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Cracking the media management puzzle through insights, solutions and data. ▪️Website — http://thefix.media ▪️Newsletter— http://bit.ly/2Tsr0M9 Reach out: @thefixmediabot
✌️ Good evening! Here is the recap of the stories we published this week:
🧠 AI in podcasting;
🗞 The fall of free newspapers in Europe.
📍And, our AI course is underway. This week, Alberto Puliafito reviewed how to leverage artificial intelligence for SEO in journalism. Sign up for free to receive eight weekly instalments.
❓ You can also help us become better by taking a survey.
Can Europe’s free newspapers survive the decline of their core business model, newspaper advertising? Romain Chauvet spoke with Eliane Loum-Gräser of 20 Minuten and Roberta Carlini of Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom and looked at the fall of free newspapers.
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What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: Staving off AI slop; telling stories for social media
▪️The articles featured pertain to how social media is transforming the way we tell stories, and ways to present hard news to Gen Z.
▪️Interesting insights on Financial Times' impressive revenue, and the dark side of AI enabling publishers to convert their reporting into other languages from our colleagues at Press Gazette;
▪️Great opportunities from UNESCO, Exile Media Forum, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
📍 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
How to present hard news to Gen Z? Priyal Shah looks at insights from dpa’s #UseTheNews initiative and best practices from some of the biggest outlets.
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🧠 In the second instalment of Alberto Puliafito’s email course, we're digging deeper into the implications of artificial intelligence for journalism, including:
✅ The backstory of AI and its impact on the news industry
✅ Real examples of how newsrooms are leveraging AI
✅ Innovative AI applications for content, analysis, and more
✅ Addressing ethical AI challenges like bias and privacy
Learn how to navigate the AI revolution in journalism responsibly by signing up for our email course to get the first part in the series and the following seven instalments weekly.
🎂 The Fix Media turns 5! 🎉
This month, we mark a special milestone – the 5th anniversary of The Fix Media! What started as a project covering news media specifically in Europe, focusing on underrepresented markets has grown into a vibrant community of readers, writers, and industry enthusiasts.
We're grateful to each and every one of you who has been a part of this journey.
Over the past five years, we’ve become a trade publication for media professionals, bringing value to leaders both in newsrooms and in other walks of the media industry, as well as reporting on solutions and offering practical insights – rather than just pontificating about the problems.
Cheers to the next chapter! 🥂
P.S.
Would you like to help make The Fix better for the next five years? Take our editorial survey to offer your feedback.
Those who fill out the survey by November 1st will be entered to win one free professional consultation and two €50 Amazon vouchers.
Earlier this year, we spoke with Brian Morrissey, the author of The Rebooting, about the launch of his membership program, the woes of general news publishers, interesting niche players, and advice for established news players hoping to survive ongoing turmoil.
◼ Morrissey traces many current struggles back to general interest publications losing competitive advantages with the rise of the internet. Another core issue is that people want less news overall – a demand curve no business in any other industry would ignore.
◼ What gives him hope? Apart from The New York Times and a handful of other big players, successful players are smaller and more flexible. “They are building businesses around those specific areas,” he notes.
◼ What can help established news outlets? Lobbying for money from the governments and negotiating with big tech companies might be useful to a handful of big publishers, but most news organisations won’t survive a strong growth agenda and a sharp focus.
◼ A throughline in Morrissey’s writing is the advice to do “more with less”, learning how to stay lean and use resources effectively while focusing on what’s important. Diversifying revenue is another important piece. Subscriptions or advertising alone are unlikely to save a publisher, you need a healthy mix of different streams.
◼ After leaving Digiday in late 2020 to found The Rebooting Morrissey started with relying on advertising as the core revenue stream, but over the past years he started doing events, research reports, and other ways to monetise his work.
◼ Most recently Morrissey launched his own membership program, which offers two tiers. He has sold more of higher-tier subscriptions than he had expected thanks to his community of media operators and С-level executives.
📍 Learn more about doing more with less in the full article.
For the latest instalment of our media job series, we spoke with Predrag Blagojevic about how he built a big independent media in Serbia – and why he had to walk away.
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The job of a war correspondent is invaluable. They risk their lives to report stories about the military conflict, its aftermath, and the people affected. To shed light on this work, last year we spoke with Nastya Stanko, a prominent Ukrainian war journalist, who has been covering Russia’s aggression against Ukraine since 2014, and returned to being a full-time war reporter in 2022. She now serves as the chief editor of the investigative outlet Slidstvo.info.
▪ In 2022 and early 2023, @NastyaStanko reported for hromadske from Bakhmut, Kherson, Izyum, Kupyansk, Lyman, and other hotspots of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Her planning process for a trip to the frontline could take up to a week, and the team published approximately three reports after each trip.
▪ Coordinating with the military press officers is the most time-consuming aspect of her work, which involves planning and finalising materials. Transcribing the materials also takes a lot of time – she prefers to do it herself to ensure accuracy.
▪ The work is intense during shoots, often starting at 4-5 AM, and sometimes requiring spending nights in military shelters. Stanko recounts staying in a basement with the military for three nights to avoid attracting attention.
▪ At the frontline, she usually left early, coordinating with the military to pick her team up from the agreed location and take them to their positions. They shoot for the whole day and sometimes at night if there’s enough lighting.
▪ To Stanko, it is essential to share these stories so that people are aware of the reality. Despite the challenges and risks involved, Stanko feels when reporting from the frontline she is doing what she does best and hopes her work makes a difference.
▪ According to Stanko, war journalists must be prepared to invest time, understand the military structure, manage limitations and obstacles, update information continuously, develop skills and experience gradually, and know the local communication system.
📍 Learn more about Stanko’s previous role and the challenges associated with it in the full article.
We recently spoke with Olle Zachrison, Head of Artificial Intelligence & News Strategy at Swedish Radio, about their innovative approach to AI. During the interview, he revealed how to potentially gain 1.4 million new consumers and improve content recommendation using AI.
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🇱🇧 The Fix's Gentiana Pacarizi spoke with Naqd Media, a non-traditional media venture in Lebanon that combines marketing operations with reporting for a younger audience.
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💭 “It is my dream to show that this membership-based and value-based journalism is not a Nordic phenomenon, or something that can be found in small countries”, Zetland’s Jacob Moll says.
We spoke with him & Antti Pikkanen about Zetland’s new Finnish sibling Uusi Juttu.
In last year's interview with The Fix, Thomas Seymat, who is currently Head of Innovation and Digital for News at ARTE, recounted how he made the switch from content production to his previous role as Editorial Projects and Development Manager at Euronews, how he learned to improve as an editorial project manager, and what others can learn from his experience.
◼ Thomas Seymat had been at Euronews for almost 12 years. After a decade-long journalistic career, he joined the business development team in March 2021. He describes his last position there as a “bridge role” between business development and the newsroom.
◼ Work processes were noticeably different from the times Seymat worked as a journalist. “Contrary to a newsroom role, I don’t really have a day-to-day [work routine]. It’s more like week-to-week rituals and meetings”, Seymat told The Fix.
◼ Thomas Seymat says his switch from journalism to project management happened gradually over many years. When a proposal he championed received external funding to develop 360° videos, Seymat became a de-facto project manager – “without really any dedicated training or really knowing what it was”.
◼ Seymat believes that every journalist has some skills that are useful in project management: splitting a bigger task into smaller ones, getting from an idea to an objective to a deliverable, “is something that journalists do every day”.
◼ One of the hardest challenges in project management is influencing without authority. None of the journalists and newsroom managers Seymat workув with reported directly to him, yet he had to get them to do things on top of their already demanding day jobs.
◼ For those looking to transition from reporting to project management, a practical piece of advice is to find the money for a project, such as by applying for a grant. This will automatically make you the most obvious option for managing the work you helped fund.
◼ The shift requires “changing the mindset”, Seymat says. As a project manager you don’t have the luxury of publishing something quickly and moving on, you need to adopt a longer-term perspective.
📍 Learn more about Seymat’s experience of switching to project management in the full article.
⚡️ New from The Fix – a story of Le Courrier des Balkans & Le Courrier d'Europe centrale, two French-speaking media outlets from the Balkans and Central Europe.
How do they work – and manage to survive?
What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: From reporter to manager; US elections coverage in Europe
▪️The articles featured pertain to European outlets' approach to US elections, five lessons from media leaders, and Perplexity's partnerships with major publishers;
▪️Interesting insights on whether to block AI bots from accessing your content, how to work with Reddit, and how Brazilians “carve out new digital homes” amid the ban of X from our colleagues at A Media Operator, Digiday, and AP;
▪️Great opportunities from JournalismAI, and Media Development Investment Fund.
📍 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
The Romanian town of Iasi is not that big – just 250,000 people. Since 2022, Alex Enășescu’s Iașul Nostru, a European publication that won the Substack Local grant, has quadrupled its free subscriber audience to over 6,000 people and almost doubled the number of paid supporters. Here are some insights into their story from our interview earlier this year.
◼ After finding his position as newsletter editor at PressOne.ro was at risk, Enășescu sought a plan B – local journalism. Substack was just beginning to emerge as an alternative platform for authors and announced a program for local newsletters. The journalist was one of the 12 recipients of the Substack Local Initiative, the only journalist from mainland Europe to be part of the program.
◼ In 2023, Iașul Nostru doubled its newsletter audience from 3,000 to 6,000 free subscribers, mostly through a series of local guides that were promoted on social media, courtesy of an innovation accelerator run by the International Press Institute. The outlet has 5,500 followers on Facebook and 3,700 on Instagram.
◼ Currently, it’s mostly a one-man team. In the first year of the grant, Iașul Nostru had an editor paid by Substack, and employed around 10 paid freelance reporters over the first 2 1/2 years. Now Enășescu does most of the editing and reporting for our weekly briefing himself, with the help of a copy editor and a local journalism student who aggregates local news and events.
◼ Iașul Nostru has three main revenue sources:
-paid subscriptions (145 subscribers at 5 euros/month or 30 euros/year = $6,000 gross).
-advertising – 2,000 – 3,000 euros per year.
-grants – $40,000 from Substack in 2021-2022 and 15,000 euros from IPI in early 2023
◼ The outlet is generating total revenue of less than 10,000 euros a year, which doesn’t cover the costs.
◼ Enășescu believes that public interest local journalism is essentially a case of market failure. That would make state intervention even more vital, but Europe is lagging behind the US — the European equivalent of the Press Forward initiative was 40 times smaller, and most of the money goes to large-scale cross-border investigative efforts.
📍 Learn more about Iașul Nostru in the full interview by James Breiner.
Google’s service NotebookLM went viral for helping create uncannily human-like AI-generated podcasts. We look at NotebookLM and the wider role of AI in podcasting.
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Earlier this year, The Fix spoke with Kait Bolongaro, who leads a team of about 30 people covering Europe at MLex Market Insight, a newswire focusing on regulatory risk. We asked her how she went from reporting to editing to managing within a few years – and what others can learn from this experience.
◼ As the managing editor for Europe, Kait Bolongaro leads a team of correspondents and editors across two European offices in Brussels and London. She reports to the editor-in-chief Richard Thompson.
◼ Bolongaro is both the people manager of the people on her team and its most senior editor and spends most of her time on management responsibilities – overseeing the team, hiring and onboarding new people. Team building is an important part of her job.
◼ In 2021, while covering Canadian politics from Ottawa for Bloomberg, Bolongaro wanted to return to Europe and transitioned to MLex as a senior editor. In 2023, she was promoted to her current position.
◼ She has handled the transition partly thanks to leadership training she received back at university, although the most important aspect was the support of her leaders and peers.
◼ Her advice to journalists looking to transition from reporting to editing or management is to be prepared “to take your ego out of the equation” as editors and managers are “more behind the scenes” compared to reporters.
📍 Learn more about Bolongaro’s journey and experience in the full article.
As social media continues to reshape how we consume news, visual journalism is becoming indispensable. Visuals cut through the clutter, deliver information clearly, and engage audiences like never before. Gentiana Pacarizi sat down with Lazar Čovs, an investigative and data journalist at BBC World Wide News, to discuss the developments.
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What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: Five years of The Fix; paywallisation & alternatives to Substack
▪️The articles featured pertain to the story of one media manager from Serbia to Canada, and how Ghost is catching up with Substack;
▪️Interesting insights on Denník N acquisition of a minority stake in a Czech lifestyle magazine for women, and how the politicization of fact-checking has contributed to a decline in the number of fact-checking sites globally from our colleagues at Médiář and Axios;
▪️Great opportunities from Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, BBC Studios, and more.
📍 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
✌️ Good evening! Here is the recap of the stories we published this week:
🧑🎓 How Predrag Blagojevic built and left Južne vesti;
👻 Ghost's impressive growth amid Substack fatigue.
📍And, our AI course is underway. This week, Alberto Puliafito reviewed the basics of Artificial Intelligences for journalists. Sign up for free to receive eight weekly instalments.
The advantages that made Substack strong in its early days are now pushing major users, including European media, towards other platforms, such as Ghost. Romain Chauvet looks into the trend.
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What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: Lessons from the Nordics
▪️The articles featured pertain to lessons from Swedish Radio's AI strategy, and insights into the work of a travel journalist;
▪️Interesting insights on Vice's debuting its first subscription product, and publishers building audiences on WhatsApp from our colleagues at Adweek and The New York Times;
▪️Great opportunities from Earth Journalism Network, and The Economist.
📍 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
How do you balance working as a travel journalist with travelling sustainably and cutting back on flying? We spoke with Lyon-based Anna Richards about her work as a freelance travel and outdoors journalist.
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What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: Zetland’s Finnish expansion; launches and acquisitions
▪️The articles featured pertain to one case of young journalists redefining journalism in Lebanon, and Zetland’s member-centric model's expansion to Finland with Uusi Juttu;
▪️Interesting insights on The Washington Post's high-profile test of micropayments, and Google’s AI-powered research assistance service from our colleagues at Nieman Lab;
▪️Great opportunities from the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, and Global Investigative Journalism Network.
📍 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
Earlier this year, we spoke with Brian Morrissey, the author of The Rebooting, about the launch of his membership program, the woes of general news publishers, interesting niche players, and advice for established news players hoping to survive ongoing turmoil.
◼ Morrissey traces many current struggles back to general interest publications losing competitive advantages with the rise of the internet. Another core issue is that people want less news overall – a demand curve no business in any other industry would ignore.
◼ What gives him hope? Apart from The New York Times and a handful of other big players, successful players are smaller and more flexible. “They are building businesses around those specific areas,” he notes.
◼ What can help established news outlets? Lobbying for money from the governments and negotiating with big tech companies might be useful to a handful of big publishers, but most news organisations won’t survive a strong growth agenda and a sharp focus.
◼ A throughline in Morrissey’s writing is the advice to do “more with less”, learning how to stay lean and use resources effectively while focusing on what’s important. Diversifying revenue is another important piece. Subscriptions or advertising alone are unlikely to save a publisher, you need a healthy mix of different streams.
◼ After leaving Digiday in late 2020 to found The Rebooting Morrissey started with relying on advertising as the core revenue stream, but over the past years he started doing events, research reports, and other ways to monetise his work.
◼ Most recently Morrissey launched his own membership program, which offers two tiers. He has sold more of higher-tier subscriptions than he had expected thanks to his community of media operators and С-level executives.
📍 Learn more about doing more with less in the full article.
What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: AI for newsrooms; unique French outlets from Central Europe
▪️The articles featured pertain to the challenges faced by small French media outlets from the Balkans and Central Europe, and an initiative helping kickstart AI projects in the news industry;
▪️Interesting insights on UK news publishers increasingly asking readers to pay to opt out of sharing personal data for advertising, and how mobile newsrooms are restoring citizens’ faith in journalism” in Macedonia and Latvia from our colleagues at Press Gazette, and OCCRP;
▪️Great opportunities from The Kyiv Independent, European Media and Information Fund, and Internews.
📍 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
AI is becoming a must-use technology for newsrooms, but smaller publishers face a lot of barriers.
👩💻 In this partner article sponsored by Atex, we look into the Atex AI Challenge, a new accelerator program that helps newsrooms and journalists kickstart their AI projects.
Artificial Intelligence is shifting the media landscape. Stay ahead of the curve with “AI for Journalists and Newsrooms” – a free 8-part email course from The Fix.
Authored by Slow News’ editor-in-chief and AI expert Alberto Puliafito, this course offers:
🧠 The basics of AI in journalism
🔎 How to approach covering AI
📝 AI for research and news gathering
📈 AI for SEO and social media management
✔️ AI for fact-checking
🗓 The course debuts on September 26th with the first email instalment, followed by weekly lessons.
📍 Sign up for free now to receive the first part on the launch date followed by seven more weekly instalments!
✌️ Good evening! Here is the full list of stories we had this week, including European outlets' approach to US elections, five lessions from media leaders, and Perplexity's partnerships with major publishers.
🗳 Covering American elections for European audience;
✍️ Insights on going from a reporter to a manager;
🧠 How one AI company approaches work with news media.