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Seasonal publishing

What I'm doing with One Man & His Blog this Autumn — and four hand-rolled links for your pleasure.

Adam Tinworth

3 Sep 2024

I'm back from my holiday (a sojourn in France with my brother and his family and then a blissfully internet-free week camping in the woods.), and gearing up for the rest of the year. It's my busiest time at City St Georges, as I now have to get used to calling it, post-merger, teaching on three separate modules, while keeping my other courses and consultancy running, so I badly need to give myself some structure to keep this site (and newsletter) running.

So, here's what I've been planning and plotting while I've been away, after a trial run earlier in the summer… (If you don't care about all this, scroll down a wee bit to find today's links. No more such self-indulgence for a few months, promise.)

My baseline OM&HB for Autumn 2024

Here's what I'm planning between now and (whisper it) Christmas…

“Think” pieces

I'm aiming to do two longer pieces a week: one for paid subscribers, one for free subscribers. It's the longer pieces that tend to attract the most new subscribers - so getting the free one out there is critical. But persuading people to upgrade to a paid subscription without keeping something juicy back for the subscribers is going to be hard. So, for the time being, one free, one paid. And I'll review it at the year's end, based on the impact on subscriptions.

The paid pieces will be emailed out to paying subscribers, the free ones will be linked from the daily newsletter. Speaking of which…

Three or four links of interest, daily during the working week. My job is to generally keep you abreast of developments in audience work and journalism that will have long-term impact. I'm more interested in being useful than newsy. That doesn't mean I won't do news, but it might mean that I link something I've had open in a tab for six weeks alongside something that happened overnight.

This will run in “seasons” — it's an idea common in podcasting, but seen less in newsletters — allowing me to step off the treadmill during the school holidays. My kids are young enough and I'm still self-employed enough that I pick up most of the holiday childcare, and so I need to give myself the wiggle room.

And if I miss the occasional day due to other work - c'est la vie. I'm a one man band, and I need to keep the students at City educated, and my paying clients happy.

Today's links

A year in the indie media trenches

I remember talking to my students nearly a year ago about the new wave of membership-based indie tech titles that were emerging. They included 404 Media and Aftermath, and were generally founded by people exiting the “big” media sites built in the last wave of digital media launches.

A year on, both are still there, and 404 Media has blogged about what they've learnt:

In the last year, we learned that the technical infrastructure exists now for even non-technical journalists to build a sustainable site that can receive money from subscribers. That may sound obvious on the surface, but when you run a site for investigations, and multiple podcast feeds, and send different types of newsletters to different segments of your audience throughout the week, there are several moving parts you and the tools you buy need to link together. If you are a journalist reading this thinking about going out on their own: the tech is there for you to do so with very little know-how needed, and we are happy to talk you through any questions you might have.

(They're using Ghost, the self same system that underlies this site.)

Implement these three rules now

And as for Aftermath, these three rules made me laugh, and then made me think. I've rarely been controversial enough to have hit much of this, but this seems like something we should be thinking about when people will form social media mobs because you wrote something that is true — but which they don't like…

The barren post-CrowdTangle landscape

I had a strange relationship with CrowdTangle, the Meta-owned vitality tracking tool. Every single audience person I talked to raved about it, and tried to get our students access to it. And every single time, as soon as “University” was mentioned, CrowdTangle cut the conversation. It seemed Meta didn't want anyone associated with academics tracking what was happening across its platforms.

Well, now nobody can do that: Meta has killed CrowdTangle, and the potential replacements aren't great…

I say, old chap, is that AI in my SERP?

Google's much-feared AI Overviews in search results have oozed outside their testing ground in the US into other countries — including the UK. I spent a while trying to get an AI Overview to trigger on my searches this morning, and ver few queries actually threw one up.

But this needs careful watching.

Thanks for reading, folks. See you tomorrow.

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Adam Tinworth Twitter

Adam is a lecturer, trainer and writer. He's been a blogger for over 20 years, and a journalist for more than 30. He lectures on audience strategy and engagement at City, University of London.

Seasonal publishing