This was finally the year that exposed just how fragmented our sources of news, information, and entertainment have become. And it’s going to be extremely hard to put audiences back together to form one or two mass mediums of distribution — just ask the “media,” who fully lost hold of a broad audience during this year’s presidential election. Reaching an audience enmeshed and attuned to the topics, formats, and/or sensibilities that creators have previously sublimated to favor broad appeal will present a new opportunity to creators. And the way we think (and track) those audiences has to change to ensure that we’re making content discoverable to as many people as possible (through ad-supported, freemium models, for example), so that we can use that relationship to push super-users into a high-touch, high-margin experiences.
What are those high-margin experiences? As someone who spent spare time in 2016 launching a print-only magazine, I’m a big believer in the prospect of indie publications to connect with specific audiences and charge a premium for an exemplary experience. What we’re doing at Racquet — identifying a niche audience centered around highbrow tennis culture and providing a premium experience at a premium price — tracks with what I do in my day job at Acast — working with independent producers and media companies to attract and grow high-value audio products with high CPMs to match to reach more engaged audience.
Live events, newsletters, merch — even wine clubs — round out the mix for publishers looking to expand a footprint in one medium and open the door for super-users to a premium environment where they can better control and monetize the experience. Our magazine efforts join a long-established community of Indie publishers, but increasingly we’ll see other creators venture into print to create a splashy, high-touch offering. Matter Studios put out a print accompaniment to its Total Power Move event in November, and the e-commerce mavens behind Of A Kind capped off the year by releasing Kind of a Mag, a new foray into a very old and beloved medium. Watch out for many more in 2017.
To better accommodate a world where individual media consumption is fragmented into a collection of personalized niche topics, recommendations, integrations, and connectivity will become more important than ever. Any media company who can anticipate where their audience is likely to be and how they’re likely to consume content can expect to make huge gains in the current media landscape. My former employer, The Washington Post Co., is a great example of how a fully integrated media company could function. Amazon Prime purchases can fuel recommendations for print products and digital subscriptions; data provided by on-demand audio delivered by Alexa and funneled back into Amazon and Audible to determine the slate of releases for the next season of programming. To accompany this, we’re likely to see a return to the studio model, where IP is the most valuable asset a media company or an independent producer can leverage.
News and entertainment have merged to create “content,” but while the election revealed that broadcasting to a giant unified audience might not be recoverable, recommendations and empowering a niche audience can help free news to be news again. With the prospect of a post-fact political climate defining our next four years, speaking truth to power has never felt more necessary or patriotic as it does now, and the amount of Americans willing to spend or donate money to support quality journalism has proven encouragingly high; see the soaring subscription rates to The New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post as well as increased donations to ProPublica and Mother Jones. This frees news to unshackle itself from polls, clickbait, punditry that defined (and saw declining audience in) the past two decades and to shift towards investigations, FOIA requests, policy analysis, and legislative scrutiny. What better outcome for this new cycle’s shortcomings than to pave the way for shoe-leather reporting, reporting, reporting that could reboot our entire industry.
Caitlin Thompson is director of U.S. content for Acast and publisher of Racquet magazine.
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Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
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Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
AX Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
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Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
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Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
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Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
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Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
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Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
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Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
David Weigel A test for online speech
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
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Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
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Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
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