The rise of the “creator economy” has allowed individuals to make a living by creating and sharing content online. At the crux of this profession is the concept of “1,000 true fans,” first coined by Kevin Kelly in 2008, which states that by cultivating a base of 1,000 dedicated fans willing to purchase products or services, creators can sustain a successful middle-class career. This concept is the foundation for an entire class of internet entrepreneurs and a swirling ecosystem of vendors like Patreon and Substack.

To reach 1,000 true fans, creators must first acquire 10,000 mediocre fans, 50,000 lookyloos, and 100,000 passerbys. These “top of the funnel” fans inevitably attract advertisers and sponsors, leading many content creators to prioritize gaining a large audience on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tiktok, instead of focusing on building relationships with 1,000 true fans who pay with their personal money for a product or service.

Just as consumers have experienced monetary inflation, content creators who chased large numbers of followers have started to learn about the negative effects of “follower inflation.” Not all followers are equal, especially if they were artificially created or never meaningfully engaged with the content. Follower inflation can provide short-term benefits and increased confidence, but if the relationship with a follower isn’t built on a platform that allows for meaningful connections to be formed, creators will ultimately be left with an empty bag.

Where The Inflation Comes From

You’re popular with bots!!!!!!

One way followers are inflated is through bots. One of Elon Musks’ presumptive goals is to rid Twitter of bots, which researchers have estimated to be between 9–15% of all accounts. The “Dead Internet” theory, that bots comprise much of the content/follower activity we see, is overblown, but not entirely without merit. Maybe those TikTok numbers are real, or maybe they’re inflated by a platform which knows it can keep content creators on a treadmill chasing virality and producing free content if their egos get a number boost. This form of follower inflation is particularly egregious as it comes from the platforms themselves. And while it sounds conspiratorial, only a few years ago the biggest episode of follower inflation of this kind came from Facebook which notoriously over-counted video views for over a year. You could say the “pivot to video” was built on a big lie.

Nobody actually stays

Another way followers are inflated is through the never-ending scroll feature on most major platforms. Even if your post is favored by the algorithm and does get to a segment of your audience, they will quickly be distracted by the next post in their feed. This gap between “views” and actual “engagement” leads a content creator to think their follower bark is bigger than its bite.

Social media platforms are like sharks. They need to keep moving and growing to stay alive. The feed is designed to keep the user scrolling and associating the overall experience with the larger brand, Facebook/Twitter/TikTok and not neccesarily the individual content creator.

The nature of platforms is to incentivize this kind of follower inflation, but just as economists will tell you a bubble needs to pop for the financial ecosystem to be healthy, so too do the follower numbers in our media environment.

Followers are more Fickle

Audiences in 2023 are more likely to consume content and less likely to become loyal fans if their main interaction with your brand is through a larger platform. There’s a gluttony of creators vying for attention and it can be difficult to stand out and attract followers to your specific “SubscriberStareOnfaneon” page.

Today, being a “true fan” may no longer mean a lifetime commitment. Instead, individuals may purchase merchandise and then move on with the tide. In 2023 it’s easier for audiences to flit from creator to creator, making it harder for professionals to retain a steady fanbase. Churn is now an occupational hazard for creators. This is a new challenge that wasn’t present in 2008 when the concept of “1,000 true fans” was first introduced. Back then, the technological barriers to becoming a fan were much higher, making the signal to noise ratio better. Any fan that found you was immediately a more dedicated and committed supporter. Now, with the ease of subscribing and unsubscribing, retention and churn have become major concerns for creators.

Squeezing the Middle Class

As the legendary rapper Biggie Smalls once said, “more money, more problems.” The professionalization of the creator economy has led to increased expenses and competition, rather than less. One of the key aspects of the “1,000 True Fan Theory” was that internet creators could keep their expenses low. However, as creators have become a professional class, with expenses such as management, platform fees, travel costs and more, they are facing increasing financial pressures.

Follower Inflation is real, but that doesn’t mean the party is over

The 1,000 True Fan theory isn’t obsolete, it’s just been taken to the next level.

Gaining a following has become more challenging as it requires more investment and takes longer to achieve because it is harder to convert followers acquired through typical platforms. However, there are still opportunities for success. For example, smaller and more niche communities tend to convert faster. This means that not all followers are equal. Having one follower on TikTok might be worth 1/100th as much as having a follower who subscribes to your RSS feed, podcast, email, or text group.

In today’s landscape, a successful creator must focus on building a bridge between the large number of followers at the top of the social media funnel and the smaller group of dedicated fans who will remain loyal through any circumstance. The skill of strategically placing and nurturing these bridges will differentiate those who are blindly casting a net and only acquiring cheap inflated followers and those who are deliberately working towards acquiring 1,000 true fans.

 — -

Join “This Week in Digital Media” a text group where every-other week(ish) a different digital leader shares their thoughts via text to you.

It’s the year 2040 and our newsroom is as silent as ever. The proprietary AI we license “GA-Net” does most of the daily grind stories. I honestly forget what it’s like to do the sports score, Wall Street-score, obits and other run-of-the-mill event-based stories.

Today our reporters focus only on enterprise stories. Everything else is covered faster and better than we could ever churn them out by the AI. Our head of AI-editorial has to fill in the occasional variable and is staying on top of the latest developments, but for the most part we’re hooked into the right inputs to get those stories out seamlessly.

The newsroom is silent, because well, who even goes into the newsroom? Our chat rooms, however, are buzzing both with people conversing but also the notifications of smart contracts being executed. Our newsroom operates off four main layers of smart contracts and you can tune in and see how we’re doing by subscribing to those notifications. In short, our newsroom is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).

Today if you want to plug into the global value transfer protocol you need tokens and a wallet, just like in 2004 you would have needed a website to plug into the global information transfer protocol that defined the early internet. In the year 2040, digital property rights are arguably more safe and secure than meat-space property rights. This security has enabled a thriving marketplace and our newsroom operates trying to grab our fair share.

The path to get here wasn’t always obvious. There was the mis-and-dis information wars of the early 2020s. And who could forget the midinformation wars that followed from 2025–2029, where expert consensus over emerging scientific data reached a fever pitch. But the roots of our newsroom go back to 2007ish and the rise of the anachronistic phrase “citizen journalism.”

In 2007 Wired writer Jeff Howe, who coined the phrase “crowdsourcing,” observed in a blog post ‘The Importance of Community’ “a dirty little secret of open source.” While crowdsourced projects of the early web are thought of as the product of a few super-contributors and a mass of people who contribute minor bits, there’s another important element Howe observed. “Any crowdsourcing project must install one go-to guy (or girl) who will thanklessly toil day and night to keep the project on the rails. At a magazine this person is called the Production Manager.” Many minds make for lighter work, but there has to be somebody to make sense of it all.

Back then somebody had to pull the levers to finish the “last mile” of a collaborative project among strangers. Today, in a world of DAOs and smart contracts, a series of rules, written into code govern these relationships. Even with individuals operating in their own self-interest, incentives and structures allow “organizations” to emerge.

The critical discovery was when news organizations realized that it wasn’t enough to open themselves up to drive-by audience participation: leave a comment here, hit a Facebook like there. That was the hub-and-spoke model of the first quarter-century. It kept the “Cathedral” news operation intake. Through the use of smart contracts, proper incentives and blockchain technology the community became the organization itself. The spiderweb of relationships became the bazaar of information exchange where news was produced and value exchanged as a result.

The rules didn’t come via social media companies like Facebook or Twitter. Those organizations got close to becoming the arbiters of information between the Arab Spring and the 2024 election, but, we realized by 2025 that multinational corporate entities were actors, not governors, in the information space. Instead the rules were protocols that anyone could interact with. For the first 25 years of this century the protocols of the web were open to all, but only a few elite organizations were able to truly enrich themselves. After the monopoly scares of 2027 even those organizations were ready to embrace a new protocol layer to the internet that enabled commerce and gave secure property rights to the participants themselves. You owned your data and any value it created.

In short, the revolution has rules that are put into code. Most newsrooms today, in 2040, rely on four main layers of smart contracts. There’s the layer of editorial creation, the layer of management and the layer of ownership. As you might guess, these layers can intermix, mingle or downright plop on top of each other. But we have rules in place for these situations.

Most people who engage with the newsroom do so in a fleeting way and that’s fine. Some tune into our streaming videos. Every minute they’re charged .0000005 BTC, the equivalent of a less than a penny in 2022 dollars. It’s possible to have this low rate because there’s no middleman or payment processor. Most people agree to the smart contract that governs this transaction once and never think about it again. Same for per-article transactions.

All of this revenue from readers is governed by the layer of “ownership.” That’s a strong word, since most people who add U.S dollars or BTC into our system in exchange for access don’t own anything more than access. This access can only be granted via these kinds of transactions which add liquidity into our own DAO tokens. The tokens are what signify a level of ownership. These tokens can be purchased separately or earned.

Some users step up their interactions and want to comment on articles, join the community chat or even eventually write their own op-eds. These loose editorial creations do not yet earn our DAO tokens. They are different from the transactions above in that they can be both purchased or earned through our editorial marketplace.

Open up your crypto wallet (what we call a “key” in the year 2040) and you can browse our editorial marketplace. Here, our managers, who have a specific class of DAO tokens, create bids for what they think our newsroom needs. They can be entire op-eds, or as specific as a quote from an official on a topic. They can be open to all users or only able to be bid on by people who have earned a other specific class of tokens. Earn enough and you can make a living and even rise higher in the ranks until you’re a manager too. This is the machine at work, where the layer of management and editorial meet. The content decisions that used to happen every morning around a table with croissants and bagels among a select few is now distributed.

The active are rewarded. The quality of one’s work isn’t judged in the vacuum of a corporate office, but by the outcomes of their work.

Transparency is the new objectivity in this world and nothing goes unseen. Everything is tallied and tabulated. If fact-check, their own bids to be taken up, finds somebody’s work was sloppy, Tokens can be revoked. This can be permanent if necessary. There’s always an audience sloshing around our content and within that audience we can see who is browsing our editorial marketplace, what work they’ve done for other newsrooms and more.

It’s 2040 and you open your key (crypto wallet) and seen an offer to buy 500 tokens for .00005 BTC to join a driverless car DAO that has a fleet of 50 cars in your city. As you take the driverless cars from point A to point B, part of the proceeds are taken by the DAO and go towards maintenance and saving up to buy more cars for the fleet. More cars increases the appeal of the network and might even increase the value of your remaining tokens.

Like the newsroom, this was written into the code of the DAO and was advertised to you and part of the reason why you decided to try it out. You could take Uber’s driverless cars. They do come with unique media (Uber-only shows) but you wanted to feel like you were investing in a car-share too.

This is the age we live in. You don’t just participate, you own, invest and interact with coded rules with almost every decision you make.

As storytelling becomes enhanced through technology so too will our narrators. We’re increasingly comfortable engaging with fictional digital personas like Alexa and Siri to get us real world information, so it stands to figure our fictional characters should take a giant step into real world space.

Wired captured some of this in a recent article: CGI ‘Influencers’ Like Lil Miquela Are About to Flood Your Feeds.”

“In the near future, Rivietz thinks, many companies may begin building their own digital influencers, simply because it’s a more efficient way of controlling the message that reaches their target audiences.”

It’s not clear what the rules are for these characters or what ‘best practices’ might be.

For example, while they can break the fourth wall they never need to acknowledge their own artifice. In other words, these CGI characters can take selfies, and know they are posing for the camera, but they appear to have just as much at stake in their self-image as real people.

This is not a new phenomena. The Muppets, for all their meta-humor and interactions with real people over the decades, have a rule that the characters never acknowledge they aren’t real. They are just a different class of person, like children or senior citizens. Just like the Muppets, these new characters will walk among us, or at least, our feeds.

Brands are taking tried and true characters and turning them into modern trans-media narrators. Not sure exactly what I mean. Check out Barbie’s YouTube page. Here’s her latest video, a vlog about how she wants to stop using the word “sorry” as a reflex.

This video is not about plot. This is an empowering message the brand wants to associate with Barbie. The delivery is authentic, even if the CGI is obvious. There’s enough willing suspension of disbelief in watching Barbie go through her vlogs that the message comes through loud and clear. The character in this instance is successful in transmitting her message, perhaps more successful than any real person could be.

We expect to see more brands play in this space. This isn’t your father’s Jolly Green Giant. These characters aren’t meant to sing a tune for a commercial and disappear. They are immersed in the same digital ocean we swim in. We can leave comments for them. They can “like” our content back. They will respond and react to the same real world conditions we are keeping up with.

How will Ronald McDonald react to the latest Marvel movie release? How might Mr. Clean comment on U.S. politics? Maybe The Quaker Oats man has a wicked sense of humor and will tell us a story about his college days. For all the praise the Wendy’s brand has gotten for its Twitter snark, the real jump will be in turning Wendy into a fully formed character we can see interact in the world….. holding a phone…. sending a “real” Tweet.

That’s not to say these new narrators will only have commerce as their goal. In fact, I think there’s potential in mystery, intrigue, drama and more. Students of the web may remember LonelyGirl15, an early YouTube vlogger who turned out to be a character played by an actress. What we are seeing now is the evolution of that moment. How might studios build characters that don’t live on comic pages, but instead are built out on Snapchat or Instagram?

“What Web 3.0 represents is an Internet where private digital property is finally realized. Safe and secure property rights are the basis of any thriving marketplace.”

In 1997, an astute prediction would have been that, in five or ten years, every barber, florist, and creative designer would have their own website. “This HTTP thing could have legs to it!”

Today, there’s a betting chance the same can be said of crypto wallets and tokens.

When the web started, journalists lamented the truism that “information wants to be free.” What Web 3.0 represents is an Internet where private digital property is finally realized. Safe and secure property rights are the basis of any thriving marketplace, and if you want to plug into a global value transfer protocol, you’ll need a token and wallet, just as you would have needed a website to plug into the global information transfer protocol that’s defined the Internet thus far.

What does this mean in the near term?

NFT to XYZ

Near the end of 2021, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution created NFTs to celebrate the World Series victory of the Atlanta Braves.

In addition to selling the digital rights to these collectible works of art, owners of the NFTs are joining a community. “Owning an AJC NFT is a great way to own a part of Atlanta culture. The AJC NFT team will deliver online and offline experiences for members of the AJC NFT community. Additionally, a portion of every AJC NFT offering will be given to a community organization to help the Atlanta region grow and thrive.”

The experiences Atlanta Journal-Constitution could offer in the coming years are boundless, and each one could both serve this community and act as marketing to bring more people inside it. Maybe they’ll organize a business cruise, a “shop local” day with discounts, or they’ll take over Truist Park one lazy Sunday. In any of these scenarios, the NFT holders don’t just have a piece of art/history, but a piece of a growing economic system, and the AJC is essentially a small central bank issuing currency.

Crypto isn’t going away and next year we can expect more media organizations to join the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in making a first foray into NFTs. The differentiators will be what events they are able to capitalize on (a World Series win is a good one) and what experiences or alternative value they’ll be able to offer in tandem with the “art.” Owning an NFT isn’t just about having a digital playing card to look at. It’s a golden ticket into the economic system and experiences the Atlanta Journal-Constitution can create. A thriving marketplace will attract more participants and give them the chance to mint more NFTs.

NFTs are the low-hanging fruit, especially for news organizations right now as the marketplace of Web 3.0 gets set up. But I don’t expect it to be the end-all of blockchain technology.

You down with DAO? Yeah, you know me!

Elsewhere on the internet in late 2021, a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) raised over $40 million to bid for ownership of a physical copy of the U.S. Constitution up for auction. Token holders of the “Constitution DAO” wouldn’t have had fractionalized ownership of the Constitution, but instead voting rights on where it would have been housed, among other voting parameters. We’ve seen how social media storms can be used for good (Arab Spring) and bad (trolls), and in 2022, I think we’ll see this phenomenon become financialized. Now anyone can build their own GoFundMe. Here’s a Twitter thread that expands on this possible utopian/dystopian vision. You thought Twitter storms had consequences? Now we can have cash-storms with smart contracts that execute actions if successful.

This could mean the next local media org on its deathbed could be saved by a community in the form of a decentralized autonomous organization. Perhaps the DAO will include fractionalized ownership of the organization, or it could include voting rights on elements laid out in the code of the DAO. We’ve seen community media orgs die in 2021. Perhaps next year a DAO could be a savior? This kind of collective action raises more questions than it might answer, but so did Reddit when it first launched.

Facebook loses the metaverse

Despite claiming to be “Meta” incarnate, the PR-inspired name change of Facebook won’t guarantee its success in the metaverse.

For starters, there won’t be just one metaverse but many metaverses, and Meta (I’ll just call it Facebook from here on out) is already late to the party. Or maybe I should say they’re late to the “game,” with Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite already defining the experience of virtual worlds for the next generation. These aren’t just games either. Fortnite hosted a concert attended by 12.3 million concurrent players. Add in payment platforms and these virtual worlds are ripe to take advantage of a networked digital property layer in a way Facebook just isn’t.

Surely Facebook, the great platform maker, will find a way to undercut these gaming companies, right? After all, creating platforms is how Facebook got its start! Alas, Facebook is behind the 8-ball here too. To build virtual worlds, people rely on virtual world engines like Unreal Engine, owned by Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite. Facebook itself is relying on the Unity engine. When it comes to hardware, Sony (Playstation), Microsoft (Xbox, Minecraft), and others already have a larger market share along with years of infrastructure and hardware production experience over Facebook.

That buzzword “decentralized”

As an industry, we’ve spent the last 10 years online roiling in closed platforms, often feeling like the rug was being pulled from under us. The audience was aggregated and Facebook (or pick your walled garden) placed itself at the center of commerce via an algorithm. Businesses had to advertise to communicate with customers.

But in the coming years, a clothing company won’t advertise on Facebook in order to get their product out to users. Instead, they’ll mint 3D versions of their new outfit and place it in all the metaverses for users to interact with. They’ll work with content creators to market and maybe even sell unique digital copies of it, with smart contracts defining future royalty payments for resales.

A garden can have a wall around it, but the coming metaverse will be a vast jungle, too big for any one company to control. Moreover, with strong digital property rights, if you create, participate, or interact, then you’ll be at the center of the transaction, not Facebook’s algorithm. This could allow for a new generation of a “thousand flowers blooming” that we haven’t seen since the dawn of the social web. And this time, if it is successfully decentralized, then smaller local players like the AJC might finally have a leg up on behemoths like Facebook.

I often refer to the journalism community as a diaspora. Like the Jews in the biblical story of Moses, we’ve left.

Most people know the basics of the story; After 10 miraculous events the Jewish people grabbed unleavened bread (Matzah) and fled the only life they knew in search of a new homeland. What most people don’t know about the story is that despite all the miracles that happened, the Jews weren’t whisked away to the promised land, or even a place with air-conditioning. Instead, they wandered the desert for 40 years. An entire generation lived and died only knowing this nomadic life. And while it can be depressing to think of journalists today as wandering the desert, there is also a noble role that this generation must play.

When fleeing their life in Egypt, there wasn’t much time and so it was an easy choice to take unleavened bread. At the same moment, the Jews decided to take the Torah, a cumbersome and heavy object, strapped to their backs and protected for the next 40 years. This was a value decision. Today, journalists are making similar decisions. What do we value? What are the traditions, customs and ethics we wish to carry with us for generations to come and what do we feel comfortable dropping, to be lost in the sands of time?

Three Examples: What we can drop

A perfect example of a tradition to be dropped is the “reporter standup” performed by most local broadcasters. This was first pointed out by Jeff Jarvis in 2008 in this post “Rethinking TV news.” While beautifully fit for a time-locked TV viewing experience, this tradition of the TV reporter being ‘on the scene,’ but really just holding a mic against a backdrop that doesn’t add much information, will go the way of the Dodo bird. And as far as values go, I don’t think we’re losing much. Seems like leavened bread to me.

Another place of slippage is the idea that a local paper must be “daily.” We’re already seeing this with the decline of 7-day-a-week print editions, but even digital-first news organizations may decide that they don’t need the eyeballs from churning content, and would prefer the loyalty of subscribers earned from infrequent but deep reporting. Maybe it would be a boon to have a news org that only focuses on press releases dropped on Friday evenings. Such an org wouldn’t compete with the breaking news of the AP, but it could become a highly sought-after weekly visit rich with sponsors and members.

A third area of change might be the dropping of relatively young trends or traditions, which have only come of age recently. During our nomadic years we’ve seen the rise of millennial media news organizations, mostly venture-backed and reliant on social media platforms for distribution. In retrospect, our worship of the “pivot to video” could be seen as a false idol moment. It’s definitely something we’ve lived through and has played a formative role for any journalist coming of age in the last 15 years, but I wonder if some of the newer habits from these orgs will stand the test of time. These organizations changed the way we wrote headlines and the traditional career arc (go straight to New York, do not stop in a small market first, do not collect print clips) and more. But I suspect many of these traditions will revert or morph. Whereas elements of this fad will become a part of journalism going forward, others may end up watered down as new, more fit traditions take their place.

What we can’t stand to lose

If that’s what we can leave behind, what is our Torah? What are the traditions and norms we should strap to our back and carry through the wasteland no matter what? This is the most important question for journalists today, because ultimately this will be our legacy – what we carry forward. What I most value about this framing is it brings us back to first principles. What is journalism for?

It’s worth noting that this is precisely where the best arguments should be had. While I offer suggestions, I don’t think any one person can be the arbiter of truth here. At one time most journalists would have listed “objectivity” as an immediate keeper, but even that value is under attack as something to drop in the sands of time. I’ve even been part of a startup that tried to imagine journalism without the confines of “the article” as the core unit of information. Nothing should be taken for granted and everything must prove its worth. That’s our generation’s calling. We are the funnel through which values and traditions must pass and we should not take that responsibility lightly.

What do you, reader, think are the values and traditions journalism can leave behind and what should we clutch close to our chest?

Glossy brands are situated for an increase in digital shopping, but it isn’t just for them. Local media organizations can offer their own twist.

In 2022, people will adjust to the new normal. The pandemic that started in 2020 will begin to fade. That’s not to say all the problems in its wake will be solved, but the public will adjust and move on. News organizations will have to do the same.

With the shift to the new normal comes lots of opportunities. One that I think is poised to grow in 2022 is how local and national media organizations will diversify revenue strategies, specifically by leaning into e-commerce.

In August 2021, Esquire magazine teamed up with Bespoke, a monthly subscription service of curated goods. The collaboration offered a perfect cross-marketing opportunity. Esquire could bring its discerning taste and audience with Bespoke providing the infrastructure to do regular co-branded monthly collections shipped directly to their home. This isn’t a “shop” button on the Esquire homepage. That would sully the site with 2009 style e-commerce. This is “an experience” with editorial edge.

We’ve been in a vast unbundling phase that began with Craigslist and today is marked by cable unbundling for Netflix and Hulu. But as former Digiday president and editor-in-chief Brian Morrissey often says, “Unbundling phases in media quickly give way to rebundling.” That rebundling, however, never looks exactly like its historical analog. For news publishers, part of the rebundling could include a shopping experience.

Digiday noted that, this November, InStyle and The Cut both created their first product boxes just as Eater and Group Nine celebrated the 1-year anniversary of their own product boxes. Each publication’s box has their own on-brand flavor to match its audiences. These products offer a tangible way for magazine brands to uplift their advertisers, serve readers/customers and generate recurring revenue. One fell swoop. Not bad!

The local product box

While glossy brands are situated perfectly for the increase in digital shopping, this style of revenue isn’t just for them. Local media organizations can have their own twist.

A local publication that understands its community is in the perfect position to leverage its business relationships to put itself at the center of commerce. I fully expect a local publication to create a cookbook from local chefs replete with discounts to brick-and-mortar restaurants. Other ideas include a “shop local gift giving guide” (too late for December 2021, but get ready for Valentine’s Day), or perhaps it’s tickets to local events, which are finally making a comeback — and readers might value a discount/commitment to one event a month.

We talk about “service journalism,” but we forget that many of these services don’t have to be “Big J” journalism. The newspaper of old had classifieds, public notices, crosswords, job adverts, apartment listings, and more. All of these were services. Newspapers had coupons and other deals to help shoppers. Today, the service isn’t in finding a deal. We have Amazon for that. But newspapers can create a sense of curation and editorial finesse to make a shopper feel like they’re getting quality and participating in their community. Anyone can consume, but it takes somebody in the know to shop!

As always, the tough legwork will be in fostering the relationships between the restaurants, candy stores or other local businesses and explaining the value. But, this isn’t your grandmother’s advertising. This is selling a real product, which means advertisers can turn into revenue partners as well. Everyone is looking for ways to compete with the DoorDashes, Amazons and Zooms of our new distributed reality. Local news publishers actually outfox their digital counterparts with the right product fit and marketing.

Imagine: “Sign up for ‘Food Week’ and we’ll deliver a meal to you from these 5 restaurants M-F, limited to the first x people who sign up. $130.” It lacks some of the convenience and user experience of food delivery apps, but it creates an experience and that’s part of what people pay for.

Much will be afoot in 2022. One area that I hope publishers can ground themselves will be in exploring direct revenue. Subscriptions and membership is the obvious and low-hanging fruit, to be sure, but I believe publishers who branch out and expand what their “products” are can find new direct revenue.

In 2022, ask yourself: What’s your box and how many people will order it?

Many companies are embracing ‘startup thinking’ to launch their own products and a growing number of journalists are going solo. Here are the top lessons I have learned during my career in research and development – usually referred to as R&D – where most of the innovation happens around new products and services. Startups especially must create and sustain this culture of experimentation.

For the last six years, I have been a senior director of the Alpha Group, an internal incubator at Advance Publications with the aim to build startups in tech and media. Adding this to my years in startups and I have got 20 years of experimenting at the particularly rough intersection of technology and media.

“Ideas are cheap, execution is everything”

You do not need exact coordinates when you start to chase down an idea.

It is great to have a general sense of important trends and tech. But in the end, lots of people can come up with the same conclusions. What matters are the details both from a product perspective but also an operational one. What you need need to figure out is how to get somewhere specific and meaningful.

I have seen startups blow up because the founders could not sit in the same room, or the product did not have any user input, or the business just did not add up. These were all “good” startup ideas. Their markets have since been validated. It was the execution that was off. 

The only major upside of going through bad execution is that you build a “spidey-sense” to recognise it earlier next time. The startup space has a history of “fake it till you make it”. Perhaps those days are coming to an end with the trial of Theranos, the blood-testing technology company which lied about its finger-prick tech and military use.

The bottom line is: trust your gut feeling when it tells you when your execution is lacking and rationalise from it. It is easy to ignore but invaluable to pay attention to. After all, ideas are cheap but the execution is everything.

Network effects are real

The value of a service increases as more people use it. We call this phenomenon ‘network effects’. And it is very real.

The Instagram account Friday Beers got a rough start using a product the Alpha Group built that let content creators produce easy video memes. Years (and 1.4M followers) later when we created Subtext, which lets content creators text directly with their audience, it made sense for us to reach back out to Friday Beers. That product makes a lot more sense for them, and now they use Subtext to text out sports betting advice.

Network effects exist at multiple levels. In the startup arena, social media sites are the first thing people think of when you say “network effects,” perhaps citing Metcalfe’s law. But network effects are real in business relationships, hiring, building trust, and more.

The point of all of this is that the process is cyclical. If you help your clients to grow, their expanding user base will also mean there will be more opportunities for you. And as more people hear about and use your product, the more it will develop over time.The more positive business relationships you build with coworkers will lead to better working relationships with more people down the road.

“Keep your head down”

I learned this one early. My first startup “Spot.Us” was a crowdfunding site for journalists. At the time, crowdfunding was still a new concept. My claim to fame was that Spot.Us launched before Kickstarter, which popularised the concept of crowdfunding. But here is the lesson: “don’t get distracted by your competitors”.

As technology overturns every sector, the odds that you are the first or only disruptor is slim-to-none. But just because there is somebody else in your niche does not mean you cannot both be successful. And even if you truly believe it is a winner-take-all game, focusing on what your competitor is doing will not improve your product, networks, execution or ideas.

Yes, it is a good idea to keep tabs on competitors. You can even be inspired by them. Just avoid turning it into a dog fight unless you need to. Nine times out of ten, you can avoid going toe-to-toe and let the best product/experience win. Even better, it can be a rising tide that lifts all boats. There will be competition. There will be projects that graze, overlap, or downright sit right on top of your project. The challenge is to choose your battles.

Lead from the back

Leaders often think they have to risk literal life-and-limb (via no sleep, friends or love) to prove they are worthy of a leadership role. This is a recipe for burnout and it will not actually rally the troops. You have to be at 100 per cent every day.

If you go 120 per cent and burn out this inevitably means you will be at 80 per cent for a week while you recover. You are not Superman. It is okay to find a sustainable 100 per cent.

More to the point, you should express this to your team(s). “Don’t be a hero” is what I tell people. Be your best, but do not be a hero. We need you for the next fight and the one after that too. Most importantly, everyone wants to find a way to lead. The best part about working on a startup is the opportunity to grow. Do no take that opportunity away from other people because you felt the need to climb every mountain. Are there times to do a war-cry and charge? Sure. But as with most of my lessons, moderation is a virtue. 

Stop debating, start testing

We have all heard of going for the “MVP” – the minimum viable product – where a new product or website is developed with enough features to work for early adopters. Feedback from this initial group is used to design a final product. But why? The reason for this is because a rule of the internet is that it is ultimately cheaper and easier to try something than it is to debate about whether or not to try something.

I learned this early on in my consulting days when there would be meetings with the entire editorial staff to debate whether or not a news organisation should start a Twitter account. Today that is a silly question but we spent a lot of cycles and meetings to schedule meetings to have the real meeting to talk about starting said account. A free account nonetheless.

When we launched Subtext our first MVP was actually just a burner phone. We got Joe Eskenazi, a reporter who still texts about San Francisco politics today, and we invited him into our slack. Every morning he would slack me what to text out and I would send it out. The burner phone could only send 10 texts at a time, so in batches of 10 I texted over 400 subscribers. If they responded, I would send it to Joe and he would slack me back what to reply with. It is an MVP we are particularly proud of because the cost was minimal and the user experience was still very solid. 

Final thoughts

There is no substitute for first-hand experience. No amount of Gary Vee YouTube videos can give you the intuition about execution. No Substack essay can give you the peace of mind to keep your head down. Like most life lessons, these have to be experienced, absorbed, and re-articulated. Prepare now, because lessons are coming your way.

They say necessity is the mother of invention. It’s a truism that can be traced back as far as Plato, who said in The Republic, “Our need will be the real creator.” 

Pretty much anyone who has lived through COVID-19 would trade the last 20 months for, well … just about anything. But decades or even generations from now, historians will dispassionately examine this time not for the devastation it wrought, but for the societal-level transformations that took place in its wake.

The rally for independent local news

With media having its own “Theranos moment” in the form of Ozy Media, one area that is ripe for rejuvenation is local media, a polar opposite to the millennial branded, venture capital-backed media organizations of the 2010’s.

Two organizations that speak directly to rebirth at the local level are LION — Local Independent Online News Publishers — and News Catalyst. When talking about local news, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen said, “When there is no more profit to be won by cutting quality, firing people and raising prices for a (worse) product, the financializers will abandon the franchise and Indy publishers will take root.” 

Like many things in the fallout of the pandemic, it’s not the trajectory that is new, but the velocity of change. Both LION and News Catalyst predate COVID-19, but it was during this trial they announced the Tiny News Collective, an effort to launch 500 new local news organizations within three years. “The project will offer entrepreneurial journalists a tech stack, business training, legal assistance, and back-office services like payroll for around $100 a month.”

In the aftermath of every forest fire is new life, but it can take many seasons before that beauty becomes apparent. The Tiny News Collective is an innovative way to spread the seeds of local independent online news publishers and perhaps it’s an approach that never would have come forth had it not been for Covid. 

Moving from eyeballs to community

Content is still king, but community is queen. In chess, the king is the most important piece, without which you lose the game, but the queen is the most powerful piece and often predicts the winner. Another major transition for the industry is a shift in revenue away from an emphasis on eyeballs and monetizing through ads to direct revenue through community. As we return to our new normal this is a space where we can expect a ton of creative destruction. We see it already at the individual content creator level, with major platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) recognizing that they have to offer creators the means to directly monetize their niche/small audience through Facebook Bulletin and Twitter’s Revue. 

That this trend is just hitting the major platforms means it’s large enough to take seriously, but still has plenty of room to grow. It’s also possible that it’s just not in the DNA of the algorithmically based platforms to get this right. If that’s true — large media organizations like The New York Times have a chance to finally get one up on their frenemies: the platforms. This also begs the question of how media organizations will navigate the changing power dynamics between their own brand and that of their staff.

Events in the 21st Century 

Events organized by news organizations, once an innovation unto itself, had to be re-thought during Covid. For more than a decade Technical.ly organized in-person quarterly stakeholder meetings with a dozen or so readers in every city they publish. It was an opportunity to get regular, qualitative feedback from readers. In the absence of in-person events CEO Chris Wink said the business publication spun out several virtual versions including AMAs in their public Slack community, more reporter-led virtual chats and several small learning communities. 

Publications across the country like Scalawag Magazine and Radio Ambulante used events not only to connect with readers and provide a service, these events served as sources of revenue too. And of course – the “socially distanced event” is an innovation that only Covid could have spawned. It’s a practice that is actively being refined and defined with journalists sharing tips and tricks through professional slack communities in the hopes that collectively we can create an experience worth virtually attending. It looks very promising as one Poynter article notes “While in-person events went on the shelf, many local news outlets made an impressive shift to virtual, sometimes even ramping up their level of connection to their audience.” 

I do believe the emerging art of virtual events is something that will continue to evolve through 2022 and will be another innovation we can credit to the pandemic.

In conclusion

We started with a truism, so perhaps it’s best to end with one as well. “Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world.” Covid will not be the end of journalism. Just like the biological adaptations that persist through time, the changes that serve journalism best in our “new normal” environment will be the innovations that keep us keeping on.

David Cohn
Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Subtext

About: Subtext is an award-winning conversation platform that connects creators and subscribers through text messaging. By making direct connections with their fans, Subtext hosts have the ability to communicate one on one or at scale free from the toxicity of social platforms and the clutter of email. Subtext customers include INFLCR, Sony Music, Condé Nast, USA Today Network, CNET, and IRONMAN. Subtext is the fourth product spinout from The Alpha Group, a successful incubator for new technology and media properties inside Advance.

The media’s first step into blockchain may be a dead end, but what grows out of it could have impact

Circa 2015 the phrase “pivot to video” became popular in the news industry. Organizations were indeed leaning into video, but fast forward just a couple of years, and the catchy phrase had become a tongue-in-cheek joke. It had become clear that video wasn’t going to be any kind of panacea. The jump into video was in truth a leap of faith. It had immediate consequences, like layoffs, but we pursued the strategy nonetheless in the hopes that social media platforms like Facebook would catch us before we fell.

Today news organizations like The New York Times, Time magazine, Quartz, and others are selling NFTs or “non-fungible tokens.” While they are bringing in a pretty penny, this buzzword vault into blockchain, while worthy of criticism, could in retrospect be the opposite of the infamous “pivot to video.”

The “pivot to NFTs” is subdued, and everyone already recognizes that its current instantiation is limited and probably a cash grab. I would argue, however, that over time the dipping of toes that is happening now into blockchain technology, via NFTs, could end up becoming a rich ecosystem where the news industry finds an interesting and viable path forward.

Simply put, an NFT proves ownership of a unique digital asset. Whereas one bitcoin has the same value and can be swapped one for one with another bitcoin, an NFT’s value is in the eye of the beholder. Hence, NFTs are very popular in the arts and sports memorabilia sectors.

How does this translate to journalism?

Step 1: Sell your headline

There’s a closet in my parents’ house that is filled with copies of historic editions of the Los Angeles Times, covering events including 9/11, the election of Barack Obama, the Los Angeles riots of ‘92, and so on. Certainly, not every headline is precious, but one thing that can drive value up is scarcity. Imagine if my mother had the ONLY copy of these Los Angeles Times editions. With every article published, news organizations can create an NFT and, with digital scarcity now enforceable, perhaps there will be buyers, too.

A fair critique of this development, and one that I share, is that headlines turned NFTs by news organizations is a quick buck, serving an audience that doesn’t really care about the news, but wants assets they hope to flip. In short, it’s a bubble. The long-term “market” for headlines is probably few and far between, with the exception of rare and historic moments. Even then, I suspect the NFTs of headlines will serve the needs of a small, elite and wealthy audience.

But perhaps there could be more to the story? Much like the early adoption of the internet, our industry tends to skate along the surface of new technology without fully recognizing the tectonic shifts that are beginning to form. What’s the next step to add value to these NFTs?

Step 2: Build the value

Tickets to events are also non-fungible. They may grant you access to the same event, but you wouldn’t swap courtside tickets for seats in the nosebleed section. They just aren’t equal.

Embedded in NFTs is the ability not only to sell an asset, but to sell access. “GaryVee” has done this with his “VeeFriends.” People aren’t necessarily purchasing his doodles because they think he’s a great artist, but because of the benefits these tokens can bestow within his community, including multiyear access to the annual VeeCon conference, among other things.

Along these lines, the USA Today Network auctioned its first NFT, and it included “an exclusive behind-the-scenes Space Coast tour with Florida Today Space Reporter Emre Kelly.” As reported in the Press Gazette, in addition to selling this NFT for more than $8,000, Gannett CEO Mike Reed said that NFTs could represent “a new business opportunity for Gannett [USA Today’s owner] as we see how this space continues to develop and how our incredible archives could be monetized in new marketplaces.” By including a “Space Coast tour” as part of the NFT, USA Today has already taken NFTs from “trinkets” to “tickets.”

While a step in the right direction, it’s still fair to say this isn’t game changing. News organizations can already sell tickets to events. But perhaps the rabbit hole goes even further? I would argue by making NFTs more than just assets, but also tickets, news organizations have dipped their toenails into a new type of audience and community engagement. Enter the DAO.

Step 3: Build the community

Another feature of blockchain technology is the ability to write rules for how tokens (scarce digital assets) can be used and exchanged. These “smart contracts” can become the backbone of a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization).

Imagine a series of rules written into code that govern relationships between people who may never actually meet or converse. While everyone may be operating in their own self-interest, incentives and structures enable an “organization” to emerge. There are lots of practical applications for these smart contracts, including giving and receiving loans, making bets, and even incorporating.

In terms of audience engagement, practices like “callouts” still require a centralized organization or even an individual to make sense of contributions from the public. With DAOs, we can begin to ask questions like, how does audience engagement evolve if participation is codified?

Think about what Coral, which uses open-source tools to help journalists and communities engage,  has done for the comment section of websites by applying unique technology and incentives. Now imagine a system of rules that touches every level of how a person can contribute to an organization. In this world, owning an NFT isn’t just about having an asset worth money; it’s permission to contribute at various levels, access to edit, proof that something has been edited, and/or perhaps even a seat at the table for governance. (To be clear, this isn’t about ceding editorial control or creating pay-to-play schemes at legacy news organizations. It’s about creating sustainable platforms that can bring people together.)

Let’s look at “Mirror,” which states, “Joining Mirror does not only make you a community member. It makes you a co-owner of the platform. As a result, our platform is a sum of our contributors.” You can only publish on Mirror if you have a token, and each week token holders vote on what writer(s) will join their cadre. If two or more writers work on a story together, the revenue—derived from cryptocurrency or crowdfunding—can be split among them. Mirror is similar to a Substack: contributors own what they create. Currently, it’s a straightforward DAO with simple governance rules, but we can imagine all kinds of added layers.

Some tokens might be just for the public, giving them access to read and comment. In the case of Mirror, other more “rare” tokens might be for freelancers who have earned the right to contribute columns. Maybe even more rare tokens bestow the privilege to edit other contributors’ content. Financial rewards could be built into the acceptance of work at various stages, all predetermined with the goal of keeping the organization moving forward with correct incentives.

This kind of organization to a reader would look like any other media site. It could cover any topic. What would make it unique is how it functions. To create the content, people would take actions to complete contracts, which would act as guides for how to be productive in the network. Is there an editor in chief or a publisher? That would vary depending on the specific DAO’s code, which would be transparent for all to see.

Today the audience trusts a news organization based on its brand. They participate with the news in limited and often unstructured ways. A news organization built as a DAO would gain trust based on the transparent and coded rules of participation and its outcomes.

What many journalists misunderstand is that blockchain technology isn’t about money. It’s fundamentally about truth, transparency, and participation. It’s still very early in this space and not only will there be misses (Civil was too early, among other issues) but, if we’re honest, it’s too early to know how it will all play out.

The early internet pioneers pictured a decentralized utopia built on top of the web. There was a moment when it felt like things were on that track. It’s possible blockchain technology could end up becoming just as fraught and centralized as social media today. News organizations that play in the space now may not hit the nail on the head, certainly not at first. But they are paving the way for us as an industry to explore what the news could be as technology continues to become the message.

David Cohn is a cofounder of Subtext (JoinSubtext.com) and a senior director of the R&D team at Advance known as “The Alpha Group.”