Media Voices Podcast Media Voices

On this week's episode Edward Hyatt, Director of Newsroom SEO at The Wall Street Journal takes us through staying abreast and ahead of changes to the SEO landscape. From personal experience he outlines the differences in SEO strategies between subscription and non-subscription publishers, the changes in the SEO landscape over the past decade, and the potential impact of AI on SEO for publishers.
In the news roundup the team discusses the news that Forbes has been using a made for advertising (MFA)  subdomain to game the digital advertising ecosystem. Since 2017, Forbes was using tactics that have long been condemned by anyone who cares about quality media - and we discuss the likelihood that they are the only ones. According to a US Association of National Advertisers (ANA) survey conducted last year, MFA sites received 21% of all ad impressions and 15% of digital adspend, despite being widely considered as a low-quality medium for advertising. So, what (if anything) can be done?
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This week we hear from Chris Minasians, Director and Editor at TotallyEV, an independent site dedicated to articles, reviews and interviews about electric vehicles. TotallyEV has recently hit 5 million views on YouTube, so he discusses building an audience through video reviews, and what it takes to run your own reviews site - including getting access to vehicles - as a solo publisher.
Minasians also explores the differences he's noticed between his electric vehicle coverage on TotallyEV, and his more consumer-focused tech reviews on his other YouTube channel TotallydubbedHD, from audience engagement to relative revenues.
In the news round-up, Chris (Sutcliffe!) and Esther run through a busy week in audio and podcast news. We ask where people listen to podcasts - not Google Podcasts any more - and whether podcasters are seeing any benefit from Apple's promotion of paid shows. There's also the first agenda sneak preview for the Publisher Podcast Summit...

This week we speak to The Telegraph’s Head of Newsletters Maire Bonheim, and Deputy Head of Newsletters David Alexander, about the publisher's newsletter portfolio. We talk about why The Telegraph and others are prioritising newsletters, how newsletters can be used at different stages of the subscriber funnel, and what they’ve learned from a community-focused approach to their Politics newsletter.
Marie and David also discuss building a live event from a newsletter brand, and the value of newsletters as a retention tool for the subscriptions-focused publisher.
In the news roundup we have a good chat about The Atlantic’s announcement that it is profitable and has hit the 1m subscriber milestone. We discuss the extent to which investing in high-quality content (longreads, mostly) creates a virtuous circle when it comes to growing subscriptions.
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On this week's episode we hear from Jane Ferguson, an award-winning journalist with a huge amount of experience covering wars and conflicts the world over. She tells us about how wars often bring the issues around modern journalism – mistrust, disinformation, lack of resources – into the starkest focus, and how the democratisation of tech is making the job of journalists covering war both easier and more difficult.
In the news roundup the team discusses the news that French authorities have levied a fine on Google for its unauthorised training of AI tools upon publisher content, and ask to what extent this is justified and its relationship to the ongoing acrimony between Google and publishers. Esther makes several excellent segues.
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This week we hear from Ridhi Radia, Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Immediate Media, about where media sits on the change spectrum for diversity and inclusion. She tells us why she is encouraged by the fact that she hears people from a wide range of backgrounds talking about ED&I, embedding values of inclusion in the workplace and within organisational leadership, and the work that she is doing inside Immediate helping networks of underrepresented groups come together to create change.
In the news roundup the team discusses research from Toolkits and National Research Group into consumer attitudes to publishers’ digital subscription products. Of particular interest is its finding that aversion to advertising within subscription products appears to be growing, with 28% highlighting “too many advertisements” as a key reason for their dissatisfaction, up significantly from 19% in 2023.
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On this week's episode of Media Voices we hear from Tshepo Tshabalala, project manager & team lead at the LSE’s JournalismAI project. Rather than focusing on the negative coverage and speculation we so often hear about AI replacing journalism jobs, Tshepo tells us about uses cases and the benefits of AI in smaller newsrooms and how collaboration is helping journalists get on board the AI rocket ship.
Tshepo joined the JournalismAI project just three months after ChatGPT went public. Some might call that perfect timing; for others it would be a nightmare, with the playing field changing week by week. He’s taken it all in his stride, however, telling us, “It was a rollercoaster… trying to learn the job, trying to understand the field and understand who the players are, also serving our audience and our users that need help. But growth doesn’t happen in a comfortable space.”
Knowledge-sharing is at the heart of everything the JournalismAI project does, from the JournalismAI Starter Pack, designed to help news organisations understand the opportunities offered by AI, to the 2023 JournalismAI report surveying 105 newsrooms in 46 countries. Tshepo says, “It's really just sharing knowledge, and then with the hope that they can decide thereafter, what they do with that knowledge.”
In the news roundup the team discusses Sydney Sweeney, at length. They also discuss the disparity between how much journalists and creators get paid versus the shareholders of media companies, the news that GB News made an enormous loss last year, and ask whether it's good or bad for TalkTV to be going digital-only on YouTube.
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