Building community back onto publisher sites
Plus: Time to embrace creators + The Lead's local network expands to buy The Knot in Stoke
Good evening and welcome to the latest edition of the What I’ve Been Reading Digest.
A little later than usual thanks to a power cut this morning that wiped out a good few hours. Joy.
A reminder for those who have recently subscribed, each week (usually!), I’ll bring you three interesting reads, or listens, which have crossed my feed recently which tend to be in the digital journalism or local media space - generally with the theme of trying something new. As always if you spot something I should be including, drop me a line on ed@almaonline.co.uk
The news industry lost communities — now it wants them back - Greg Piechotak, INMA - journalists, and publishers, have traditionally spent a lot of time on other people’s platforms, cultivating large followings on X, YouTube, Facebook, but what about our own back yards? Greg takes a look through how comments and engaging on-platform are coming back into focus - particularly with the subscription model. But even for scale publishers, there’s an inherent value to having readers who are genuinely invested in the brand. This stuck with me:
Compared with fly-by users, community contributors to the Star generate 24x pageviews per user and 28x time on site per user.
From building fan forums and places for discussion under or adjacent to stories, apps and community spaces that aggregate and help readers make sense - it’s a crucial part of creating a publication in 2026. And crucially, it’s something AI can’t do and it’s something a publisher can then leverage as it’s owned and operated space. But it isn’t an either or, you have to be off platform and on it at the same time.
A warning to the news industry: act now or the Joe Rogan/Piers Morgan ecosystem will leave you far behind - Deborah Turness, The Guardian - the individual brand of journalists and editors will only accelerate, I only need to take a skim through the recent shortlist for many awards and it is publications, newsletters and stories where the journalists and editors are strong, visible, and credible, presences who are catching the attention of readers, viewers and followers. And it’s crucial to see creator-led brands and individuals as potential collaborators - in the same way many TV personalities crossed over into becoming newspaper or magazine columnists in the past.
Local newsletter network The Lead buys Stoke-on-Trent title - Charlotte Tobitt, Press Gazette - I was down in Stoke last week to meet with James Routledge and Helen Dalley as we talked about the future of The Knot. Some of that creator spirit (mentioned above) was definitely in action two years ago when James set up the Substack to try and provide a different news outlet for Stoke-on-Trent and North Staffs. He explains it all far better than I can in his note to subscribers about The Knot becoming a part of The Lead’s local newsletter titles which Luke and I oversee.
That’s all for this week’s edition - we’ll be taking a breather next week as it’s the half-term holidays here with the kids off school. So the digest returns on Wednesday 3 June.
Thanks very much for reading.
Keep going.
Ed
I said it publicly many times - the biggest publisher mistake was to outsource community to Facebook, and then other social networks, instead of developing their own solutions.