This week saw the arrival on the scene of two new players in the news media space, one welcome, the other, … err… less so, but both with implications for legacy publishers.
First – the welcome one – the launch by five former-Observer journalists of The Nerve, a journalist owned, membership funded news operation.
According to founder Sarah Donaldson, “We chose the name because we realised nerve is the essential quality needed in our increasingly turbulent world. Too many people in positions of power are losing nerve, and the people we most admire have it in spades. We want to channel that kind of courage into a new publication.”
That’s an appealing pitch and The Nerve joins the growing list of journalists and influencers building their own audiences outside the confines of traditional media and providing yet more competition for audiences’ attention.
How should mainstream publishers respond to this trend?
At the Independent, they are trying to harness the energy and creativity of individual creators under the Independent banner. As CEO Christian Broughton tells Meg Carter in the upcoming September / October issue of InPublishing magazine, through their new Independent Studio operation, they are partnering with third-party creators, giving them a great deal of artistic freedom albeit with discrete Independent branding. The Adam Clery Football Channel is one such example.
The not-so-welcome newcomer is ChatGPT Pulse, unveiled this week and promising to generate personalised news bulletins for users while they sleep, ready for them when they wake.
The content for these bulletins isn’t magicked out of thin air – it comes, primarily, from mainstream news sites. It’s one more example of big tech profiting from content created by others, something which puts enormous pressure on the business models of mainstream publishers.
As News Media Association Owen Meredith says, also in the Sep/Oct issue of InPublishing: “Journalism cannot be endlessly scraped, repurposed, and monetised without undermining the economic foundation on which it is built.”
Mainstream publishers must redouble their efforts to attract the most talented journalists and creators to their mastheads, whilst working together as an industry to press for proper regulation of big tech and fair compensation.
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