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I mean the Smith/Smith media startup is using some.... interesting language about who they anticipate their audience to be right?Permalink On twitter.com
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I dunno if my pitch for a new media company would be "college educated English speakers are not served in the global media economy" for like... a lot of reasonsPermalink On twitter.com
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Though the least of which is that it is clearly untrue... like... that's literally the NYT's audience. Also... most journalistic magazines including The New Yorker, The Economist, Vanity Fair and more?Permalink On twitter.com
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So what exactly would *be* their differentiation b/c if you're not like that, & you're two white dudes, & you're targeting is just "college educated English speakers" it sounds like you're down to a few choices: a "not biased media", a Gawker-like, BI clone, or... LitHub?Permalink On twitter.com
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Just please don't let it be an insane cryptocurrency thing.Permalink On twitter.com
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Imagine if they are about to announce that they bought Ozy.Permalink On twitter.com
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Or imagine if it's going to be one of those "print is back" plays and they're going to ship out a glossy magazine.Permalink On twitter.com
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But honestly.... I'm going to bet that it's really just a Politico But For Non Political News. It's the most obvious "unfilled" slot & the numbers add up. If you're building a site with the explicit (if dumb) mission to "not cover politics" you're opening up to a bunch of ad revPermalink On twitter.com
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It's a really obvious pitch to investors. You can still do biz coverage which advertisers like. But if you claim you are doing a non-political news org that doesn't have to deal with brand safety blowback and can pull in audience from across the spectrum that's pitch deck juice.Permalink On twitter.com
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It's also *very dumb* because *everything is political* something that was always true but is even more obvious now. But that's never stopped anyone from trying. Worth noting that is fundamentally the original pitch Ozy had too, to be non-political.Permalink On twitter.com
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Ok, I'm laying my chips down on "Politico but for Culture-as-in-the-newspaper-style-section". That's my bet.Permalink On twitter.com
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Either that or we're going to be really surprised by some creepy badly thought out optics around "unbiased reporting" that everyone will immediately respond to with "it's not unbiased, you're just rich white dudes".Permalink On twitter.com
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But yeah most obvious play is to say "aren't you tired of politics, what if there was a publication where you could be in a nice safe space where no one confronted you about the fact that you either see the world falling apart or you've alienated your friends via Tr*mp-worship"Permalink On twitter.com
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Can't wait to see what's going to come out of this media company that is already getting bad optics out of just noting the target audience!Permalink On twitter.com
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Lol nope, looks like Smith/Smith are just going to uhhh... Restart the AP from scratch, but as a publication not a wire service, and uhhh... be "post social" which means... I guess they're not going to have a Twitter account? sarafischer/1478686796024324096?t=Yevp8MZNi7M5iVV2-Ff-ew&s=19Permalink On twitter.com
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I definetly have to disagree that the global news ecosystem hasn't seen a new entrants in 40 years. Not that that's necessarily a reason to start something up anyway, since existing entrants are pretty hardcore, but more narrowly topically defined global pubs have entered.Permalink On twitter.com
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Because of the nature of subscription existing traditional publications including Bloomberg, NYT, WashPost and WSJ, are going to be harder than ever to disrupt...Permalink On twitter.com
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So what's the lever? They could aim towards young audiences, since it's been well documented that existing pubs are vulnerable or have lower capture there. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/our-research/how-young-people-consume-news-and-implications-mainstream-mediaPermalink On twitter.com
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But young people have decreasing amounts of money. Getting them to subscribe, or pitching premium advertisers to put ads in front of them, or getting this... global... audience to pay a premium for events, seems harder than ever with the generational gap increasingly a wealth gapPermalink On twitter.com
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Not to mention the promises to be "post-social" seem to imply them disinterested in engaging that audience.Permalink On twitter.com
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This part is really the most baffling, because while it seems to be the closest to describing some sort of mission, it doesn't really describe most legacy media, as both Smiths know, with the exception of Murdoch owned media and uhhh BuzzFeed (lol)?Permalink On twitter.com
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There's an inherent contradiction in the claim news organizations are too slow and dumb to change but also they've been terribly deformed by social media, these two things are opposed claims, but ok... Moving past that... The core claim is 'existing global news isn't trustworthy'Permalink On twitter.com
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This supposition is troubling to me because "trusted news" & "independent world view" imply that existing news orgs have a specific trust gap and that's the lever they are going to wedge in to get a new audience but there are two majorly undeserved anti-social platform audiencesPermalink On twitter.com
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Either you're going to aggressively try to pry Murdoch's audience out of his hands or... It's the Gr**nwald fans and their bullshit "just asking questions" style of shitty politics that pretends towards neutrality by dumping on younger people trying to bring social issues forwardPermalink On twitter.com
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Which means uh oh I'm leaning towards this now Chronotope/1478413049602183169?t=gk7-hZQtS9USRBOrx1jkuQ&s=19On twitter.com
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'Unemotional' sure sounds like 'unbiased'. 'not algorithm led' could easily be 'intellectual dark web'-type language. :/ There's one weird thing in this document though...Permalink On twitter.com
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Assuming they aren't being intentionally obtuse for the purposes of fundraising most of these problems aren't w/ traditional news orgs so much as how they're filtered by social platforms. It isn't that news orgs stopped producing platform-unpopular content, it just doesn't trendPermalink On twitter.com
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The exception being with TV. So maybe what they really want is a new TV network? Or with all these digs that are really at social platforms maybe it's really a newsroom with its own social platform.Permalink On twitter.com
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Hard to see how they can succeed what CNN is entering with CNN+ though. I dunno, I think it's just very weird to lay this stuff at the feet of traditional news. If it's not some weird 'vote with your crypto' thing then it's either feeling like Ozy's pitch... Or some darker placesPermalink On twitter.com
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I will say that the brightest light in this is that, according to Axios, they're not taking VC money, which is very smart,Permalink On twitter.com
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Putting on my optimist hat, a standard news startup that isn't VC backed would be somewhat revolutionary in and of itself as VC models are at the core of what has gone wrong with most news startups in the past 20 years. But capital gotta grow, so who knows what impact it'll have.Permalink On twitter.com
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