New Media energy

Today, notes from conversations with FeedMe’s Emily Sundberg on the energy shift in media and Axios COO Allison Murphy on bringing an individual-led franchise model to local news.

The Rebooting Show is now available through Beehiiv’s new podcast functionality. Newsletter platforms are expanding beyond email while keeping email as essential media infrastructure. 

First, some thoughts on the OpenAI’s shock purchase of TBPN for “low hundreds of millions of dollars,” which lit my phone up with texts from newsletterers and podcasters who suddenly could see a home with Oracle if the numbers are right. I’ve always been passionate about databases. My email is [email protected].

I have no idea why OpenAI bought TBPN. My guess is that it wants to curry favor in the Silicon Valley hot house during a gold rush. Yes, the AI narrative is terrible; I don’t see how TBPN has shown a capacity to capture mindshare of the masses. It is explicitly focused on Silicon Valley’s powerbrokers, not a suburban mom upset about a data center and three unemployed college-graduate kids still living at home.

I wouldn’t extrapolate too much from this kind of curious decision by a company that’s made all kinds of curious decisions. Does it make more or less sense than $6.5 billion for Jonny Ive’s design studio? Why would the deal be announced just as the company’s CEO of applications and CMO go on medical leave — and the CEO who is reportedly very comfortable with lying is feuding with the CFO? These people are not like the rest of us. Understatement of the year was this line in the acquisition post: “We’re not a typical company.”

That said, it’s a sign of a few things:

I’m more intrigued by how TBPN built such a successful model in such a short time. Many capital J journalists took shots at TBPN for drafting off reporting and creating an information product that isn’t journalism. Too bad, so sad. The market’s incentives are to refine reporting, not unearth it.

John Coogan and Jordi Hays are information entrepreneurs who use some trappings of journalism – the aesthetics of CNBC with the tickers, for example – but skip the play by play to focus on the color commentary. 

My lessons:

They had great energy. More below on this notion of earned energy in new media entrants. TBPN did a three-hour daily streaming show and kept their energy levels high. That’s difficult to pull off. But they also approached their work with joy. They enjoyed themselves. People notice that.

They didn’t get distracted. The constraints of doing 15 hours of live programming a week has the upside of keeping focus on The Main Thing. They didn’t do a rolling fund, courses, a live tour, merch, and so on. They sold yearlong sponsorships and stayed focus on the show rather than focus on the business around the show. Sometimes people with product-market fit get distracted by too many opportunities.

They embraced the clip economy. The live show is a great conceit. It’s a way to efficiently produce content and get out of haggling over  a good time on someone’s calendar. The show happens when it happens. The more guests, the more clips. The more clips, the more they get shared. The clipper economy is big – with its distressing offshoots like the street-interview hustlers – and tapping into it made TBPN’s paltry reach amplified.

They reinvented the trade model. Too much is made, in my view, of how they took a SportsCenter approach to tech news. The format is fine, hardly some great innovation. I was more struck by how they built a new version of one of the oldest forms of media: the trade magazine. Trade publications were always supportive of the industries they covered. They would act as the hometown papers of their fields. They were not where one would go for adversarial interviews or in-depth investigations. Watching TBPN is like watching the Sixers with on NBA League Pass with the Sixers home announcers. They’re going to focus on the unfair calls against the Sixers, trust me. It’s why I chose that option. This is harder to pull off, if not impossible, as an arm of OpenAI.

Media is a core competency. The Information Space has created a mispricing of content assets. The old media monetization methods are broken, but media remains more valuable than ever. Now operating media assets, and managing the inherent conflicts they present, is far more difficult, as I bet OpenAI will find out. TBPN as a media asset is far less valuable now than it was last week. Companies will continue to find ways to unlock the leverage of media beyond the traditional approach of ads and “working the refs” through PR. 

The TBPN guys executed great. And while I do not have high hopes for the brand as an OpenAI-owned asset – can’t wait to hear the discussion of Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker piece on Sam Altman’s inherent and obvious slipperiness –  I won’t criticize anyone taking the dough. Media is a very fickle industry. They were at the peak of their hype cycle. Sometimes it pays not to overthink it.

FeedMe’s Emily Sundberg subbed in for Alex on People vs Algorithms. We got to talking about what New Media is. This is a term that has improbably come back. New media was used during the dot-com days to denote Internet-native media. But then, it was mostly copying old media conventions onto the World Wide Web. Growth hacks then were confined to putting Pamela Anderson search terms in the metatags. 

New Media now is not defined by its distribution. Print magazines can be New Media. Events can be New Media. But the spiritual home of New Media is with podcasts, YouTube and streaming. New Media is usually centered on an individual or group of individuals, rather than a monolithic brand. New Media is often personality or expert led. Lenny Ratchitsky’s Lenny constellation, Rachel Karten’s Link In Bio, C.J. Gustafson’s Mostly Metrics are all New Media. New Media has deep audience ties that lead to different business models that aren’t about arbing search traffic with programmatic demand. 

Those are features, however. The big differentiator in New Media from legacy media is in energy. As Troy put it, New Media is about “earned energy” while legacy media is based on inherited energy of a hallowed brand. "There is an innate attraction in humans to a little bit of mischief and playfulness and having good jokes,” Emily said. 

Listen to our full conversation for more on New Media energy, why the aesthetics of Catholicism are cool, Troy’s vibe coded hot take machine, why Emily identifies as an artist, a debate over the future of text content, what makes a good party, how to create a cinematic universe, and the creeping overselling of hyperbolic newsletter conventions that blare SCOOP and list 45 random people’s names in bold.

Allison Murphy, COO of Axios, joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss the evolution of Axios Local five years in. Axios plans to be in 43 cities by the end of the year. It is adapting its franchise model to build around individual reporters. In this model, the journalist becomes “talent” for multi-facated businesses, with Axios providing the support structure, shared services and a small team. We touch on how using AI tools can enable this kind of small-team approach. 

The typical Axios Local team is two or three journalists. They’re testing single reporter outposts. These are not the sprawling newspaper newsrooms filled with guys smoking cigarettes who were hunched over typewriters.

The upside: It allows Axios to expand into places like Colorado Springs. There are over 100 metro areas with a population of 500,000 or more. With a tech and sales infrastructure that can be spread across new outlets, scale works as leverage by lowering the cost. For most new cities, finding the journalists is the hardest part.

"The proportion of our employee base who are reporters versus other roles will be higher,” Allison told me. “We're at this point where to have a new city, we don't need another engineer. We need a reporter.”

Newsletters showed the way. Axios bet heavily on newsletters as a product, not just a distribution channel. Axios co-founders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen knew the power of a personality-led newsletter from creating Playbook at Politico. That meant it got a head start on getting comfortable with a “star system,” as it created franchises led by Sara Fischer (Media Trends), Dan Primack (Pro Rata) and Eleanor Hawkins (Communicators) and Colin Demarest (Future of Defense). “If you're more of a traditional newsroom, that's maybe a harder thing to come to grips with,” Allison said.

Reporters are anchors. The days of reporting out stories, filing them, having a copy editor write your title and retiring to the bar are sadly over. Being a reporter now means also being able to bring perspective and point of view, serving as a “face” to a community, going beyond text with audio and video, having convening power and the ability to lead conversations, and doing public appearances on behalf of the brand. “The main evolution is how do we go from a fantastic reporter who can carry a newsletter to how do we find the folks who can do that and also anchor a franchise?” Allison said

Publishers are more than talent wranglers. The agents have come for individual creators in journalism and journalism-adjacent fields. I find the talent management approach necessary but insufficient. Brokering deals is only one aspect of the publishing function. Axios is building an infrastructure around its franchises, like a high-octane events capability that runs over 150 events a year, 

Listen to the full conversation with Allison.

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