Lunch with Janine Gibson | New York Times explains podcasts paywall move
And Guardian overtakes Sun and Mail for audience reach in August, according to our latest ranking
Good morning and welcome to your Press Gazette Future of Media newsletter on Thursday 3 October, brought to you today in association with Qonqord.
Download their white paper, The Ultimate Guide to Content Orchestration, here.
Journalism is at once completey meritocratic and completely unfair.
Good journalists generally rise to the top but can also find themselves back at square one when the career roulette wheel comes up zero.
FT Weekend editor Janine Gibson, who is the subject of our first (and possibly only) Lunch With PG feature, is a case in point.
She turned the late lamented Media Guardian website into an addictive hit which you needed to load up on several times a day to stay up to date on industry news and gossip. She won every award going (including a Pulitzer prize) when helped land the Snowden Files scoop as US Guardian editor. And she seemed all but set to succeed Alan Rusbridger to the top job at the title (and a £500k salary) but for the uniquely Guardian tradition that journalists there get to elect their editor.
The Guardian's loss has ultimately been the FT's gain (she has been the paper's Weekend editor since last year and was associate editor for the three before that) and over lunch at The Quality Chop House in Clerkenwell she shared her insights into the title's winning recipe for interviews and explained why print journalism will outlast us all.
We also this week talk to New York Times head of subscriptions growth Ben Cotton about how the Gray Lady plans to add to her already prodigious paid media empire by placing podcasts behind the paywall.
And we have big news from the UK news websites rankings where there is a new top dog among commercial publishers (in terms of total reach, if not overall monthly minutes).
A reminder: midnight tonight is the final deadline for entry to the British Journalism Awards 2024.
From our sponsor:
We make publishers perform better. How?
Download our whitepaper now and discover the benefits of content orchestration for your company!
On Press Gazette
FT Weekend editor Janine Gibson: 'This interview is a disaster'
“Our recurring beef is that people are too sensible now to have a glass of wine.”
Paywalled podcasts: How New York Times is adding audio to subscriptions bundle
“Once we've built up a deeply engaged audience and feel like we have made something that we've proven, that is strong enough that people will be willing to pay for, we want to actually go ahead and do that.”
Top 50 UK news websites in August: Guardian rises above Sun and Mail as UK’s biggest commercial news site
Nine of the ten biggest news websites in the UK in August saw month-on-month decline after a busy news month in July.
Press Gazette highlights
News media job cuts 2024 tracked: ABC News layoffs and US national network Scripps News shuts
Tortoise heads for showdown with NUJ over bid to buy Observer
Michael Jermey to leave ITV after 16 years as director of news and current affairs
Police tracked journalist number plates to warn sex offenders they were approaching
Top 50 news websites in the world: Traffic pulls back after big July for US politics
Standard managing editor Jack Lefley to replace Pete Clifton as PA editor-in-chief