Truly final reminder: TRB Audience Summit is on Thursday, Sept 17 in NYC. We have a handful of spots remaining to join a terrific group of 250 media operators. We have most major publishers and many niche publishers coming, with 75% from media companies. You can see a sample list of the types of people coming here. We plan to close registration at the end of this week. Reserve one of the final spots.
I had the ideal prep call yesterday with Nick Thompson, The Atlantic’s CEO. Two minutes of small talk, five minutes total. Pro’s pro.
Most media CEOs talk around a simple question: What will your businesses look like in five years? Nick’s game. At TRB Audience Summit, he will sketch out what The Atlantic is building, producing and making money from in 2031. He’ll put that against the backdrop of how the overall media industry operates in five years, with both a maximally optimistic scenario and pessimistic scenario. Nick noted that The Atlantic dealt with the Civil War just four years after its founding, not to mention all the other disruptions of the 20th century, how bad could AI be? That is all premised on it not wiping out humanity, the ultimate pessimistic scenario. In that case, we don’t need to worry about the efficiency gains from AI workflows.
The Atlantic is a rare case of a magazine brand that’s modernized and become a stronger business. And it did that not by excelling at growth hacks or spinning up GLP-1 affiliate pages but by building an audience-focused business with distinctive journalism at its core – and a talent focus, as seen in its regular poaching of top talent, including David Brooks from The New York Times and several top Washington Post journalists. Underpinning that is an audience revenue business with 1 million paid subscriptions.
I’m convinced that most journalists should never get near running media businesses, but the one that do have the right profile, like Nick, are uniquely well-positioned.
Nick’s a Platonic ideal of a media CEO. He’s a journalist, technologist and built a big subscription business at The New Yorker. He’s deeply immersed in AI and has a nuanced view of its potential impact. It has partnered with OpenAI but sued Cohere, for instance.
The big question I want to get at is how much the model will need to change in five years.
Anna Bateson, CEO of The Guardian, is joining me on stage in the afternoon. The Guardian is another success case of a publisher taking an audience-centric approach. The Guardian is a unique case. It is backed by the Scott Trust. This isn't all that different from The Atlantic’s stewardship by Laurene Powell Jobs, who has proven one of the outliers in the checkered record of billionaire media owners. (The Boston Globe’s John and Linda Henry are also exceptions.)
The Scott Trust backing comes with a mission mandate. The Guardian’s long-held belief in free expression meant it needed to take a different approach to audience revenue. It succeeded with a voluntary donations model. It has successfully expanded to the U.S. market, getting ahead of the pack of the parade of British publications looking to break into the far larger and more lucrative U.S. market. In the U.S., The Guardian now has over 500,000 contributors.
Audience revenue now accounts for 63% of The Guardian’s revenue. It has 1.4 million recurring revenue contributors, triple what it had a decade ago with print subscriptions. That’s the makings for a sustainable model.
Anna and I will discuss how independent journalism businesses can meet the moment by adapting to an AI-mediated environment without losing audience trust, and how The Guardian is beating the odds to create a global news brand as it creeps closer to non-UK revenue overtaking its sales in its home market.
Across both of these conversations, and those throughout the day, I suspect we’ll come to a simple but hard conclusion. The most successful media companies will invest in their core product, build durable relationships with its audience, and adapt to fit the environment.
Thanks to TRB Audience Summit supporters: Raptive, Beehiiv, Omeda, ProRata, Chargebee, the Alliance for Audited Media, Echobox, DanAds, Momently, Core Advisors, Bombora, Marfeel, Subtext, Axioma and Viafoura.
Hope to see you next week at TRB Audience Summit.