“In the future, everyone will have a podcast and an email newsletter for 15 minutes.”
That little tweet from my longtime friend and colleague Jim Maiella a few years ago really summed up the rush to storytell and create authoritative share of voice these days, albeit into a crowded marketplace and sometimes, without fully know who, why and where one should be doing so.
We say this with some experience having done a weekly best practices newsletter for over 11 years now once a week, and having done a pretty respectable sports business podcast with my colleague Tom Richardson at Columbia for over tfive years now. Both filled a need that we saw and have generated an audience that we can speak to. Neither has grandiose notions of being massive revenue centers; they are informational tools that serve a very distinct purpose to reach and inform an audience; not with one point of view or slant, but rather a wider engaged audience with a need to hear from voices not usually heard, or to amplify great storytelling that one can miss.
They both take time and effort, and in the case of the newsletter, with a partner at Smartbrief, has been reformed and like the Energizer battery, keeps going until there is no longer a need.
I read this another story about the death of journalism with the constant constraints being put on the news and entertainment business in what was print and is now digital, and it touched on the fact that New York in the 1940’s and ‘50’s had as many as nine daily newspapers and now the dailies have dwindled in most cities to a precious few.
It occurred to me that today’s global news sources, many curated by various newsletters, actually give me more than nine daily options at my fingertips, and how great it is to have all those choices, even just in the sports, media and entertainment fields, that don’t tell the same stories but, if I choose to look, give me wide and varied stories. Time management and book marking of such content (Twitter being one great way to bookmark by the way) is really essential to make sure one can read, watch, listen and consume what is really necessary, but the option to learn more about key areas of focus, or a wide swath of news and information with great storytellers really has never been greater.
On a typical day I get an ever growing list of news digests, be they original and curated content from places like Forbes, Front Office Sports, the Morning Consult, Hashtag Sports, Sporttechie, Sports Business International, Axios, Sports Doing Good, Sportico, D1Ticker or Sports Pro (in addition to the Sports Business Daily); wider sources with quick hits like Cynopsis or John Wall Street; the great offering of Media Redefined or Media Post or The Skimm or several others in niche areas as well. If you miss some you can always go back, and frankly if they don’t float your boat you can always go elsewhere. Platforms like Substack have gone after storytellers with concentrated audiences as well, but when you hit that paywall what to do? Discretionary income vs. value, even in micropayments, are key.
Is it too much? Only if you get lost in the mix and you, as the reader, get to pick, choose and share. More importantly, what will you pay for and what can come in with a free, nonrepetitive stream? That’s really going to continue to be the challenge. Our newsletter was never meant to be a revenue source. It is an information source that gives us looks at lots of things, something we can curate and share with colleagues, almost 55,000 now, on a weekly basis. It makes us think.
Still someone eventually has to pay for that original content and storytelling. I am certainly not averse and do so many times over as a business expense…last week at an airport I actually spent almost $30 on…yes…magazines…but am I the exception and not the rule, and will those sources continue to dry up and become more homogenized until the media business figures out how to make a better mousetrap? All is TBD.
I’m glad, I guess, that we were first adopters in a newsletter that works for its audience and in a podcast that is fun and informative. The audience size varies but they serve their purpose, hopefully for more than 15 minutes. We hope others can keep doing the same, but when the 15 minutes is up, it will be interesting to see which ones can figure it out and keep on keeping on.
