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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
Media must evolve from audience-hunting to community-building, Mark Lee Hunter argues in a column for The Fix. Read his take on why traditional watchdog journalism needs reinvention.
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Launching a digital subscription service can be both exciting and challenging for any media organisation. Amid the dire financial situation of media, especially small ones, digital subscription is often seen as a way to forge a more direct and financially independent relationship with the audience.
This summer, Gentiana Pacarizi talked to Paweł Nowacki, a digital subscription expert who has been mentoring many Polish media outlets. He argues that before launching any subscription model, newsrooms should understand how close their audience is to their product.
We identified four key points to keep in mind when launching a digital subscription mode.
1️⃣ Digital subscription is not a sprint, but a marathon
To navigate the complexities of digital subscriptions successfully, adopt a strategic and patient approach. Nowacki advises focusing on small, specific goals rather than attempting to tackle everything at once.
2️⃣ Package journalism as a service
News organisations often fail to understand audience needs and preferences. A study shows untapped audiences are often willing to pay for niche content like health, technology, and science. Key to subscriptions is tailoring content to specific user needs, not just providing general content.
3️⃣ Make your subscribed users feel exclusive
Nowacki argues that once you have users onboard, you have to make them feel exclusive, not just approach your content as exclusive. Treat them as premium clients with tailored offerings – early access to articles, niche newsletters, special cards/offers. Build loyal audiences by catering to their specific interests and making it easy for them to access.
4️⃣ Simplify the process
Sometimes, the registration or subscription process takes too long, and users might stop midway. Nowacki suggests ensuring an easy registration and payment process gives a better chance of success.
📍 Find more tips in the full article!
What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: US elections; video podcasting boom
▪️The articles featured pertain to lessons from the Reinventing Media Business Conference, and LinkedIn's news content strategy;
▪️Interesting insights on how media made no difference during the US election, and strategic autonomy in the information ecosystem from Thomas Baekdal and our colleagues at Media Finance Monitor;
▪️Great opportunities from the European AI & Society Fund, Goethe-Institut, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
📍 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
LinkedIn is making a play to become a major platform for news and journalism. The professional networking site is now highlighting more news stories in user feeds and working with over 400 publishers globally. But challenges remain, including fair compensation for publishers and compliance with EU rules around licensing news content, Romain Chauvet writes in his latest article.
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As misinformation and disinformation continue to proliferate, the role of fact-checking has never been more vital, Alberto Puliafito writes in one of the instalments of his AI email course.
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The "Reinventing Media Business" conference, hosted by the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, offered valuable insights on new strategies for media sustainability, digital innovation, and audience retention. Here’s a round-up of three critical insights shared by media leaders.
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✌️ Good evening! Here is the recap of the stories we published this week:
✍️ Euractiv's new subscription strategy;
🎶 TikTok's power in news.
📍And, our AI course is underway. This week, Alberto Puliafito reviewed AI for social media management in journalism. Sign up for free to receive eight weekly instalments.
❓ You can also help us become better by taking a survey.
TikTok is redefining news for Gen Z, blending short-form video, relatable personalities, and authenticity—ingredients that traditional formats struggle to replicate.
In her latest column, Erika Marzano explores how Gen Z's demand for ‘real’ is changing journalism. She argues that newsrooms need to let journalists step into the spotlight, put authenticity first, and experiment with new formats if they want to engage young audiences effectively.
What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: AI in podcasting; micropayments
▪️The articles featured pertain to the latest insights from research, and using AI for news gathering;
▪️Interesting insights on Morning Brew's slight rebranding, Toronto Star's use of micropayments for subscriber acquisition from our colleagues at Axios and Media Voices;
▪️Great opportunities from Tarbell Grants, and Financial Times.
📍 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
AI can assist journalists in uncovering stories, analysing large datasets, and improving the accuracy and speed of our research processes. In this instalment of our AI course, Alberto Puliafito looks at specific ways to achieve it – and considers the ethical implications of using these powerful tools.
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What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: Rebuilding Ukraine’s media business; decline of Europe’s free newspapers
▪️The articles featured pertain to the use of AI in podcasting, and the fall of free newspapers in Europe;
▪️Interesting insights on BBC's newsroom cuts, The Economist's paywalled podcast strategy, and Semafor’s successful events business from our colleagues at Financial Times, Press Gazette, and Digiday;
▪️Great opportunities from Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, IJ4EU, and CORRECTIV.
📍 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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An important decision looms for publishers - whether to block or allow AI crawlers access to their content. This seemingly technical choice carries significant legal, ethical, and strategic implications.
In this instalment of his AI email course, Alberto Puliafito considers the copyright concerns surrounding scraping practices and the fair use debate.
"Watching a podcast" is no longer a joke – it’s a reality that’s transforming media. Major names, from Joe Rogan in the US to Ukrainska Pravda in Ukraine, are bringing podcast conversations to YouTube, reaching massive audiences.
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✌️ Good evening! Here is the recap of the stories we published this week:
🧠 AI for social media management;
✍️ Lessons from the Reinventing Media Business Conference;
🔤 How to use AI for fact-checking;
🗞 LinkedIn's news content strategy.
📍And, our AI course is underway. This week, Alberto Puliafito reviewed how AI can help with fact-checking in journalism. Sign up for free to receive eight weekly instalments.
❓ You can also help us become better by taking our editorial survey.
A Data Journalist is a person who uses data and statistics to investigate an important topic and to write a story and/or illustrate it with a data graphic. This is both a journalistic and technical position, as it asks for skills in collecting data, cleaning and analysing it, and familiarity with programming and design software.
We described the position based on our 2023 interview with Sondre Ulvund Solstad from The Economist, a British weekly newspaper and an online outlet famous for its data journalism.
◼ Sondre Solstad is a Senior Data Journalist at The Economist, where he has worked since February 2020. He is part of the data team led by the Data Editor. Solstad explains the essence of his role in one phrase: “To produce journalism that helps our readers make better decisions.”
◼ The Economist is a huge outlet, and the data team itself has 9 data journalists. As Solstad explains, they work mostly independently on their projects. The cooperation starts later when there is enough processed data to write a story or prepare a visual.
◼ To prepare the story for publishing, data journalists cooperate with designers to make a final product like an interactive map. Then it goes up the chain — to the data team editor, then to the editor of a section, like the Britain or China editor, and to the editor-in-chief or other senior editors looking at the story before it goes public.
◼ Sondre Solstad says that he doesn’t have metrics as his KPI. Instead, to understand how well he works, Solstad looks into the audience that read his articles and the policy impact — for instance, if people refer to his works or quote them.
◼ Asked about verifying data, Sondre Solstad replies that he starts with a basic premise that any data isn’t trustworthy. Then he looks into reasons to trust it. One source of trustworthy data is those obtained in automated ways, for instance from satellites. Next goes the data on apolitical topics.
◼ However, everything gets tricky with politics and economics. The journalist looks for incentives one may have to misrepresent the data, but uses logic as well. For example, businesses may be incentivised to publish incorrect data to hype up their product, but then they can get sued if caught, thus making a case for the data being more trustworthy. Anyway, every case is different.
◼ Solstad says that the job’s most exciting part is the ability to help people make better decisions: “To be able to write about important topics and to inform people about how they should see and react to them.”
◼ Solstad’s advice? Generally, when trying to break into the field, it’s useful to rely on personal preferences. For example, if a person loves pieces that rely on satellite imaging, then it is a good idea to dig into this field, to look for resources to understand how it works and what tools journalists have.
◼ Solstad also thinks that the importance of creativity is often overlooked in data journalism, and it will be priced more with time. The number of data journalists is growing, and they use relatively similar sources of data, but Solstad believes there is a push to be more creative.
📍 Find more insights into this profession in the full article.
What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: The peril and promise of reader revenue
▪️The articles featured pertain to Euractiv's new subscription strategy, and TikTok's power in news;
▪️Interesting insights on how Reach leverages the Google Discover service, and Meta AI's first news deal from our colleagues at Digiday and Axios;
▪️Great opportunities from the European Press Prize, Bloomberg, and the European Commission.
▪️Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
📍You can also help make The Fix better by taking our editorial survey to offer your feedback. All respondents will be entered to win one free professional consultation and two €50 Amazon vouchers.
Social media isn't just for content sharing – it's a hub for audience engagement, trend monitoring, and even breaking news. In this article that is part of his AI email course, Alberto Puliafito explores how artificial intelligence tools can streamline social media management, enhance interactions, and analyse trends.
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An Events Manager is a person who plans, produces, and manages events held by the organisation. Last year, we spoke with Tamara Novel from EURACTIV to learn more about this position.
◼ The Events Manager checks the status of all the events daily. Novel assigns tasks between the assistants and looks into issues that need more focus at the moment, such as speaker acquisitions.
◼ On the day of an event, she focuses solely on its implementation: welcoming the speakers, checking if everything works, briefing the participants, and communicating with other teams, such as the multimedia one, which livestreams the discussion, or the communication or editorial ones, which live-tweet the event and publish an article afterwards.
◼ As of last year, EURACTIV’s events team produced around 100 events in a year, most of them online or hybrid, when both the speakers and the audience can come in person or connect online.
◼ Events are sponsor-driven, it’s the key business model for EURACTIV’s events. The sponsor, which can be an industry stakeholder, civil society organisation, or an institution, can propose the topic, and the team checks if it falls into one of these hubs.
◼ Preparation involves drafting a concept note, checking it with the sponsors, selecting speakers, and communicating with them, which is quite a challenge, according to Novel.
◼ Every event takes about two months of preparation, resulting in a 75-to-90-minute discussion. After securing the speakers, the team focuses on promotion: another strong side of EURACTIV is an extensive contacts database, which helps the events team send invitations to many stakeholders. It takes a few weeks and goes parallel to social media promotion.
◼ In the last weeks before an event, the team focuses on briefing a moderator, who is usually a journalist of the outlet and then briefs the speakers.
◼ Maintaining a balance is one of the main challenges for the Events Manager. Tamara Novel explains that it means keeping the discussion balanced between different sides, and it is also about editorial independence.
◼ Novel advises being mentally flexible and ready to perform a series of very different tasks — from writing a concept note to moving chairs in the room.
📍 Learn more about this role in the full article.
Specialised in EU affairs, Euractiv, has announced a new strategy model based on several subscription options to expand its audience. This move, coupled with the recent launch of a revamped website and appointment of a new editor-in-chief prompted us to discuss the changes with René Moerland, Euractiv’s publisher.
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A few months ago, we spoke with Brad Wolverton, Editorial Director of HubSpot Media Network, about his approach to steering this network, his transition from reporter to team leader, and the trends he believes will shape the future of digital content.
◼ In his current role, he leads a team of 40 people that publishes a collection of blogs, newsletters, podcasts and YouTube channels reaching over 75 million people each month.
◼ An American tech company that sells marketing and sales products, HubSpot has a market cap of $30 billion. Its media empire serves as a vehicle for attracting new customers, while producing free content that offers value to its audiences.
◼ The blog network includes five properties covering topics like AI, marketing and sales. Together they attract 10-15 million unique views per month. On the newsletter side, the flagship product is The Hustle, a business and tech dispatch with about 3 million subscribers.
◼ Rather than chasing traditional revenue streams like advertising or subscriptions, HubSpot Media’s primary goal is to support the company’s core software products by securing new clients.
◼ Key metrics for success include leads, free signups, and the reach of the network. The team also closely tracks the company’s revenue that can be attributed to individual pieces of content.
◼ Wolverton’s path from journalist to media executive has given him a perspective on what it takes to successfully navigate the transition from individual contributor to team leader. The key to being a successful media manager is having an innate desire to help others succeed, he argues.
◼ For those eyeing a similar path, he suggests taking on small-scale management opportunities before making a wholesale leap. The idea is to get a taste of what it’s like to be responsible for the success of others, not just your own work. “I think it’s rewarding when you get to work with talented people and bring out the best in them,” he says.
📍 For more insights into Wolverton’s position and experience, read the full article.
The integration of artificial intelligence into journalism has been a topic of significant discussion and debate. Recent research presented at the 10th European Communication Conference offers valuable insights into the impact of AI and automation on the news industry. We compiled its three key findings, along with practical ways news outlets are putting these strategies into action.
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✌️ 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.