Tonight, we’re having an edition of TRB Private Table, our dinner dinner series that brings together top executives for candid conversation about what’s working in building sustainable media businesses. Thanks to our partners at Raptive for sponsoring this gathering. I’ll have (anonymous) highlights on Thursday.
More on the convening front:
Next week is the first NYC edition of the TRB Media Mixer series. We have a great group coming from Bloomberg, Hearst, Semafor, the Financial Times, Netflix, the Wall Street Journal, BBC, BuzzFeed, The Guardian, Meta, Business Insider, Fast Company, The Onion, Vox Media and more. Thanks to Beehiiv for partnering on this mixer.
We are holding a networking dinner at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia next month. If you’ll be in Perugia and would like to meet up, send me a note.
The Rebooting will be at Possible in Miami Beach next month. We will do a series of video podcasts there in partnership with EX.CO. We might also arrange a small gathering away from the madness of the Fontainebleau because people get the wrong idea of Miami Beach. Get in touch if you’ll be at Possible.
Partnering in Cannes: We are finalizing our schedule in Cannes. We will be doing a series of conversations at various locations throughout the week, as well as a private dinner and morning mixer. Send me a note to discuss partnerships.
Get in touch: [email protected]
TIME’s newsletters reach millions of readers every week. But until recently, they were stuck with clunky workflows, limited insights, and flat engagement. After migrating 13 newsletters and millions of subscribers to beehiiv (with zero downtime) things changed fast. Open rates on “Inside TIME” jumped 63.8%. Click through rates across their portfolio increased to 11.7%. Editors now publish faster, with better tools and real-time insights. TIME proves that even the most established media brands can evolve and thrive when they own their email strategy.
Journalism is resistant to change. And right now, the journalism product itself is often losing in the marketplace. The Washington Post’s job cuts came with data showing that the product the Post has been producing is not doing well in the market.
Dmitry Shishkin, a veteran of the BBC and former CEO of Ringier International, has a back-to-basics suggestion: Journalism needs to adapt more of a product mindset. The hardly revolutionary idea is that instead of a single-minded focus on accountability or mission, news products need to be like any other product: a utility to people.
"We need to make journalism indispensable in people's lives,” Dmitry told me on The Rebooting Show. “I always ask my clients, what would happen if your organization disappeared tomorrow? And if there is a silence at the end, then there is a problem. Because we are moving from output-based journalism to usefulness-based journalism."
Dmitry codified this approach in a user needs framework that seeks to quantify the qualitative aspects of a newsroom’s output along several dimensions:
Dmitry’s analysis has found news organizations are primarily producing updates that aren’t judged nearly as valuable by people as other areas. Dmitry's most concrete data point is that at BBC Russia, 70% of output was "update me" commodity news that drove just 7% of page views. When they rebalanced — cutting total output by 60% and shifting toward educate/perspective/inspire content — the audience tripled.
The New York Times is sometimes referred to as a games company with a newsroom. What the Times has done with its bundle, including games and food, is build out utilities. News – that is to say “hard news” – is becoming a feature of larger products. News Corp CEO Robert Thompson is referring to the company as an “AI input company.”
Adapting to AI starts with being essential in Dmitry’s view. "If your editorial is rubbish, you will not make it. If your product is rubbish, you will not make it. If your data is rubbish, you will not make it."
Other points Dmitry made about fixing the journalism product:
Formats are important but can be a distraction. News is constantly trying and failing to reinvent the typical news article. Dmitry's formulation is "story first, user need second, format third.” The bigger question is whether you’re essential to an audience.
Give audience development more power. Dmitry’s provocative view is the next editor in chief should come from audience development. His larger point is that audience development is often closest to the audience data and product. This is not a role that is tangential to the newsroom.
Stop being generalists. Journalism as a profession is premised on being a generalist. I noticed at j-school in 2000 they were training us to work for big metro newspapers to be flexible enough to cover fires, courts, crime. There were no business course. Dmitry believes a generalist approach is a road to nowhere, and instead publications should view themselves as a collection of niches.
Don’t rely on industry benchmarks
Most benchmarks measure surface metrics: conversion rates, paywall configurations, churn percentages. They rarely account for deeper mechanics that drive sustainable customer lifetime value: alignment, segmentation logic, onboarding structure, retention architecture and brand positioning. What works for one organization’s audience, brand, and cost structure may quietly destroy another’s.
The TRB x HoK Audience Revenue Lab helps publishers build direct, durable relationships with audiences and grow sustainable, owned revenue models unique to each brand.
Anthropic’s battle with the Pentagon can be seen as a misstep by an inexperienced CEO. It can also be seen as a brand building master stroke. Large language models are increasingly seen as undifferentiated, and Anthropic’s long-term differentiation has been around its safety ethos. Dario Amodei left OpenAI to start Anthropic for this reason. Taking on the Pentagon backs up those words with actions. Anthropic’s Claude rocketed ahead of ChatGPT to the top of the app download charts.
On the other hand, we have the case of McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski, who awkwardly ate McDonald’s new pricey burger, the Big Arch. Calling it “product,” Kempczinsk looked every bit the Boston Consulting Group consultant he used to be. The video resonated because too many companies are too distant from their products, relying instead on professional managers more adept at financial engineering.
For more on this week’s topics, see the People vs Algorithms newsletter.
Thanks for reading. Send me a note with your feedback by hitting reply.