Substack becoming a media giant
Plus: 'Shoring up' local news in the UK + the social video battleground
Good afternoon,
And welcome to the What I’ve Been Reading digest back to its usual quick-links format after two different posts in the past fortnight. Thanks to Jacqui for sharing her learnings from the Press Gazette Future of Media conference and also to those who enjoyed my reflections on the re-design of Blog Preston after a decade.
Let’s dive into this week’s interesting bits which have crossed my feed/timeline/inbox in recent days…
Top 50 news websites in the US in August: Substack leads just five sites with year-on-year growth - Press Gazette - it’s perhaps not surprising given how aggressively Substack is pushing people into its app and ecosystem, and also more publishers deciding to launch on it. Substack is increasingly becoming a platform and media player in its own right and these figures confirm it.
Is having a Substack going to become the norm as in having a presence on TikTok or LinkedIn is for some brands? There’s some good insights and thoughts from Sam Shedden, who is part of Reach’s change onto the platform and also runs The Melbourne Snap too, which includes him speculating that adverts are coming to Substack. It does feel inevitable and that’s why some publishers/creators have decided to leave the platform and are finding success elsewhere because Substack can’t'/won’t plug into advertising networks.
Is support from Government for local news about to happen? - Behind Local News - Culture secretary Lisa Nandy has indicated the Local News Strategy, promised by the government last summer, may not be too far off. She appeared on the Media Confidential Podcast to give her thoughts about the ‘urgency’ of acting. Exactly what form that action will take is still to be revealed but there was much talk of ‘shoring up’. How the government decides to do that, and which titles and where, will be a difficult decision to make - especially with the fiscal situation so tight. What I hope to see is a recognition of the importance and emergence of independent titles, such as Blog Preston, have in their communities and also a challenge to both established and independent publishers to innovate and importantly giving them the headspace and resources to do that. As always, the devil will be in the detail. Let’s hope the Local News Strategy is something substantial and not just more warm words for the importance of local journalism.
STOP! You’re not moving fast enough - Jonathan Tanner - this post from Jon breaking down how the government had approached the digital ID cards announcement compared to opposition parties on social media caught my eye. The ‘hot take’ has definitely been adopted by Reform and it is paying off, he looks at how short video posts in the hours after the Prime Minister’s announcement across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube had amassed nearly 1m views. Labour by comparison had posted one Instagram graphic in that time. It also feeds into this idea, which seems to be commonplace now, to breadcrumb an announcement. Similar to the Pride in Place announcement, release a short clip, of 20 seconds, with no real substance or detail, and then make everyone wait a day or two for the actual information. And people wonder why the public get frustrated with politicians. It’s like someone telling you the start of a joke, walking out of the pub, and then coming back the next day to tell you the rest.
Hope you’ve found those useful and interesting insights, as always if you spot something you think I should be including in the What I’ve Been Reading digest then send it over to ed@almaonline.co.uk and I’ll be happy to look at including.
This afternoon I’m heading off to the Foxton, a charity which does great work in the Avenham and Frenchwood area of Preston, to lead the second of our Blog Foxton sessions. I’ll write more on these in the weeks ahead but we’re running four sessions to get a group of young people creating the news for Blog Preston. It was fantastic to meet them last week. More to follow on it as I say, but do have a read of what they got up to in week one.
Have a great rest of the week.
Keep going.
Ed
Good stuff Ed! The enshittification of Substack and inevitable arrival of ads is why I'm leaving v soon. Sad but the founders are sadly going against their promises. Ownership of audience being the final straw for me. And I agree, more publishers will come but that'll only make it more noisy.