X hasn’t won over many mainstream creators

Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

Sign up here

Let’s jump into it…

From the Wrap:

HuffPost’s National desk has been reduced to three reporters as BuzzFeed’s latest round of layoffs took effect Monday. Management laid off 10 members of the HuffPost Union in total.

Jessica Schulberg, who was laid off after 11 years at the publication, said on X that the desk had seven reporters before Monday’s cuts. It had already been reduced from 14 reporters to seven just over a year ago.

Who’s old enough to remember when there were serious discussions in journalism circles about whether HuffPost might one day supplant The New York Times as the world’s largest and most influential news outlet? This was, after all, a news organization that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012.

There was never much strategic logic behind BuzzFeed’s acquisition of HuffPost, and the resources it spent buying both HuffPost and Complex Networks arguably hastened the demise of BuzzFeed News, which at the time employed some incredible journalists and had built a genuinely strong news brand.

If I were ranking Jonah Peretti’s biggest mistakes, not selling to Disney when he had the chance would be at the top of the list. Right below it would be saddling the company with enormous debt and an even higher burn rate after the venture capital spigot had already been turned off. The HuffPost and Complex acquisitions helped push BuzzFeed into a debt spiral it never managed to escape.

As a side note, while writing this I went to look up old pieces arguing that HuffPost represented the future of journalism and came across this gem from financial journalist Felix Salmon. Not only does it argue that HuffPost will eventually surpass the New York Times as a business, but also that the latter’s paywall will ultimately fail. Here’s the final paragraph:

Rather than learning from or trying to emulate HuffPo’s hugely valuable editorial technology, then, the NYT is sticking its head in the sand and retreating to a defensive stance of trying to make as much money as possible from its core of loyal readers. There’s no growth in such a strategy. Indeed, the opposite is true: the NYT is making it both hard and expensive to become a core, loyal reader. Meanwhile, the open web will become ever more accessible and social, with friends pointing friends to news in a site-agnostic manner. The NYT is distancing itself from that conversation, standing proud and aloof. It’s a strategy which is doomed to fail.

Prescient!

If you ask Dave Anderson what he does for a living, he’ll probably tell you he’s retired, but that’s not entirely true. While he did leave his last full-time job at Amazon back in 2020, he still writes a weekly newsletter on Substack about tech leadership. And even though he only works on the newsletter part time, it currently has over 2,000 paid subscribers. It turns out a lot of people want to tap into his insights gleaned from 20 years working in the tech industry, including over 10 at Amazon.

In a recent interview, Dave discussed the newsletter’s origin story, how it found its audience, and why he doesn’t have any ambitions to scale it into a larger media company.

From Adweek:

MS NOW has unveiled its newest direct-to-consumer product, Membership, which the network says is an additive experience to its already existing television and digital offerings …

Launching on Wednesday, Sept. 9, MS NOW Membership will be available for $7.99 per month or $79.99 annually, with an introductory annual offer of $39.99 running from launch till Sept. 30. This DTC product will offer new opportunities for the network’s members to interact directly with the brand’s trusted journalists, exclusive community features to engage with each other, a new roster of contributors and experts, original creator content, new verticals that explore how news and politics impact everyday life, and 24/7 access to live streams and television programming.

Overall, I’m fairly bearish on this subscription offering.

The one thing MS NOW has going for it is that it’s very talent-forward, with a strong emphasis on hosts who have distinct points of view. Personalities like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes have built strong parasocial relationships with their audiences, and those kinds of connections can be especially valuable when trying to convert viewers into paid subscribers.

That being said, MS NOW doesn’t have a large newsgathering operation, especially after its corporate split from NBC News, which had traditionally handled more conventional reporting. Without the ability to regularly break news, MS NOW will probably struggle to expand its subscription base much beyond its most devoted fans.

What’s perhaps most perplexing, though, is why media conglomerates like Versant refuse to take greater advantage of bundle economics. The company owns several channels focused on nonfiction programming — including CNBC, Golf Channel, and Oxygen — yet it has never pursued a unified subscription strategy that could help those brands cross-pollinate their audiences.

Instead, media conglomerates often allow their channels to operate as separate fiefdoms, each wasting resources building its own digital business. The audiences for MS NOW, CNBC, and Golf Channel certainly don’t overlap perfectly, but they don’t have to. Combining them could still create meaningful subscription synergies. In fact, those kinds of economics are a big part of what made the cable bundle so profitable in the first place!

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. X hasn’t won over many mainstream creators

2. The difficulty of converting shortform video viewers into longform video viewers

Let’s jump into it…