Inside Hearst’s Texting Playbook
Join Hearst Newspapers senior director of new content initiatives Alex Ptachick, Subtext CEO Mike Donaghue and The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey for a one-hour, interactive case study on how Hearst is using texting to drive results. We’ll dig into how Hearst is using texting for breaking news and weather alerts, live sports coverage, critic-led city guides, membership saves, and time-boxed commerce. We’ll also cover how the team sets cadence, keeps the tone human, and proves impact.
What you’ll take away
What’s working with texting campaigns
How to set up an effective SMS campaign built for engagement and ROI
How to use SMS to mitigate churn and drive new subscriptions
How SMS can be used to build human connections with creators and journalists
Effective workflows for SMS
“We’re going to tell you exactly where we come from”
Ad industry impresario Michael Kassan has long waved away criticisms that his ventures have built-in conflicts of interests with a pithy line: “No conflict, no interest.”
That same approach is taking root in the Information Space, where mass media has been shattered into a chaotic kaleidoscope where the husk of institutional media battles an army of feral information entrepreneurs and upstarts who view neutrality as not just a fool’s errand but a marketplace liability.
“For journalism to work properly, it needs American liberal democracy,” The Bulwark’s publisher Sarah Longwell told me on The Rebooting Show. “The traditional media doesn’t know what to do as we slip further away from that. They have this studied neutrality they cling to, and that prevents them from meeting the moment.”
Longwell is an apt messenger because she isn’t a capital-J journalist at all but a longtime Republican political operative and strategist who helped found Republican Voters Against Trump and has spent much of the past decade as an active participant in the political arena. She approaches media not as an active participant in the hurlyburly, not a passive observer. Along with The Bulwark, she owns Longwell Partners, a DC comms and public affairs shop.
Many journalists will bristle at being lectured on how their profession should work from someone who is not, at least by standard definitions, a professional journalist. But journalism is an unaccredited profession that is losing ground in the marketplace as trust shifts from institutions to individuals.
The Bulwark has emerged as an energetic brand built out of the Never Trump movement, which by all measures has spectacularly failed in a political sense. The Bulwark has shifted its own ethos to being “analysis and reporting in defense of America’s liberal democracy.” There is no mention of Trump other than an oblique reference to “a Bad Orange Man.”
“We’re not trying to save the Republican Party,” she told me. “We’re trying to save America. We tell people exactly where we come from and exactly what we stand for. And people say, I understand who you are and what you advocate for, so I know what you’re saying is true.”
That also happens to be rewarded in the information marketplace. The Bulwark has built a large, loyal following across newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube by replacing neutrality with transparency. Tim Miller, a former GOP operative turned media personality, is a sign of this shift. His mix of insider experience, humor, and conviction has made him a breakout star. Audiences reward voice and conviction more than process and professional credentials.
My j-school professors would laud longtime Supreme Court reporter Lyle Denniston for proudly claiming to have never voted in decades as a way to prove his monastic bona fides as a neutral observer. That always struck me as extreme, even suspicious. It’s like how Europeans view philanthropy as a sign a rich person is covering up some kind of nefarious activity.
The collapse of neutrality is part of the collapse of mass media. Neutrality is a fairly recent phenomenon in American journalism, part of the industrialization of the information industry.
Before the 20th century, newspapers were overtly partisan; political parties literally owned many of them. As the telegraph and the Associated Press distributed news across ideological lines, neutrality became a commercial necessity, a form of standardization. It was a way to sell the same product to everyone — Democrats and Republicans alike — and attract mass advertisers. It was built for scale.
That’s now a liability as information entrepreneurs find niches with their own mix of analysis, opinion and some motivated fact gathering. The Bulwark is more than a collection of podcasts. It produces its own reporting, much in the same way The Free Press or The Dispatch do. Washington has always produced ideological publications that straddle the line between advocacy and journalism. Many of The Bulwark’s founding team emerged from The Weekly Standard, which was a conservative alternative to the more
The question for institutional media is how to respond to the market signals. Trying to be all things to all people is increasingly untenable. Seen this way, David Ellison’s move to install Bari Weiss as the head of CBS News is a smart business decision. Fox News generates about $1.5 billion in profits a year, by far the most profitable cable news operation.
Some are attempting to split the difference on neutrality on the product level. Luke Bradley-Jones, The Economist’s president, detailed on yesterday’s TRB Live how the publication’s updating its traditional voice-of-God (or at least Oxford) institutional viewpoint by "lifting the veil” on how their newsroom debates and decides its collective point of view. “We realized that we had to find a way to strike the right balance between that deeply held institutional point of view and the growing audience desire to get closer to our journalists,” he said, a significant change of approach for a publication founded to oppose the Corn Laws.
Isaac Saul’s Tangle is a profitable independent political media companies with a simple premise: show multiple sides clearly, then state your own.
“We embrace viewpoint diversity,” he told me recently in a conversation for an upcoming episode of The Rebooting Show. “We share perspectives from the left and right, and then I give my take. It’s transparent about bias instead of pretending there isn’t any.” Tangle now has over 70,000 paying subscribers and $4 million in recurring revenue, proof there’s a market for fairness that doesn’t hide behind neutrality.
“We’re going to tell you exactly where we come from, exactly what we stand for,” Sarah said. “People say, I understand who you are and what you advocate for, so I know what you’re saying is true.”
Listen to the full conversation with Sarah on The Rebooting Show for more on how neutrality has become an albatross.
Listen to the full conversation with Sarah on The Rebooting Show for more on how neutrality has become an albatross.
Other topics we discussed:
The “Christmas massacre” of The Weekly Standard, the shift from Never Trump to saving liberal democracy, how The Bulwark built a “SEAL team” newsroom, evolving from pundits to multimedia operators, the mission-first ethos of a publication run by political refugees not career journalists, Tim Miller as breakout star of the YouTube era and the move to “turn the cameras on,” the contrast between YouTube’s instant feedback chaos and Substack’s collegial comment culture, why The Bulwark doesn’t identify as “a Substack,” audience expansion across newsletters, podcasts, and live events, live shows as community builders not profit centers, Bari Weiss and The Free Press compared to The Bulwark’s independence, the “regime media” consolidation of CBS under David Ellison and Trump-aligned billionaires, not building for an exit, and why “human-crafted, artisanal journalism” will endure.
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