DefinitiveInk

Product and insight at the intersection of editorial, technology, and business

Opinion

By Leave a Comment

A Must Read For Smaller Publishers From The Founder of Skift

What is the smaller publisher to do in this world of giant page view generators like Buzzfeed and The Daily Mail? What is their business as Medium and others are trying to be the place where one should publish?

Rafat Ali, the founder of Skift a wonderful site for travel industry news, has written a must read about his experience trying to raise money, regaining  focus, and just doing what they need to do to succeed titled, “How We Got off the Addiction to Venture Capital and Created Our Own way to profits.” How they stopped chasing scale, focused on building direct channels to their readers versus trying to be a distributed media platform, focused on doing things today that brought revenue today”, worked on their company culture, and strengthened their utility for, and connection to, their readers.

“Lastly, we embraced the idea of being boutique, in the truest sense of that word, and have been loud and proud about it. One of the fallacies of mainstream media coverage of smaller media businesses is that these are just lifestyle passion businesses. Passion about the subject, enough to spend many years of our lives in it, sure. What business engenders loyalties if it doesn’t have passion behind it?”

The post is inspiring and a great blueprint for smaller publishers who want to work in and own a niche. The kind of publishers that I like to work with and believe the web is supposed to enable.

 

By Leave a Comment

Where are the hyperlocal media predictions for 2016

After my stints at LocalVox (which worked with local merchants to distribute their marketing information) and then at Blankslate (which was effectively the publisher of several of the largest local blogs in the country) I consider myself well out of local media. I still follow the  space still by subscribing to Street Fight. Like every news and pundit site they offered their list of things to look for in 2016. I was struck by the fact that none of their prognostications dealt with it, focusing instead on retailers, startup services, and beacons.

It was also interesting to me because I had just read an article on Nieman Journalism Lab about adding local news to people’s walls on FB. This in turn led me to think about outside.in where I had worked to develop a local blogger network and a toolkit that mapped stores to their locations. Outside.in may have been a bit ahead of its time as aggregating local stories and then placing them into FB and Snapchat would probably be a good service given how hard media is in general now an how difficult hyperlocal media is on top of that. It wouldn’t solve the problems that the creators of the stories face but it could get them in front of an audience where good things might happen. Foursquare might end up doing something similar with ads.