Once again, lots of smaller stories this week. Do you prefer this format to the longer analysis pieces? Hit reply and let me know.
Disney finally announced the details of their streaming service, Disney+. It’ll cost $7 a month (a fair bit cheaper than Netflix’s $13/month), and will eventually feature basically all the Disney and Fox content you can imagine. No, it’s not quite a Netflix-killer, but as a kids-focussed platform it’ll be hugely popular (and that in turn hurts Netflix, which might lose families who realise they’re mainly subscribing for their kids). Matthew Ball points out the platform’s guaranteed success: $2.8b each year is already spent renting/buying Disney content in the US. If the platform manages to replace that revenue, that’s 40 million users already.
The Press Association’s automated journalism tool, RADAR, has grown from a Google-funded experimental project into an actual business. It’s yet another tool that generates articles from datasets, but it seems that RADAR’s in-house journalists (who write templates specifically for the tool) makes it more attractive to publishers than competitors (a newsroom that used Arria for instance would need its own journalists to write the templates).
Going back to film, an activist investor is pushing for Sony to sell their Sony Pictures division (the film studio). Apparently Amazon and Netflix are interested in buying it. I imagine that their TV unit would be of particular interest to Netflix – Sony already makes The Crown for them.
Re: Amazon, a good thread from Joshua Benton about how they can become a very profitable ad-supported streaming site thanks to all their data collection. Particularly a threat in sports: ESPN and Sky should be worried.
ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok and news app Toutiao, has raised $1.3b in debt financing (primarily from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs). They’re trying to establish a physical presence in the US too – it wouldn’t surprise me if an English-language version of Toutiao is released soon.
As the New Yorker publishes yet another story about the importance of “slow news”, it’s worth remembering what I’ve said before about whether this is actually a need people have. From Richard Fletcher on Twitter: “One study found only 14% of Bing toolbar users read 10 or more news articles in a *three month* period”. Most people don’t suffer from news overload: journalists just think they do because we do.
Another follow-up from previous newsletters: I’ve written about the importance of audio as a radio-like continuous feed on smart speakers, and that UX has now launched on Alexa. Expect publishers to start designing for this method of consuming, which will quickly become the default mode of engagement.
The Wall Street Journal has made commenting a subscriber-only feature, and now starts off comments with a question prompt from their reporters. Great idea.
Automated transcription company Trint has raised a bunch of new cash, which is great news because they are a cool London media-tech startup. Their plans for future products are a bit jargon-y though: “building the world’s first enterprise product for managing the workflow of the spoken word”.
The total cost of Apple’s News Plus service has been calculated at around $485m, because of the minimum payout deals they’ve struck with some publishers (sidenote: publishers aren’t happy about the weird two-tier system Apple has). To recoup that cost would require four million subscribers for a year (or two million for two years), which is never gonna happen IMO. And that adds credence to my theory that Apple’s using News as a loss-leader for their bundled subscription service. They’ve managed to overtake Spotify in the US, so it will probably work too.
The stuff in here about Quartz’s efforts to build a new kind of influencer network is really interesting. They have a group of smart/famous people who comment on articles in exchange for the platform and exposure that offers them. A lot of places could do versions of this that harness their readers, many of whom are already pretty important people! Everyone loves to have their voice heard.
Final Thought
Been thinking a lot about management and culture in media companies this week, particularly after the sale of Gizmodo/The Onion to a private equity firm. Univision’s massive loss on the properties was partly due to paying too much for them, and also because of huge mismanagement. The Gizmodo sites lost loads of their best writers because execs like Raju Narisetti just didn’t fit the culture – it was no longer the swashbuckling company that people liked to work for. And whoever decided The AV Club should move to the Kinja CMS should be permanently banned from working in media (the site’s now a disaster to use).
You’d hope the new private equity owners would learn from Univision’s mistakes, but it seems not. The new CEO, Jim Spanfeller, is best known for developing Forbes.com back in the day. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Forbes, but its whole self-congratulatory smarmy tone is the exact opposite of GMG and The Onion. As Peter Kafka puts it, this is going to be an “uncomfortable fit”, to say the least. It’d be nice for owners to realise that this stuff matters!