Zara Seidler has taken The Daily Aus in a different direction from most youth news publishers: it’s straight-down-the-line, objective news. Zara, as co-founder, has seen her Instagram-based service grow to more than 400k followers, receive substantial investment and begin considering expansion beyond Australia. Subscribe to the Crawford Media podca…

Spotify’s Head of Studios ANZ Ben Watts has always been fixated on audio, whether music or spoken word, and now he’s bringing the two together at the global streaming giant. In this conversation Ben traces his moves through the digital platform and publishing industry and how his thinking has evolved around the use of metrics. Along the way there a…

Lucy Blakiston might be young (24), but she’s been publishing to big audiences for the best part of a decade. The force behind youth news brand S**t You Should Care About is a one-person social media phenomenon: 3.6 million Instagram followers and tens of thousands of newsletter subscribers want to hear what she has to say about world affairs, Form…

Tim Griggs is the force behind Blue Engine Collaborative, a company that has run accelerator programs all over the world helping businesses make digital news pay. One of the first things he tells program participants is that there is no magic bullet. As the guy behind The New York Times’ early foray into news subscriptions, Tim is well-qualified to…

Genevieve Jacobs believes she and her company, Region Media, have cracked the secret to doing local publishing profitably. If so, why are so many other outfits struggling to stay open? In this Crawford Media podcast, the Canberra-based publisher describes a business model that leans heavily on search traffic and local business reviews, along with i…

Dan Stinton is the Managing Director of The Guardian in Australia and New Zealand and is forthright in this podcast about the main thing holding growth back: "half the country hasn't heard of us". To that end, The Guardian is launching a new marketing campaign with a new tagline around "the fight for progress". Stinton also dives into the need for …

Hello everybody, Here is the much-anticipated second part of my journey into AI-land with OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model. In addition to continuing my conversation with The Open University’s Mike Sharples, I spoke to another education scholar: Stephen Marshall, Director of the Centre for Academic Development at Victoria University in Wellington. In …

Hello everyone, This week is the first part of a two-part podcast on AI language transformers in general and GPT-3 in particular. First up, I am dealing with general impacts and impressions and next week I’ll go deeper into the effects of text generators on education. All of this is a follow-up to The Machines Have Acquired Language, which I wrote …

Kia ora koutou, In this week’s podcast I am speaking with journalist, entrepreneur and author Tim Duggan. Today just happens to be the day he is launching his new book, Killer Thinking. I won’t summarise the book’s thesis, but I will let you know that I enjoyed reading it, and that it is full of information to challenge you and help take your idea …

Happy Friday all, Gideon Haigh is in the Crawford Media spotlight today. If you’re any kind of Australian cricket fan at all, you will be familiar with Haigh’s writing. He’s been covering the game for more than three decades, but that’s far from his only area of activity. Haigh has become a specialist in the longest form of journalism available: bo…

Hello everyone Special treat for you today if you’re a Crawford Media podcast listener: I’m speaking to Victor Vlam, a Dutch journalist who also happens to curate the world’s biggest collection of news theme music. I wrote earlier in the year about the power of audio, and how the majority of news publishers intend to increase investment in podcasts…

As noted in this week’s newsletter, the latest Crawford Media podcast is an interview with Sarah Bristow, News Director at Discovery in New Zealand. Bristow is a former colleague and an interesting character: I wanted to ask how she’s finding things, the practical difficulties trying to transition from TV to digital (still happening, even if the st…

Hello everyone, Today in the Crawford Media podcast I have a conversation, recorded last week, with visiting US journalist and professor Bill Grueskin. Grueskin is in Sydney at the invitation of the Judith Nielsen Institute (JNI) to engage with Australian journalists and educators - delivering lectures and sitting on panels - and to investigate the…

Hello everyone, I find the process of putting together these podcasts immensely satisfying, and never more than when I have beautiful material to work with. It’s like woodworking with good timber. That’s the situation I found myself in this week with this week’s conversation with Paul Henry, a New Zealand broadcaster of long experience and great sk…

Michael Anderson was the CEO of Mediaworks and my boss for more than three years. We talked a lot together, particularly about the difficulties of managing people within media companies, and two days before I left my news director job in 2020 I asked his permission to record our final conversation. At the time, I was much occupied with the ideas of…

Hello everyone Andrew Jaspan is the founder of The Conversation and the “force of nature” behind a new news startup called 360info. 360info is conducting a closed trial right now, but will open for business in the new year. In the podcast this week Jaspan reveals his thinking behind what is best described as an academic wire service, or news agency…

Hello everyone Today I have a podcast with University of Canberra Associate Professor Caroline Fisher for you. Fisher is a former broadcast journalist working at the News and Media Research Centre - with Professor Sora Park among others - and she has some important data on who is willing to pay for news. She’s also currently researching whether tru…

Hello everyone, Funding news is not easy. It’s tough to commercially fund news. Everyone know this. In fact, we’ve heard so much about how hard it is to fund news commercially that it’s become a bit dull. Advertising is owned by the digital platform companies and only a small percentage of people subscribe. What you may not realise is that funding …

Hello everyone As promised, this week I have marketing and storytelling guru Jonah Sachs on the podcast. Sachs wrote “Winning the Story Wars” back in 2012, following up with “Unsafe Thinking” in 2018. Both are excellent books. I wanted to speak to Sachs in particular about what has been happening to Facebook in the story arena: I thought he would h…

Gautam Mishra is the founder and CEO of Inkl, a Melbourne-based news aggregator that has been quietly building audience for the past seven years. Years ago Mishra and his news app were mentioned to me by Jack Matthews, the former Fairfax Metro CEO, and I went and downloaded Inkl. Mishra had worked with Matthews at Fairfax, where he set up the paywa…

Hello everyone, Today, I present you with Margy Vary, former marketing director at The Guardian Australia, and the possessor of a keen analytical mind. Vary has applied that mind to the thorny and important question of how to coax money out of news audiences. In the podcast, Vary explains how she and her colleagues at The Guardian began with the be…

Hello tribe, Many Crawford Media readers work inside the companies I write about, and today that is particularly relevant. Some of you will have much better knowledge of the deals for news content made in the shadow the Australian News Bargaining Code than both me and this week’s podcast interviewee, William Turvill. These deals are something we ne…

Hello everyone! Recently I had a great discussion with the CEO of The Conversation in Australia and New Zealand, Lisa Watts. I wanted to dig a bit more into the success of the university/news hybrid that began in Melbourne 10 years ago, and how it has expanded globally. The idea of using subject matter experts within academia to explain the issues …

Patrick Gower, or Paddy as he is known, was one of my first and favourite New Zealand news discoveries. Not that I discovered him in the sense of a talent scout. As you’ll hear in the podcast, Paddy moved years ago from print to broadcast, where he established himself as one of the most well-known and loved NZ TV personalities. What fascinates me a…

Hello everyone Last week I mentioned the Australian High Court decision in the Dylan Voller defamation case, and how it was freaking a lot of people out. The High Court found that three news organisations being sued for defamation were in fact the publishers of comments attached to their posts in Facebook, despite the fact they didn’t write them, a…

Hello everyone A few weeks ago News Corp and Google announced the creation of the Digital News Academy in Australia. The Academy is a 3-year, 250-student program for working journalists within News Corp and other smaller media companies. It has been championed by News Corp Australasia Executive Chairman Michael Miller. As you’ll hear, I didn’t mana…

Hello everyone, This week I bring you Simon Crerar, the founding editor of Buzzfeed Australia and now the co-founder of a local news startup called PS Media. To date Crerar and crew haven’t publicly disclosed details of how PS Media is going to work, so I relished the opportunity to get him talking. I’ll leave you to listen to the podcast to find o…

I first met Schwartz Media CEO Rebecca Costello en route to a news industry “offsite” in Tasmania: we were flying in on a tiny plane. Small, dangerous-feeling spaces are good for creating connections, and I immediately took to Costello’s straight-talking approach to the event we were about to attend. Costello has presided over the independent, high…

Earlier this week I wrote about Nine and the ABC being recognised internationally for their fast-growing news sites. I took the opportunity to examine the ways that metrics can be used and abused in newsrooms, and from the comments I received on that piece it’s clear that I hit a nerve with many people who have worked in digital. If you’ve been ins…

Hello everyone - and happy Friday. This is the podcast follow-up to this week’s newsletter, and you’ll find it incredibly dense with interesting ideas. Benedict Evans is one of the smartest tech analysts in the world, and in this interview he’s turned his mind to the business of news. We cover: * How the internet not only changed advertising, it ch…

For the first podcast of the Crawford Media experience I have the honour of presenting Mumbrella founder Tim Burrowes. The discussion covers the tumultuous last decade in Australian media history, as told in his book Media Unmade. I went deep into the book in my review. Here you have a chance to hear Burrowes explain his thinking around the book’s …