“Brevity is the soul of wit.” -William Shakespeare
In other words, say more with less.
We all know a long-winded Polonius from Hamlet, who will take five minutes to tell you what he could have said in 30 seconds. In 2020, where attention and time are money, where there is constant noise coming at us from all different directions, one digital news startup is banking on brevity.
BANKING ON BREVITY
axios.com
Axios is putting its money on “smart brevity,” its motto and registered trademark.
In a sea of layoffs, furloughs and newsroom closures, the three-year old startup is poised to make a profit this year in spite of the pandemic that has shuttered newsrooms across the country with
“smart, efficient news worthy of your time, attention and trust.”
The company is on track to take in about $58 million in 2020, up more than 30% from the year before, according to The Wall Street Journal, thanks in large part to its sponsored newsletter business, which makes up more than 50% of the company’s total revenue.
Now, Axios is now positioning itself to fill a gap that is widening by the day in local news. Early next year, Axios plans to launch local newsletters in four local markets:
- Minneapolis
- Denver
- Tampa, Florida
- Des Moines, Iowa
Axios was founded by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz after they left Politico. They’re not alone. Journalists are leaving newsrooms and becoming their own media companies.
theskimm.com
The Skimm was founded in 2012 by two former news producers who launched it from their couch. A brand which now includes newsletters, an app, podcasts, video social and community reaching an audience of 12 million people across platforms.
morningbrew.com
At the end of August, the Morning Brew hit one million unique daily opens. Alex Lieberman and co-founder, Austin Rief, were two bankers, who launched the Morning Brew to liven up traditional business news reporting and make it more conversational and fun.
Instead of focusing on subscribers, the word that makes for great headlines, The Morning Brew focused on metrics that matter: Open rates.
Similar to social media, a lot of attention is paid to follower counts, but it’s a vanity metric—things you can measure that don’t matter. As entrepreneur & author, Tim Ferris, puts it:
“Vanity metrics: Good for feeling awesome, bad for action.”
A subscriber that isn’t opening an email isn’t a valuable metric.
So, The Morning Brew hyper focused on engagement and for email newsletters, that’s open rates.
As co-founder, Austin Rief, tweeted, The Morning Brew would stop what they were doing to see at 11am every day to see the open rates, then they’d write it on their “great wall of opens.”
A daily reminder of what really matters.
They also hopped on Instagram Stories early and benefitted greatly from that.
Other journalists are leaving newsrooms and using tech companies such as Substack to reach an audience.
Emily Atkin, a former reporter at the New Republic, told the Washington Post that she got into a position I believe many journalists, including myself, do at some point or another, asking herself: “Is this publication giving me as much as I’m giving it?”
heated.world
Soon after, she launched “Heated” a four-times-a-week newsletter on the climate crisis. It’s now one of Substack’s top paid publications.
substack.com
Substack describes itself as “A place for independent writing. We make it simple for a writer to start a paid newsletter.”
The platform handles the technical end of the newsletter process in exchange for ten percent of the subscription revenue.
Some journalists have left their publications to write on Substack full-time, including Matt Taibb, who left Rolling Stone & Andrew Sullivan who left New York Magazine to resurrect his blog, “The Dish.”
Ten years ago, many declared “Email Is Dead,” as they turned to the next shiny new thing, Facebook. But algorithms are a tricky thing, deciding who sees your content and who doesn’t. Email puts it right in front of them and meets people where they are.
I resigned from my TV producing job a few years ago, after 20+ in local television. It’s hard to leave the only thing you know whether you do it by choice or it’s a choice made for you. I had no plan. I wasn’t even on Facebook at the time. So, I wrote, started a blog…
It’s that writing that connected me with my next opportunity.
I turned on the local news the other day for the first time in a long time. Same format, same way we were doing things 20 years ago. Nothing has changed.
I looked up their Instagram accounts. One of them hasn’t posted since the First Day of Fall. That was September 22nd.
Today is October 12th.
A lot of news happened in that time…
Seems like a good time to remind you of another Shakespeare quote, “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”