Some news about our plans for Unmade
Welcome to Unmade, written while you were sleeping on Thursday morning.
Since leaving Mumbrella’s staff and launching Unmade, I’ve been slowly figuring out what it is and, more to the point, what it’s going to be.
Four months in, a plan has gradually started to come together. Today I’d like to share it (and offer you an opportunity to come along on the next stage).
If you’re a subscriber to the Mumbrellacast, you’ll hear me say goodbye to listeners in the end-of-year special due to be uploaded later this morning.
When I left at the end of July, the management at Mumbrella and parent company Diversified Communications were kind enough to invite me to stay loosely involved, along with giving me the honorary title of editor-at-large.
It was a pleasure to do so, but it also created more confusion than I anticipated. Like most people, I’m able to keep one idea in my head at a time about a person or a brand. So although Unmade was now my day job, and Mumbrella my side gig, as founder I was still so strongly associated that not everybody realised where my main focus now lies. It didn’t help that at the same time I was also promoting my book. Three things was two too many.
In terms of my daily focus and priorities, my aim is for the industry to think of me first as Tim from Unmade, rather than Tim from Mumbrella.
So I reluctantly decided that it was time to step back altogether from Mumbrella. My former colleagues have been hugely supportive of Unmade – indeed, it’s been a partnership with Mumbrella from the beginning. Whatever happens with the development of Unmade in the coming years, I’ll think of Mumbrella and its staff as friends rather than competitors.
Which brings me to what Unmade will be, and is already becoming.
First, as Unmade grows beyond just me, the singular cultural touchstone of what will eventually, hopefully become a larger business will be locked in from the beginning. Our simple focus and priority will be in serving our audience.
It was something I used to drill into new recruits to Mumbrella back in the day. Our only job as journalists was to write for our audience, and to help them in their working lives and careers. That means that although we valued our relationships with advertisers, editorial contacts, industry leaders and even our rivals, we only wrote with one group in mind – our audience. We weren’t setting out to impress or appease anybody else.
That same ethos will always be at the heart of Unmade. While we’ll value advertising and sponsorship when the time comes to seek partners, our first loyalty will be to our readers. That will mean that sometimes partners will be unable to reach our audience in ways that they might be able to via our rivals. To put it bluntly, our editorial content will never be for sale or rent.
That’s easy to say, but I believe I can point to the years I was one of Mumbrella’s owners that this was always (possibly uniquely at the time) our central principle. It will be for Unmade too.
Which brings me to the second part of what will make Unmade different in an ocean of email alerts all containing the same press release. My aim will be to make it worth your while opening an Unmade email, every single time.
That means using my 30 years as a journalist and 20 years of writing about media and marketing to offer analysis of what developments mean for our audience, not just recounting the facts (or reposting press releases).
Often that means hidden work. A big part of editorial curation is deciding what to leave out. For instance, when I include a digest of five events from the global marketing world, it comes after half a day of scouring every relevant source, and choosing what to omit.
Take yesterday’s analysis of the final radio ratings of the season as one example. It took me the whole day to crunch the numbers and find data that had passed everybody else by in their first takes. It created a couple of ripples.
Building up audience faith that my take is worth reading will take a long time, and is achieved gradually, by trying to offer something worthwhile every single time.
When it comes to industry analysis, much of it is also about neural pathways. I’ve spent two decades looking at every development with the first question of “what does this mean for brands?” That becomes a habit.
Last year, in the five months I spent on long service leave writing Media Unmade, I spent every day thinking about the meaning and context of how Australia’s media has developed in the decade just gone, and where it’s going next. It means that I have a good chance to be among the first to spot patterns as they are forming.
There’s a third point of difference.
I’m writing this today in the UK. Often in the coming years I’ll be in the northern hemisphere.
Sometimes that will simply mean a timezone advantage. At the time that I’m writing a piece to catch you as the Australian day begins, not only have I got the entire previous day to look back on, but I can also be the early bird to catch breaking developments Down Under.
It’s more than that though. My aim is for Unmade to cover the big international developments in marketing, but always from an Australian perspective. In 2022, I plan to be at many of the major media and marketing conferences in the UK and US (as well as in Australia of course). I suspect I’ll often be the only Australian journalist in the room. When my hand goes up when they invite audience questions, it will be to draw out the context for what it means for people working in the Australian communications industry. That may be a tad annoying for other attendees, but I’ve always been willing to be one of those annoying journalists for the right cause.
Hopefully that will mean unique – and useful – content you will only be able to read on Unmade.
Which brings me to my fourth point – Unmade’s business model. As I’ve previously written, Unmade has launched as part of the Substack Pro program, which offers first year support to independent journalists. I believe there are only two or three of us in Australia who were accepted onto the program.
As well as financial, that support from Substack includes access to the Getty Images library, the Lexis Nexis database and the Rev transcription service. That’s why my podcasts come with transcripts attached.
What that support from Substack means is a chance to steadily build an audience without monetising it early on through advertising with the time compromises that entails. There’ll be no ads at all for the first year.
I’ve got nothing against advertising (obviously), but it would have been a distraction from that singular audience focus.
Instead, it allows me to experiment with a subscription model, the first of its type in the Australian media and marketing trade press.
While it’s a big ask when there are so many free outlets offering content of variable quality, I’m hopeful that there will be enough people willing to pay a modest sum to access premium content.
So far there are 181 paying subscribers, which is more than I expected so early.
Which brings me to the point of today’s email. I’d like to incentivise you to join them, and you’ve got just one more day left to get a price that will never be beaten.
The annual price for subscribing is $650. But until tomorrow, I’m offering a 74 per cent discount, taking the price back down to just $169 for the year.
The way I see it, that’s a price that de-risks it for you now, and gives me a year to offer enough useful content week in and week out to prove it’s worth you renewing at $650. The challenge for me (which comes back to my first point around serving the audience) is to offer enough relevant, helpful content in every email so that Unmade becomes an obvious (and tax deductible) business expense next time round.
For now, the main content you receive is
Two pieces per week of deeper industry analysis, dropping on a Wednesday and a Saturday.
A start-the-week newsfeed of the key international developments from the Australian weekend, along with whatever has broken in that morning’s mainstream news mastheads’ Monday marketing pages.
A Tuesday podcast interview with a key industry player.
A Saturday podcast episode of the latest chapter of the audio edition of Unmade.
Additional analysis when a major event occurs.
Next year, I’ll build on that some more. Eventually I’ll hire further staff. For editorial voices, my first criteria will be to find people who can add value and context, not regurgitate press releases.
Some content will remain free for everybody, but in time, more will be only for those who are part of the paying tier.
For those interested in publishing business models, I also share a lot more detail of the economics, metrics and strategy of Unmade’s development with our paying subscribers. That will include the failures as well as the successes. In some posts, only our paying subscribers will have access to the comments section. And in time, we’ll start running events. Unmade’s subscribers will receive a discount.
My pitch to you today is a rational one, not an emotional one. You may feel good about supporting independent journalism in a highly conflicted sector (even if it is probably tax-deductible support at that). But that’s not why today is the day to lock it in.
It’s because the price will never be as low again after today. This is your last chance to lock in that one-year price of $169 before it ends tomorrow.
Please do join me.
I’ll leave you to get on with your Thursday. I’d love to hear from you at letters@unmade.media.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes – Unmade
