WhatsApp Channels moment in the spotlight to arrive
Plus: Social media usage for news fragmentation continues + all the learnings from the Publisher Newsletter & Podcast Summits
Good afternoon,
We're about to head into a heatwave here in Preston, yes, really.
After two weeks of this newsletter being 'on the road' with reporting from the Journalism Leaders Forum and the Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summit, we're back to the normality of three interesting reads for you this week.
It was good to catch up with lots of people, past and present in London last week and hear what they are up to. Everyone has shared challenges and different ways of trying to ultimately do the same thing - ensuring the media brands we work for, big or small, are going to be there in decades to come. Which is why we'll start with what I think is going to be a big shift in the months ahead when it comes to news and content consumption.
WhatsApp to start showing more adverts in messaging app - Zoe Kleinman, BBC News - within this story about essentially Meta starting to look at how it monetises the vast usage of WhatsApp (which has certainly replaced text messaging for me and many many others) is this line 'The new ad features will appear in a section called Updates, which is a separate tab at the bottom of the app.'
Within this section is where WhatsApp channels live. I've written about these before and we've been plugging away at growing a channel for Blog Preston since last year and now have around 2,000 followers who are extremely highly engaged.
Why is this significant? Meta will need eyeballs on its Updates section and one of the criticisms of channels is they are fairly hidden within the app. I think it is likely we'll see WhatsApp surface channels, and the updates section, more regularly or differently to ultimately ensure those adverts get the exposure they need.
For those publishers who have been early in the game on WhatsApp Channels, it may be they start to accelerate in the number of people natively discovering them through WhatsApp.
Read more: See everything I’ve written on WhatsApp Channels
And it gives a secure, direct, connection with an audience to build upon for distributing stories and also bringing people back to an owned and operated platform - or signposting others.
I recently interview a number of teenagers in Preston for a piece about the city's youth strategy, it was eye-opening for many reasons, but I also took the chance to ask them whether they read Blog Preston and how they did.
Reassuringly they did engage with it, but my key takeaways were:
- They read it when their Mum, or another authority figure, shares a link
- They often used it more for verification of something they had seen on social, and that was the start of their journey for reading a story. Local media's role as a verification tool will be ever increasing as snippets trend on social, but people seek to fact-check or get context.
Social media usage fragmentation continues - Charlotte Tobitt, Press Gazette - the publication of the Reuters/Oxford digital news report is always a key moment in the year, whether you're in newsrooms, media management or academia. It's one of the go-to reports for how media consumption and journalism is changing.
There's lots of focus on how more people in the US get their news from social media than TV for the first time (not really a surprise). There's good analysis from Charlotte at Press Gazette on a number of different trends which emerge, for me the usage of different social platforms and how that has fragmented is a fascinating one.
The days of being able to say 'it's on Facebook, job done' are long gone. As publishers, are you going to be on every platform? Or be brilliant at a few? It's a hard call as each has its own language and grammar, and nuances.
Key themes from 2025’s Publisher Summits…as shared by you - Media Voices - there was loads to unpack from last week's Publisher Newsletter and Podcast Summits, Esther Kezia Thorpe has this ground round-up of some of the key learnings and insights which people have written about and shared. Well worth a dive through.
That’s all for this week’s What I’ve Been Reading digest, as always I hope you’ve found it useful and tips on what to include to ed@almaonline.co.uk
Hope you’re having a good week. I’m off to cover a council meeting this evening, yes, really.
Keep going.
Ed