The Digiday Podcast

Sara Fischer, media reporter at Axios, joined the Digiday Podcast for the first of two year-end wrap-up episodes looking ahead to 2020. On this week's episode, Fischer weighs in on why the flurry of digital media acquisitions in 2019 will continue into 2020 and why next year regulation will be in the spotlight. (Next week, Digiday media reporters Tim Peterson, Lara O'Reilly and Max Willens will ad...

Gaming is often thought of as a subculture, but it’s just as dominant a part of youth culture today as music. For gaming companies, that means growth opportunities on par with MTV. “Music might have been at its core, or might have been its origin, but at some point the majority of content that they made had nothing to do with music,” said Lee Trink, CEO of FaZe Clan, a gaming collective that’s par...

If you've been upset by something you read in The New York Times' Style section, that was by design. "[The] Style desk covers change, it covers generational change, it covers change in how we talk about gender, it covers young people," says the section's editor, Choire Sicha. "It covers technology, and it covers love, marriage and how we look. Those are all things that are incredibly fraught at th...

The Washington Post's CRO Joy Robins thinks ad agencies deserve a little more sympathy. "We need to better understand their business, better understand how they make money," Robins said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "You start to see more and more that the agencies represent their own business model, they are facing their own challenges," she said. "So how do we stop looking at th...

Condé Nast is on a journey to remake itself from a magazine company -- home to Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and more titles -- and into what new CEO Roger Lynch calls "a 21st century media company." The exact contours of what that looks like remain a work in progress. One aspect that isn't in doubt: video and the establishment of franchises is absolutely part of that vision. Condé Nast Enter...

Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs worked together for five years before cofounding Food52 in 2009. That was enough time for them to recognize a gap in the online landscape. Americans were getting more serious about food and cooking as rewarding pursuits and social opportunities but the internet had yet to reflect that movement. "We felt that aside from food blogs, which were really exploding, there...

As many publishers zero in on consumer revenue strategies and hardened paywalls, HuffPost is taking a different tack. "Look, I spent 15 years working at The New York Times, which is a fantastic news organization, and I'm thrilled to see them thriving with a subscription model that restricts access to their product," HuffPost editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen said on this week's episode of the Digiday...

Hearst Magazines' properties garner 1 billion video views per month. For its head of video, Zuri Rice, that number (and the more granular "watch time") is almost incidental: "Total watch time is something that we think about, but total watch time, of course, is really tied to volume," she said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "So I think for us it's thinking about, as we're growing,...

The prickly relationship between news publishers and tech platforms appears to be improving. Look no further than recent moves by both Apple and Facebook to pay publishers directly. "We are seeing better commercial opportunity coming from the [social media] platforms than we ever have," said Josh Stinchcomb, CRO of The Wall Street Journal and Barron's Group. "We've done a couple of big deals this...

With over $100 million in outside funding, The Athletic is quickly racking up subscribers, recently crossing the 600,000 mark. Hitting 1 million paying subscribers would put The Athletic in rarefied company: "You're talking about companies like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and a couple of others," said Adam Hansmann, the site's co-founder, on this...

Sam Dolnick became the New York Times' mobile editor back when the handheld revolution was only just beginning. "And from there, it kind of shifted to trying to think about how our journalism needs to change." Days after president Trump's inauguration, the paper of record launched The Daily, the blockbuster news podcast that inspired challengers at news organizations including the Guardian, the Wa...

For all the hand-wringing about the digital media business, there are several bright spots, ranging from successes in consumer revenue products and wringing licensing fees from tech platforms. That being said, publishers must face the reality that the digital media businesses are likely to be smaller than once imagined, according to Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith, speaking at last week's Digiday...

Podcasts are trendy now for publishers, but Slate has been doing them for 14 years. Slate now has 25 podcasts that drew 180 million downloads in 2018 and expects to top 200 million downloads this year. Podcasting was 28 percent of Slate's overall business last year, and this year will be half of revenue -- eight figures. "The hardest thing to do is to make something that is big," said Slate presid...

Chances are you've heard of Business Insider. But how about Insider, full stop? In this week's episode, Insider, Inc. CRO Pete Spande talks about growing the Insider brand that complements Business Insider, balancing subscription revenue with that coming from advertising, and Insider's reasoning behind their recent merger with eMarketer.

Building publishing products is fraught with challenges, as product leaders have to balance various constituencies -- editorial, sales, marketing -- that sometimes have competing goals -- all while keeping users top of mind. “It serves its purpose,” Barton said on this week’s Digiday Podcast. “It allows both sides of the business to be represented. It allows the newsroom to be represented, and for...

Two decades ago, The Fader launches as a magazine for up-and-coming music, entering a crowded space with the likes of Rolling Stone, Spin, Vibe, The Source and XXL. Times have changed. Taking a multiplatform approach, joked Fader president and publisher Andy Cohn on this week’s Digiday Podcast, is “that’s the only way for us to stay alive.”

For Dow Jones, Barron's Group -- home to Barrons, MarketWatch, Mansion Global, Financial News and Penta -- is home to its more niche publications focused on financial decision-making. Digiday's Brian Morrissey spoke to Barron's Group publisher Almar LaTour on this week's episode.

In 2014, Time Out opened its first marketplace in Lisbon, Portugal. The idea was a food hall with restaurants, bars, a cooking school and an event venue, a  curated celebration of the best the city has to offer. Since its opening, Time Out has seen massive success with this market. Just last year, nearly 4 million visitors passed through its doors, and it is largely considered to be one of the bes...

Since short-form video app TikTok, formerly known as Music.ly, burst onto the scene in 2018, it has captivated young audiences with its endless challenges, memes and lip syncs. The app even helped launch rapper Lil Nas X, and propel his hit "Old Town Road" to a record-holding 17 weeks on top of the Billboard charts. To outsiders, the app has a reputation for "cringey" content and comedic music vid...

National Public Radio is no stranger to the world of audio, which is why embracing the rise of podcasts was a natural move for the company. NPR is a nonprofit media organization that creates content to distribute to its network of affiliate stations throughout the country. For a long time, that content was meant for traditional broadcast radio, but in recent years the company has begun testing out...

In 2018, After a long career in media, former Politico USA president Poppy MacDonald decided to make the jump to a non-partisan, not-for-profit, data reporting publication: USAFacts. USAFacts was founded in 2017 by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, with the mission to "help inform active citizenship and fact-based debate, and advocate for transparency of and ease-of-access to public data," accor...

In 2015, CNN launched Great Big Story -- a video-first media company that produces inspirational micro-documentaries. For its first four years, that meant building an audience on platforms. Now, as Coupe looks towards the future, she wants to see GBS continue to grow, not just in views, but also in audience impact. On this week's episode of The Digiday Podcast, Brian Morrissey sits down with Coupe...

When Will Welch took the helm as editor-in-chief of GQ in January, he announced that a new era of GQ had officially begun. And this new GQ is not for everyone. In the latest iteration of the men's fashion and lifestyle magazine, Welch intends to home in on the strengths of the GQ brand through a more focused content and an evolving social media strategy. In this week's episode of The Digiday Podca...

What was once a digital-first news brand has now become its own full fledged news network. Newsy, which got its start as a syndicator of short-form video, now is a news channel that claims to reach nearly 40 million viewers. The decision to move away from its roots, according to Newsy CEO Blake Sabatinelli, was a result of a shifting digital space. Just last year, the E.W. Scripps-owned brand took...

There are many video streaming services hoping to be the next big player in the future of TV. Peter Kafka, a reporter at Recode Media and host of the Recode Media podcast by Vox, thinks Netflix has remained ahead of the curve and will retain the top spot for as long as streaming services keep positioning themselves as the answer to Netflix.