Time to compete

Nothing but admiration mixed with concern for the guy next to me on a 6am flight who managed to neck two IPAs on a 1.5-hour flight. Where does his day go from there?

I’m not sure how competitive he’s going to be today, but it’s the topic for today’s newsletter. (This is a members-only piece. Consider taking out a TRB membership. It’s $200 a year or $20 a month if you’re wary.) It sprung out of the conversation we had for the new episode of People vs Algorithms about the future of work and careers. That comes out on Friday. You can get PvA on YouTube | Apple | Spotify | other podcasting platforms.

Yesterday we held The Rebooting’s first online forum of the year on how publishers compete with alternative media that has many advantages when it comes to costs, looser standards, lack of nostalgia and institutional ties to outdated conventions. 

Bharat Krish, chief product officer of Newsweek, and Mark Zohar, CEO of Viafoura, joined me in the discussion. A couple points  that stood out. 

• Publishers need to reclaim conversation that they ceded to social platforms.
• "Community" isn't a fluffy nice-to-have but a business tactic that drives ROI.
• The product function at publishers is underdeveloped and critical to executing audience-first strategies.

Thanks to Viafoura for sponsoring the conversation, and to Mark and Bharat for sharing their expertise. See a replay of it here.

Time to compete

I’ve been thinking more about Mark Zuckerberg’s comment to Joe Rogan that companies need more “masculine energy.” It was silly, of course, the stereotype of a nerd who finally found his bros. 

But I think what he was getting at is companies need to be more competitive. The vibe I get from the tech right is they regret how their companies got bloated and focused on tangential social issues, or as Zuckerberg said “culturally neutered.” Basically they had a form of luxury beliefs and fully embraced Kara Swisher’s description of San Francisco as a place where “young people go to retire.”

The pivot to competition is an important vibe shift and perhaps an inevitable denouement to the ZIRP era. Trump is right that the Deepseek “Sputnik moment” was a “wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win.”  Publishers need to get more competitive if they’re going to win.