The killing fields of digital publishing
Welcome to a midweek edition of Unmade, the media and marketing industry update your boss reads. She’s probably a paying member too.
Today: The publishing startups that did (and didn’t) make it, and a better day on The Unmade Index.
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The hard thing about hard things
It’s been a week where a couple of planets aligned.
On Monday, Chris Janz and David Eisman revealed their first big hire for their news startup Scire. The editor-in-chief will be John McDuling, national business editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Scire will be one of the big publishing stories of the year. With its stated plans of hiring 50 staff, that suggests outgoings of more than $10m a year. Its focus on general business news creates the biggest challenge for the Australian Financial Review and The Australian since Business Spectator was swallowed up by News Corp in 2012.
And yesterday, Tim Dunlop published an exhaustive overview of the current state of Australian alternative media in his Substack newsletter The Future of Everything. It’s well worth a read.
I was among those who commented on the piece. When we were chatting, I mentioned to Tim a book I’d contributed to almost exactly ten years ago – What’s Next in Journalism, edited by Margaret Simons.
Each chapter was written by somebody trying a new thing in Australian journalism. I speculated to Tim that the majority of those things didn’t make it.
This week I went back and took a look at the 11 publishing ventures featured. A decade on, more survived than I thought. Five are still going, and of those, two of the contributors to the book are still involved in the project they wrote about. Five sites died, and one is trapped in a weird digital purgatory as a zombie host of an Amazon spammer. But we’ll come on to that.
Here’s what became of them, first the two survivors:
Giles Parkinson – RenewEconomy: This site, focused on the green energy transition, appears to be thriving with Parkinson still at the helm. Launched in 2012, it’s built an audience as the word has moved towards it and appears to do well for advertising too. Right place, right time, lots of hard work.
Melissa Sweet – Croakey Health Media: At the time of the book, Croakey was a blog sitting within Crikey. When Crikey’s owner Private Media went through one of its periodical reorganisations, Croakey span out of the company and became the not-for-profit Croakey Health Media.
Then the three other sites that made it:
Meld Magazine: Founded by Karen Poh (who left in 2018) Meld is still going as an NFP, focused on writing for Australia’s international student community, and offering them work experience opportunities.
Open Australia: Co-founded by Matthew Landauer, who now works at the Digital Transformation Agency, Open Australia was never quite a journalistic venture. It offers useful tools to allow the public to be better informed about what people in power are up to, including receiving alerts about local planning proposals, simplifying Freedom of Information Requests and tracking how politicians vote.
Mumbrella: At the time of writing my chapter, I was nearly five years in. We sold four years later in 2017, and I then stuck around with Mumbrella until 2021. What was noticeable, rereading my chapter, is how much we failed at. At the time we had three new projects on the go – Mumbrella Asia (which was closed in late 2019); Encore magazine (which we closed a few months after the book came out) and The Source (which sort of lives on as Mumbrella Pro).
There’s also one site which is trapped in SEO purgatory:
The Castlemaine Independent, founded by Andrew McKenna, is still live, but in a weird zombie existence like one of those bugs taken over by a parasite, full of crappy product reviews offering Amazon affiliate links, and a fake staff page of made up people with weird bios.
And the ventures that didn’t make it:
The Hoopla, from former radio host Wendy Harmer, targeted older women. It was a good idea and a good product, but they failed to develop the business side of the operation. It closed in 2015.
Your View was an attempt to better inform the public about key social issues. As founder Tim van Gelder concluded at the end of his chapter: “YourView is still young, hasn’t yet reached any significant scale, and might well end up quietly expiring in some lonely corner of cyberspace.” He wasn’t wrong.
Delimiter: Of all the sites that didn’t make it, Delimiter is the one I miss most. Founded and run by Renai Le May, it offered an intelligent, informed take on Australia’s technology sector. Some of it was product reviews (and that was what helped pay the bills, I suspect), but the best of it was policy analysis. My impression was that the business model actually worked, but Renai (who rented a desk from us in the Mumbrella office for a while) chose to walk away to work in the public sector. These days he works for Deloitte’s cyber and strategic risk team, but is a much missed journalistic voice.
Newsflock: This was an attempt, led by Chris Were, to create an Australian news aggregator and social media network. It’s barely left a trace.
OurSay, co-founded by Eyal Halamish, was an attempt to give the public a digital voice on politics and policy. It didn’t make it.
What is noticeable about the projects that made it is that none of them were particularly innovative in their business models. Mumbrella probably reached the biggest scale, and that was through an entirely traditional B2B publishing and events model, applied to a digital format. The same goes for RenewEconomy too, I think. Persistence and luck may be the secret weapon.
A better day on the Index
It was a good day for most of the Unmade Index of ASX-listed media and marketing stocks on Tuesday. The index rose by 1.36%, to 653.6 points. This outperformed the wider ASX All Ords, which was up by just over 1%.
The biggest lift came for ARN owner HT&E, up by 4.29%. Fellow audio player Southern Cross Austereo was up by 2.87%. Nine was up by 1.82%, while Seven West Media was flat.
Time to leave you to your Wednesday. We’ll be back tomorrow with a podcast-led edition, in which we focus on a new business model in the creative agency world.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
tim@unmade.media
