The Digiday Podcast

In this special four-episode series of the Digiday Podcast, we invite executives from bootstrapped media companies to talk about how they run a sustainable and profitable media business. Courier, a London-based, bimonthly magazine, is focused on modern business and startup culture around the world. The bootstrapped media company is about six years old and has 12 people on staff with a network of c...

Meredith, which acquired Time Inc in 2018, is home to a stable of female-focused media brands like People and Every Day with Rachel Ray. The company's long relied on print revenue, but like everyone else, is now looking to diversify revenue streams, especially in digital. Jon Werther, president of National Media Group at Meredith, discusses their roadmap to revenue diversification, competing with...

Programmatic advertising is playing a larger role in the future of publishing. Recent Digiday research found that over half of publishers now generate more revenue from programmatic advertising than any other channel. On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Mike Smith, chief data officer at Hearst, joined Digiday editor-in-chief Brian Morrissey in an attempt to break down the current state of prog...

The pivot to paid is not on the cards for Group Nine, the holding company founded in 2016 that houses brands including The Dodo, NowThis and Thrillist. The goal for the media company: Use advertising, including branded content and entertainment, to build a sustainable media business. At a live recording event of the Digiday Podcast, Group Nine president Christa Carone said the strategy has paid of...

IMGN Media, the digital media company that owns Daquan, the meme account with 12.3 million Instagram followers, is focused on creating content for teens and young adults primarily on Instagram and Snapchat. Barak Shragai, co-founder and CEO of the company says the company isn't just a social media account but also a media brand. On this episode, Shragai makes a case for why Instagram accounts with...

2018 was a year of organizational restructuring at Condé Nast, followed by a decision to offset the decline in print business by focusing on the growth areas, including on longform video and of course, implementing a paywall at all of the publisher's properties by the end of 2019. Pamela Drucker Mann, Condé Nast CRO, discussed how the subscription plan across all Condé Nast properties in the U.S....

Local journalism is in crisis. Emily Bell, director of Tow Center at Columbia University, sees hope in policy and regulation to provide a solution. Sign up for the three-month Digiday+ subscription plan. Use code INTRO. Offer available for a limited time only.

Whether big tech platforms need to be broken up in order to rein them in is now a matter of public debate -- and will be a big topic during the U.S. presidential election next year. Dina Srinivasan is an academic, who went from being an ad tech entrepreneur to writing about the anti-trust case against Facebook, most recently for the Berkeley Business Law Journal. She doesn’t think breaking up big...

One-year-old startup NewsGuard is trying to turn the problem of unreliable and fake news into a real business. The company, which raised $6 million in an initial funding round, creates "nutrition labels" for news organizations, rating them red if they are unreliable and green if they are trustworthy. The rating is not based on an algorithm but traditional reporting by a team of 35 journalists. Ste...

In the era of deep connections with passionate audiences, being in the middle is rough. That's why USA Today is focused on scale. USA Today makes 75% of its revenue from digital advertising and 25% from print advertising. On this episode, COO Michael Kuntz discusses why USA Today won’t pivot to paid in the foreseeable future, the reason for mass layoffs a couple weeks ago, the next step forward an...

Diversification is on most publishers' minds as they work to build sustainable businesses that can withstand massive shifts. Pam Wasserstein, CEO of New York Media, is intimately familiar with the process of revenue diversification, from paywalls to e-commerce and even technology licensing. Moving forward, Wasserstein is focused on achieving a balance between advertising and these new streams of r...

Digital media is going through a tumultuous period. Layoffs at publishers such as Buzzfeed, Gannett and Vice in recent weeks have become the latest example in what appears to be a coming reckoning for new media companies. At the same time, successes where publishers have created differentiated brands also proves that it's not all doom and gloom. Melissa Bell, publisher at Vox Media, and the founde...

For many, digital media's ills are down to the broken advertising technology that acts as the plumbing for the industry. Adam Zucker-Scharff, director of ad tech at the Washington Post, says it's more complicated than that: Advertisers are going to have to work at making ad tech transparent. “We’ve seen advertisers pulling back from the programmatic space because of these conflicts. We need them t...

Gen-Z is the latest object of marketer fascination. The teenage demographic has its own language and very different traits when it comes to the Internet and social media consumption -- just witness the Instagram egg. Taylor Lorenz, staff writer at The Atlantic, has carved out a niche for herself exploring the nuances of Gen Z internet culture, and the impact it has on media and marketing. Lorenz d...

If you’re in sports media, you’re likely familiar with the world of sports betting. Action Network, a subscription-based media company that covers sports betting and helps bettors make informed bets, is on a mission to turn all sports fans into bettors of some degree. Patrick Keane, CEO at Action Network, discusses whether the category is niche or attracts mass participation, having more than one...

Publisher interest in podcasts is at an all-time high. But figuring out exactly what kind of storytelling model is ideal for audiences, as well as metrics for success, still remains difficult. On this bonus episode of the Digiday Podcast, we took an in-the-weeds look at what makes a successful podcast strategy. Jessica Stahl, director of audio at Washington Post discusses the evolution of podcasti...

This week, it was reported that Conde Nast is going to put all its titles behind a paywall in the U.S. by the end of the year. Internationally, however, the magazine publisher is taking smaller, more cautious steps towards reader revenue. Wolfgang Blau, president of Conde Nast International, discussed paywalls, centralization of Conde Nast International, taking a Vogue-first approach in the intern...

For most publishers, the pivot to paid has meant a whole new way of working. But the Wall Street Journal has had a paywall since 1997 and they have developed and refined this muscle over years. Today, the Journal has just under 2.5 million subscribers, out of which 1.5 million are digital subscribers. On this bonus episode of the Digiday Podcast, where we invite guests to dive deep into the mechan...

At a time when subscriptions are the big topic in the media industry, The Hill is going big on video. Jimmy Finkelstein, chairman of The Hill, discusses the publication's non-partisan coverage, its video ambitions and diversifying its traffic sources.

As publishers focus on digital products -- from their sites to apps to newsletters to podcasts -- it's getting hard to operationalize the process. They face everything from broken workflows, a lack of a seamless functionality and a lack of efficiency. For Paul Ford, CEO of Postlight, publishers need to stop waiting for an innovation that will fix these issues -- and just focus on efficiency instea...

With The New York Times's shift to focus on audience revenue, it's also put more of an emphasis on brand building. David Rubin, the first-ever chief marketing officer for the Times, is leading that charge. Rubin discusses the role of marketing in a newsroom, how the Times sees its brand around truth and the challenge of not being pigeonholed as an anti-Trump brand.

On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, as part of five-episode series where we invite guests to dive deep into the mechanics of making products that make money, we took an in-the-weeds look at what makes a successful events business. We talk to Margaret Low, president of Atlantic Live, the events arm at The Atlantic to see how publisher built its events business, which now stands at 100 events a...

With publishers refocusing on direct connections with their audience, email newsletters are critical. Quartz has bet on email from its earliest days. On this limited edition episode of the Digiday Podcast, where we invite guests to dive deep into the mechanics of making products that make money, Quartz’s chief product officer and executive editor Zack Seward, gave us an in-the-weeds look at what m...

On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, we recap the big themes that emerged for publishers this year, from pivoting to a reader revenue strategy to a new approach to relationships with platforms.

Most publishers see Snapchat as a nice-to-have but not a must-have platform. But Vertical Networks, a digital content company founded by Elisabeth Murdoch, is betting on Snapchat as showing the way to the future of mobile programming. Jesus Chavez, CEO of Vertical Networks, joins us in this episode.