Subscribe now

Back in the early days of digital media, journalist and scholar Philip Meyer sounded like a prophet of doom with his book “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Digital Age.”

Craigslist’s online ads had begun ravaging newspapers’ most profitable revenue source, the classifieds, in 2004, the year Meyer’s book was published. That was also the year that Google went public with a valuation of $27 billion. Its search engine had just begun its surprising, astronomical revenue growth, on its way to destroying the business model of newspapers. That same year Facebook was launched.

This newsletter will touch on:

• Philip Meyer’s predictions for journalism

• How media mogul Rupert Murdoch responded

• Some current examples

• Final thought: where we are now

‘Print will die in April 2040’

Meyer, who famously advocated “precision journalism,” used trending data in his book to predict that print newspapers would be gone by April 2040. Not just 2040, but April 2040.

None other than media mogul Rupert Murdoch referenced Meyer’s book in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper editors. He also quoted a study by the Carnegie Corporation that said the future course of news “is being altered by technology-savvy young people no longer wedded to traditional news outlets or even accessing news in traditional ways.”

Murdoch said the study showed that “consumers between the ages of 18-34 are increasingly using the web as their medium of choice for news consumption. While local TV news remains the most accessed source of news, the Internet, and more specifically, Internet portals, are quickly becoming the favored destination for news among young consumers.”

These young consumers, Murdoch said, “want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.” He went on: “They want news that speaks to them personally, that affects their lives. They don’t just want to know how events in the Mideast will affect the presidential election; they want to know what it will mean at the gas-pump.” (This was two years after President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, triggering a steady rise in gasoline prices. — JB)

Flash forward to 2026

Two decades later, Meyer’s prediction looks like it was too optimistic. The death of print is occurring at a much faster pace. Here are some recent examples.

• The 157-year-old Atlanta Journal-Constitution printed its final physical edition on December 31, 2025. The paper officially transitioned to an all-digital format. This shift made Atlanta the largest metropolitan area in the United States without a printed daily newspaper.

• Newspaper analyst Dan Kennedy just reported that Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory is shaking up the newsroom to modernize its website, “our most widely read platform.” Kennedy quotes a McGrory memo in which the editor says the Globe is too print-centric. “This is not to suggest that print isn’t important. It is, but there are exactly no prospects for increasing our print readership.”

• Alabama Media Group completely eliminated print production for all of its major historic daily titles—including the Birmingham News, Mobile Press-Register, and The Huntsville Times—shifting entirely to a unified digital brand, AL.com. This move also resulted in the closure of the group's central printing facility.

• Meanwhile my hometown newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer (cleveland.com), which I delivered as a teenager, has home delivery only three days a week. It is one of several Advance Publications (Newhouse) newspapers that have shifted away from daily print schedules over the years.

• Print cutbacks at other Newhouse publications: The company announced it would cease daily print publication of the Newark Star-Ledger in 2025, along with sister publications the Times of Trenton and South Jersey Times, due to rising costs, decreasing circulation and reduced demand for print.^[21] Meanwhile, another Newhouse paper, the Oregonian, Oregon’s largest and oldest continuously published newspaper, reduced its print editions to four days a week.

Final thought

Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism hosts the Local News Initiative, which tracks the local news landscape across the country. In the 20 years that it has been accumulating data, “Almost 40% of all local U.S. newspapers have vanished, leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to a reliable source of local news.”

The implications go far beyond the financial situation of an industry that the general public holds in low esteem. The cutbacks mean fewer reporters are on the ground, out in their communities, monitoring the activities of the powerful.

Fewer news organizations are watching the institutions and people who control the money and power. When that happens, it’s much harder for ordinary citizens to find out what’s really going on. When no one is watching how the money is spent, authorities get careless. Sometimes they use the public’s money to benefit themselves, not the people they are supposed to be serving.

Opportunities in niches

The good news is that small, independent news organizations — often nonprofits — are seizing the opportunity of declining local news coverage to fill the gap. In my hometown of Cleveland, there are a number of new digital media. One of them, Signal Cleveland, just published a piece on “a nonprofit you’ve never heard of that awards public money to businesses.” Reporter Nick Castele followed the money and found that this supposedly public body didn’t announce when and its meetings would be held, did not announce an agenda, and did not publish other information of public interest.

That will surely change, now that the Cleveland Citywide Development Corp. board members know someone’s watching. Thanks for reading Your News Biz! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Leave a comment

Also: From Manchester to Main St., why local news media are surviving and thriving

New Yorker cartoon by Christopher Weyant

Subscribe now

Open door, closed mind

A big mistake I made as a newspaper publisher was my open-door policy. The mistake wasn’t the open door. It was the closed mind.

I prided myself on having an open door. But when any of the 30 employees came through the door — to ask about a company policy, to make a suggestion, to request we spend money on something — I often had a ready answer: We’ve tried that, and it didn’t work; it’s not in the budget; we don’t have the technology; or some other comment that shut down the conversation.

I often didn’t try to find out what was bothering them or what they thought. I should have been more curious and exercised more humility.

This post will focus on the power of listening:

• In coaching employees

• In mentoring small business people

• In news organizations

Ask questions, listen, suspend judgment

We live and learn. A few years later I was working with an executive coach who advised me to respond to employee comments with, “Tell me more about that.” And then maybe, “What could you do about that?” Other favorite questions were, “What’s the solution look like, what’s in the way, and what’s it going to take.”

The coaching discipline I learned resembles the techniques used in all kinds of counseling or mentoring. One technique is to show the client that they’re being heard: “So you’re saying the problem is X, have I got that right? And you feel that this other person is being disrespectful to you, is that right?”

(The technique also works in most personal relationships. When my wife met my coach, she thanked him for making me a better listener.)

In journalism and business

When I began working as a mentor of small business people, we were trained to talk less and listen more.

This advice was especially important for our mentors, many of whom had decades of high-level executive experience. Often we were assigned to coach people who simply had an idea for a business or were in early stages of development.

Our job was to help them move beyond this starting point and get their business going.

At Cleveland Business Mentors, we’re using a discipline called LISTEN

• L — Listen - let the mentee speak; you should speak no more than 40% of the time

• I — Inspire -Ask open-ended questions that make the mentee think (not yes or no questions)

• S — Share - if you share your experiences, make sure it’s relevant to the mentee, and keep it short

• T — Trust - guarantee confidentiality; it creates a safe space for frank conversation

• E — Establish - set expectations of coaching sessions; end with a mentee action plan

• N — Navigate - Know your limitations; bring in other experts to help the mentee

Many other counseling or coaching disciplines suggest similar methodologies. The goal is not to give the mentee a solution to their problem. It’s to help them find their own way to a solution, making the most of their own talents. It’s to be a guide.

Listening posts

In the journalism world, a great model for building trusted relationships is the Listening Post Collective, founded in 2013 in New Orleans by my friend and journalism colleague Jesse Hardman.

Jesse has worked in public radio, done video reporting for Time magazine, and freelanced for NPR, Al Jazeera America, the Atlantic, and other outlets.

His LinkedIn profile includes his work as a journalism trainer and community media developer on projects in Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Peru, Chile, Guatemala, Belize, and Pakistan, among other countries.

He’s also been a professor at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism and Columbia University in New York.

Hardman launched his first Listening Post by meeting with people in New Orleans’ mainly Black neighborhoods, asking them how they got information. He listened on front porches, at barbecues, at churches, in grocery stores, in barbershops, at street fairs — anywhere people gathered. That included asking how they shared information on their smartphones.

Building trust where it matters most

What emerged from those conversations was a multi-platform experiment in community media. Hardman sent news updates via text, hosted conversations in person, and made use of public spaces to disseminate verified information.

Fast forward a decade later and the Listening Post had developed a Playbook (graphic below) to help local collaborators “turn insight into strategy and strategy into sustainability.” Internews' 2023 impact report said LPC had provided $1 million to 85 people and organizations. In all, 29 community-driven media projects were using its Listening Post Civic Media Playbook (graphic below).

Jesse Hardman and I first met in Latin America nearly 20 years ago when we were both working as Knight Fellows training journalists and students — he in Peru, I in Bolivia. We became friends and have stayed in touch off and on over the years.

So it is with mixed emotions that I congratulate Jesse on the next step in his career. He has been accepted in the next class of John S. Knight Journalism Fellows at Stanford University. I am sure that he and his classmates will develop projects that help build trust in media.

Final thought

I’ve always said that bad journalism is a fantastically successful business. Just feed people’s appetites for entertaining, salacious, sensational, scandalous, or morbid news, and you can always find a ready audience. I admit it to reading and enjoying bad journalism — a guilty pleasure. Bad journalism will always attract lots of attention and advertisers.

Good journalism, on the other hand, takes time and money. If you want to get below the surface of what’s happening in the world, you have to hire skilled researchers and investigators and give them the time to find out what’s really going on. You have to follow the money and influence to see whether the powers that be are serving the public interest or using their power to enrich themselves at our expense.

So I am a paid subscriber, partner, friend, or financial supporter of a number of publications that practice the best public service journalism. In economic terms, journalism is a “public good” like public safety, public health, public education, and public transportation, among others.

In other words, journalism or public information — an essential pillar of a functioning democracy — cannot be provided by the market alone. If we want high quality trustworthy journalism, we need to support it.

Leave a comment

New Yorker cartoon by Kim Warp

The complete Nieman Reports conversation is here. What follows are some excerpts:

Joy Mayer, the founder and director of Trusting News, has spent a decade studying how audiences relate to journalism — including how their trust is earned and lost. A former professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, Mayer now helps newsrooms bridge gaps and build stronger connections with the communities they aim to serve.

Mayer spoke to the current class of Nieman Fellows about best practices for gaining trust, including taking care over word choices and exhibiting transparency in the news-gathering process.

Q — What are the biggest barriers to newsrooms earning trust?

A — Fundamentally, what we’re trying to get newsrooms to do is to think about the obstacles to trust. What is preventing people from accessing what you’re doing, from understanding what you’re doing, and from finding what you’re doing credible?

The answers are not that complicated. Part of it is transparency — what do people not understand about what you do? And how are you explaining everything from your ethics, your funding, your corrections, how you decide what to cover, how you pick sources, and how you treat sources?

Then there’s the engagement piece, which is being in continual contact with the people you aim to serve, and understanding what you’re getting wrong — which most newsrooms do not prioritize in a way that I consider meaningful.

At the core of this is intellectual humility — a curiosity about who you’re not serving, who feels seen and understood by your journalism, and who feels neglected or misrepresented by your journalism, and what you’re willing to do to change that. I see intellectual engagement with those ideas much more than I see an institutional commitment to change based on those ideas.

+++

Q —You’ve said that online creators and influencers are reshaping what trust looks like. How so?

A —I feel like people spend their trust in a lot of different ways. A woman I know told me, “I trust everything Rachel Maddow says. I’m not going to pay attention to the rest of it.” People say the same thing about Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson.

[People think,] “I don’t want to have to look for information. I want it to find me.” Wherever people are spending their time, if there’s somebody who feels like a trusted friend saying, “I’ve got you, don’t worry about it. Here are really the five things you need to know about [X],” or “Let me just give you the basics” – in some ways, I think that can be really responsible and effective and mission-driven.

I think it’s possible to be a very well-informed news consumer mostly through creators. It all depends on who’s in your feed, right? I’m tired of the industry’s response of being defensive, saying, “Oh, if it’s on TikTok, it can’t be credible.” Of course, it depends on who you follow on TikTok. That’s what they said about blogs back in the day: “That’s not journalism. It’s a blog.”

Again, the complete Nieman Reports conversation is here.

Mayer’s messages that I’m taking with me on vacation are that we, as journalists, need to be more curious — ask more questions rather than thinking we have the answers — and we need to show more humility. Over and over again, news organizations based in major media centers have missed covering what matters to ordinary Americans.

Leave a comment

Below: New Yorker cartoon by Michael Maslin

Who do you trust? Standing out in a flooded inbox

If it feels like every channel you rely on — your inbox, your feed, your texts — is getting noisier and less trustworthy, you’re not imagining it.

This week’s roundup is really about one question: as AI-generated content, automated pitches, and algorithm-driven feeds multiply, where do people go to find news and information they can trust? And what does that mean for those of us running small, independent operations?

Subscribe now

In this post, you’ll hear about:

• NewsGuard’s AI tool steers you to 12,000 reliable news sources

• CEO of Associated Press touts credibility, independence

• Spain’s leading daily takes aim at 60 million Spanish speakers in U.S.

• Watchdog journalism outlet in Ohio adds CEO, more cities

• A final thought on the value of trust

NewsGuard’s bet: People pay for fact-based sources

Steven Brill is co-founder of NewsGuard, the publisher-rating and fact-checking service, and they have a new product, NewsGuard AI. It aims to help publishers who produce trustworthy news by sharing subscription revenue with them 50-50.

Brill described the service in an interview with Emily McPhee of the UK’s Press Gazette.

Brill said a NewsGuard AI subscriber is protected from the two things that make AI news tools untrustworthy: hallucination and uncredited scraping. NewsGuard only pulls from the 12,000 sources it has vetted and cross-checks against a database of roughly 64,000 claims already proven false so it doesn’t repeat them. (More detail here on how the service works.)

He told the Press Gazette that people who already pay for quality content — such as a national or local paper subscription — are exactly the people who’ll pay for a tool that only draws from reliable sources. It’s a bet that trust is a product people will pay for, not just a nice-to-have.

Why this matters right now. NewsGuard’s team audited well known large language models (LLMs) and found that roughly a third of the time, when asked about claims already proven false, the models repeated them anyway — something Brill attributes in part to coordinated disinformation campaigns, including Russian-linked ones, that have flooded the training data those models draw from.

The AP’s CEO: High standards are the product

Next up, a McKinsey interview with Daisy Veerasingham, the Associated Press’s CEO: How a 180-year-old news institution prepares for its next reinvention.

Veerasingham believes that news consumers trust AP because it refuses to customize the news. She told McKinsey’s Raju Narisetti that the very same baseline reporting reaches outlets despite their varied politics and priorities — none of them gets a different version. That consistency is what lets AP claim to be fact-based across such a fragmented media landscape, she said.

Veerasingham also touched on how much the business itself has changed even as AP standards haven’t. Newspapers used to be AP’s core customer base; now they make up under 10 percent of revenue, with the other 90 percent coming from data licensing, direct-to-consumer products, and other lines the cooperative didn’t have a generation ago.

AP journalism reaches roughly 4 billion people a day, from 200 locations in 90 countries.

McKinsey’s Narisetti concluded that there’s a lesson for outlets far smaller than AP: the brand isn’t the size of your newsroom; it’s whether your standards are visible and unchanging.

(A big thank you and to my friend Ismael Nafría, publisher of the newsletter Tendenci@s, for alerting me to this profile. — JB)

+++

Related: The AP in the U.S. has had a running battle with White House after they refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by the name preferred by President Trump — the Gulf of America.

El País targets the Spanish-language market in the U.S.

El País, Spain’s leading daily, has named María Sánchez Diéz to lead its U.S. edition. She joins after five years at the New York Times as senior editor for digital narratives. She worked across newsrooms in New York, Washington, San Francisco, London, and Seoul. She’s also a Fulbright scholar and Tow-Knight Center fellow at CUNY.

El País says the move is aimed at the more than 60 million Spanish speakers in the U.S. They are building on editions the paper already runs in Mexico, Colombia, and Chile, alongside El País in English. It’s a reminder that the “local news crisis” in the U.S. doesn’t look the same in every language.

“The appointment of María Sánchez Díez is an investment in the present and the future,” said El País editor Jan Martínez Ahrens. “Her knowledge and experience,” he said, “will strengthen a high-quality team.” The paper launched its U.S. edition two years ago.

Ohio news network hires CEO

Signal Ohio, a network of nonprofit newsrooms, has named longtime nonprofit executive Susan Brownknight as CEO. She joins a business team that includes Michelle Everhart Sullivan, chief audience officer, and Michael DeAloia, Northeast Ohio general manager. Signal announced the appointment on its website.

A native of Cincinnati, Brownknight spent 30-plus years leading local, state, and national nonprofits, most recently LADD, one of Ohio’s largest organizations supporting adults with developmental disabilities, according to the release.

“Susan has spent her career building trusted institutions that improve people’s lives,” said Doug Ulman, board chair of Signal Ohio. “She understands how to lead organizations through growth, build lasting partnerships and create sustainable support for mission-driven work.”

Brownknight joins Signal Ohio as it looks to expand. Since launching in 2022, the organization has established newsrooms in Akron, Cleveland and the Statehouse, built a staff of more than 30 journalists and business professionals, and raised more than $15 million to support independent, nonprofit local journalism. They plan to continue expanding with coverage in Cincinnati.

When I interviewed Signal leaders last March, they reported having 40,000 free subscribers. At the time 75 percent of their revenue was coming from philanthropy and 25 percent from individual donors, including 2,400 small donors (I’m one of them). The long-term goal is to diversify revenue, adding in sponsorships and advertising while lowering the reliance on philanthropy. More in the story below.

Quick hits:

Newsrooms are leaning into Reddit. The Dallas Morning News and other outlets are using Reddit Pro for Publishers, a tool launched in March 2025 that tracks where a newsroom’s links are being shared, generates an RSS feed for easier distribution, and recommends where to share next.

Northwestern University’s Medill School Local News Initiative has a detailed report. Among the findings:

Since 2021, link traffic has declined sharply on other social media platforms, particularly Facebook and X (formerly Twitter). Part of Medill’s 2025 State of Local News Report tracked the web traffic for the 100 largest newspapers and found that on average, their monthly page views have dropped about 45% over the last four years. Only 11 of the 100 saw growth over that period.

“It was really just about providing tools to be more successful on the platform, and when they’re more successful on Reddit, we all win,” said Gabriel Sands, the news and lifestyle partnerships lead on Reddit’s media, business development team. “Users really like engaging with news content on the platform.”

The PR-spam problem is getting worse, and weirder. Simon Owens’s newsletter dug into a wave of AI-generated fake PR reps flooding journalists’ inboxes with pitches and follow-ups — complete with machine-generated headshots and fabricated firm names, none of which have any presence outside the reporter’s own inbox. It’s a good prompt to revisit your own filters: if a “fellow journalist” or “outreach specialist” has zero verifiable footprint, spam is the right call. Read more: Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter.

Final thought: The common thread

Every item here is really the same story from a different angle: trust is becoming the actual product, not a byproduct of good journalism.

NewsGuard is trying to steer news consumers to 12,000 sources it has vetted and boost their revenue with a shared subscription model.

The Associated Press is reminding its worldwide clients that its high standards are a promise of a fact-based product.

El País is aiming at a Spanish-speaking community of 60 million in the U.S. It has prioritized coverage focused on the needs of the growing Hispanic population, combining national reporting with a local approach.

Signal Ohio is expanding its public service reporting to cities that have seen local news coverage from traditional print and broadcast outlets shrink drastically.

Reddit is capitalizing on the fact that more news outlets are finding that news consumers who want reliable content are discovering their links on the platform.

Leave a comment

New Yorker cartoon by Lee Lorenz

“Try again, boys. This has visibility and credibility, but it still lacks deniability.”

The goal of any dictator, autocrat, or tyrant — whatever you want to call them — is that there’s only one version of what’s occurring in the world, only one story, only one law.

It’s a great system and it works perfectly if you’re the dictator or a member of their gang. Anyone who disagrees is just an obstacle. They have to be removed or silenced.

In this newsletter, we’ll look at:

• Impact of one-party rule in China

• How Ohio and Washington compare

• Suppression of free speech and a free press worldwide

• Reasons for optimism: we stand together

• Weekly cartoon: burn a book

Subscribe now

What one-party rule looks like

For those of us who live in a democracy, where everyone is supposed to have a voice, it’s hard to get big projects done. So many well meaning regulatory agencies have to give permission. And then if one homeowner stands in the path of a new highway or high-speed rail line, they can hold it up for years — possibly forever.

Contrast that with China, where I worked for two years. In their one-party government, they simply silence or remove the opposition. The government displaced 1.4 million people to build the Three Gorges Dam, then told those people they would have to move again. More land was needed.

Neighborhoods demolished

When preparing for the 2008 Olympics, the government evicted 15,000 residents and ordered the demolition of thousands of traditional hutong homes in Beijing. They were in the path of new highways and subway lines designed to accommodate millions of visitors to the Games. The projects moved at lightning speed.

In our neighborhood of Beijing, near Tsinghua University, the hutongs were no threat to the big projects. They were spared.

Compare that to Ohio. Authoritarians might say, “Look how efficient things are when you don’t have to deal with rabble rousers and dissenters.” In a democracy, things can move slowly.

The Ohio High Speed Rail Commission and its successor agencies have spent almost 40 years studying a line linking Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, and Cincinnati. I know because I reported on this back in 1990 for the Columbus Dispatch. Now, after decades of commissioning feasibility studies, Ohio officials are still just talking about it.

Below: A current map showing how A Cleveland-Columbus-Dayton-Cincinnati rail line would connect to other regional lines. (Credit: Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission)

Washington rules

Toward one songbook. In Washington, the White House choir are all singing from the same songbook. Anyone who tries to sing counterpoint may be bullied into silence. The President just threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of TV networks that decided not to air his primetime address. He took to the national airwaves to claim once again, without proof, that the 2020 election was stolen amid widespread voter fraud [his bogus claims debunked here by NewsGuard].

(Related result of intimidation: Paramount agrees to pay $16 million in settlement with Trump over 60 Minutes interview.)

Self-censorship. What worries me is that the economic impact of a revoked license might be enough to have a reporter, producer, or news director pull a punch rather than put the network at risk. And with an activist FCC commissioner like Trump-appointee Brendan Carr, the threat has to be taken seriously.

Vulnerable targets clam up

Dick Tofel, former president of ProPublica, said in his newsletter that the recent subpoenas of the Trump administration to reporters for the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times are an “abuse of power.”

He went on: “If such an effort were being directed against more vulnerable targets, our concern should be much greater. If the government was run by more serious people in a more serious way, they would be threatening to our freedoms as citizens.

“As it is, it may be that some sources, especially of lower rank, aware of other failings of government, are being deterred from telling the public things it needs to know, which is a loss for us all.”

In other words, threats and intimidation can prevent “more vulnerable targets” from raising questions, revealing corruption, and holding the powerful to account.

A worldwide trend

The same instinct that removes obstacles from infrastructure projects can also remove dissenting voices from the press— critics, watchdogs, and inconvenient facts.

Financial pain. I’ve seen how aggressive reporting of potential corruption has led governments in Europe and Latin America to punish critical media by withdrawing advertising and urging their allies to do the same. In many countries the government is the biggest media buyer. Media that promote the government line are rewarded with rich contracts.

Legal pain. Defending a libel lawsuit by a deep-pocketed corporation or government can exhaust the resources of a news organization. Some publishers decide to avoid sensitive stories or kill investigations rather than risk legal action — self-censorship.

Threats, intimidation, and violence. More than half of the 3,000+ digital media from 68 countries in SembraMedia’s Project Oasis Report have been subjected to online harassment, threats, and physical violence because of their journalism.

Reasons for optimism: we stand together

So, it takes courage to do public service journalism in most of the world. As Benjamin Franklin told the signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, “"We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Journalists around the world continue to do courageous work in spite of all the threats mentioned above. At risk to their personal safety, they continue to offer a check on the absolute power of authoritarians and dictators.

And when they do this, they win the loyalty and financial support of their grateful readers. Here are some examples:

Media lessons from Ukraine: People pay for trustworthy news. The funding model of the Kyiv Independent shows dramatically how a media organization can survive and produce valuable news and information under extremely trying conditions — power outages, missile and drone strikes, and battlefield coverage.

Investigative journalists protect you from the powerful. The Global Investigative Journalism Network, the Organized Crime and Corruption Project, the International Fact-Checking Network, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists have all pooled the collective efforts of their members to keep citizens informed, in spite of government efforts to shut them up.

This media startup helps us sort through propaganda and misinformation. NewsGuard uses a team of journalists to vet thousands of news websites on a 100-point scale. They don’t claim to be the unique possessor of “The Truth”. They attempt to give a fair and honest evaluation of how credible, reliable, and trustworthy various news sources are.

It’s free, but 120,000 pay to read Spain’s leading independent news startup. elDiario.es is not connected to any political party or larger commercial enterprise in order to maintain its editorial independence. Reader support helps them fight off lawsuits designed to intimidate and silence them.

What do you think? I read and respond to every comment. Please leave one below.

Leave a comment

New Yorker cartoon by Zachary Kanin

Are books being banned (or burned) in your community? Please leave a comment below.

Leave a comment

‘My web traffic has gone away’

As a mentor to small business people, I have been hearing complaints that their social media, email, and SEO strategies have stopped working. What should they do?

This is a tough one. AI chatbots have changed all the rules. When people search now to find the best local plumber or dentist or pizza joint, the chatbots provide “overviews” that often don’t lead to the websites of the local providers.

In addition, AI has made it easy for trolls and bad actors to automate their misleading or fraudulent sales pitches. So we are all flooded with messages from people we’ve never heard of who promise us the world.

Amid this flood of junk, how do we find information we can trust?

Leave a comment

Get real

What I’ve been telling my clients is this: Get real: back to basics with people, not bots. In essence, amid an avalanche of digital junk, businesses of all kinds are rediscovering the power of direct relationships with known people and organizations — through email, events, and trustworthy news and information.

In other words, stop trying to pull prospects in from outside sales funnels like Facebook, LinkedIn, or search, mainly Google. Start from within and work out. Build on the relationships and organizations of those you know and who know you.

Media ‘foragers’

I was glad to see that an internationally known media researcher, Patrick Boehler, has been exploring solutions to this very problem and came to similar conclusions. He studies how people search for — forage for — information.

Information foraging theory “views humans as ‘informavores’ who seek the maximum amount of information for the least effort,” Boehler writes. Internet users will abandon an information source (called a “patch”) when the value of what they’re getting drops below what is available elsewhere. They will move to a new source if it is not too difficult — technically, there is a low “travel cost”.

He explains: “The chatbot is a patch with almost no travel cost and almost no friction, which by the logic of the marginal value theorem is the kind of patch that drains all the others.”

Chatbots disrupt a publication’s traditional sales funnel.

How we compete

Faced with the power of the tech giants, what can news publishers do to hold onto their audiences? Boehler says they have two strengths:

• Relationships: This holds onto “foragers” through a distinct, trusted voice and a reliable cadence (like a weekly briefing).

• Exclusivity: The publisher’s unique content holds onto information “hunters” who visited a website searching for an answer to a specific question. Some of these hunters can be converted into longer term relationships if they find the information trustworthy enough or exclusive enough that they decide to come back.

As for how to build on relationships while competing against chatbots, he says, “Discovery now relies on person-to-person distribution—forwarded links and direct recommendations. You earn your place in this chain by creating work that people are genuinely glad to pass along to others. This targeted attention builds the trust and influence required to survive, whereas raw reach no longer suffices.” (Emphasis mine — JB)

It’s a question of drawing attention that someone gives to you, not necessarily drawing a big crowd. “That is the only kind [of attention] that turns into trust, and eventually into influence and the money to keep going. Reach on its own no longer does either.”

Final thought: Relationships don’t scale

Every marketing strategy eventually comes down to one question: Why should someone trust you?

AI can summarize information. It can imitate expertise. It can flood inboxes and social feeds with convincing noise. But it cannot replace the confidence that comes from a relationship built over months or years. That’s why newsletters, personal recommendations, local events, and communities are becoming more valuable, not less.

My advice to independent publishers and small businesses is simple: stop measuring success by how many strangers you can attract. Measure it by how many people know your name, trust your judgment, and recommend you to someone else.

Relationships don’t scale—and that’s exactly what makes them valuable. Build them one at a time, protect them carefully, and they’ll become your most durable competitive advantage in the AI era.

+++++

I have to thank my friend and colleague Janine Warner of SembraMedia.org for introducing me to Boehler’s work.

Boehler’s media lab has created a free five-minute gut-check questionnaire for any business to test whether their digital media strategy is working.

Since I am involved in the launch of a free mentoring service, ClevelandBusinessMentors.org, I answered the questionnaire and received a free analysis that I am using to make sure we stay on the right track.

Leave a comment

New Yorker cartoon by Charles Barsotti

Once a year I get an email from Ignacio Escolar, who is president and editorial director of elDiario.es, which is the second-most read digital news outlet in Spain, just behind the prestigious El Pais.

Its slow, steady growth over the past 14 years is remarkable, and Escolar makes clear that the founding principles drive their success: “I am certain that independent journalism cannot exist without economic independence.” This is why elDiario.es has from the beginning made it a priority that much of its revenue come from individual reader-donors, whom they call “socios” or partners. (The full message from Escolar, in Spanish, is here.)

Subscribe now

Zero debt

They finished 2025 with revenues of $20 million, a profit after taxes of $1.7 million, and zero debt. “This is one of the keys of our independence,” Escolar wrote in a report to partners on July 11. “We don’t want to owe anything to anybody except our community of readers.” (All figures are based on 1.14 dollars to the euro.)

In the graphic below, you can see the growth in the number of people who pay to support elDiario’s high-quality, trustworthy journalism. It’s a free publication, but 121,000 people pay an average of $83 a year to support it. “Socios” or partners get certain benefits, such as an ad-free reading experience, invitations to events, and a quarterly print publication, among others.

But 5,800 partners pay “whatever they can,” or nothing at all, while another 17,000 willingly pay more than the standard subscription price ($91) to support this extra distribution.

The headline reads, “Evolution of the number of partners of elDiario.es,” and it tracks the growth from its launch in 2012. (I’ve been a paying partner for eight years).

‘There’s no journalism without journalists’

The company dedicated most of its revenues of nearly $20 million last year to increasing staff by 10 to 150, and increasing overall pay.

Two thirds of the staff — 99 in total — are journalists. The others are in sales, administration, customer service, metrics, design, and events. In addition to the central office staff, elDiario has another 96 employees in their 17 local editions in the autonomous communities (similar to our states) and another seven hyperlocals.

Revenue growth

The graphic below — headline, “Evolution of the revenues of elDiario.es” — shows the breakdown of revenues over 14 years. In the last bar, for 2025, the breakdown was 50% from advertising (yellow), 42% from partners (blue), and the remaining 8% (Other, gray) came from their quarterly print edition and subsidies from various public entities, mostly European.

The price of telling truth to power

elDiario.es is not connected to any political party or larger commercial enterprise in order to maintain its editorial independence. Its investigative reporting often reveals corruption, and this has resulted in some 13 outstanding court cases.

The spending on legal services, trials, and insurance amounted to roughly $250,000 in 2025. “It has doubled in barely two years and is likely to rise again this year,” Escolar wrote. It represents 1.4% of total expenses.

“So far, not one of the cases against elDiario.es’s journalists has resulted in a conviction,” he said. “Even so, it’s exhausting. The worst part isn’t the money: it’s the sleepless nights. When they accuse you of crimes punishable by prison time, it’s not easy to tolerate.”

A history of careful growth

Escolar has avoided the trap of many other media startups by carefully controlling costs and not expanding until revenues justified it.

In 2014, I interviewed him at a journalism conference in Huesca, Spain. Below is the video, with subtitles in English.

At the time, the publication had about one-tenth the revenues of today and 10,000 partners compared to the 121,000 of today.

“It’s easy to hire more journalists and pay them more, Escolar said in the interview. “But it’s much harder to go the other way.” That’s why he’s been careful. That’s part of the reason the publication has survived and thrived.

Final thought:

There are lessons in elDiario’s story over the past 14 years.

Everyone in the news media is looking for the formula to counter the business trends working against them. The organizations that try to serve their communities with trustworthy — as opposed to sensational or subservient — news and information have seen tech platforms and authoritarian governments divert the revenue flows that supported them in the past.

elDiario.es shows there isn’t a formula, but they share common elements of those that survive and thrive:

— There is a scarcity of reliable, credible information in the digital media world. Scarcity creates value. If you provide this scarce resource, people will be willing to pay for it. It gives them social and economic advantages. elDiario.es’s partners demonstrate that.

— Viral growth, with skyrocketing audience and revenue numbers, attracts attention. It also leads to layoffs and closures when times get tough. Slow, steady growth builds value and loyalty over the long haul and allows you to put aside resources to cushion you in times of crisis.

— Producing valuable news and information takes money and time. You have to invest in salaries and benefits to recruit and retain good people. elDiario.es spends most on people and manages to give raises and bonuses across the board.

— You have to commit to telling truth to power in order to win the respect and loyalty of your readers. You have to have the financial resources to fight back when commercial and political interests try to silence you.

Related:

Here’s what high-quality trustworthy journalism looks like

The worldwide movement for trustworthy journalism

Leave a comment

New Yorker cartoon by Tom Cheney

You’re reading the Your News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs and small businesses find viable business models. This is a slightly updated version of a newsletter post that appeared May 14. — JB

Back in February, I started seeing some promotional advertising for a new retelling of Homer’s “The Odyssey.” It’s the story of the Greek warrior-king Odysseus and his 10-year journey home after the Trojan War. This $250 million budget movie opens in theaters on Friday July 17. Its trailer is generating a lot of buzz. I admit to being curious to see the movie in IMAX big-screen format.

A cynic might say that this movie is just a shameless appeal to the younger audience’s appetite for superhero action movies. And to ensure box office appeal, it has two bankable international stars, Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope, the faithful wife who awaits his return.

Another message for creators and publishers is that timeless themes of heroism, kinship, family, loyalty, and treatment of foreigners can attract audiences as long as they are original and creative, not a hackneyed product of an algorithm. “The Odyssey” certainly is timeless. The story has been retold hundreds of times in poetry, novels, movies, and TV series.

This post is in three parts:

• My personal relationship with classical Greek and Latin literature

• A modern, unheroic parody of “The Odyssey” by James Joyce

• A brilliant new translation by Emily Wilson

What it means to be ancient

For my generation of high school students, ancient Latin and Greek literature formed a core part of the educational experience. Our teachers did their best to interest us in the mythical stories of Odysseus and Athena as well as the writings of historical figures like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Many students couldn’t wait to leave that all behind. But I spent most of my college years reading English and French literature, and then got a master’s in English, focusing mainly on the 16th and 17th centuries (Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton).

In that environment, you couldn’t avoid ancient Greek and Roman characters if you tried. They fill the novels and poetry of the 19th century in Britain and America. The classical references popped up regularly in the writings of Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Melville, among many others. (Moby Dick has its share.)

An unheroic modern sequel

I was an English major at the College of Wooster when I decided to do my senior independent study thesis on James Joyce’s groundbreaking novel “Ulysses.” It’s recognized as one of the most influential works of the 20th century. (Ulysses is the Latin name for Odysseus.)

I had taken a seminar called Modern Forms of the Epic, and “Ulysses” was part of it. We discussed how Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, and many others tried reviving the ancient myths to energize their work. They were rebelling against a civilization whose myths were dismantled by science, industrialization, and endless warfare. What was left was a “heap of broken images.” They needed something new.

Joyce responded with his stream-of-consciousness technique to follow the thoughts of three characters on their wanderings during one day in 1904 Dublin. The episodes parallel and parody the epic tale of Odysseus as he tries to make his way home after the Trojan War.

Joyce’s version of the Greek hero is Leopold Bloom, a somewhat hapless ad salesman, a Jew adrift among Catholics. Like Odysseus, he often gets sidetracked on his way home. Bloom’s wife, Molly, betrays her husband, unlike Odysseus’s faithful Penelope. Stephen Dedalus is a penniless intellectual aesthete, meant to stand in for Telemachus, their son, who goes looking for his father.

Banned in the U.S.

The novel’s denouement roughly parallels that of “The Odyssey.” The childless Bloom, whose son died in childbirth, rescues a drunken Stephen from a violent scene, just as Odysseus and his son were reconciled. Bloom then finds his way home to bed and Molly.

In her earthy internal monologue, Molly reflects on the day, her husband, and her lover, among other things. The frank sexual language of this chapter — perhaps the most famous part of the book — has been mined for the last century by scholars of every imaginable academic persuasion: she’s C.G. Jung’s archetypal Earth Mother, or a defiant feminist, or a sexual rebel.

The book was published in Paris in 1922. It was banned at first by U.S. customs censors on the grounds that it might cause American readers to harbor “impure and lustful thoughts.” Fortunately, a U.S. district court judge overturned that ruling on the grounds that the book had literary merit.

Leave a comment

‘The Odyssey’ in modern English

I had heard about Emily Wilson’s new translation of “The Odyssey,” and the news about the new movie version prompted me to break down and grab the book when I saw it in a bookstore. It was time to revisit the epic tale.

Wilson’s introduction lays out the complicated history of the text we have today: it’s based on an oral tradition, and it was first written down about 2,700 years ago.

Her translation is a pleasure to read. It’s in the same poetic form as Shakespeare’s great plays — iambic pentameter with blank verse (no rhyme).

Wilson uses simple English monosyllables to tell the tale. She avoids the trap of many previous translators who tried to capture the majestic rhythm of Homer — dactyllic hexameter, 18 syllables to a line — which is difficult to do in English.

(Joyce’s novel includes a quip about Homer’s heroic meter. Stephen notes that a loudmouth friend’s name is “Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls.”)

Wilson also emphasizes that the ancient Greeks observed the Law of Xenia, a sacred duty to welcome any foreigner as a guest. That could be a message for modern readers.

Final thought and recommendations

If you find the length of Joyce’s novel intimidating, I recommend the abbreviated six-hour audio version narrated by Jim Norton and Marcelle Riordan. It’s available on Libby, the free library app, which includes Molly Bloom’s famous monologue.

The voices and rhythms reminded me of what you would hear in any West Side neighborhood bar in Cleveland 50 years ago. There was a pipeline from County Mayo to Cleveland in the late 19th century, and the habits of speech persist.

Also, you should definitely see the latest swords-and-sandals Hollywood movie if only to compare it with the 2024 film adaptation of the epic — “The Return” featuring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. The long scenes of dialogue might be slow for audiences used to action movies, but I was totally engaged.

Leave a comment

New Yorker cartoon by Harry Bliss

Subscribe now

It’s all about trust

Readers of this newsletter know my concern about declining trust in the information they receive from the airwaves, print, and online media. The message I hear most often from media professionals and my own friends and family is that they don’t know what they can trust.

Navigating this unhealthy media landscape has become much more complicated with the arrival of artificial intelligence chatbots. They can be harnessed to produce falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and online scams at an industrial scale.

But AI can also be our friend.

I’ll attempt to break down the problem of trust into smaller pieces, first by looking at it from a journalism perspective, second from a small business perspective.

The journalism perspective comes from the Reuters Journalism Institute’s Digital News Report for 2026. We’ll look at:

• News consumers’ uses of AI

• Trust level of news consumers using AI

• How AI is hurting publishers and broadcasters’ revenues

Then we will look at AI and small businesses.

• How I’m using AI to help small business clients

• How consumers are using AI

• Consumers’ trust level of AI

• And some recommendations

The Reuters Institute collected data from nearly 100,000 surveys of news consumers in 46 countries plus the territories of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Amy Ross Arguedas provides a thorough analysis of the data here.

She cautions us: “It is important to acknowledge that the data reflect self-reported behavior, which may under- or overestimate what people do in practice, due to limitations in recall and the tendency to give socially desirable responses.”

Who uses AI for news. She writes, “a small but growing share of the public is beginning to use these tools [chatbots like Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini] directly to get news, as chatbots become more embedded in everyday digital life.” The adoption of AI chatbots “continues to be driven by younger people, typically at the forefront of tech adoption, including AI.”

Reasons for using AI. According to the survey, the biggest reason news consumers like AI is that they can ask a followup question for more in-depth information or detailed explanation — 42% responded that way in 45 global markets. Close behind were: AI is faster than other ways of getting news, AI summarizes complicated stories, and “I know I will get an answer to any question I have.”

Detailed responses from 45 global media markets in the graphic below.

Trust in news from AI chatbots among the general population is a very low 20% globally. “However, a different picture emerges when looking at those who use these tools: 44% of AI chatbot users express trust in news from AI chatbots, compared with just 17% of non-users.” It seems “low trust is driven by people who aren’t using the technology.” People who use it have more confidence in how to use it; they know how to overcome its weaknesses.

Put me in the category of those who lean toward trusting AI while being aware of the need to verify its output.

How do you verify AI output

One way is to ask a followup question, such as, “How have other news organizations covered this news event?” If the news you read is being reported by only one source, that can be a red flag for bias or manipulation.

Another approach at verification is to ask, “How did [a news organization you trust] cover this news event?” Be aware, of course, that your trusted news source may simply reinforce your own views. We all have our biases.

AI’s impact on publisher revenues. Publishers are seeing that growth in use of AI chatbots has eaten into their referral traffic. Argueda writes that users are getting “more detailed, personalized answers to their questions within the chatbot environment.” Individual publishers cannot match this with their technology.

Leave a comment

And now, Part 2 of this analysis of AI use.

How AI can help small businesses

I have been a volunteer mentor to small businesses in Cleveland, Ohio, for several years. (Recently I moved my practice to a new nonprofit mentoring organization, Cleveland Business Mentors.) I urge my clients to use AI to help them analyze competitors, get feedback on their marketing and business plans, to formulate sales pitches, and to design marketing materials, among other things.

The question I get most often is, How can I get more customers and generate more revenue? Related to that is, How can I improve my marketing so that I attract more customers?

One answer I’ve been giving clients is that the old promise of the internet, that it would bring you customers from everywhere, is not working.

As we saw above, news consumers are using AI to search for information the way they used to use search engines like Google or platforms like Facebook.

The message for small businesses is that their potential customers are also using AI to find and compare products, services, pricing, and ratings. What kind of answers will those potential customers get when they search for your company?

You can improve your likelihood of being found or mentioned in an AI search by setting up a LinkedIn profile for B2B clients, establishing a Google Business Profile, marketing the right way with email, posting to YouTube, and adjusting your Facebook profile to attract B2C clients. Having a strong presence on these channels improves your “authority” in AI searches.

At the following link, you’ll find more information about how to build the base for increasing your visibility and authority in AI searches: Five digital marketing tips for small businesses.

It touches on how to take advantage of:

• LinkedIn for B2B and B2C

• Google Business Profile

• Email for marketing

• YouTube videos

• Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok

AI overviews

When internet users type in a question, very often they are routed to an AI response that does not include links to websites. AI simply answers the question in an “AI overview.” The result has been that many businesses have seen their page views plummet. The old sales funnel isn’t working.

Completing a Google Business Profile improves the likelihood that a link to your business will appear in AI results. Most small businesses rely on developing clients who live within 15 miles of their location. This is especially true for retail products and services like supermarkets, restaurants, hairdressers, and barbers, among others. (See also: Get real: back to basics with people, not bots.)

LinkedIn can help you connect with businesses in your community and beyond. B2B marketers rank it ahead of Facebook and Twitter (X) for generating leads. LinkedIn attracts an audience of professionals focused on career and brand growth.

Also, when consumers look for trustworthy businesses, they often consult LinkedIn to see if a business has a local presence and connections with local organizations.

Don’t give up on email

Your name and your company’s name can make email marketing more effective for you. Your name in the subject line, along with your location — e.g. Reliable Home Repair, Northeast Ohio’s trusted source — can send a signal that lets people feel comfortable clicking to read more.

Why do you immediately delete most of the email you receive? Probably because you don’t know the sender, or they’re trying to sell you something, or they’re trying to lure you into clicking on something.

Trust is in short supply, and trustworthy relationships – be they family, social, religious, or business – are also in short supply. Email newsletters and email marketing can work for you because your name, or your company name, opens doors. People will let you in.

YouTube for purchasing decisions. People watch videos. You can use that focused interest to help grow your business with YouTube. Several sources estimate that about 60% of online shoppers use video to make purchasing decisions. Here are some tips for starting a YouTube account.

Your phone might be all the camera that you need. Make some short videos of your clients talking about you and your business. It’s free. And I believe your profile there generates trust. With practice you’ll get better at producing a 20- or 30-second short video.

Another popular kind of video is a 3- to 5-minute tour of your business, where viewers meet the employees, who then give demos or describe how they serve clients. YouTube can maximize your business impact.

Finally, posting those videos to Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to can spread the word about your business.

Leave a comment

New Yorker cartoon by Barbara Smaller

The 2026 Digital News Report of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism helps us understand the crazy year we just went through. And it offers some possible guidance for how publishers and broadcasters can satisfy the information needs of their audiences around the world.

This is the 15th edition, and the coverage has grown to 48 media markets (46 countries, two territories). Over the years, the report has adjusted to changes in audience behavior and attitudes. Among recurring issues are the business of media, censorship, information consumption, trust in media, and news avoidance, among many others.

Key findings of the report are here. (Also in Spanish, prepared by my former colleagues at the University of Navarra in Spain.)

Here are some of the findings that caught my attention:

• Trust in news has fallen in 29 of 48 markets this year, resulting in a drop overall to the lowest level, 37%, recorded in this report since 2015.

• For the first time, a majority of people now watch online news video in all 48 markets: 77% of people globally consume online news video each week.

• Around a quarter (27%) of respondents globally get some news from news-focused individual creators or influencers, and almost half (46%) get some news from creators of any type.

• The percentage of people paying for access to online news in the basket of 20 countries tracked is unchanged at 17%. News publishers are competing with many other media subscriptions — movies, series.

• The use of AI chatbots for news is growing quickly but not as quickly as AI use for other purposes: 10% of people use AI chatbots for news, up from 7% last year. Some users ask, What’s new in my neighborhood, town, or country today?

Leave a comment

The news media under attack

“In the United States, only a quarter (25%) of people now say they trust the news most of the time,” the report found. It’s a global tendency. “Some of this worldwide drop in trust reflects wider anxieties beyond the news industry – trust in institutions and leaders is widely declining, and journalism is also often under direct attack from high-profile politicians. Despite these pressures, trust in the most widely used individual news brands is holding up better than trust in news overall.”

TV is giving way to online video. “[I]n 45 markets, more people now watch online news video than watch broadcast TV news – Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands are the only three countries where TV news leads or is on a par with watching news online.”

Influencers are more fun. “Respondents say creators are more entertaining, easier to understand, and more relatable than traditional news outlets. On average, people think creators are less trustworthy and less impartial compared to other attributes such as authenticity and relatability.” So beware.

A financial opportunity. “Significant numbers of people are supporting non-traditional news outlets financially,” the survey found. “People mainly pay for news for the direct benefits they get from the content they want to access (81% say this is at least part of the reason for paying). But almost half (46%) of respondents who pay for news also express values-based motivations for paying (such as supporting journalism because of its importance to society) and some news organisations are capitalising on this.” (I’ve highlighted two examples in my own newsletter, in Spain and Ukraine.)

Some telling graphics

Journalists who cover the public sphere or civil society spend much of their time holding the powerful to account. That means they often reveal corruption or other bad behavior. And those in broadcast news like striking images: natural disasters, explosions, forest fires, severe weather. At times it seems that all the news is bad. Is it any wonder that people avoid the news? It’s a global tendency, as shown in the graphic below.

This year’s survey did not ask why they avoid the news, here are the reasons they gave in 2022, the year when COVID-19 was raging.

Newspapers, radio and TV lose their audiences

This is another graphic that floored me. In the chart below, the percentage of media consumers getting their news from social media increased in the U.S. over the past 13 years to 56% from 27%, while TV, newspapers, radio, and news websites all saw big declines.

Paradoxically, people say they trust social media less than the other sources, but they use it more.

Richard Fletcher, director of research for the Institute explored some of the reasons in this report.

As a career print journalist, I took particular interest in the line above that shows newspaper use has fallen from 41% in 2013 to a mere 6% today. But why should I be surpised? In that period, I traveled frequently between Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. I subscribed to digital versions of favorite publications. I don’t subscribe to any in print.

Newspaper publishers keep their print editions as long as advertising revenue justifies the cost of production and distribution. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Oregonian (Portland) are among the latest to go completely digital. My hometown Cleveland Plain Dealer and other dailies in the Advance group print only a few days a week.

Final thought

When I arrived at the University of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain) a decade ago, the faculty asked me to teach journalism students “Economics for Communicators.”

I’d taken exactly one college economics course on my way to a master’s in English literature — though I did have years of experience covering business and the economy as a reporter and editor. My colleague Alfonso Vara Miguel handed me the textbook he’d written on the subject. In Spanish, of course.

As the old joke about professors goes, I stayed a chapter or two ahead of my students. For the first time, I had to explain the theory behind the forces driving decisions by consumers, businesses, and public institutions as they grappled with inflation, unemployment, taxation, tariffs, and prices. I’d interviewed plenty of economists and executives over the years; now I was finally learning the theory behind their decisions.

That’s why I learn so much from the Reuters Institute’s annual report: it studies media from the perspectives of publishers, consumers, and public institutions alike. Its rigorous social-science standards help me understand what’s really happening in media — and what I can do to help make it better.

Leave a comment

New Yorker Cartoon by Tommy Siegel and Dan Kirkwood

The gigantic, enormous, intergalactic interest in the life, misdeeds, and death of Jeffrey Epstein have driven people into all kinds of media excesses.

This week’s newsletter is an attempt to explore what journalism, science, and social science can tell us about what’s going on in the world around us.

Subscribe now

This post will talk about:

— How investigative journalists work

— The journalistic and scientific methods compared

— Some history of theories that were debunked by science

— Ways we can get closer to the truth

Part One, The Epstein Case

I was fascinated recently by an interview of investigative reporters who worked together on the Jeffrey Epstein case to see if they could answer a basic question: did Jeffrey Epstein commit suicide while in prison, or was he murdered?

It would be hard to exaggerate the impact of this case globally. It has taken down politicians, billionaires, philanthropists, and media celebrities.

So, as someone whose career specialties were business and investigative journalism, I was drawn to an article in which these journalists described what they believed about the case to begin with, their investigative methods, and what they concluded.

In their 10,000-word investigation, the reporters “consulted tens of thousands of pages of newly released documents, obtained Epstein’s own notes handwritten in jail — never before made public — and interviewed dozens of people related to the case.”

Here were some of their takeaways:

• Lots of new evidence suggests that Epstein was determined to end his life.

• Epstein might have tried to kill himself more times than was previously known.

• Epstein often talked about suicide in the weeks before his death.

• Warnings about Epstein’s risk of suicide, and the need to protect him, were routinely ignored.

• The handling of the death scene and evidence in Epstein’s cell helped lead to lasting suspicions around his death.

• There are limits to what the autopsy of Epstein’s body can tell us.

But as a former investigative journalist, I was fascinated by the interview with the reporters in which they described how they went about their work. You can read it here. I’ve selected a few of their quotes below:

JAN RANSOM: As an investigative journalist, my role is to follow the facts wherever they lead, test assumptions and provide the public with the fullest and most accurate account possible. As a reporter who has covered deaths in New York’s city and state corrections systems, I had an open mind about exploring what could have happened. I had just finished reporting on people killed in the state’s prisons by guards and efforts by them to cover it up, so I knew it was important to follow all of the possibilities.

CHARLES HOMANS: Our reporting found a preponderance of evidence — much of it not previously seen — that Epstein was considering suicide and attempted to kill himself at least once before while he was in jail . . . . But a lot of crucial information about Epstein’s death is simply missing and always will be . . . . [O]fficial narratives can be wrong, and strange things do happen. It’s a natural and healthy impulse to seek explanations for why the world is the way it is.

MICHAEL ROTHFELD: We found no viable explanation for anything other than suicide that didn’t involve a nearly impossible number of conditions and co-conspirators.

Part Two, the Scientific Method

Human beings have always tried to explain the world based on what they see. What is really happening, and why? One way is the scientific method, which is based on facts. Kenneth Angielczyk of the Field Museum of science in Chicago explains it this way:

• A fact is an indisputable observation of a natural or social phenomenon. We can see it directly and show it to others.

• ​A hypothesis is an idea that we can test with further observations. We set out to gather evidence to see if our hypothesis is supported.​

• ​A theory is a carefully constructed possible explanation for what we observe, drawing together many facts and hypotheses. Theories become stronger as they explain more facts. If a theory explains facts conclusively, it becomes accepted as the most likely explanation for the observed facts.

Let’s start with the statement “the world is round”. This is a fact. Those who argue that the world is flat don’t have scientific evidence to support their claims. However, that doesn’t stop them from promoting their pseudo-scientific beliefs on social media and recruiting celebrities to their cause.

How continents move

When I was studying geology at university in the 1970s, the theory of plate tectonics and continental drift was still controversial. It explained how the continents of the eastern and western hemispheres were once part of the same continent and moved apart over some 180 million years. A glance at a globe would suggest this: the tip of Brazil would fit neatly like a puzzle piece into the notch of Africa.

Still, the theory was roundly rejected when first proposed in 1912 by the geophysicist Alfred Wegener. It was only with improved scientific methods and observations that it came to be an accepted fact.

In the last century, scientists have repeatedly revised their explanations of the origins of our own species, Homo sapiens. Advances in the study of DNA, climate, and linguistics, as well as new discoveries of skeletal and cultural remains, have made our family tree more complex. The best science journalism about the topic asks independent researchers to comment on the methods and limitations of any study.

Deep Throat

Journalism has been called the first draft of history, and rightly so. For events of public interest, the news media have a responsibility to report the best information available at any given time, and to update it as necessary.

Look how the story of Watergate has continually been revised over time with new information. The identity of Deep Throat, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s anonymous source who helped bring down Richard Nixon’s presidency, was revealed more than 30 years after the scandal broke. The posthumous recognition of Post editor Barry Sussman’s role as the unsung hero of the investigation is another example.

For controversial topics like safety and effectiveness of covid-19 vaccines or the causes of global warming trends, journalists have a heavy burden. They can’t independently test the scientific theories. But they can find independent authorities to verify data or offer alternative explanations. This is not easy to do when trustworthy media are trying to compete with misleading sensational headlines and viral memes.

Countering science misinformation

Nieman Lab recently published a study headlined “How science helps fuel a culture of misinformation”.

The author, Joelle Renstrom, wrote:

“We tend to blame the glut of disinformation in science on social media and the news, but the problem often starts with the scientific enterprise itself. . . . Institutions often incentivize scientists going for tenure to focus on quantity rather than quality of publications and to exaggerate study results beyond the bounds of rigorous analysis.”

The scientific publication industry itself has contributed to the problem by “preprinting” scientific work online while it is still in progress and before its methods and conclusions have been peer-reviewed.

Adding fuel to the fire are university press offices, which promote their researchers’ work to help them get grants and win awards. They sometimes exaggerate. Renstrom suggests that the scientists themselves review the press releases beforehand.

She has several other suggestions for reducing misinformation:

• Scientists should use fewer acronyms and scientific jargon so the general public can understand the research. These are called lay summaries or
  plain-language summaries.

• “Scientists can also communicate more effectively with the public by harnessing social media.” Many fail to communicate outside their own academic networks.

• Scientists should also engage more directly with the public in order to communicate the value and trustworthiness of their work.

Final thought

The scientific community has developed standards of verification and proof that the social sciences, including communication and journalism, have adopted. Our theories, hypotheses, and conclusions are subject to continual tests to prove or disprove them.

Unfortunately, bad journalism about science — sensationalistic stories that create fear and anxiety — is a good business. It gets attention and sells ads. Unscrupulous media, scientists, and commercial actors can make a lot of money by supplying misinformation to a public that seeks to have its beliefs and political leanings confirmed.

However, scientists can help journalists give accurate information to the public by getting more engaged themselves with the process of public communication.

In a media ecosystem drowning in misinformation and inanities, ordinary people are looking for sources they can trust. They want to understand how to keep their families and communities healthy and safe. Science journalists can be those beacons of trust. The research and investigation never really end.

We are all pursuing the truth, but truth is a goal that we never really achieve. If we are honest about saying what we know and don’t know, the truth is that there is always more to know and be discovered. It’s a lesson in humility — virtue in short supply

Leave a comment

New Yorker cartoon by Charles Barsotti

Almost one-fifth of my newsletter subscribers are from Spain and Latin America, so reading in Spanish might be more pleasurable. This post will have lots of information about entrepreneurs, media management, self-publication, and leadership, all in Spanish. Here goes!

Subscribe now

Mentores 1: Los mejores nos ayudan a vislumbrar más opciones

Por qué todo emprendedor o buscador de empleo necesita un “empujón”

Para leer más, haz clic aquí

Mentores 2: Sobre los maestros y cómo ser uno de los grandes

Recordamos a aquellos que esperaban lo mejor de nosotros y nos dieron normas por las cuales regir nuestra vida

Para leer más, haz clic aquí

Mentores 3: Jefes con lecciones memorables

Y por qué sus lecciones sobre liderazgo y confianza siguen siendo importantes en nuestro mundo digital

Para leer más, haz clic aquí

Mentores 4: Crea valor para tu equipo en 5 horas a la semana

Si inviertes en desarrollar las habilidades de tu gente, generas beneficios a largo plazo para toda tu organización

Para leer más, haz clic aquí

Mentores 5: No es cómo empiezas, sino cómo terminas

Lecciones en liderazgo y servicio de uno de los entrenadores de fútbol americano de secundaria más exitosos del país

Para leer más, haz clic aquí

Leave a comment

El juego de la imitación

Alan Turing, ChatGPT, Inteligencia artificial

Lección magistral sobre la Inteligencia Artificial del profesor, conferenciante y autor José Luis Orihuela, en el acto de graduación de la LXV promoción de la Facultad de Comunicación de la Universidad de Navarra, celebrado en Pamplona, 9 de mayo de 2026.

El científico británico Arthur Clarke (a quien recordarán como autor de la novela y coguionista de la película 2001: Una odisea del espacio) sostuvo en uno de sus más famosos ensayos que: «cualquier tecnología lo suficientemente avanzada es indistinguible de la magia».

Lo cual es cierto, aunque no necesariamente bueno.

Para leer más, haz clic aquí

[El profesor Orihuela es un amigo y colega de mís años como profesor asistente en la Universidad de Navarra — JB]

Autopublica tu libro: Guía práctica para hacer realidad el sueño de publicar y vender tu obra

Por Ismael Nafría

Está concebido como una guía práctica de 108 páginas que ofrece las claves necesarias para que cualquier persona pueda cumplir su sueño de autopublicar su libro.

Por qué este libro?

Son muchas las personas que sueñan con publicar un libro, y ese sueño cuenta hoy con un aliado que no todos conocen: la autopublicación, un sistema que permite a cualquier persona escribir y publicar su propio libro, en formato impreso o digital, sin depender de la industria editorial tradicional.

Para leer más, haz clic aquí

[Ismael Nafría es un amigo y colega de SembraMedia.org. Ambos formamos parte del consejo ejecutivo de la organización. — JB]

Algunos programas universitarios en español sobre emprendimiento y pymes en España y América Latina:

UMH (Universidad Miguel Hernández, Elche) — MBA con énfasis en Emprendimiento El MBA de la UMH prepara a los participantes para asumir puestos de responsabilidad en las empresas y les ayuda a crear y gestionar su propio negocio. La UMH también ofrece programas activos en su Parque Científico para startups y spin-offs con mentoring y financiación. 🔗 mba.umh.es

Universidad de Navarra — Innovation Factory (Centro de Innovación y Emprendimiento) Mentorizan Trabajos Fin de Grado y Máster relacionados con el emprendimiento o la innovación, e impulsan aceleradoras de empresas, incluida Atelier by ISEM (sector fashion-tech) y SofIA (Big Data). También ofrecen incubadora de proyectos abierta a emprendedores externos. 🔗 unav.edu/web/innovation-factory

Universidad Europea — Curso de Emprendimiento e Innovación (online) Diseñado para personas apasionadas por el emprendimiento y la innovación que buscan mejorar sus habilidades para lanzar o desarrollar sus propias empresas. Especialmente recomendado para graduados en administración de empresas, ingeniería, ciencias sociales, o estudiantes de MBA y másteres afines. 🔗 universidadeuropea.com

Tecnológico de Monterrey — Maestría en Innovación para el Desarrollo Empresarial (MID) La MID desarrolla competencias para proponer ideas y proyectos originales, aplicando técnicas y metodologías para desarrollar soluciones y emprendimientos innovadores de alto valor agregado. También forma para gestionar la movilización de recursos y transformar la cultura organizacional hacia la innovación. 🔗 posgradoseic.tec.mx

FUNDAE gestiona la iniciativa Universidad PYME, que ofrece recursos digitales y formativos para pymes, autónomos y emprendedores para impulsar la formación en competencias digitales a lo largo de la vida laboral. Es un buen punto de partida para formación más corta y orientada a la digitalización de PYMEs. 🔗 fundae.es

El Colegio Universitario Politécnico (CUP) de Córdoba (Argentina) imparte una Tecnicatura Superior en Emprendedorismo: Una carrera para desarrollar criterio profesional: pensar problemas reales, decidir con evidencia y crear valor en organizaciones públicas y privadas, proyectos propios o equipos profesionales.

https://cup.edu.ar/carreras/emprendedorismo/

New Yorker cartoon by Victoria Roberts

Subscribe now

Kenny Katzgrau’s mantra is “Long Live Local News.” It’s his mission in life to help small news publishers take back some of the revenue that they’ve been giving away to tech platform giants Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook, Instagram).

Back in 2012, he decided to counter the tech giants when he saw a restaurant that had been advertising with a hyperlocal news site pull its money and move to Facebook. Social media looked cheaper, the digital reach seemed broader, and everyone was doing it.

Katzgrau had seen a version of this too many times. He put his tech skills to work and created a simple automated system that pulled the restaurant’s daily lunch specials directly into ad placements on the local news site. No manual work. No friction. Just the advertiser’s content, in front of the community that cared about it most.

That advertiser, Katzgrau says, has been running ads “to this day.”

A new venture emerges

That small fix — solving a practical problem for one small business — became the seed of Broadstreet, the advertising technology company Katzgrau founded in 2012. Its mission is to help small, independent local publishers take back revenue they’ve been quietly surrendering to tech giants for over a decade.

Katzgrau described his journey in an interview with Johnny Levy of Data Joe. I met Katzgrau online through monthly collaborations among journalists, data analysts, and tech experts. Katgrau himself is the publisher and majority owner of a local news outlet, RedBankGreen.

The problem with automated ad sales

Google generated $265 billion in advertising revenue last year, a major share of which used to go to news publishers. Today some local news publishers depend on revenue from Google ads placed on their sites by programmatic advertising networks. These automated systems sell the publisher’s ad inventory, often for fractions of a cent per impression. Publishers justify doing it by saying the revenue comes with no effort on their part.

Katzgrau points to one publisher whose entire programmatic operation generated $400 a month. When that publisher was guided to replace those automated ads with a single direct advertiser relationship — one local business, sold personally — the monthly revenue jumped to $1,200 — three times higher. In reality, Katzgrau says, the benefit is closer to four times higher when factoring in the improved reader experience (no intrusive popup ads) and the stronger relationship with the advertiser.

“Local publishers don’t need to out-Google Google,” Katzgrau said. “They need to stop trying.”

The tool he gives away

Broadstreet’s team is small — about 15 people — but its ambitions are not. The company’s stated 10-year goal is to serve 10,000 local publishers, a target Katzgrau intends to push toward aggressively this year.

In February Broadstreet launched Daybreak, a lead generation tool that they offer free to any publisher who wants it. I interviewed Isaiah Simpson of Daybreak to find out more about the tool.

In its first 10 weeks, Daybreak has been adopted by 330 publications and has generated more than 1,200 sales leads for small publishers across the country, Simpson said.

This is far more effective than cold calling on businesses, Katzgrau said.

Leave a comment

How it works, step by step

First, a local business owner visits a publisher’s website, fills out a short form to express interest in advertising. Then the system goes to work. Artificial intelligence enriches the lead with background research on the business, contact details, and conversation prep material. The publisher’s sales rep — who in many cases is also the publisher, the editor, and the person who took the photos — receives a warm, ready-to-work lead instead of a cold prospect.

Katgrau said if he picks up the phone himself and contacts 100 small businesses, he typically lands two to five sales meetings. That’s an industry-standard conversion rate of 2% to 5%. It reflects the reality of outbound sales: most people aren’t ready to buy, most calls go to voicemail, and most follow-ups go nowhere.

Daybreak flips that equation. A business that fills out a form on a local publisher’s website has already made a decision. They’re not a cold call. They’re a raised hand.

Katzgrau estimates the average Daybreak publisher receives three to four leads per month — with considerable variability. He describes one stretch where eight leads arrived in a single week, followed by six quiet weeks, then three more in rapid succession. Local publishing runs on community rhythms, not quarterly projections. Persistence, he argues, creates the conditions for opportunity.

Not eyeballs — community

Local news organizations, he argues, aren’t competing for eyeballs. They’re competing for belonging. The strongest local publications aren’t platforms — they’re civic institutions. The businesses that advertise with them aren’t buying impressions; they’re buying an association with the community where they live and work.

This belief led Katzgrau to eventually take ownership of Red Bank Green, a community news outlet in Red Bank, New Jersey, when its original publisher considered shutting it down. He didn’t acquire it because the numbers were attractive. He acquired it because he believes local publications are worth preserving — that they are, as he puts it, “the shared story of the town.”

Final thought

I asked Daybreak’s manager when this lead-generation service might be available to businesses other than news publishers. I told him I am coaching a number of small businesses that might benefit from this tool.

Simpson said that Katzgrau is not considering it at the moment. There is a slogan that runs through everything Katzgrau does: Long Live Local News. That’s what it says on his T-shirt.

He describes his slogan less as a marketing phrase and more as a declaration — defiance against the prevailing narrative that local journalism is dying, a refusal to accept industry pessimism, and a commitment to building institutions designed to outlast any single owner, platform, or business cycle.

His ambition is not to build something that gets acquired, Katzgrau said. It is to build something that endures — 10,000 publishers, independently owned, financially viable, deeply woven into the communities they serve.

One lunch special at a time.

Leave a comment

New Yorker cartoon by Liana Finck

Subscribe now

A discovery from a mistake

A few weeks ago I was traveling in Europe when I published my weekly Substack newsletter, Your News Biz. But I got confused about the settings for when to publish. As a result, a newsletter that I normally send out at 7 a.m. went out at 1 a.m. local time in the Eastern U.S. (six-hour time difference).

And how many people were sitting by their computers at 1 a.m. waiting to click and open my newsletter? Supposedly a lot, judging by the open rate that Substack recorded.

At 1 a.m., fully one-fifth of my 1,500 free subscribers apparently were sitting by their computers or scanning their phones and clicked to open my newsletter.

But no, they probably didn’t open the newsletter. Several tech sources I’ve talked to said open rates are often inflated because many email systems automatically preload images in an email without a human actually reading the email, and this is recorded as an open. Stronger indicators of reader engagement are replies, shares, donations, purchases, and event registrations

Why publishers emphasize open rates

Open rates are big numbers that impress potential advertisers and sponsors. If you have 10,000 free subscribers and you can show that more than half open and view the content, a media buyer will feel comfortable spending money with you.

That’s an easy story for any salesperson to tell. It’s not too technical. But it’s misleading.

For the same reason, website publishers traditionally emphasized their page views or users — also misleading big numbers. Those numbers don’t work these days for smaller nonprofit public service news organizations. They have had to develop their own metrics of impact.

Quality metrics

My friend and digital media expert Ismael Nafria is an advocate for what he calls quality metrics — realistic reporting of reader interaction with websites and newsletters. He believes a focus on the big numbers is misleading.

A native of Barcelona, he publishes his own email newsletter in Spanish, Tendenci@s, and uses a 10% rule in evaluating digital metrics. He talked about it in an interview with me: basically, if you say you have 100,000 subscribers, only 10% of them are really engaged.

The digital advertising market seems to be driving publishers to show rapid growth and big numbers of users, he said.

“I think that has really done a lot of damage because it has forced many media to adopt strategies of growth only. And it is a false growth because there are many people who are in those numbers who do not even know that they have gone through your site.” — Ismael Nafria

Leave a comment

Final thought: public service or self-indulgence?

This weekly newsletter that you’re reading takes up a lot of my time. I justify it by telling myself that it’s a form of self education. It keeps me engaged with the latest in digital news media. It prevents me from getting out of touch.

But honestly, I wonder about its impact. In a typical week, Substack shows that about half of the 1,500 free subscribers view it and a third open it. Using Ismael’s more realistic 10% rule, I’m writing for 150 people every week. That seems right. Substack itself rated 168 of my 1,500 free subscribers at 4 or 5 stars for high recent engagement.

Some colleagues tell me that’s enough. I should view that as I’m talking to a roomful of 150 people every week. For the time being, I suppose that’s enough.

A thank you to all my subscribers

The graphic below shows the top 5 countries where my subscribers live. Half are in English-speaking countries. In Latin America, I also have 49 in Mexico, 28 in Argentina, and 20 in Colombia, all places where I worked a lot.

New Yorker cartoon below by Will Santino

“While the duck appears to be calmly working from home, under the surface it is frantically searching social media.”

Based on a poll of subscribers, your #2 concern is how to find trustworthy news and information. It’s a topic of concern not only to readers but to advertisers. We’re flooded with propaganda and misleading information.

(By the way, your #1 concern, hands-down, was how to generate more revenue. Keep following Your News Biz for updates — JB).

Subscribe now

In Ukraine, the news is free but 30,000 pay for it

I’ve been following the Kyiv Independent news organization for several years, because it is the model of a small business startup.

It’s the story of a media innovator in Eastern Europe named Jakub Parusinski and what he sees as the future of independent media around the world.

The funding model of the Kyiv Independent shows how a startup media organization can survive and produce valuable news and information under extremely trying conditions — power outages, missile and drone strikes, battlefield coverage. I told you about it in June last year: Media lessons from Ukraine: People pay for trustworthy news.

And on May 20, Chief Operating Officer Zakhar Protsiuk announced, “Yesterday, we crossed the milestone of 30,000 paying members of The Kyiv Independent. We reached the first 10,000 in 1 year and 3 months. The second took us 2.5 years. The third – a bit less than a year.”

As examples of their news, The Independent reported on Friday May 15 that Ukrainian drones had attacked and caused fires at a Russian oil refinery. Rather than simply accept this report from Ukraine’s military, the Independent went deeper.

“The Kyiv Independent cannot immediately verify reports of the attacks nor claims made by Russian officials. Ukraine’s military has not yet commented on the reported strikes.” However, the Independent compiled official comments of various Russian officials about drone attacks and explosions that lend credence to reports of damaging drone attacks.

“Photos and videos posted on social media purport to show a massive fire emanating from what appears to be the Ryazan oil refinery amid a Ukrainian drone attack. Large plumes of smoke were seen over the city into the morning hours following the attack.

“Local residents of the city of Ryazan reported several drones flying overhead before hearing multiple loud explosions in the area of the refinery.”

They report what they know and what they can’t verify. They bring us closer to knowing what’s really going on.

+++++

Debunking the extremists

All of the biggest media outlets that dominate our news feeds — Google, Facebook, and traditional media — scream for our attention with scary headlines. Reasonable people often find this flood wearisome, and they become news avoiders. Or they come to disbelieve everything they’re seeing and hearing. Trustworthy information is in short supply even though the demand for it has never been greater.

NewsGuard’s free fact-checking newsletter service, Reality Check, takes time on a weekly basis to dig deep behind the scary headlines generated by extreme left- and right-leaning information outlets. I wrote about them in December: Who can you trust? Inside the fight for reliable news and information.

Here are two of the latest examples of their attempts to debunk.

The first involves the Hantavirus outbreak

Here is Reality Check’s report: “Social media users skeptical of mainstream health information are claiming that the hantavirus outbreak on the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius was caused by 6G technology. There are two problems with this claim: 6G technology isn’t yet available so 6G couldn’t have caused anything, and in any case it’s biologically impossible for human viruses to spread through wireless networks.”

Users who had earlier pushed the claim that the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by 5G technology now pushed the idea that 6G technology might be spreading the Hantavirus. One of these was an Instagram account called Gubba Homestead, whose video received 1.1 million views and 41,900 likes in five days, Reality Check reported.

The second was a Tucker Carlson interview

Iuliia Mendel was Zelensky’s first press secretary to the Ukrainian president. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, she suggested he is a cocaine user: Ex-Zelensky Aide’s Hoax-Filled Tucker Carlson Interview. In 2022, Mendel published a positive book about Zelensky that described him as the ‘nation’s protector’,” Reality Check reported.

However, over the past two years, Mendel has grown increasingly critical of Zelensky and has advanced pro-Russian falsehoods about her former boss, including the cocaine charge.

+++++

He wanted to know who wrote 1,000 articles about crypto

Rob Waugh, one of the UK’s leading technology and science journalists was alerted by a tipster that four financial journalists who cover cryptocurrency had written more than 1,000 articles for at least 30 different news outlets.

Were these people real, the tipster wanted to know, or were they part of an AI-generated public relations campaign?

Waugh’s investigation in the UK’s Press Gazette dug deep into the histories of these four and attempted to verify information about them — to no avail. They “have ignored repeated requests by Press Gazette to verify their identities.”

Waugh wrote, “The danger to publishers of employing freelance journalists without properly verifying their credentials was previously highlighted by the case of Margaux Blanchard, a freelance journalist published in Wired, Index on Censorship, and Business Insider – who we revealed to be an AI-powered invention.”

All of the four have connections to Market Across, an Israeli PR firm that describes itself as a promoter of the blockchain industry. Waugh and the Press Gazette have done a public service in this verification process.

Last word: The Baltimore Banner and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

And finally, I am a fan of Dick Tofel’s substack, Second Rough Draft, which calls itself “a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.”

His posts reveal deep understanding of the economics and business of public service journalism. He was the founding general manager (and first employee) of ProPublica from 2007-2012, and its president from 2013 until September 2021. Earlier he was an assistant publisher of the Wall Street Journal. He knows what he’s talking about.

So I was most interested in his interview with Baltimore Banner CEO Bob Cohn. The Banner is often held out as a success story in that it has been a Pulitzer prize winner and finalist and has filled some of the gaps left as the Baltimore Sun has slashed its reporting staff and coverage. The Banner has 100 employees.

But the Banner is not yet profitable, and Tofel grilled Cohn on why the Banner’s owner, the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, would buy another struggling news organization, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Venetoulis kept only 58 of the Post-Gazette’s 90-some journalists.

Tofel’s direct and relentless questioning is a good model of what investigative journalists do best. They keep asking for data, sources, and verification.

Leave a comment

More wit of Roz Chast from the New Yorker

You’re reading the Your News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs and small businesses find viable business models.

Subscribe now

Back in February, I started seeing some promotional advertising for a new retelling of Homer’s “The Odyssey.” It’s the story of the Greek warrior-king Odysseus, and his 10-year journey home after the Trojan War.

This new movie struck a chord with me on several levels, even though it might be just another Hollywood sequel with a couple of bankable stars, Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope, the faithful wife who awaits his return.

When I first wrote Movie moguls bet on tales of ancient Greece, I got carried away, and the early draft was far too long. I cut the part about how Odysseus and his story touched my high school and college selves in a deeply personal way.

I also forgot to say why any of this matters to publishers and creators. This is a reminder that timeless themes of heroism, kinship, family, loyalty, and treatment of foreigners can attract audiences as long as they are original and creative, not a hackneyed product of an algorithm.

So this newsletter will touch on:

• The influence of classical Latin and Greek literature on a generation of high school students

• My college thesis on James Joyce’s famously difficult novel “Ulysses” (the Latin name for Odysseus)

• And why I re-read “The Odyssey” in a new English translation, the first by a woman

What it means to be ancient

For my generation of high school students, ancient Latin and Greek literature formed a core part of the educational experience. Our teachers did their best to interest us in the mythical stories of Odysseus and Athena as well as the writings of historical figures like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Many students couldn’t wait to leave that all behind. But I spent most of my college years reading English and French literature, and then got a master’s in English, focusing mainly on the 16th and 17th centuries (Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton).

In that environment, you couldn’t avoid ancient Greek and Roman characters if you tried. They fill the novels and poetry of the 19th century in Britain and America. The classical references popped up regularly in the writings of Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Melville, among many others. (Moby Dick has its share.)

An unheroic modern sequel

I was an English major at the College of Wooster when I decided to do my senior independent study thesis on James Joyce’s groundbreaking novel “Ulysses.” It’s recognized as one of the most influential works of the 20th century.

I had taken a seminar called Modern Forms of the Epic, and “Ulysses” was part of it. We discussed how Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, and many others tried reviving the ancient myths to energize their work. They were rebelling against a civilization whose myths were dismantled by science, industrialization, and endless warfare. What was left was a “heap of broken images.” They needed something new.

Joyce responded with his stream-of-consciousness technique to follow the thoughts of three characters on their wanderings during one day in 1904 Dublin. The episodes parallel and parody the epic tale of Odysseus as he tries to make his way home after the Trojan War.

Leopold Bloom is a somewhat hapless ad salesman, a Jew adrift among Catholics. Like Odysseus, he often gets sidetracked on his way home. Bloom’s wife, Molly, betrays her husband, unlike Odysseus’s faithful Penelope. Stephen Dedalus is a penniless intellectual aesthete, meant to stand in for Telemachus, the son, who goes looking for his father.

Banned in the U.S.

The novel’s denouement roughly parallels that of “The Odyssey.” The childless Bloom, whose son died in childbirth, rescues a drunken Stephen from a violent scene, just as Odysseus and his son were reconciled. Bloom then finds his way home to bed and Molly.

In her earthy internal monologue, Molly reflects on the day, her husband, and her lover, among other things. The frank sexual language of this chapter — perhaps the most famous part of the book — has been mined for the last century by scholars of every imaginable academic persuasion: she’s C.G. Jung’s archetypal Earth Mother, or a defiant feminist, or a sexual rebel.

The book was published in Paris in 1922. It was banned at first by U.S. customs censors on the grounds that it might cause American readers to harbor “impure and lustful thoughts.” Fortunately, a U.S. district court judge overturned that ruling on the grounds that the book had literary merit.

Leave a comment

‘The Odyssey’ in modern English

I had heard about Emily Wilson’s new translation of “The Odyssey,” and the news about the new movie version prompted me to break down and grab the book when I saw it in a bookstore. It was time to revisit the epic tale.

The introduction lays out the complicated history of the text we have today: it’s based on an oral tradition, and it was first written down about 2,700 years ago.

Wilson’s translation is a pleasure to read. It’s in the same poetic form as Shakespeare’s great plays — iambic pentameter with blank verse (no rhyme).

Wilson uses simple English monosyllables to tell the tale. She avoids the trap of many previous translators who tried to capture the majestic rhythm of Homer — dactyllic hexameter, 18 syllables to a line — which is difficult to do in English.

(Joyce’s novel includes a quip about Homer’s heroic meter. Stephen notes that a loudmouth friend’s name is “Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls.”)

Wilson also emphasizes that the ancient Greeks observed the Law of Xenia, a sacred duty to welcome any foreigner as a guest. That could be a message for modern readers.

Final thought and recommendations

If you find the length of Joyce’s novel intimidating, I recommend the abbreviated six-hour audio version narrated by Jim Norton and Marcelle Riordan. It’s available on Libby, the free library app, which includes Molly Bloom’s famous monologue.

The voices and rhythms reminded me of what you would hear in any West Side neighborhood bar in Cleveland 50 years ago. There was a pipeline from County Mayo to Cleveland in the late 19th century, and the habits of speech persist.

Also, you should definitely see the latest swords-and-sandals Hollywood movie if only to compare it with the 2024 film adaptation of the epic — “The Return” featuring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. The long scenes of dialogue might be slow for audiences used to action movies, but I was totally engaged.

Leave a comment

New Yorker cartoon by Harry Bliss

If you like what I’m doing, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. All you need to do is type in your email address.

Subscribe now

Part 1. The world

Reporters Without Borders does an annual ranking of countries based on the state of their press freedom. Things are bad all over.

“In 25 years, the average score of all 180 countries and territories surveyed in the Index has never been so low,” their latest report said.

(See the whole list of 180 ranked.)

This is not a ranking of credibility of the news media, which itself has been in steady decline in the era of digital news and social media. (See this report by the Reuters Institute on nine countries in the developed world.)

Why should you care?

All of this worries me. Journalists are working for you and me. They’re trying to tell you what’s really going on in your country, your region, your community. They need freedom to do their work.

What is press freedom? As explained in the Index’s Methodology section, press freedom consists of “the ability of journalists as individuals and collectives to select, produce, and disseminate news in the public interest independent of political, economic, legal, and social interference and in the absence of threats to their physical and mental safety.”

Let’s break that down. Press freedom:

• is the ability of journalists as individuals and collectives to select, produce, and disseminate news in the public interest

• requires independence from political, economic, legal, and social interference

• is free of threats to the physical and mental safety of journalists

So there are lots of ways to silence the news media and achieve the goal of all dictators, autocrats, and despots — to make sure their message is the only message the public receives.

Leave a comment

Part 2. Hungary, autocrats, and Trump

Hungary was a great example of suppressed press freedom. Before Victor Orban and his Fidesz party were defeated in April, the libertarian Cato Institute showed how, over decades, he gradually took control of all levels of government, bought up and co-opted opposing media, and intimidated or prosecuted opposing media and individual journalists (jump to the Media section of the Cato study for details.)

Of course, one of Orban’s biggest fans has been President Donald Trump. In the wake of Orban’s defeat, NPR consulted many analysts who saw Orban’s defeat as a victory for democracy.

The NPR report noted:

“[M]any political scientists say Trump has adopted a version of Orbán’s “competitive authoritarian” playbook. Trump has sued news organizations, and the Federal Communications Commission has threatened to pull licenses from broadcasters the president has said are biased against him.

“Trump has also suggested the federal government take over the running of elections in 15 states and has used the Justice Department to target his perceived political enemies.

“Orbán’s defeat shows the limits of these sorts of tactics, especially when wielded by an unpopular leader.”

Part 3. Press freedom in the U.S.

In 2025, the U.S. dropped from 57th to 64th place in the world ranking. Our overall score ranks our country as one of the “problematic” ones.

Here’s why:

“Since returning to the White House in 2025, President Trump has extended the war on the press he launched while running for his first presidential term.

“He has censored government data, attempted to dismantle US public broadcasters, weaponized independent government agencies to punish media that criticize his actions, halted aid funding for media freedom internationally, sued disfavored outlets, and applied pressure to install cronies to lead others.

“Press freedom in the United States continues to decline as a result of these actions.”

The danger: This kind of intimidation can lead news organizations and individual journalists to pull their punches, to self-censorship, just to avoid harassment and lawsuits.

Part 4. Media pay Trump $90 million

A year ago, when the previous Index of Press Freedom came out, I wrote about some of the ways media were taking action to counter the trend in the U.S.: Free speech playbook: How media are refusing to be silenced.

But Trump’s intimidation of the news media continues. He’s managed to extract multimillion-dollar settlements in several cases. He regards news media and journalists as “enemies of the people.”

• CBS-Paramount Global: Agreed in July 2025 to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit regarding the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, Trump’s opponent in the 2024 presidential election. (The settlement was intended to avoid regulatory blockage of an $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The combination of Paramount and Warner Bros. would put two legacy movie and TV studios, in addition to multiple cable networks, under one roof, a prospect that has drawn regulatory scrutiny.”)

• ABC News-Disney: Agreed in December 2024 to pay Trump $16 million and issue an apology following a defamation suit regarding comments by political commentator George Stephanopoulos about a rape finding in a civil lawsuit that named Trump. (If any large media empire like The Walt Disney Co. annoys Trump, it risks incurring regulatory scrutiny and possibly loss of its licenses to operate from agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission. Walt Disney Studios owns Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Studios, television networks (ABC, ESPN, Disney Channel, FX), eight TV stations, and streaming services (Disney+, Hulu).)

• YouTube: Settled a similar lawsuit over its suspension of Trump’s account for alleging he incited the Jan. 6 2021 attack on the Capitol — they paid $24.5 million in September 2025.

• Meta (Facebook-Instagram) and Twitter (X): The LA Times reported that Social media platforms Facebook (now Meta) and Twitter (now X) settled lawsuits with Trump for $25 million and $10 million, respectively. Both had suspended Trump’s accounts over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots. Twitter said his account had to be suspended to avoid “the risk of further incitement of violence.”

More lawsuits by Trump

Here are three reported by The Washington Post:

• “Trump sued the Wall Street Journal; its parent company, Dow Jones; News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch; News Corp CEO Robert Thomson; and Journal reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo for $10 billion in July 2025, alleging that the newspaper defamed him by publishing an article about a lewd drawing purportedly signed by him and given to financier Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003.” The Journal reported that the drawing included several lines of text inside the outline of a naked woman and ended with: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump denied writing the note, saying it was “a fake thing” and that he doesn’t “draw pictures of women.”

• “Trump sued the New York Times, four of its reporters and book publisher Penguin Random House for $15 billion in September 2025, alleging that the newspaper’s reporters defamed him in the 2024 book “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success” and in several articles about his wealth, business career and rise to national prominence.” The suit, filed in federal court in Florida, was dismissed but Trump has refiled the complaint.

• “Trump sued the British Broadcasting Corporation for up to $10 billion in December 2025, alleging that an episode of its documentary series “Panorama” defamed him by misleadingly editing his Jan. 6, 2021, speech to make it appear he explicitly encouraged the violence that day at the U.S. Capitol.” Two BBC executives resigned and apologized for the way the episode was edited. Trump filed his lawsuit in federal court in Florida, District of Florida. The case is scheduled to go to trial in February next year.

Dismissed

In addition to the three cases above, the Post also listed four Trump lawsuits that have been dismissed — one against CNN, one against the Post itself, and two against the Times.

Part 5. Hope flies below the radar

Hardly a day goes by without Trump and his enablers finding new ways to suppress media that challenge his version of reality. Personally, I find myself raging against the political machinery of the White House and the distorted depiction of news events fed through his friendly media.

At the same time, I follow the activities of thousands of independent public service media around the world. As a board member of SembraMedia.org, I’ve been involved in the research about their work.

• Reasons for optimism #5: SembraMedia’s discoveries about 200 digital native media on three continents. Among other things, the study found that fully one-third of all the founders of the media were women. In the digital world, women are finding fewer barriers.

• Reasons for optimism #3: Journalists around the world: Thousands of organizations are collaborating to produce quality news. Here I mention several dozen initiatives that you’ve probably never heard of.

• Reasons for optimism #7: The global movement for trustworthy information. Here you’ll find a series of tools you can use to find trustworthy sources of news and information. Extremists on both ends of the spectrum are probably unreachable. But these tools benefit people who have questions and are seeking answers. One of those initiatives comes from NewsGuard, which made its reliability ratings available to 7 million library patrons.

• Reasons for optimism #8: Journalists discover marketing (finally). When they begin to partner and coordinate with the sales and marketing people of their organization, journalists discover more about what their audiences want and need. And there is no need to cross ethical boundaries.

Part 6. Final thought

Jonathan Swift nailed it in 1710 when he wrote, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” And in the age of electronic communication, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” (A quote commonly attributed to Mark Twain, without evidence. That’s irony for you.)

It’s easy, cheap, and lucrative to promote scary, sensational rumors and conspiracy theories. Verifying rumors takes time and money. So the truth usually does come limping after.

But I am encouraged by all the grass-roots organizations worldwide that are producing trustworthy news and information — in spite of everything.

Remember the words of sociologist Margaret Mead:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

New Yorker cartoon by one of my favorites, Roz Chast. She has a knack for finding humor amid the darkness and despair.

Given that we profiled the newsletter of Signal Cleveland a few weeks ago, I thought we would include some information about a competing daily newsletter with a Cleveland edition, Axios Local.

The media business publication A Media Operator (AMO) just did a deep dive into Axios operations and headlined their story, Five Years in, Axios Local Still Isn’t Profitable. Can it Be? They interviewed several Axios Local executives, including Holly Moore, executive editor, and Liz Alesse, general manager.

Moore declined to share revenue numbers. She did say that the oldest of their 34 markets are profitable but not the newer ones. Axios Local has no physical newsroom in any of its cities and over 100 people in editorial, Alesse told AMO.

Ad Age reported that in 2023, Axios Local booked $7.5 million in revenue while operating in 24 cities. Its ambitious expansion plans had slowed down because revenue had been disappointing. But now expansion plans are heating up again.

Expanding to news deserts

Axios has partnered with OpenAI with the goal of expanding their footprint to 43 markets this year, including some areas that will have just one reporter. Axios said that using AI will allow them to “hire more local journalists to serve smaller metro areas — a model it can use to ultimately reach thousands of news-impoverished areas around the country,” the company announced in January of 2025.

“Axios Local will leverage OpenAI’s technology to streamline workflows, surface local trends, and reduce time spent on administrative tasks, giving journalists more capacity to focus on original reporting,” they announced.

The for-profit Axios has done fairly well in attracting national advertisers across their whole portfolio, according to A Media Operator, but it hasn’t cracked the code for attracting local advertisers.

Their nonprofit Ohio competitor

One of their local competitors is the nonprofit Signal Cleveland. It has a staff of 14 and is funded 75% by philanthropy, 25% by individual donors. Signal Cleveland is part of Signal Ohio, which includes newsrooms in Akron (3 people), the Columbus Statehouse (3 people), and later this year in Cincinnati.

By comparison, the for-profit Axios has two Cleveland reporters.

Only real people should apply

So, to end where we began, Can Axios Local be profitable? The answer may lie in how effectively they can build their local advertising business.

In my humble opinion, they need local advertising sales people. Local advertisers want to buy from a person they can shake hands with —a real person connected to other real people and organizations in the community. AI-generated sales pitches and faceless online sales tools won’t cut it on the local level.

On the other hand, Google and Facebook cornered three-fourths of the world’s digital advertising with automated, faceless sales tools. So digital works. But relationships are the key at the micro level.

A package deal on Mentors 1-5

Feel free to copy, paste and share this recent series of five articles on mentors.

• Mentors 1: The best ones help us see more options They come from friends, family, chance meetings

• Mentors 2: On teachers and being a great one Your role is to develop leaders in your organization

• Mentors 3: Bosses with memorable business lessons Help people meet your high expectations

• Mentors 4: Create value for your team in 5 hours a week An investment in your people will pay you dividends

• Mentors 5: It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish. Business lessons from a successful teacher/coach

New Yorker cartoon by Christopher Weyant

What does it take to build a winning organization — year after year, decade after decade? And what does the answer have to do with your responsibility as a business leader to the people coming up behind you?

Those questions above were at the center of a recent talk given by Chuck Kyle at a church breakfast for about 300, mostly men. Kyle taught English for 50 years at St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland. He also coached the football team for 40 years, winning the Division I state championship 11 times.

Subscribe now

Kyle and I were classmates at St. Ignatius a century ago, and I knew him as a football star, not a coach. (We still call him by his nickname — Chico.). I had never heard him speak about his philosophy of teaching, coaching, and developing young people.

He surprised and inspired me. He has a deep religious commitment. His main points:

• Leadership is service to others, not personal glory. We are here to serve our family, friends and community, he said. On Friday nights, with the football stadium lights blazing, “The lights are not shining on the coach,” he said. “They’re shining on the players. It’s their game. And what was I doing? I was serving them.”

• His teaching and coaching philosophy: “I’m going to help you understand this: that you are going to learn to prepare mentally, physically and spiritually for any challenge you have in your life.”

• He told his players that the football has a funny shape and it bounces in unexpected ways. When the ball bounces the wrong way, “Deal with it. If you’re prepared, you can handle it.”

• We should strive every day to get better at what we do. After every practice, Kyle asked his players to stop and reflect silently for 10 seconds on a mistake and make a commitment to not make it again. (He said he has arthritis in his thumb from writing in red pen on his English students’ papers, “Don’t make the same mistake again!”)

• He and his players attended Mass before every game. He did not tell his players to pray for victory but for the strength to give everything they had. “God does not care who wins or loses a football game. What God cares about is whether we have made full use of the gifts He gave us.”

• His message to graduating seniors was that opportunity does not wait. “Opportunity knocks. Handle it. Respond to it. Don’t look back ten or fifteen years and say, ‘I should have, I could have.’ “ He traced his own career to a single unremarkable moment. A shoulder injury ended his college football career. A chance encounter with his old high school coach led to an invitation to help with the team. That led to a lifetime of teaching and coaching at the school.

• And finally, “We can’t make it to the end zone alone,” Kyle said. As a 160-pound running back, he needed linemen to open the holes. And in the spiritual life, “We need community, the Church, and one another.”

Kyle told the graduating seniors in his final year of coaching that all of them were capable of achieving their goals — but only if they were willing to work hard enough.

Leave a comment

The other speaker at this event was Elvis Grbac, who went on from St. Joseph high school in Cleveland to play quarterback at the University of Michigan and in the NFL for the San Francisco 49ers, Kansas City Chiefs, and Baltimore Ravens.

Grbac became a coach after his playing career. Some of his mentors believed in yelling and screaming at players to make a point. He got a different message when he returned to Cleveland and was helping Coach Kyle with his players.

“I was coaching a junior varsity quarterback at our home field at Ignatius, and he came off the field, and he wasn’t playing very well, and I laid into him. The stands were right there by the bench. And I think his mom was sitting right there. And Coach Kyle pulled me aside and said quietly, ‘We don’t do it that way here.’ And that was my introduction to Coach Kyle and how to be a teacher and a coach. I needed to learn how to be a teacher, teach the game.”

He said, “Coach Kyle one of the greatest coaches of all time, and probably one of the greatest teachers of all time.”

Business lessons beyond football

Kyle and Grbac have two lessons for business people. First, you have to seize your own opportunities, even when they are disguised as setbacks. Second, and perhaps more importantly for those in leadership roles, you have a responsibility to help the people around you see the doors that are opening for them. That is what Kyle’s old coach did for him.

Business leaders often rise through organizations because of individual performance. The shift to genuine leadership requires something different: the willingness to make your people’s success the measure of your own.

A manager who claims the spotlight and hoards credit for success may be effective in the short term. But they are not building anything that will outlast them. The coaches and executives who leave lasting legacies are the ones who understand that the role was never about them.

The leaders who make a lasting difference — in sports, in business, in any institution — are the ones who understand that their most important output is not a product, a profit margin, or a won-loss record. It is the people who were shaped, challenged, and prepared for their own lives by their mentor.

Is there a formula for leading a successful and fulfilling life? Kyle seems to have one. He shows us how to “make it to the end zone.”

Leave a comment

Kyle is the author of a book called “The Object of the Game,” and one of his former players, Matt Waldeck, produced a documentary series for Apple TV by the same name. Here Kyle and Waldeck are interviewed by Kristi Chapel.

Leave a comment

New Yorker cartoon by Drew Dernavich

This post will focus on:

• Why managers don’t take time to train people

• How to carve out time for training

• Prevent fires instead of putting them out

• Free, easy teaching tools like YouTube, Zoom classes

The workplace as classroom

Before the digital era, small newspapers and broadcast outlets served as a kind of classroom and training ground for journalists. But frankly, I’m worried that this kind of training is not being done either at the large traditional media or in the small digital newsrooms.

I’m also worried that small business entrepreneurs neglect to invest time and resources into training because they don’t believe they have the time. They feel so much pressure to grow revenue and market share rapidly they feel they can’t breathe. I keep reading about young people burning out.

Leave a comment

I hope you were able to leave a comment at the orange button above and tell more about training — or lack of it — in your organization.

Invest in people, not product

Most young people spend the first 10 years or so after leaving school trying to figure out where to go in their lives. They’re looking for something fulfilling. Even if they have trained for something specific — auto mechanic, musician, engineer, artist, lawyer, writer — they often discover they’re interested in something else. They find a rewarding career in something completely unexpected.

In my years coaching entrepreneurs, I’ve seen this over and over again. When a boss or colleague recognizes a person’s talent and devotes time and resources to developing that person, it launches them in a career that gives meaning to their lives.

Your most valuable resource — time

A generation ago, the career path for a news professional was to begin at a small local news outlet and, over time, move up to a bigger place with better pay, a bigger audience, greater opportunities, and more responsibility.

That was how I progressed from reporter, to editor, to publisher of a business newspaper. People in other careers — from fast-food to professional services — often describe a similar path.

As a brand-new publisher, I quickly found I didn’t know what I was doing. I had been running a newsroom; now I was responsible for advertising sales, subscription sales, marketing, administration, and distribution. On the advice of a veteran publisher, I hired an executive coach.

1 hour a week with each key person

The coach and I worked on many things, but the one that created the biggest impact on our 30-person company’s culture and financial results was this: I started meeting every week for one hour with each of my five department managers –- the editor, sales manager, marketing/circulation director, business manager, and production director –- to talk with them about their personal and professional goals.

• Our weekly meetings were on a set day at a set time, and were confidential

• The department heads came up with their own personal and professional goals

• Weekly topics were their problems, their questions, their progress toward goals

• They had to write a recap of the sessions

For example, our marketing manager wanted to do more events but needed help. We worked together to help her identify other members of the staff to find venues, negotiate terms, and design and execute promotional materials.

Our editor and advertising sales manager used to clash about ethical boundaries. Some sales people hovered around reporters’ desks trying to figure out how we would be covering an upcoming topic. It would help them sell a potential advertiser. In journalism, this is an ethical no-no.

These two managers wanted me to tell the other one what to do. That wouldn’t have solved anything. Whenever they came to me with complaints about the other, I insisted they talk with their counterpart. “Work it out yourselves. If you are uncomfortable with a confrontation, let’s figure out the language you can use, language you’ll feel comfortable with, and how to approach them.”

Preventing fires, not putting them out

At one of our parent company’s national meetings of all 40 publishers, I described this process of spending five hours a week with my key people. Many of my fellow publishers said I was crazy. As publishers, they were far too busy to spend that much time every week on personal training, they said.

My response? Those five hours of developing my managers’ personal and professional skills saved me an enormous amount of time and trouble. They became skilled at solving their own problems rather than relying on me to give them solutions. My solutions most likely wouldn’t work for them anyway.

Because these sessions were confidential, the managers told me everything that was going on, any problems I should be aware of.

Many bosses guarantee that they won’t hear bad news because they react with anger. People are afraid to tell them the truth. By contrast, I was learning about all of the problems we had and could help the manager find ways to manage or eliminate them.

This helped me shape long-term strategy for the organization by removing obstacles that were getting in the way. I had more time to focus on raising the profile of the business journal in the community. That focus strengthened the brand and resulted in growth in ad revenue, employee recruitment and retention, attendance at company events, and profitability.

A great place to work, a learning organization

When you focus on developing your people, they will help you accomplish your mission. When hiring, talk with candidates about the mission and expectations. People want to join something that’s bigger than themselves.

Work with people you hire to help them discover and develop their talents. Sometimes that means they will want more responsibility than you can give them and will need to move on. If this is because they have grown, consider that a good thing. Those people will help you recruit replacements.

Your organization will get the reputation as a great place to work and learn and grow. You will always have lots of talented candidates. The people will make sure your organization stays successful in a highly competitive environment.

Leave a comment

Second-best bet — the university of YouTube

There is nothing like your personal mentoring for having an impact on a person’s development. But you can get an assistant coach free online — online webinars, short “how I solved it” reels, and so on.

There is so much valuable, free advice out there. If your key people are asking you for help, show them how they can do research on any issues they are struggling with. Have a conversation with them about what they’ve found.

Third bet — coffee or a Zoom

Invite a business expert you know to spend 45 minutes with your team. As a small business mentor, I’ve found that other entrepreneurs are proud of what they’ve learned through experience and are glad to share it.

And a fourth

This article by Dave Bailey — Why founders need coaches, not consultants— captures for me the essence of being an effective leader: listen to your people, ask lots of questions, understand what motivates them, and help them find their own solutions rather than dictating them.

A few years ago, a student in a media management course interviewed me for his final research project. In the course of an hour, he got me to talk about my philosophy of management in the digital era.

Reading over the transcript of that interview, I realized how my thinking had changed over the years. The main lesson I learned was to put people first. Growing up in the old media model of the news factory, I developed skill in the many processes of production, meeting deadlines, and getting the product out the door. The priority was the product: produce a sufficient quantity of content at a level of professional quality consistent with the limitations of time, money, and space available.

Make the people your priority. They’ll help you improve the product.

Previously:

Mentors 3: Bosses with memorable lessons

Mentors 2: On teachers and being a great one

Mentors 1: The best ones help us see more options

New Yorker cartoon by Frank Cotham