What I've Been Reading: The Messenger implosion, Meta's AI ad bounce + what I've learned on WhatsApp channels

Plus how Cityside flipped from being for-profit to non-profit in the local news space

Good afternoon,

And happy Wednesday. My usual digest of interesting links from across the digital journalism landscape and beyond is below, plus also some learnings from the WhatsApp channel we’ve launched for Blog Preston in the past few weeks.

The Messenger is shutting down - Axios - over in the US, it was a big play to build a whole new scale-news site from scratch, but that was the attempt by The Messenger. There’s insight in this Nieman Lab piece from Joshua Benton was to what went wrong. My reflection from this is that not having a core competency or USP leaves you very vulnerable in the 2024 digital space. What is your reason to exist? What are you doing better/more consistently than someone else? If you can’t answer those, then it’s unlikely the algorithm will ever move in your favour and also audiences won’t understand why they should build a relationship with you. And if you don’t have audience, you don’t have a way to build revenue - whether that’s through an ad-funded model, a reader revenue model, or a blend of both.

Publishers' ad future looks doomed as Meta soars on AI ads - Ricky Sutton - while the platform in Facebook may have been losing market share to the rise of TikTok and others, it’s still a behemoth in terms of usership and audience engagement. Enter their upskilling of the ad stack to take advantage of AI and there’s been another big leap in Facebook’s ad performance. Ricky dismantles the numbers and to me it underlines that for publishers it’s going to be all about direct relationships in the commercial space that AI cannot replicate. What’s bespoke and different across your title or portfolio that a generic AI-targeted advert can’t deliver on Facebook?

How Cityside built a sustainable model for local news - Simon Owens - well worth a watch below the full length chat with Lance Knobel about how this independent mini group in the States has branched out beyond their core site and into adjacent territories. It was also interesting how they converted into being a non-profit news organisation, but crucially kept that same rigour as a for-profit news organisation would have when it came to consistency, publishing approach and more.

And now for the learnings from WhatsApp Channels.

• For Blog Preston, we launched a WhatsApp Channel back in November and have been testing and learning with it. Beyond a quick launch story and plugging it within stories we’ve not done huge promotion.

• The early growth saw a little burst of users sign up, we stayed around the 50 mark for quick a while and then it started to accelerate when we had some snow in mid-January and we’re now closing on 200 channel subscribers.

• We are mainly posting links within it and trying to ensure we give a bit of extra colour or context around a story when putting it in there. We need to increase the variety of posting - using native images and also trying out voice notes too (maybe giving that extra context alongside when we have an exclusive story, such as the RAAC concrete being confirmed in the Guild Hall).

• I don’t think we’ve quite cracked the USP for it yet, should it be a breaking news alert type channel? Should it be behind the headlines? We tend to just post stories which are significant for the city or have an interest to the city as a whole, rather than very hyperlocal stories. This does mean we might not post for hours at a time, but I hope, over time, it means those following the Channel know that when we do post it’s something worth tapping on.

• It might sound odd, but we do try and be polite on the channel. And give a time of day related message, recognising that ‘eurgh it’s Wednesday’ or ‘happy Friday’ etc to try and show there’s a human on the other end of the WhatsApp.

• Channels themselves are rather tucked away in WhatsApp, so I do think that’s why the growth has been slow - it’s reliant on converting our existing audience to a new distribution channel.

• The addition WhatsApp has made of enabling multiple admins to post to one channel is an absolute god-send!

• Is anyone engaging? We haven’t enabled link-tracking for what we’re dropping in (and do need to do this) as WhatsApp will disappear into the ether of direct traffic in Google Analytics but we received this random email from Janet and it made my week and confirmed we should keep plugging away with WhatsApp and it’ll pay off.

Be interested to know how others are finding WhatsApp channels so do drop a comment on what you’re seeing.

And finally, a project we’re working on as Alma was featured in The i’s media column this week - as we launch town-focused email newsletters, then to be followed by a free print edition, for The Lead and bring a fusion of social affairs content to a local level that supports what The Lead does on a national level. We seem to be catching the eye and most importantly our newsletters are seeing strong subscription and engagement levels. Will share more learnings in the future on what we’ve found on doing some very slow local journalism in those markets.

No newsletter next week as it’s half-term here in the UK, so I’ll be focused on the family. Normal service resumes on week beginning the 19 February.

Have a great rest of the week and keep going.

Ed