An interview with Substack Co-Founders Christopher Best and Hamish McKenzie, who recently raised a Series A to enable newsletters from Andreessen Horowitz.
Disney and the Future of TV
TV is moving from a world where distribution dictates business models to one where business models need to fit the jobs consumers want done. That is the best way to understand Disney’s latest announcement.
The BuzzFeed Lesson
The lesson of BuzzFeed is that dominant Aggregators like Facebook have no incentive to act against their self interest and support suppliers.
More on Amazon’s “HQ2”, Two New Paywalls, Subscription Fatigue?
More details are out about Amazon’s site selections, including a 3rd city. Then, two new sites have paywalls, but the paywalls are different in important ways. Plus, why I think “subscription fatigue” both is and isn’t a thing.
Faceless Publishers
The missing piece when it comes to the future of media are faceless publishers. Vox Media’s deal with The Ringer shows the way.
The Local News Business Model
Subscriptions are the future of local news: the key, though, is getting rid of newspapers.
Grantland and the (Surprising) Future of Publishing
ESPN’s decision to close Grantland seems to be more evidence that there is no future outside of massive scale or one-man operations. Bill Simmons’ recent successes, though, suggest that the answer could be the exact opposite.