In an excellent article in our forthcoming July/Aug issue (if you’re not on our mailing list, register here to receive), Peter Houston writes, “seven episodes in, most podcasters will abandon their efforts”.
This somewhat depressing stat, in an otherwise uplifting piece, makes me doubly pleased that, yesterday, we published the eighth episode of The InPublishing Podcast (nine if you count the short introductory one).
(As a quick aside, we are actually taking a break in August, but will be back in September.)
There have been some fascinating interviews so far, and here’s a takeaway from each:
- the future involves ever closer integration and co-operation between all your editorial outputs – print, web, social, podcasts, events (Episode: Rob Attar, editor, BBC History magazine)
- weekly newspapers need to operate more like dailies via a ‘journalism-first’ approach, a preferable term to ‘digital-first’ (Katie French, editor, Basingstoke Gazette)
- entertaining content is not enough; consumer media needs to incorporate an e-commerce element in their offering, like MCN Compare (Rob Aherne, MD, Bauer Media’s motorcycling portfolio)
- successful publishing brands all have one thing in common: editorial excellence, integrity and consistency (Caroline Law, editor-in-chief, The Week)
- authentic, deep-rooted passion and empathy for your readers and their interests is a good place from which to start a new publishing venture (Hannah Taylor, editor, The Delicate Rébellion)
- a vibrant LinkedIn group can be the springboard to a successful publishing brand, but it needs full engagement; interact, don’t broadcast (Lucy Brazier, publisher, Executive Secretary)
- traffic numbers alone are not enough; you have to know who is visiting your site, and what they do when they visit (John Barnes, CDO, William Reed Business Media)
- clever aggregation and repurposing of archive content can drive deeper engagement, greater reach and increased revenues (Sam Kinchin-Smith, head of special projects, London Review of Books)
Thank you to all our guests so far and to Ciar Byrne for her expert hosting, and also to our first sponsors, Atex and Acorn Web Offset. Our next podcast will be published on Wednesday 2 September.
