The Digiday Podcast

For Complex Networks CEO Rich Antoniello, the pivot to reality in digital media couldn't come soon enough. He joined Digiday for a live podcast at the Cannes Lions festival.

Facebook has rankled publishers with its political ads policy, which lumps promoted publisher content in with political advertising. For Jon Slade, the global chief commercial officer at the Financial Times, the policy was enough for the FT to pull advertising from Facebook in the U.S.

The media industry’s struggle with Facebook is increasingly looking like a "Game of Thrones" episode to Christy Tanner, evp and gm of CBS News Digital. The focus is on the wall while other armies are amassing behind you. CBS works with various other platforms, and it's seeing positive results, Tanner said.

Reddit has 330 million monthly users on its platform but still struggles to woo advertisers. That’s why Jen Wong, its newly minted chief operating officer, is at Cannes. She talks about Reddit's advertising ambitions.

Publishers are more vocal than ever about the threat of Facebook to their industry, but Facebook is also a looming national security threat, according to New York Post CEO and publisher Jesse Angelo. Facebook will have to create better artificial intelligence than that of bad actors, which is also thorny, Angelo said in this Cannes edition of the Digiday Podcast.

USA Today is for “the entire United States,” but that does not mean it can be “all things to all people,” said Nicole Carroll, the publisher's new editor-in-chief, on this week’s Digiday Podcast. As local news publishers struggle to establish sustainable business models, Carroll is finding solutions in audience, editorial focus and leveraging synergy between USA Today's local and national newsroom...

When Glamour tapped social and digital media aficionado Samantha Barry as its new editor-in-chief, she steered the team effort toward making Glamour a habit for readers online. She is building habit for Glamour among readers through differentiated reporting. Barry discusses the challenge of resuscitating a struggling print legacy brand in the digital sphere, advertising challenges with political c...

Digiday+ held an exclusive member event on May 23 featuring a rapid-fire discussion between Dotdash CEO Neil Vogel, Bustle CEO Bryan Goldberg and Digiday Editor-in-Chief Brian Morrissey. 

Genius has spent the past two years expanding beyond being an annotations site to adding original video content, with series like "Verified" and "Deconstructed." But Genius is not betting on Facebook, once the go-to for publishers new to video. Instead, Genius has centered its strategy on YouTube, where it adds 150,000 subscribers a month and has 2.6 million total, according to Genius co-founder a...

In the pivot to subscriptions, a variety of paywall and subscription models are emerging. The Telegraph chose a freemium model to make sure visitors to the site power its advertising business, and subscribers keep coming in for distinct content. That paved the way for a freemium model that puts 15 to 20 percent of The Telegraph’s content behind a paywall, with the rest free to access. The publishe...

It’s been about nine months since Emerson Collective, a philanthropic organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, acquired a majority stake in The Atlantic. On this week’s Digiday Podcast, The Atlantic’s svp Hayley Romer talks about the publication’s ambitions in the wake of the acquisition, growing reader revenue and the challenges of advertising.

Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall started the website as a personal blog in 2000. Today, TPM is a 25-person independent publisher that's moving from an ad-dependent model to over half of revenue coming from 26,000 subscribers. Marshall discusses advertising challenges for a small publisher, downsides of venture capital, not pivoting to video and more on the episode.

The New York Times has proved to be a success story for publishers contemplating a pivot to subscriptions. But HuffPost CEO Jared Grusd says a subscription business is not for everyone, particularly digital-first news media organizations. Grusd discusses broadening focus beyond the Trump news cycle, the importance of scale, HuffPost's plan for video and more in the episode.

This week's guest is Chris Altchek, the CEO and co-founder of Mic, a news publisher focused on young people. Mic has raised nearly $60 million -- and it was one of the first publishers to talk about the pivot to video. Chris discusses whether the pivot was a mistake, figuring out Facebook, and how Mic’s vertical expansion is going.

When CEO Julio Bruno joined Time Out three years ago, it was a publishing guide for cities. Today, the company has diversified into commerce, events and operating branded food markets. Last year, the group drove 700,000 transactions, from restaurant reservations to tour bookings, and put on 250 live events. Bruno discussed Time Out’s revenue streams, the publisher’s plan to reach profitability, th...

For Digiday’s 10th anniversary, founder and CEO Nick Friese joined the Digiday Podcast to talk about the company's first 10 years and its diverse revenue streams.

On this week’s Digiday Podcast, Recode executive editor Kara Swisher said Facebook’s relationship with the media has long been based on lip service. Swisher discusses the need for Facebook to clean up its act, whether platforms will ever pay media organizations, Recode’s venture into TV and more in the episode. 

In the year since Axios launched, the company has raised $30 million in two rounds of funding and is already a touted news source, especially for Washington heavyweights. We checked in with Jim VandeHei, CEO and co-founder of Axios, on this week’s Digiday Podcast about what has worked for the publisher and if its approach has changed since VandeHei last joined the show in April. 

In the nine months under CEO Heather Dietrick’s charge, The Daily Beast has entered the competition for Donald Trump coverage with big players like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Like with other publishers, the Beast's Trump coverage grew its audience. Yet the Beast’s growth was not contingent on Facebook, and that prevented the publisher, which Dietrick said gets less than 10 percent...

Imran Amed began The Business of Fashion as a blog he wrote for himself. Today, it has grown into a leading news and analysis website for the fashion industry with offices in London, New York and Shanghai. The publication has grown several revenue streams: events, online courses, a careers website and most recently, subscriptions. Amed discusses subscription strategy, events, filling a white space...

The media industry as a whole struggles to build a loyal audience for their brands. But theSkimm, which covers big national and global stories of the day, launched about six years ago with email newsletters. Now, with over 6.5 million subscribers, theSkimm is growing into a bigger brand with a loyal audience, and it all started when cofounders Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg aimed at becoming a...

Nick Thompson, editor-in-chief of Wired, recently co-authored a story on how the 2016 election shook Facebook and catapulted them into an identity crisis. As he investigated this story over two years, it refined his own digital strategy and views towards Facebook's role in the business of news. Thompson discusses the story, what it means when the world of Silicon Valley collides with Washington, w...

338311

On this week’s Digiday Podcast, YouTube network AwesomenessTV president Brett Bouttier joined us to discuss programming on YouTube and the emerging post-cable world. Awesomeness TV is doing programming for YouTube Red, but Bouttier said the platform is still in experimentation phase.