Three Questions with Jon Laurence, Newpress
What's the most important question right now?
In content strategy, it's about oil rather than pipes.
The editorial organizations struggling right now have spent the past decade-plus focused on the enormous pipes of SEO and social, thinking about what they had to put in them. That produced “What time is the Superbowl?” journalism, putting a watermelon on Facebook Watch because someone was paying for it, and a host of less extreme incarnations. I worked at social video startup NowThis for a lot of this era, where we were proud to count our monthly views in the billions, with a b. Scale was the point, and it felt like if it just got big enough it would, to mix metaphors, become the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That scale never belonged to us, and the SEO apocalypse plus platform fatigue has ended it for good.
The organizations that are thriving right now are the ones that struck oil. Oliver Darcy's newsletter, Status, which tells you exactly what's going on in the NYC media scene, is never going to be a mass product, but it's indispensable if you work in that world. It started with a really focused editorial idea – and it has spawned a series of products as a result (rather than the other way round, as in the examples above). It's specific enough to motivate you to pay for it – and it is bringing in millions of dollars of annual subscription revenue with a tiny staff.
Highly-focused publications built around an engaged community with first-party data, and ideally owned IP, are the move. The editorial question is: where can you strike oil?
The editorial organizations struggling right now have spent the past decade-plus focused on the enormous pipes of SEO and social, thinking about what they had to put in them. That produced “What time is the Superbowl?” journalism, putting a watermelon on Facebook Watch because someone was paying for it, and a host of less extreme incarnations. I worked at social video startup NowThis for a lot of this era, where we were proud to count our monthly views in the billions, with a b. Scale was the point, and it felt like if it just got big enough it would, to mix metaphors, become the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That scale never belonged to us, and the SEO apocalypse plus platform fatigue has ended it for good.
The organizations that are thriving right now are the ones that struck oil. Oliver Darcy's newsletter, Status, which tells you exactly what's going on in the NYC media scene, is never going to be a mass product, but it's indispensable if you work in that world. It started with a really focused editorial idea – and it has spawned a series of products as a result (rather than the other way round, as in the examples above). It's specific enough to motivate you to pay for it – and it is bringing in millions of dollars of annual subscription revenue with a tiny staff.
Highly-focused publications built around an engaged community with first-party data, and ideally owned IP, are the move. The editorial question is: where can you strike oil?
