Media & Publishing
Business Insider’s new CEO is monetizing audience off the website
Christian Baesler says BI’s next revenue engine is the audience already sitting on YouTube, LinkedIn and newsletters, not the shrinking homepage: U.S. visits are down more than 50% in two years, while BI has 10m+ YouTube subscribers, 11m LinkedIn followers and 1m+ newsletter subscribers. The four-vertical structure gives sales a cleaner sponsorship and professional-subscription product around CMO, markets, AI and small business audiences.
Media & Publishing
NYT Opinion’s growth engine is video
Kathleen Kingsbury’s Opinion desk has roughly 200 employees (~10% of the newsroom), a consolidated Shows team and enterprise video that can reach audiences far beyond the Times app; some shorts have drawn more than 10m YouTube views, The Ezra Klein Show sits in Apple’s top ten and Opinion has won the editorial/opinion Emmy category five years running. The tension is product clarity: field reporting and video make Opinion more powerful, but they also blur the reader-facing distinction between argument, analysis and newsroom reporting.
Media & Publishing
The Economist’s Play tier is converting entirely new customers
The $15 audio-video tier launched July 1 in Canada, Denmark, Norway and Sweden; in the first three weeks every Play conversion was a new customer and Premium held. Full deep dive below.
Media & Publishing
El País is treating the U.S. Hispanic market as an Americas expansion
EL PAÍS US hired former NYT senior editor María Sánchez Díez as it expands in the U.S., adding to existing editions in Mexico, Colombia and Chile. This is the same beachhead logic as The Guardian’s India newsletter: use a global brand and a focused local editorial lead to build owned direct relationships.
Media & Publishing
SFGATE put a $4.99 app beside its free local-news model
Friends of SFGATE adds an ad-free feed, a California mini-crossword, interactive maps and AI-narrated article audio while keeping journalism outside the paywall. The logic is not subscription replacement: Hearst’s most profitable news title is adding paid touchpoints around its heaviest users without disturbing the free audience and ad map that make the site work.
Media & Publishing
Commercial leadership change at The Free Press
Bari Weiss told staff that publisher/president Dennis Berman and chief growth officer Daniel Hallac are moving into advisory roles, less than a year after joining and shortly after The Free Press sold to David Ellison. The clean read is post-deal lifecycle: Berman helped professionalize and sell the asset faster than expected; Hallac’s growth brief looks less central now that the next job is Paramount/CBS integration, but there are rumors of a misfit.
Media & Publishing
Forbes fired the executive who built 30 Under 30
Randall Lane was fired after Forbes found he had received a secret payment of around $6m from the founder of a research firm that works with the magazine. The business read is trust infrastructure: a franchise-led publisher loses the executive most tied to one of its most monetizable editorial brands.
Media & Publishing
The Washington Post named Mark Lasswell interim Opinion editor
The deputy opinion editor, at the Post since 2018 after leaving the WSJ, steps up after Adam O’Neal quit July 31, a year into the “personal liberties and free markets” mandate, still without explanation.