Every news outlet should produce a video podcast

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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.

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Let’s jump into it…

The Guardian debuts new flagship video podcast

From Semafor:

The Guardian is launching a daily video podcast later this year, Semafor has learned, to compete with the likes of The New York Times and NPR. The show will be co-hosted by WNYC host Kai Wright and The Guardian’s Carter Sherman, and will have a staff of ten employees …

A spokesperson for The Guardian emphasized that unlike other daily podcasts, it would be launching in a video format, with a YouTube-native feel that could be easily clipped for Instagram and other platforms.

I think just about every news publisher should have some kind of video podcast offering. From a production standpoint, it’s a relatively light lift, and it creates multiple new entry points to the journalism you’re already producing in text form. Audiences can engage with the full-length podcast or video, and you can also break it into clips for distribution across social media.

It’s also an effective way to build the personal brands of your journalists—something that’s increasingly important in an era of declining search traffic. The goal is to give audiences a reason to actively seek out your journalism, rather than defaulting to an AI chatbot for information.

Journalism schools are teaching fear of the future

An editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer says the paper now directs its reporters to upload all their reporting “materials” to an AI writing assistant that then writes a first draft of an article. The reporters/editors then read over and edit the draft before it’s published to the web. He claims this has allowed the paper to expand its coverage and increase its reporting capabilities. [Cleveland.com]

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Trump officials condemned Don Lemon. He’s bigger than ever after arrest.

From WashPo:

The White House took a victory lap late last month when federal authorities arrested journalist Don Lemon after he covered an immigration protest in a Minnesota church, tweeting his photo and the caption, “When life gives you lemons,” along with the emoji for chains.

But in the nearly two weeks since he was taken into custody, Lemon has enjoyed a triumph of his own. A new audience galvanized by the arrest has flooded his online-media empire, earning him more than 300,000 new followers on Instagram and 140,000 new subscribers on YouTube.

His Substack business has soared 73 percent to more than 140,000 subscribers, many of whom pay $8 a month to be a part of “Lemon Nation.”

This is pretty much the Streisand Effect in action. In a place like Russia, it's relatively easy for Putin to intimidate journalists because they know he can have them killed. In the US, any arrest of a media figure will simply result in them growing more popular — especially if they operate their own independent channels.

Meet Molly O’Shea, the VC-turned-podcaster who gets execs like Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey talking

There’s now an entire podcast ecosystem that can book major tech titans as guests, largely because those executives know they won’t face tough questions. Business Insider

Honestly, I can’t fault the podcasters for this — mostly because they never claimed to be producing hard-hitting journalism. And I think getting a tech executive to talk extemporaneously for 2+ hours does have journalistic value because actual journalists can incorporate quotes from these interviews into their reporting. After the 2024 election, for instance, Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan, and it did illuminate how the tech moguls consider Trump’s victory to be reset in terms of how they approach content moderation.

How Tim Burrowes helped build Mumbrella into a $7 million media brand

Mumbrella’s gossipy comments section quickly attracted an audience of bored office workers. [Simon Owens]

Hollywood wants to beat TikTok at its own game — but faces hurdles

From Business Insider:

Paramount has made short-form video a product priority and wants to add a million short-form clips to Paramount+ “as quickly as possible,” according to one exec, as Business Insider previously reported. Netflix and Peacock have also invested in short-form clips, while Disney has added vertical video to its revamped ESPN app and said it plans to do the same for Disney+ …

Paramount plans to dabble in short-form video by first repurposing existing content on its platform, according to internal documents viewed by Business Insider.

The only way vertical videos will gain real traction on streaming apps is if studios commission original programming specifically optimized for mobile viewing. More likely, though, they’ll use these vertical feeds to recycle clips from existing TV shows and films. If that’s the case, they’ll just end up as watered-down TikTok clones that struggle to attract much engagement.

How a small journalism nonprofit is holding the largest pharma companies to account

For decades, Diane Salvatore helped lead some of America’s most recognizable magazine brands, including Consumer Reports, where rigorous product testing and consumer safety were core to the mission. Now, as executive director of the MedShadow Foundation, she’s applying that same watchdog mentality to one of the most opaque corners of the marketplace: prescription and over-the-counter drugs.

In a recent interview, Diane explained how MedShadow functions as a nonprofit investigative newsroom, how it’s expanding into social media video, and how it plans to build a donor-supported model to fund independent health journalism.

Check out the interview on YouTube:

If you want to listen to an audio version, subscribe to the Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts: [Apple] [Spotify]

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