TV might develop – and how low-cost competitors might multiply.

What’s special about TWiT? The technology is relatively simple, highly-effective and brings together TV, the internet, podcasts and social media. The operations are, by TV standards, stunningly low-cost. Leo Laporte has been making a profit since he won 2,000 regular viewers in his first year, and is now probably making profits of at least $2m. This is dynamic, open-access TV where viewers Skype in and engage in dialogue online and on-screen. In the age of Twitter and user worries about the “commercialism” of Facebook,  TV channels (sort of) operated by their viewers could become huge. TWiT offers its viewers not just friendliness but also authenticity: controversial views are challenged and corrected in real-time in ways which would appeal to many consumers reared on the untouchability of mass media. This new generation TV could produce powerful media channels in many special interest and business sectors.

Although Gawker’s early reputation was built on celebrity gossip, it also was responsible for some major exclusives including former US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s hacked emails, stolen iPhone prototypes, and the resignation of a  scandal-hit New York congressman. But, for all the scratchy journalism, Denton has always been a web media leader, pushing for a switch from measuring page views to the monthly uniques that are now widely recognised as the most valued measure of blog readership. Such campaigning has made him a real power broker in New York media and technology. His various comments have implied he might at some point form an alliance with BuzzFeed or The Guardian or News Corp.

Gawker has ruined careers, toppled leaders, sparked lawsuits and criminal investigations. But Denton can truly claim to be a believer in free expression, evidenced by personal attacks on him by his own staff on his own blogs. A few years ago, Denton believed someone was about to publish private “sex pictures” stolen from his phone. Rather than try to suppress their publication, he wrote a blog post about the episode — one he ended up never needing to publish, as the whole thing proved to be a hoax. But you get the point. He sees the role of his blogs – like that of Facebook and Twitter – as being “to uncover information about the way people actually live”.

Denton simply believes that there’s no secret that’s not worth exposing. That’s why his blogs have made a practice of outing public figures and why they continue to make claims about the sexual orientation of Apple CEO Tim Cook. Denton, who himself is openly gay, says: “It would be socially useful for the most powerful man in American business to be seen and widely known as being gay.”

What’s special about Gawker? Nick Denton has helped set the pace in ensuring that well-produced blogs are able not just to complement other media but to supplant them. Gawker Media is clearly one of the most profitable blogging businesses. He has brought journalistic flair to the way that comments by readers have always been an important element of Gawker’s model and is key to the strengths of digital media. Last year, he introduced  a system that encouraged readers to send tips to the site and track others’ tips. Gawker knows how to make money from its readers and has a sales team dedicated to developing the comments section as a marketing and branding platform. It is easy to feel that Denton’s brand of journalism  (sort of) makes him the 21st century heir to the no-holds-barred newspaper traditions of  Randolph Hearst. Perhaps that explains the continual rumours of a Gawker deal with Rupert Murdoch.

4. Mia Freedman: Mamamia

Australia is the gilded country whose women’s magazines long had the world’s highest pro rata circulations, steepest cover prices, and best profit margins. They had it all. But one of the country’s best-known former editors Mia Freedman has already written the epitaph: ”Decisions were taken years ago that meant those titles never became digital forces which is a travesty because those brands should have quickly followed their readers online. Or got there first. Instead, they remained as printed products. Publishers didn’t realise they were content producers, they kept acting like magazine makers, much to the detriment of those once powerhouse brands. Now it’s too late. How do you stay current and relevant in a 24hr news cycle when you’re publishing once a week or once a month? It’s a very uncertain time and I can’t see things improving.”

That feels (just a bit) like an exaggeration of a digital future which will include some major brands with a command of loyal audiences – whether or not they are currently handcuffed to hard copy. But Freedman’s Mamamia super-blog is a real magazine-media phenomenon.

In seven years, it has become Australia’s leading women’s web site with a staff of 40, hundreds of contributors, and more than 635,000 monthly viewers. This is a four-fold audience increase in the last two years. Its native advertising revenues of some $4-5m derive mainly from those very beauty and cosmetics advertisers – like most of her readers – which were once the almost exclusive preserve of magazines like those she managed. Media people reckon Vogue has the best digital platform of any Aussie magazine – but Mamamia’s audience is 50% larger.

Politicians, TV broadcasters and newspaper columnists fall over themselves to quote Freedman or Mamamia. It’s a blog with a clear, distinctive and widely-supported tone of voice. In some ways, it seems like the complete online magazine for women, with digital and video content across a much broader range than anything in hard copy: “On any single day we will run a story about the political issue of the moment, share one woman’s heartbreaking experience of losing a pregnancy, explore the new ways media is distorting women’s bodies, and interview one of Australia’s favourite TV personalities….We’ll show you some awesome fashion ideas from women who AREN’T professional models, have a comedian relate an anecdote you’ll guffaw at, bring all the mums together for some group therapy on a 4-year-old obsessed with weapons, while also providing you with a cheat sheet to help you understand the conflict in Syria.”

What’s special about Mamamia? Lost advertising revenues have wrecked the profitability of many magazines, especially in newsstand-dominated markets like the UK and Australia. But readers have remained relatively loyal, which seems to suggest that many magazines could survive in some kind of blended digital-print world – with re-worked business models. Mia Freedman’s huge personal following in magazine-centric Australia shows that digital media can out-compete even long-standing publications. This may identify the need for magazines – as well as newspapers –  to develop new (and different) digital brands separate from their print. Mamamia’s success, after all, clearly has something to do with its range of content being much broader than anything in women’s magazines. So, rather than slavishly developing clever-or-not digital versions of print brands, publishers should be developing new digital-only brands and content. Follow Mia.

5. Andrew Sullivan: The Dish

Andrew Sullivan is the British-born former editor of the US’s right-wing New Republic magazine, a regular contributor to the UK’s Sunday Times, and a pioneer of blogging. To add spice, one of America’s most-read and outspoken bloggers is Catholic, conservative, gay, was successively pro-Bush and pro-Obama, and is a graduate of Oxford and Harvard.

This is the extraordinary story of a journalist from the sleepy English town of East Grinstead (whose only other claim to fame might be as the one-time world headquarters of Scientology) who moved to the US thirty years ago and launched “The Dish” in 2000 when few people even knew what a blog was. Sullivan is credited with pioneering the blog as a medium where a writer can “think out loud”. His readership figures surged after the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and his home-town, Washington, DC. “I experienced 9/11 very personally. The jihadists attacked my dream, my place—I felt like I had been beaten or raped. I succumbed to the fear a lot of us felt—panic really—about this country being in mortal danger. And neo-conservatism seemed like the only ideology on the shelf with a plan for how to react immediately, and I turned to it.”

He has switched views a bit, and his blog between platforms, including Time magazine, The Atlantic and the Daily Beast. Last year, he went solo and established The Dish as an independent, subscriptions-based operation. The move is being closely watched by media people everywhere because it poses the question about whether a writer can create a self-supporting business from their personal “brand” and following.

Sullivan declared early on that he wouldn’t take advertising and would be supported only by subscribers. He also made it easy for non-subscribers to view his fast-moving stream of content — collected musing on politics and pop culture. He established what has been described as a “tip jar” format, with readers volunteering to pay $19.99 a year.

He is being followed by other stars of journalism including: the former New York Times blogger Nate Silver (backed by ESPN), former Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald (funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar), and Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, who broke away from the Wall Street Journal to launch a news site funded by NBC Universal.

Sullivan set a goal of raising $900,000 a year to maintain the current standard of his blog and to do it without advertising. People pay $19.99 a year ($1.67 a month) to have full access to the site, but they can also pay more than than the minimum (and many, apparently, do). He actually raised about one-third of the target within his first 24 hours. Now, he has some 34,000 subscribers paying a total of £875,000 annually.

He’s got no debt but also no offices, and he’s managed to pay his 10 staff – but not yet himself.

That seems a pretty credible first-year performance for The Dish which is starting to experiment with funding methods. It is now planning to raise some advertising revenues by showing video ads to non-subscribers as an inducement to sign up. Sullivan insists that subscribers will continue to read the blog ads-free. And, next, he is planning a monthly magazine-style service called Deep Dish, also probably with some advertising.

His interim verdict on The Dish is instructive:” Writing a blog because you want to get people to renew their subscription in a year creates a very different, more subtle incentive structure for journalism than if you have to get as many page-views as possible….Yes, The Atlantic and Politico have gone on to become even bigger in terms of page-views….but…we have almost 30,000 paying subscribers which is 30,000 more than Politico, 30,000 more than Huffington Post, 30,000 more than The Beast, and 30,000 more than Vox.” Yes!

What’s special about The Dish? Andrew Sullivan is hoping to prove the case for individual journalists as “brands” that can be profitable in their own right – and funded by readers. It is a rallying cry for journalists everywhere. It might also become an important cue for daily newspapers to start unbundling their content. Without the production constraints of print, why won’t newspapers let readers subscribe online just to individual columnists or, say, to the sports or business or property sections? They might learn how to make new money in new media if they do. But, if they don’t, they may lose more of their star journalists.

6. Sharon Waxman: The Wrap

If you want another view of the problems of traditional media, you can’t do better than look at the Hollywood world of film, video games and movies which, for a 100 years, has been served by two powerhouse trade magazines. Time was when the legendary Variety (famous for headlines like “Sticks nix hicks pix” = rural audiences don’t like rural films) and its rival The Hollywood Reporter were published daily in Hollywood and weekly around the world. But the dailies have gone and so have most of the

profits. Their readerships have been sliced by three digital-only operations : Time Warner’s TMZ, and also Deadline Hollywood and The Wrap – two sharp-tongued sites which emphasise how experienced journalists can outpace traditional publications and build powerful media with small teams.

US journalist Nikki Finke began writing a column called “Deadline Hollywood” in LA Weekly magazine in 2002 and launched her blog of the same name four years later. She sold it in 2009 and left Penske Media (which had meanwhile also bought the ailing Variety from Reed Elsevier). Finke’s departure signalled the end (for now, at least) of some pretty bitter personal rivalry with Sharon Waxman, the former Hollywood reporter for the Washington Post and the New York Times, who had launched The Wrap in 2009 – just as Finke was selling out for undisclosed millions of dollars.

Waxman is the formidable, award-winning former foreign correspondent who launched with some $500k of funding (including from Starbucks boss Howard Schultz) and is now pushing on with a syndicated news service WrapWire. In May, for the first time, The Wrap claimed to have beaten Variety and Deadline in web traffic, attracting some 4million regular readers. Waxman employs some 30 people between offices in Los Angeles and New York, and describes The Wrap as “a little trashy, a little sassy, and a little serious”.  She has been described as “one of the most powerful women in Hollywood”.

It’s an amazing career for Waxman who moved into Hollywood reporting just to get a job. “I’d been living in Paris as a freelancer and then a contract writer at the Washington Post. It was at that time, in the mid-1990s, that newspapers were already starting to cut back on their foreign bureaux. I had been trying to get a full-time position and then, finally, the Washington Post offered me a job in California where I had never intended to go. They didn’t actually hire me to cover Hollywood. They hired me as a style writer.” But now she lives and breathes the back-stabbing, champagne-swilling, image-obsessed Hollywood: “I care what this industry creates. I do believe that entertainment matters. I’ve been a foreign correspondent and I’ve seen first-hand the impact that popular culture created by Hollywood has across the globe. It’s not inconsequential.”

What’s special about The Wrap? This is a clear example of a rich information market which – for obvious reasons – has never lacked interest from all kinds of media and journalists. The result – in the heyday of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter – was huge revenues (relative to readership) but also high-costs and depressed profits (imagine the business lunches). But, for entertainment industry executives, information is power and can drive profits. Specialist media success, therefore, depends on high-quality journalists focused on the high-value information that once formed a relatively small part of packed hard copy publications. Today, there are countless free or inexpensive ways to distribute company-produced information to target audiences. So, there is a premium on the real news that was once described as “something that someone, somewhere wants to suppress…” It’s all about quality not quantity – sometimes an alien concept in hard copy publications where the number of pages depends on the requirements of either the printing press or the marketing department. Free digital information – paid by sponsorship and advertising – and produced by small, smart teams can create new opportunity for media profits. Nobody is boasting about The Wrap’s profits so presumably they still hardly exist. But there may never be any shortage of would-be owners of trophy media assets in Hollywood. There may, though, be many other B2B sectors that should go the same way.

7. Jessica Lessin: The Information

Jessica Lessin is the former Wall Street Journal Silicon Valley correspondent who founded tech business news service The Information in 2013. It is targeting professionals “who need the inside scoop on technology news and trends. We focus on the stories that drive conversations and help our subscribers get ahead.”

Lessin says: “We are focusing on writing for readers we think are under-served: professionals in technology and in industries being upended by it. These readers find plenty to read every day but they don’t consistently find news that is relevant to them and their business challenges. They don’t often find news that takes a stand supported by facts. We aim to do both. So, instead of chasing the highest number of eyeballs, we will chase and deliver the most valuable news. We’ve set the bar high. To succeed, we need to write articles that deliver value worth paying for. That’s why we’re a subscription publication.”

The subscription-only service costs $39 per month or $399 a year and has no free content – and no advertising. The “hard” paid-for strategy surprised observers. But Lessin says: “People talk about this type of paywall being good or bad, but it really depends on the content. The only type of content you’re going to pay that much money for is content that helps you in your business. All the different paywall experiences are very different because the content is different and the market they are going after is different. Subscription models only work for platforms that offer value beyond what you get for free.” Sceptics have pointed out that the subscription price is higher than for Lessin’s former employer The Wall Street Journal.

Why not advertising? “I really don’t think the ad business model is aligned with our mission. Any publication that makes a meaningful amount of money through advertising ends up writing stories that generate a lot of traffic to generate a lot of ad dollars. Publications wrestle with that editorial decision. The ‘bar’ for each of our articles is: “is this worth paying for?”

Business Insider, which knows a thing or two about upstaging traditional media and confounding the sceptics, explained why the model is viable: ”While all of us are laughing about how information wants to be free, Lessin and her colleagues are probably going to build a nice business for themselves. The company has five full-time staffers and two more contractors. If you figure the cost of each employee is about $100,000, then The Information only needs to find about 1,800 annual subscribers to break even. Fewer if people go for the monthly option. At that point, Lessin will have created a media company that pays five journalists solid full-time wages. And she’ll be doing it her way – with serious headlines for serious stories written for serious people, etc.

“At that point, the company will be a success by any sane measure of success. If Lessin somehow finds 5,000 subscribers, her company will have a profit of $1 million. Ten thousand, and Lessin will be $2 million into the black. Maybe Lessin will re-invest those profits into paying her journalists more or sending them around the world. Maybe she’ll stick it in a bank account and remember all our laughing. And then do it again the next year. The thing is: $2 million profits are not a big deal at lots of companies we write about here at Business Insider. But that’s because we’re usually writing about big public companies or small startups that are venture-backed and have to become huge companies to justify the seed capital.”

What’s special about The Information? It’s a small-circulation paid-for service that – just like in the heyday of small-subscription journals – can become profitable on a modest share of a well-defined market. The potential parallels are everywhere.

8. Ezra Klein: Vox

Vox is one of a handful of US-based services, including Quartz and Politico, that are producing ‘explainer journalism’.  Apart from a declared mission to explain the news rather than merely report it, what these services most have in common is that they are built for mobile, social media-savvy audiences.

They are driven by a swell of optimism about the future of online news, and have established media players scrambling to adapt. Vox Media owns seven websites including Vox, The Verge, and the hugely successful SB Nation sports services. CEO Jim Bankoff says: “Digital news is a different medium, and it has different values and different voices. We focus on people who grew up creating things on the web.” Vox Media, the site’s parent, is financed by venture capital, and raised $34 million in its latest round of funding in October 2013. Vox itself has also found an early corporate sponsor in General Electric.

The way that digital services may squeeze the life out of increasing numbers of newspapers is underlined by the 2013 departure of Ezra Klein from the Washington Post. He is the 29-year-old creator of the Post’s best-read Wonkblog on healthcare and budget policy. He has been variously named as one of the 50 most powerful people in Washington, Blogger of the Year and Best Online Commentator. He quit in January, just five months after the Washington Post was acquired by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who apparently tried to persuade him to stay.

Klein says: “We are just at the beginning of how journalism should be done on the web. We really wanted to build something from the ground up that helps people understand the news better. We are not just trying to scale Wonkblog, we want to improve the technology of news, and Vox has a vision of how to solve some of that. We want to think really hard about how to connect not just new information, but to bring it together with important contextual information to create a more thorough source and place to understand the world.”

A few months in, Vox claimed 9million unique visitors in July and says the number was substantially higher for August. It certainly is trying to do things differently. It has some helpful features, including Vox Cards (the explainers) and StoryStream (real-time updates), both of which help readers understand the context of news stories. A toggle feature allows readers to alternate between an article and a full transcript of the interview behind it. Klein explains: “Print journalism had a length limitation that meant interviews had to be condensed down to a few sentences… Now we can put up the whole interview alongside the story. It’s a way of using the internet’s infinite length more effectively.”

What’s special about Vox? Not too much really – so far. What’s special is the calibre of Ezra Klein whose reputation has already swung a huge readership across to this quite experimental format. He has brought an audience with him. Nobody can be sure what Vox will look like in, say, 12 months. But it seems likely that it will be among the leading news purveyors on the smartphone. The emphasis on mobile is something it has already got right, although it is a moot point whether (and if) the emergence of viewing platforms like Google Glass might just bring the experience of full-screen reading even to smartphones.

For all the potential of publishers and broadcasters to become strong digital providers, they have obvious handicaps when it comes to targeting consumers who are neither buying papers nor watching a TV set. The traditional media brands sometimes mean almost nothing to digital natives. The success of these 8 former stars of traditional media (and their many peers around the world) is a warning. The fact that the splashiest digital channel of all, Vice News, is just 10 months old shows that the revolution has scarcely begun.