10 Things to Know This Week if You Work in News Media, 4/10/18 Edition

Facebook offers users increased privacy controls, tension at the Denver Post, Netflix for news and Netflix on news… To be ready for the week ahead, here’s what happened last week.

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#10. In the name of openness and transparency, Vice voluntarily revealed that men in its UK office are paid on average 18.2% more than their female colleagues. The BBC, meanwhile, aims to have an equal number of male and female experts contributing on its news programs by next year.

#9. Nieman Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen interviewed the Financial Times’ first head of audience engagement Renée Kaplan on the paper’s efforts to reach more women after finding two years ago that 80% of its subscribers were male. Some good insights here.

#8. According to an April 3rd request-for-information, the Department of Homeland Security seeks to create a database of “media influencers,” comprising journalists and bloggers from traditional and social media across more than 100 languages. The database will collect influencers’ geographic spread, circulation, and “sentiment,” among other information. While the Radio Television Digital News Association has expressed concern, the DHS spokesman tweeted that it is standard practice and assertions otherwise are conspiracies.

#7. Netflix is rumored to be developing a weekly news magazine show to rival CBS’s 60 Minutes and ABC’s 20/20. The streaming giant also recently bought a slew of late night-style current affairs talk shows, as well as docuseries from The New York Times and Vox Media.

#6. TrustX, a programmatic ad marketplace created by 35 premium publishers (including Atlantic Media, of which The Idea is a part), received $2.2 million from CBSi, ESPN, Meredith, FOX News, and NBCU to accelerate growth.

#5. Facebook received accreditation on News Feed-served ad impressionsfrom media and advertising watchdog the Media Ratings Council (MRC). Facebook agreed to the audits after revelations of misreporting engagement metrics. MRC will conduct two additional rounds of audits.

#4. The Denver Post has garnered national attention by disavowing its current owner, hedge fund Alden Capital, in a series of ten pieces published Friday. Julie Reynolds reported that the hedge fund siphoned millions of dollars from its profitable news entities to its less successful non-news properties. Under Digital First Media, Alden Capital currently owns 97 other news outlets, including The Boston Herald and The Salt Lake City Tribune.

#3. Viacom rejected a bid made by CBS to merge the two companies and has asked CBS to raise its offer. The Redstone family, which controls both companies, wants them to reunite, but WSJ reports that CBS CEO Les Moonves is resisting the merger. The imminent combination would be the latest in a growing list of recent media M&A, joining AT&T and Time Warner, Disney and 21st Century Fox, and Sinclair and Tribune, among others.

#2. Facebook announced it will extend the privacy controls it will soon offer European users (to comply with the EU’s data protection law going into effect next month) to its users worldwide. Details are yet to be announced. In the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has admitted wrongdoing and offered increased transparency: it is currently investigatingother third-party apps that accessed large amounts of data for possible misuse, restricting data access of third-party developers, and making it easier for users to manage their privacy controls. It also informed users impacted by the Cambridge Analytica data misuse today and will soon allow users to see the types of data being used by marketers to target them. CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress on Wednesday, which according to Axios, will determine the next steps Congress takes to approach regulation.

#1. Medium founder Ev Williams penned back-to-back Medium posts last week:

• The first, “The rationalization of publishing,” argues that “subscriptions for publishing on a wide scale are inevitable — and that’s a good thing.” He says that people will learn to pay for news in the same way that we learned to pay for more TV as TV dramatically improved, but only for a handful due to economic and cognitive constraints. For publishers that aren’t likely to earn substantial subscription revenue on their own, he argues in favor of bundling a la Netflix, which in addition to providing steady revenue streams would also offer publishers marketing, discovery, and tech infrastructure.
• The second post, “The Medium Model,” describes how Medium is approaching subscription bundling: “put[ting] great stories behind the metered paywall” and “help[ing] people find stories they care about.” In Medium’s model, an editorial team commissions work by professional writers and small publishers that goes behind the paywall, curates content licensed from major publishers, and helps those who are already contributing quality work reach larger audiences. Stories are suggested to readers based on their previous reading behavior.

Why it matters. Looks like Medium is positioning itself to be the Netflix for news.

There have been a number of start-ups over the years that have been heralded as the Netflix for news, including Scribd and Blendle. Scribd offers its 750,000 subscribers access to evergreen content licensed from news publishers, e-books, and audio books; Blendle curates content recommended by friends and influencers for its 60,000 U.S. users (as of a year ago) and sells them on a micropayment basis. None so far have disrupted the news industry in the same way as Netflix has for film and TV and Spotify for music.

But is now the time when a Netflix for news could succeed? It would align with a number of recent trends: advertising becoming a less reliable source of revenue, the scramble towards reader revenue, and the realization that there’s a limit to the number of news subscriptions readers are willing to pay for. Medium’s recent uptick in membership growthis a positive sign for the model. Apple is another potential player: less than a month ago it acquired Texture, a subscription service giving subscribers access to over 200 premium magazine titles. And as Williams speculates in “The rationalization of publishing,” as Google and Facebook proceed with their respective initiatives to help publishers secure subscription revenues, a bundled offering from them could be a natural progression.

Look for. How Medium’s membership grows and evolves, and whether more Netflix-like offerings emerge. Is a Netflix for news possible? If so, will it mean yet another tech company in control of publishers’ revenues? And do consumers want cross-publisher news bundles?

This post is adapted from the April 9th issue of The Idea. For more news briefs, analysis, and Q&A with media innovators, subscribe to The Idea, Atlantic Media’s weekly newsletter covering the latest trends and innovations in media.