The Rebooting at 4
Lessons learned and what's next
Hard to believe, but I sent the first edition of The Rebooting four years ago to about 1,500 people. I have a retrospective below, but you’ll need to join the TRB Pro membership. Luckily, I’m offering a 20% discount for the next week. You get a year of TRB Pro, with access to all content and invites to member events, including a live podcast this December at Gannett’s NYC headquarters, for $160.
The Rebooting is kicking off a new research project with our partners at EX.CO. I’m a believer that the media business is about managing tensions and tradeoffs. What we want to understand is how video is viewed within publishing organizations. The survey only takes five minutes to complete, and all answers are anonymous.
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AI in the newsroom
On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I have a spotlight episode with Josh Brandau, CEO of The Rebooting’s partner, Nota, which offers AI tools to improve workflow in newsrooms.
As I wrote about the AI adoption curve last week, publishers have passing through the anger and bargaining for deals phases and are now moving onto practicalities. Companies overall are adopting AI initially in the hopes of becoming more efficient and productive. Publishing is no different. The Rebooting’s recent survey of news publishers found efficiency by far the biggest opportunity they saw in AI.
Josh is a publishing veteran having been CRO and CMO at the Los Angeles Times. That informed his decision to create Nota since like other publishers he saw legacy media struggling to adopt technologies that underpin sustainable businesses.
We discuss the inefficiencies inherent in a lot of newsrooms that end up taking scarce resources away from the actual news reporting, and how tasks like versioning, content optimization, SEO and tagging can be sped along with an AI assist. This is critical in a more-with-less era.
We also take a big picture view of where journalism goes in an AI world, licensing as a growing revenue source and how AI could create other new revenue streams as publishers inevitably move beyond efficiency and begin to create new products that improve the customer experience.
Listen to The Rebooting Show on Apple | Spotify | other podcast platforms
Four years in
Four years ago this week, I sent the first edition of this newsletter to 1,500 subscribers. It was an analysis of the plan I’d set out for Digiday before I joined the company in 2011. My thinking was it would give a sense of how I think of the media business from my experience.
The Rebooting has expanded incrementally since then, adding a second edition (and for an insane few months, a third), a podcast, a second podcast, online forums and research reports, dinners and in–person events.
My high level takeaways so far:
- Building anything from scratch is hard. The cliche that it “takes twice as long and is twice as hard as expected” is a cliche for a reason. Persistence pays off.
- Planning isn’t as important as doing. Most of the time spent sketching out grand strategies is rumination; you’re better off just doing things early on because you need feedback.
- Funding growth with cashflow is a useful constraint. You have no option but to listen to the market, even if it’s telling you things you don’t want to hear.
- Fractional is a force multiplier. I now have a team of seven – nine if you count Troy and Alex – but none full-time. I think more companies will look like this.
- Newsletters aren’t a business model. Many newsletter businesses are email marketing businesses. To build a media property, you need to do more than just email.
Here’s the state of The Rebooting’s business at 4 and what’s next:
