🔶 #19: "Local journalism is in the wrong business"
Hello and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter, also known as the weekly email that is crazy enough to think there’s hope to be found in journalism even in these challenging times – as long as we recenter everything we do on helping people navigate their lives and participate in their communities.
A lot of the hope I curate for you comes from people smarter than me sharing their thoughts and experiences on LinkedIn. That’s why I made it a point since the start of this newsletter to link out to the profiles of the people I feature, so you can follow them and make your feed a little better every week. (And our feeds really need some help: enshittification is in full swing on LinkedIn too.)
Imagine my joy in seeing this plan coming full circle last week, when The Fix included me in a list of 10 media leaders you should follow on LinkedIn now – along with some of my readers, no less! Shout-out to Ezra, Marcela, Amélie, Isabelle, and Madeleine: it's an honour to post with you.
It seemed only fitting to keep the virtuous circle going by sharing mostly LinkedIn posts in today's 7 links.
Before we get there: you know who is one of the people I always recommend following on LinkedIn? 🧞Matt Cronin, the founder of House of Kaizen and generous sponsor of this newsletter.
Matt regularly shares short video snippets from insightful interviews with subscription experts (not only from the journalism space, and that's a plus), exploring questions such as how to prioritise efforts between retention and acquisition, and how to move from count-based to value-based metrics to measure growth.
Friendly suggestion: join HoK's LinkedIn group, SubscriptionWorks, to add more such insights to your feed – and if your company relies on subscriptions or membership, consider hiring Matt's team to help you find better alignment between your audience's expectations and the experience your product creates for them.
And now, the links – which today are accompanied only by a quote because I had some crazy days and didn't find the time to write all the descriptions I'm doing an experiment 😉