The Guardian is finally profitable! Can it keep it up?
Yes, The Guardian made £800,000 this year, which is a two-bedroom flat in London! But that's actually really good news because they were losing millions for years. Can they keep it up? Absolutely! Because most of their revenue is now from digital and it is from readers without a paywall. So, congratulations Katharine Viner and team! Who knew you could get good news in journalism?
What is going on at The Markup and The Correspondent?
The Markup is a highly anticipated tech publication out of New York, which hasn't published anything yet, but got a lot of money from big philanthropy and it kind of imploded in the past week because of disagreements between the co-founders, because of some questionable management practices, and most of the newsroom quit. The Correspondent is a news org out of the Netherlands, which had a massive crowdfunding campaign to expand to the U.S. Now, their first American employee quit when she realized that they weren't actually going to open a newsroom in the U.S. but we're going to expand to English language content from Amsterdam. And the question is whether people who participated in the campaign were misled. Two themes in common between these two stories. One) journalism has a bad management and business culture or not much of one. Two) Innovation is hard. Startups fail all the time. Now, what happens in media - it's all over Twitter. It's all in the news because we love to cover ourselves. And three) because it's usually funded by the crowd and not just a couple of venture capitalists. It makes a lot of people angry when it fails.