Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner believes the time is now for change in media and fashion. "I want to see brands, publications, everyone in the industry commit to a long, sustainable change," Peoples Wagner said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. Peoples Wagner is a rarity in glossy media: A 29-year-old black woman from a small university in the Midwest, without connections or a rich family bankrolling her initial career. Instead, she worked her way up, moonlighting dressing mannequins and working as a waitress. In October 2018, she was named the top editor of Teen Vogue, which has made a name for itself by melding fashion with social issues. She recognizes her path isn't for everyone -- and media and creative professions need to adapt in order to expand opportunities to underrepresented groups. "You have to be willing to hire different kinds of people who will challenge you," Peoples Wagner said.

Sports media and betting are on their way to being inextricably intertwined. "If you look at the traditional way sports betting has been launched in Europe and even in North America -- in the offshore and black markets -- how people bet is through betting apps," said to John Levy, CEO of theScore, a Canadian sports media company. Those apps aren't where betters get their actual score lines and injury updates; they're where gamblers turn to once they've watched the game or read about it elsewhere. "They're nothing more than a transactional app," Levy said on the Digiday Podcast. Close to half of U.S. states (and Washington, D.C.) have legalized sports betting to some degree in the two years since the Supreme Court struck down the law that banned it nationwide. Sports betting may be on hold right now, but publishers like Barstool Sports -- purchased by gambling operator Penn National Gaming in a deal that valued the company at $450 million -- have been betting on the category growing once sports come back later this year. Like theScore, the acquisition will allow one company to facilitate wagers while also providing betters with the sports news they base their risk-taking on. The industry is estimated to be worth $8 billion by 2025. Levy thinks legalization will be accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic's effect on public funds at a state level. "That's trillions of dollars that they're now trying to recover, and I don't care what side of the political fence you're on, the reality is the governments are going to have to start to figure out how to replenish those coffers," Levy said. A majority of theScore's users bet on sports instead of just reading about them, Levy said, citing third party (and the company's own) data. Nearly half of the bets happen while the relevant game is in play, and despite being a Canadian company, 70% of theScore's users are in the U.S.

For Telemundo, shifting to streaming platforms -- everything from parent company Comcast's Peacock to Quibi -- is an obvious choice based on a simple fact: The median age for Latinos in the U.S. is 28, much lower than that of the country as a whole. For Telemundo SVP of Digital Romina Rosado, that means the network needs to be on every new platform it can be to reach the 60 million Hispanics in the U.S. "Hispanics actually over-index on a lot of social and digital platforms," Rosado said on the Digiday Podcast. "So for Telemundo, even before covid-19, it was a big part of our mission to make sure we were available on all the platforms." Telemundo has about 3,000 hours of programming on NBCU's Peacock and two programs on Quibi, which Rosado believes will take off once coronavirus ends "There's a tremendous amount of schadenfreude here at play, which seems to be a bit of a way that media reacts to media lately," she said. "People are making very quick judgments, and I think we might all be surprised."

McClatchy CEO Craig Forman describes the local news company as more relevant than ever. "The coronavirus crisis has been a reminder to all of us in our communities of just how important it is that our communities be strong and vital," Forman said on the Digiday Podcast. "We've never seen digital traffic or even demand of the scale that we've seen for McClatchy." McClatchy -- home to local papers like the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and The Sacramento Bee -- has seen digital traffic increase by nearly two-thirds to reach 100 million users in March, according to Forman. “If you talk to our local customers, they’ll say that their need for local news is not met by any of the national news publications," Forman said. “The kind of coverage that you get in Kansas City -- the award-winning investigations into secrecy in the Kansas state government that force political change there, or even the national series that results in Pulitzers -- we have 54 of them over the years -- that’s not provided by the national media, and that is the core to local essentialness, and that’s where the strength is for local brands.” But despite this boost, Forman acknowledges "a real paradox." McClatchy doesn't see that "essentialness" translating as much (yet) on the advertising side. That is why Forman is making a case that advertisers must again re-focus on the context in which their advertising appears. “What often you can’t find in the world of digital advertising is the adjacency and the renown brand construct that makes your advertising important in context," he said. "And at this time where local is the success story of the emergence, McClatchy and others are doing everything we can to partner with local brands to show them that the trusted environment of local news is where they need to be.”

The news publishing industry may be getting squeezed by the pandemic economy, but for Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO Randall Rothenberg, it set itself up for failure long ago, by leaning too heavily on advertiser revenue. "When the United States became a national marketplace in the mid to late 19th century, that marketplace was so big, so vast and laden with opportunity that it just made much more economic sense to premise your revenues and growth as a publisher on advertising," Rothenberg said on the Digiday Podcast. Even the New York Times, which is riding a high of more than 6 million subscribers, is foreseeing a drop in ad revenue of up to 55% in the second quarter, leading its head of advertising to say layoffs are likely. Rothenberg said that historically, that shortsightedness extended to magazines and even television -- media products for which, in Europe, consumers paid premiums. His big takeaway: " You need to diversify your revenue streams. Period, full stop." One bright spot for Rothenberg is the growth of central authority in the industry. "I'm really hopeful now, more than I have been ever in the past 15 years," Rothenberg said. "It has been extraordinarily difficult to get the various segments, players, companies and executives across the vast and unruly marketing and media supply chain to agree on the basic best practices and technical standards that must undergird any industry supply chain."

Verizon Media's value to Verizon itself isn't just as a media arm that can send user data or benefits back to the conglomerate. Rather, its base of 900 million monthly active users is significant enough to bring value just across Verizon Media's properties, including Yahoo, TechCrunch, AOL and HuffPost, according to CEO Guru Gowrappan. On the Digiday Podcast, Gowrappan set up the example of an article about meditation on the newly launched Yahoo Life. "You can start not just having content but taking content and saying 'Oh, you read about something, you may want to do a meditation session,' and bringing that entire closed loop ecoysystem in the same wall," Gowrappan said. Gowrappan talked about what we can learn from consumer behavior in China, what the pandemic's effect on internet infrastructures will be and how he cut his teeth at Overture.

Growing a web publishing business from a small starter loan and your own profits "toughens you" in ways that are different than venture-backed media according to Digital Trends CEO Ian Bell. The bootstrapped tech publication has grown the old-fashioned way -- that is taking in more money than you spend -- since 2006. This year, Digital Trends expects $50 million in revenue. It has not laid off or furloughed any workers despite feeling the pain of the downturn. Digital Trends also will be profitable again this year, Bell said. "Running the old fashioned way, off of profits, creates a grittier leader," Bell said on the Digiday Podcast. "You get forced to have those tough conversations with the bank, with your team. You have to meet covenants. You have to make sure that you survive at all costs. In a lot of ways it toughens you." "We'll be profitable again this year," Bell said on the Digiday Podcast. "The momentum's there." Widespread lockdowns have led people to lean more than ever on their electronics, whether to connect with loved ones or stay busy and entertained. Bell sees that as an opportunity. "You're going to find that people got that technology dopamine drip, and they're going to continue to rely on it more than they did prior," Bell said. . We're uniquely poised to be right there for them."

The Guardian's pivot to paid has a unique twist: There's no paywall. Instead, The Guardian relies on reader contributions -- a model gaining believers in news organizations caught between making their coronavirus coverage free of charge and facing ad shortfalls at the same time. "There's absolutely no doubt that we're going to see a boost to our reader revenue during this period," said Guardian U.S. and Australia CEO Evelyn Webster on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "We are going to see our advertising hit hard. I do not know how hard and how deep. I don't think any of us do. [But] even in the most dire scenario that I have looked at, the Guardian would still be a profitable business in America. So are we well positioned to continue our journey to grow? Yes. And I feel very confident about that." Reader contributions from American readers at about 40-45% of the US operation's income. Thanks to this evolving revenue scheme and a serious cost-cutting effort, in 2019 the Guardian as a whole made its first operating profit in 20 years. The Guardian recorded its best month ever in terms of web traffic. "There is absolutely no doubt that that is what's driving the current trend," Webster said in reference to the pandemic. "We hit 114 million browsers in March, and that was an increase [of] 80 to 90% on the prior month and about 160% on the prior year." Webster talked about the difference between British and American contributor behavior, why the U.S. can use the perspective of a British newspaper and how the Guardian's ownership structure (it's owned by a trust) keeps its coverage impartial.

About a third of the MIT Technology Review's revenue comes from events, according to CEO Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau. That piece of the pie is obviously under threat as activity in the United States remains frozen by the coronavirus pandemic. "We had to make a call on our largest event, called EmTech Digital, entirely on AI," Bramson-Boudreau said. "Our highest-yielding event." "What were we going to do? Were we going to reschedule it? Or were we going to move it to a virtual event?" A few weeks before the event -- scheduled for March 25th -- they decided on the latter route, streaming 20 hours of content over three days. As a result, they were able to save "about 50%" of their sponsorship revenue for the event, according to Bramson-Boudreau. "We then rolled the remaining 50% into other digital products," she said. Dropoff among online viewers, too, was lower than expected. She credited that relative success on a quick focus on recreating the event's interactivity. "It's the interaction that we can provide that's a value. We needed to find a platform that allowed for that kind of interaction, and the programming team really leaned into thinking about interactivity and community and how to foster that digitally," Bramson-Boudreau said. Bramson-Boudreau talked about the benefits to being owned by MIT, how she thinks live-streamed events can be improved and how an economic downturn is a good time to spend.

Mel Magazine, a men's interest publication born from Dollar Shave Club, wants to be more than a case study in brand content. "The way we went around building the publication, it drew from a lot of the same DNA. But it's never been there just to push razors," founding editor Josh Schollmeyer said on the Digiday Podcast. "It's been there to be a thought leader on modern masculinity." As Mel Magazine launched in 2015, Schollmeyer recalled, "the core edict was 'go out there and try to do great work, and we'll figure out how this can work back toward the brand.'" Schollmeyer talked about the myth that was the archetypical men's magazine reader, providing counter-programming to all the coronavirus coverage and why his peers thought he was crazy to take this job.

For publishing companies to survive a global crisis like the one we're in, Complex Networks CEO Rich Antoniello's formula is "brand plus brain plus balance sheet." Antoniello is no stranger to tough times in media. He stewarded Complex through the 2008 financial crisis as CEO, the role he still holds now. But compared to that, the downturn brought about by the coronavirus pandemic is "infinitely more difficult," Antoniello said on the Digiday Podcast. "We have no idea when the virus is going to slow down in the United States," Antoniello said. "And we have no idea what the financial impact is going to be."

The coronavirus pandemic brings uncertainty to the advertising business as much as anywhere else, but GroupM's Brian Wieser sees it as a chance for marketers to take action versus relying on slogans. "Every brand should be trying to figure out how they could be helpful," Wieser said on the Digiday Podcast. He pointed to GM's exploration of its capacity to build much-needed medical equipment and luxury brand LVMH's pivot to manufacturing hand sanitizer for hospitals. Or think back to the financial crisis, when Hyundai rolled out the "Hyundai Assurance" program that delayed car payments for those in a tight spot. If companies act uprightly and "want to talk about it and publicize it, they're going to benefit from it from a goodwill perspective, from governments, from society, from consumers -- whether they're in the market or not," Wieser added. Wieser, the global president of business intelligence at GroupM, also sees in China a potential bellwether for the advertising industry's looming challenges around the world -- and the best case scenario for how this unfolds in Western economies. Fourth quarter earnings -- and guidance about expectations for 2020's first quarter -- by Chinese giants like Alibaba, Baidu and Weibo help with the math. The upshot from those companies was a "20 to 30% decline in the relevant advertising-related line," Wieser said. And because January was a mostly normal month, one can attribute that expected slide to just the two following months. That said, China is showing signs of getting its economy back on track after its remarkable success in combatting the virus. Wieser joined the Digiday Podcast to discuss the three representative countries to model expectations on, why television will probably do better ("or at least less bad") than other media and the big opportunity for businesses of all types to generate goodwill in the midst of crisis.

Much of the ad industry's ways of measuring eyeballs on the internet is flat-out wrong, according to Joe Marchese, co-founder and CEO of Attention Capital. "Every Q4, there's more ad impressions in the digital world," Marchese said on the Digiday Podcast. "Do you think more people are watching more ads in Q4, or do you think we're just trying to shove them in there?" Attention Capital sees an opportunity in all that bloat and fabrication. It's a holding company with a portfolio that so far includes Girlboss and Tribeca Enterprises -- organizer of the Tribeca Film Festival -- which it invested in alongside James Murdoch. Those may seem like unrelated assets, but they fit Marchese's standard as companies that have built confidence in their ability to "curate some aspect of the world," he said. "In this world where trust is eroding, the curator brands kind of become king." Marchese joined the Digiday Podcast to discuss his other criteria for brands worth investing in, why Wirecutter is the model to beat and the attention you get when the word "capital" is part of your company name.

BuzzFeed is in the midst of change. A few years ago most of the company's revenue came from native advertising -- in 2020 that category will bring in just 20%. Other parts of the revenue pie -- commission on purchases driven by BuzzFeed content, as well as BuzzFeed's own branded products -- have grown enough for the company to bring in $320 million in 2019, and for BuzzFeed to forecast profitability. "Over the last three years we've really transformed the way BuzzFeed makes money," BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said on the Digiday Podcast. Peretti joined the Digiday Podcast to discuss the growing transparency coming to attribution, affiliate revenue and BuzzFeed News' intangible benefits.

On a live edition of the Digiday Podcast, CCO Sam Toles said the company tested 67 concepts to find the next House of Highlights, its massively popular Instagram account focused on the NBA. Toles oversees B/R's animated web shows “Game of Zones” and “The Champions,” as well as longer video content including a documentary for CBS's Showtime. Being owned by Turner (and thus AT&T) "gives us that enormous ceiling of opportunity," Toles said. "The way in which B/R can grow is boundless." In this week's episode, Toles talks about B/R's various partnerships, the value of TikTok and why the company is all in on sports betting.

Keith Grossman, seven months into the job as president of Time, doesn't mince words when it comes to Time's recent history. "It's gone through, I would say, 10 years of neglect, through mismanagement, through transition of owners," Grossman said on the Digiday Podcast. Meredith Corporation completed its purchase of Time, Inc. in early 2018. It sold the group's flagship magazine -- which had suffered a years-long decline in advertising, circulation and profits -- to Marc and Lynne Benioff for $190 million later that year. But with that new ownership, Grossman is optimistic. "Now that it has dedicated, focused resources, I think we're in a really strong position to evolve the Time brand to really capture the attention of the next generation of consumers," Grossman said. Grossman sees the main challenge as getting consumers to recognize Time as a standalone brand that goes beyond the red-bordered weekly. The publication recently recreated Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech using virtual reality. It also partnered with Nickelodeon to bring Time for Kids' "Kid of the Year" franchise to TV. Grossman put the company's second challenge in the form of a question: "Is it relevant to the next generation of consumers?" Some of Time's internal audience statistics are already promising: 44% of the "Time total community" is under the age of 35. More than half of that community is female, and a third is "non-Caucasian," Grossman added.

Vox Media CRO Ryan Pauley sees the company's acquisition of New York Magazine, last year, as pairing up complementary parts -- and he figures advertisers will see it that way too. "Less than 35% of customers spent significant advertising budgets with both companies," Pauley said on the Digiday Podcast. Vox's typical ad categories included tech, auto, financial services and food and beverage. New York Media, on the other hand, leaned toward luxury, fashion and beauty. "Where there was overlap was media and entertainment," Pauley said. But even there, Pauley said, the merged companies could very well attract advertisers more effectively. "All clients are looking for fewer, bigger, better partnerships." Pauley joined the Digiday Podcast to discuss Vox's "hyper-growth areas," its new marketing platform and the death of the third-party cookie.

Protocol president Tammy Wincup is quick to remind people that her just-launched tech publication isn't a subsidiary of Politico but a standalone news site. Still, Protocol, also funded by Politico owner Robert Allbritton, will be applying the Politico playbook -- offering a morning newsletter (Source Code) and seeking a wide audience for a set of premium, insider products of the sort found in a trade publication. With a staff of more than 30, Protocol will be able to "begin thinking much earlier about what our audience needs from the services and tools perspective," Wincup said. She added that Protocol is a business-to-business publication more than a business-to-consumer one -- although it blurs the lines between the two genres. "Your business audience is also your subscription audience [and] is also your, in many cases, sources." Wincup joined the Digiday Podcast to discuss the infiltration of tech into every industry, the Source Code newsletter and Protocol's plan to credit tech companies where credit is due.

Bustle Digital Group might not seem like a natural home for The Outline, the website once described as "a New Yorker for millennials." And that's the point, said Josh Topolsky, founder of The Outline. After its acquisition by Bustle, he now serves as the parent company's editor-in-chief of culture and innovation, overseeing The Outline, Mic and Inverse. "The opposites thing is actually part of the attraction and why it makes sense," said Topolsky. "We had this conversation about should media businesses exist where everything isn't trying to get to 40 million uniques. Let's figure out what those different brands are and build them to the right size, and find the right brands that want to advertise on them, find the right audiences that want to come and visit them. And the collection of those things makes the overall business stronger." This week on the Digiday Podcast, Topolsky discussed Bustle Digital Group's newly launched tech news site, Input; his previous declaration on the Digiday Podcast that "everything about digital media is insanely boring" and how history is repeating itself as publishers rely heavily on traffic from Google's open source Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Goop's got its share of haters, who pillory the Gwyneth Paltrow site for peddling wacky wellness products, including the infamous jade egg. "People like to say it's pseudoscience," said Elise Loehnen, Goop's chief content officer, on the Digiday Podcast. "But pseudoscience is when you present something and say, 'The science shows that this can cure cancer,' which we would never do," she added. "We're never saying, 'Oh there's all this conclusive evidence.'" Paltrow started Goop in 2008 as a free weekly email newsletter. Now Goop offers a website, a podcast (hosted by Loehnen) and a Netflix show (as of last week). Goop also sells its own clothing line and consumer packaged goods online and from a brick-and-mortar store. It is, in many ways, the model of a modern media brand, with a sharp differentiation and diversified business model that includes commerce. On the Digiday Podcast, Loehnen discussed the merits of sharing information without necessarily critiquing it, various publishing and e-commerce trends as well as her personal experience of consuming psychedelic mushrooms in Jamaica (where they are unregulated).

A large portion of the world's TikTok videos have been created by individuals (and many are quite young) on a mission to say something funny. But Flighthouse has made the crafting of TikTok videos into a company business, relying on a content studio with all trappings of a Gen Z-styled television production set. "Flighthouse is basically the largest entertainment brand on TikTok right now," said the company's CEO Jacob Pace on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "We're really the only ones producing original content." If TikTok becomes a stalwart media channel as opposed to being a mere flash in the pan, content production companies like Flighthouse will have something to do with it, Pace said. On the podcast, Pace shared his insights about TikTok's similarities with YouTube, the advent of Quibi and what kind of content works best on TikTok.

Geoff Schiller served as chief revenue officer of PopSugar until stepping into a similar role for Group Nine, the company that acquired it late last year. And some aspects of the two companies' strategies remain much the same. The PopSugar playbook was all about its verticals: "pets, finance, food, all the way through," Schiller said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "With how that scales across Group Nine, it works even better because now you have five brands to play with," he said, referring to Thrillist, NowThis, PopSugar, Seeker and The Dodo. Group Nine's editorial emphasis on a young demographic and optimism seems to have rubbed off on Schiller as he goes about his work trying to diversify his company's revenue streams, with advertising remaining a big piece of the pie. Young readers "spend more time with us than anyone else in the entire competitive set," Schiller boasted, referring to estimates the company has made based on Comscore research. Schiller discussed how his media group is capitalizing on its name recognition to stage events and the way his company is diversifying its revenue sources beyond advertising, as well as competition between legacy media companies and young digital challengers.

Eric Yang started Gear Patrol as a side hustle to his job at CBS because the publications he knew we missing the mark when it came to product coverage. "The men's magazines out there -- GQ, Esquire -- they were increasingly unrelatable to me," Yang said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "For me it wasn't about a Brioni suit and living your best lifestyle in New York. I had my own personal interests, and that for me crossed over between automotive and tech, and you had magazines that were just really focused on bro culture in men." That was in 2007. A few years later as Gear Patrol took off, Yang and his colleague Ben Bowers quit their jobs at CBS to dedicate themselves to the site full-time. They've since announced a minority stake investment from Hearst (last April), launched a print magazine and e-commerce efforts and landed about 5.5 million unique visitors in what was recently their "best month ever," in Yang's estimation. "We've been profitable every single year at Gear Patrol except for the year we took investment because we were growing," Yang said. He adds that about 40 to 50% of their traffic comes from SEO, not social media or other sources. "It's a lot of direct traffic, and the direct traffic is actually growing, for us." Yang talked about when he decided to leave CBS and make growing Gear Patrol his full-time job, the thin line between media and commerce companies and how the website's reluctance to depend on social media turned out to be a smart move.

This week's episode of the Digiday Podcast is a look ahead at what 2020 may have in store for the publishing industry. The site's reporters weigh in on the beats they know so well: Tim Peterson breaks down the streaming wars that have only just begun, the UK-based Lara O’Reilly makes predictions on a future that goes "beyond the cookie," and Max Willens explains how publishers' revenue streams may change in the New Year.

Sara Fischer, media reporter at Axios, joined the Digiday Podcast for the first of two year-end wrap-up episodes looking ahead to 2020. On this week's episode, Fischer weighs in on why the flurry of digital media acquisitions in 2019 will continue into 2020 and why next year regulation will be in the spotlight. (Next week, Digiday media reporters Tim Peterson, Lara O'Reilly and Max Willens will add their own outlooks for the year ahead in media.)

Gaming is often thought of as a subculture, but it’s just as dominant a part of youth culture today as music. For gaming companies, that means growth opportunities on par with MTV. “Music might have been at its core, or might have been its origin, but at some point the majority of content that they made had nothing to do with music,” said Lee Trink, CEO of FaZe Clan, a gaming collective that’s part professional eSports teams and part creator network. “What [MTV] had was a relationship with the audience and they understood what that audience wanted.” FaZe Clan boasts over 7 million subscribers to its YouTube channel, where its videos regularly top over 1 million views. It created branded content and also operates a merchandise store. “We reach enough people that we are tantamount to a cable network,” he said. Trink joined the Digiday Podcast to talk about FaZe Clan’s revenue streams, the brand’s signing its first (and for now, only) female member and what work is like in the Hollywood mansions these content creators all live in together.

If you've been upset by something you read in The New York Times' Style section, that was by design. "[The] Style desk covers change, it covers generational change, it covers change in how we talk about gender, it covers young people," says the section's editor, Choire Sicha. "It covers technology, and it covers love, marriage and how we look. Those are all things that are incredibly fraught at this time, and they're supposed to upset people." Inter-generational conflict is a hot topic (even before the paper of record revealed the collective Gen Z eyeroll that is "OK boomer"). So is the massive cross-industry known as wellness. But how do you cover that responsibly? "We're not talking about people's parents or people from the outside, we're talking to people and for people who actually do this stuff," Sicha said. "The Times historically will have been one step removed from that, which sounds funny to call out, but that is what we did: 'Hey, what are those kids doing in their bedrooms?' And it's like, 'We need to go in the bedrooms.' That sounds weird, but you know what I mean." Sicha joined the Digiday Podcast to talk about the freedom that comes with being funded by 4.9 million subscribers, his own take on Gen Z and how he feels about the end of Deadspin.

The Washington Post's CRO Joy Robins thinks ad agencies deserve a little more sympathy. "We need to better understand their business, better understand how they make money," Robins said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "You start to see more and more that the agencies represent their own business model, they are facing their own challenges," she said. "So how do we stop looking at these ad agencies as essentially the purveyors of the RFP?" Part of her answer is to borrow what she sees as the successful methods social media platforms have used in working with the same agencies. Since October, some of the Post's sales teams are directed at "really working with the senior-level executives at holding companies and ad agencies, to understand what are their pain points, what are the things their clients are tasking them with, and how can we ultimately partner to create something that adds value to their businesses?" On the Digiday Podcast, Robins also spoke about brands' skittishness when it comes to displaying ads next to news about the impeachment inquiry, the broken model that is the RFP and how often she sits down with Jeff Bezos.

Condé Nast is on a journey to remake itself from a magazine company -- home to Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and more titles -- and into what new CEO Roger Lynch calls "a 21st century media company." The exact contours of what that looks like remain a work in progress. One aspect that isn't in doubt: video and the establishment of franchises is absolutely part of that vision. Condé Nast Entertainment now creates more than 4,000 videos a year, garnering on average more than 1 billion views a month (mostly from YouTube, Katzeff said). Now, the challenge is turning those views into franchises. "We haven't done a great job yet in taking that IP and giving it legs beyond print," said Condé Nast Entertainment president Oren Katzeff on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "And that's no big surprise and that's no knock on anybody. For so long the magazine was the be all end all for IP. A lot of consolidation in the media space, it's about a lot of things but one of them is the opportunity to garner IP and monetize IP in long-form content. You look at Disney, HBO Max and Netflix who are spending $100 billion this year on long-form content, and we've only scratched the surface of that."

Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs worked together for five years before cofounding Food52 in 2009. That was enough time for them to recognize a gap in the online landscape. Americans were getting more serious about food and cooking as rewarding pursuits and social opportunities but the internet had yet to reflect that movement. "We felt that aside from food blogs, which were really exploding, there was no platform for real people to have a say, to share their knowledge and expertise, to have a social experience with one another," said Stubbs on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. Their answer was a website that serves as a content publisher, a forum and a good place to shop for pots and pans. And people do turn to the site for kitchenware: Food52's revenue comes roughly 75% from commerce and 25% from ads, Hesser said. The Chernin Group recently paid $83 million for a majority stake in Food52. In our latest podcast, Hesser and Stubbs discussed the 19th-century antecedent to crowdsourced recipes, the majority stake acquisition taken up in Food52 by the Chernin Group and a few straightforward recipes that everyone should know.

As many publishers zero in on consumer revenue strategies and hardened paywalls, HuffPost is taking a different tack. "Look, I spent 15 years working at The New York Times, which is a fantastic news organization, and I'm thrilled to see them thriving with a subscription model that restricts access to their product," HuffPost editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "But I think what we're ending up with is a highly unequal news ecosystem in which the wealthiest, most educated, most spoiled-for-choice news consumer are the best served. I would be very worried about a world in which advertiser-supported, free-to-consumer news just went away. I think that would be a tragic loss." Polgreen discussed the diminishing returns of news aggregation, alternative sources of revenue for HuffPost and why news publishers need to think beyond the Trump administration.

Hearst Magazines' properties garner 1 billion video views per month. For its head of video, Zuri Rice, that number (and the more granular "watch time") is almost incidental: "Total watch time is something that we think about, but total watch time, of course, is really tied to volume," she said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "So I think for us it's thinking about, as we're growing, how are people connecting with our video?" As the company's senior vice president of video development and content strategy, Rice also wants to make sure they're publishing everywhere. "Platforms are parts of our audience and parts of the pie," she said. "One might be a place where we are getting more revenue, another might be a place where we're really connecting to the audience. Of course, it's always great when we have places that do both." On YouTube, Hearst counts 20 million subscribers on YouTube across their properties -- which include Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, and Men's Health. Rice joined the podcast to discuss how Facebook's potential for video is down but not out, how the company thinks about its content and the merits of short-form versus long-form video.

The prickly relationship between news publishers and tech platforms appears to be improving. Look no further than recent moves by both Apple and Facebook to pay publishers directly. "We are seeing better commercial opportunity coming from the [social media] platforms than we ever have," said Josh Stinchcomb, CRO of The Wall Street Journal and Barron's Group. "We've done a couple of big deals this year with platforms and I think the general environment is one where they are valuing -- or they're being forced to value -- quality journalism and recognize they have to pay for it in some way." Stinchcomb joined the Digiday Podcast to discuss the company's digital ads business as a whole ("growing, absolutely growing"), the importance of its events division and how to convince advertisers that news and brand safety go together.

With over $100 million in outside funding, The Athletic is quickly racking up subscribers, recently crossing the 600,000 mark. Hitting 1 million paying subscribers would put The Athletic in rarefied company: "You're talking about companies like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and a couple of others," said Adam Hansmann, the site's co-founder, on this week's Digiday Podcast. "Being in that kind of rarefied air, we'd feel at that point incredibly secure in the foundation we built. We see 90% engagement weekly during busy sports times. We see 80% of our subscribers renew. Getting to that point, we feel good about the platform's permanence. Long term, valuations concerns in the short term aside, we believe there is a $1 billion company to build here, which might sound crazy. But if you look at The New York Times, with their 4 million digital subscribers, they're a $1 billion publicly traded company." "We have a one of a kind business that we've started," he said. "We're going against every instinct that the industry has had." The Athletic, which now has 500 employees, has its share of detractors, who note the company's path to profitability will be perilous with its penchant for paying top salaries for writers. "I think there are 50 million sports fans in the US at least," he said. "The segment of sports fans we're targeting are people that really care. That know the difference between just a headline about a story, 'who won the game,' and the true insight about the teams that you really care about."

Sam Dolnick became the New York Times' mobile editor back when the handheld revolution was only just beginning. "And from there, it kind of shifted to trying to think about how our journalism needs to change." Days after president Trump's inauguration, the paper of record launched The Daily, the blockbuster news podcast that inspired challengers at news organizations including the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Economist, Slate, ABC, and even NPR. The Daily's success also led to The Weekly, a video series that launched on FX and Hulu in June, and is averaging 1.3 million viewers per episode, according to FX. Why FX? Dolnick answers that, and talks about the differences between audio and visual journalism.

For all the hand-wringing about the digital media business, there are several bright spots, ranging from successes in consumer revenue products and wringing licensing fees from tech platforms. That being said, publishers must face the reality that the digital media businesses are likely to be smaller than once imagined, according to Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith, speaking at last week's Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida. "The reality is that the industry is not dying, it's not going extinct, but it's actually just going through a process of slimming down."

Podcasts are trendy now for publishers, but Slate has been doing them for 14 years. Slate now has 25 podcasts that drew 180 million downloads in 2018 and expects to top 200 million downloads this year. Podcasting was 28 percent of Slate's overall business last year, and this year will be half of revenue -- eight figures. "The hardest thing to do is to make something that is big," said Slate president Charlie Kammerer at the Digiday Publishing Summit. "There are 100-150 podcasts out that there that are big and then there are hundreds of thousands of podcasts that 8,000 people listen to." Slate makes money from its podcast beyond advertising, using members-only episodes to drive consumer revenue in its Slate Plus program, which boasts 60,000 members. One major challenge ahead for the podcasting world? Discoverability. It turns out that making a stellar podcast doesn't automatically get you listeners.

Chances are you've heard of Business Insider. But how about Insider, full stop? In this week's episode, Insider, Inc. CRO Pete Spande talks about growing the Insider brand that complements Business Insider, balancing subscription revenue with that coming from advertising, and Insider's reasoning behind their recent merger with eMarketer.

Building publishing products is fraught with challenges, as product leaders have to balance various constituencies -- editorial, sales, marketing -- that sometimes have competing goals -- all while keeping users top of mind. “It serves its purpose,” Barton said on this week’s Digiday Podcast. “It allows both sides of the business to be represented. It allows the newsroom to be represented, and for the newsroom to be funded. There are times we want to minimize that, but there are times to say it’s delivering our goal of delivering quality journalism to our consumers and be able to pay for it.”

Two decades ago, The Fader launches as a magazine for up-and-coming music, entering a crowded space with the likes of Rolling Stone, Spin, Vibe, The Source and XXL. Times have changed. Taking a multiplatform approach, joked Fader president and publisher Andy Cohn on this week’s Digiday Podcast, is “that’s the only way for us to stay alive.”

For Dow Jones, Barron's Group -- home to Barrons, MarketWatch, Mansion Global, Financial News and Penta -- is home to its more niche publications focused on financial decision-making. Digiday's Brian Morrissey spoke to Barron's Group publisher Almar LaTour on this week's episode.

In 2014, Time Out opened its first marketplace in Lisbon, Portugal. The idea was a food hall with restaurants, bars, a cooking school and an event venue, a  curated celebration of the best the city has to offer. Since its opening, Time Out has seen massive success with this market. Just last year, nearly 4 million visitors passed through its doors, and it is largely considered to be one of the best attractions in all of Portugal. Now, Time Out has expanded its marketplace strategy, with open locations in New York, Miami and Boston, and more on the way in Chicago, Montreal, London, Dubai and Prague. Although each location will have slight variations from one another in size and experience, Julio Bruno, Time Out CEO, says the at heart of each will be the Time Out brand: a curation of the best a city has to offer, that feels authentic and fosters a sense of community. On this week's episode of The Digiday Podcast, Brian Morrissey sits down with Bruno to discuss turning a brand into an experience, why print still works and the importance of brand control in licensing deals.

Since short-form video app TikTok, formerly known as Music.ly, burst onto the scene in 2018, it has captivated young audiences with its endless challenges, memes and lip syncs. The app even helped launch rapper Lil Nas X, and propel his hit "Old Town Road" to a record-holding 17 weeks on top of the Billboard charts. To outsiders, the app has a reputation for "cringey" content and comedic music videos produced by and for teenagers. But for Taylor Lorenz, a tech and internet reporter for The Atlantic, TikTok's unusual approach to social media is game-changing. On this week's episode of The Digiday Podcast, Brian Morrissey welcomes Lorenz back into the studio for a deep dive on the app that everyone is talking about, but not many understand. Here they discuss what TikTok is, what sets it apart from other platforms, and why it still has some growing up to do.

National Public Radio is no stranger to the world of audio, which is why embracing the rise of podcasts was a natural move for the company. NPR is a nonprofit media organization that creates content to distribute to its network of affiliate stations throughout the country. For a long time, that content was meant for traditional broadcast radio, but in recent years the company has begun testing out podcast-only content to expand its offering, and supplement its broadcast coverage. For Gina Garrubbo, the CEO of National Public Media, NPR's sponsorship arm, the increasing demand for podcasts has created a richly competitive landscape and an exciting era for the company. On this week's episode of The Digiday Podcast, Brian Morrissey sits down with Garrubbo for a podcast about podcasts. The two discuss whether or not we've reached the golden age of audio, trends in monetization and sponsorship, and why smart speakers are falling short of expectations.

In 2018, After a long career in media, former Politico USA president Poppy MacDonald decided to make the jump to a non-partisan, not-for-profit, data reporting publication: USAFacts. USAFacts was founded in 2017 by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, with the mission to "help inform active citizenship and fact-based debate, and advocate for transparency of and ease-of-access to public data," according to its website. For MacDonald, the organization was an opportunity to bring accurate, unbiased data back into the political conversation. In this week's episode of The Digiday Podcast, Brian Morrissey welcomes MacDonald back into the studio to discuss her new role as president of USAFacts, how staying away from projections translates to staying away from partisanship, and why the positive feedback she's received from lawmakers gives her hope for the future.

In 2015, CNN launched Great Big Story -- a video-first media company that produces inspirational micro-documentaries. For its first four years, that meant building an audience on platforms. Now, as Coupe looks towards the future, she wants to see GBS continue to grow, not just in views, but also in audience impact. On this week's episode of The Digiday Podcast, Brian Morrissey sits down with Coupe to discuss the importance of strategy in diversifying platforms, knowing when to say no and why she wants to make GBS's website their premier online destination.

When Will Welch took the helm as editor-in-chief of GQ in January, he announced that a new era of GQ had officially begun. And this new GQ is not for everyone. In the latest iteration of the men's fashion and lifestyle magazine, Welch intends to home in on the strengths of the GQ brand through a more focused content and an evolving social media strategy. In this week's episode of The Digiday Podcast, editor-in-chief Brian Morrissey sits down with Welch to discuss the new GQ, the evolving role of a magazine editor and the cultural shift taking place in men's fashion.

What was once a digital-first news brand has now become its own full fledged news network. Newsy, which got its start as a syndicator of short-form video, now is a news channel that claims to reach nearly 40 million viewers. The decision to move away from its roots, according to Newsy CEO Blake Sabatinelli, was a result of a shifting digital space. Just last year, the E.W. Scripps-owned brand took over Retirement Living Television's cable carriage agreement, to launch its own, fully-programmed network. Newsy is now on all major connected TV platforms such as Roku, Chromecast and Apple TV, with plans to push their streaming business even further. On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, editor-in-chief Brian Morrissey sits down with Sabatinelli to discuss the transition from digital to TV, what it means to be "anti-partisan" and why he believes that consolidation is inevitable in the growing world of streaming platforms.