The Business of Content with Simon Owens

If you’ve been working in local news over the past decade, chances are that your job hasn’t felt very secure. One study estimated that as many 1,800 local newspapers have shut down since 2004, and th…

Back in January, I wrote an article for New York magazine asking whether it’s time for the U.S. government to enact stricter regulation on social media influencers. I pointed to investigations from n…

John Yedinak didn’t have a traditional journalism background when he started his media company. He was working in the mortgage industry when he read an interview with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrin…

Peruse through the vast video archive at The New York Times, and you’ll come across plenty of your standard short documentary films, the kinds with voiceover, b-roll footage, and original interviews.…

Advance Publications is one of the world’s largest media companies. It owns Conde Nast, home to magazines like The New Yorker and Vogue, as well as dozens of newspapers across the U.S. It even has a …

Founded in 1998, MoveOn.org started as a progressive email group and pioneered political online advocacy. Over the past two decades it’s leveraged its massive email list to raise millions of dollars …

It started in 2009 in San Francisco. A couple of journalists got the idea of putting together a magazine, but instead of setting it to print, they would perform it live. Pop-Up Magazine, as the event…

The Atlantic may be a 160-year-old institution, but it isn’t shy about experimenting with new things. It was one of the first traditional publications to go all-in on digital media in the late-aughts…

When Ben Collins launched his blog about Google Sheets, which is basically Google’s version of Excel, he didn’t intend for it to become a full-time business. He was just documenting his learning proc…

In 2017, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed titled “How Antitrust Undermines Press Freedom.” It was written by David Chavern, the head of the News Media Alliance, a trade group that represent…

Name just about any media beat, and you’ll find plenty of people trying to predict the future. Political pundits argue over who will win the next election. Finance journalists report on economic fore…

Subscriptions are all the rage in the media industry right now. Facing diminishing ad rates, publishers have turned to the paid subscription model as a way to draw revenue directly from the users tha…

You can’t write a history of Web 2.0 without including the contributions of Brian Alvey. After getting his start doing design work for traditional publications like TV Guide and BusinessWeek, Alvey t…

In 2014, Ben Thompson, a blogger who writes about the business of technology, announced he was quitting his job so he could write full time. His business model? He would send out four newsletters a w…

Monica Reinagel had no background in broadcasting or radio when she launched a podcast called Nutrition Diva in 2008, but she was a trained nutritionist, had published several books, and was writing …

Just about everyone’s experienced a scenario like this: you read a highly-nuanced article on a topic you find interesting. You then decide to share it on Facebook. Within minutes, a Facebook friend l…

Sam Parr never set out to launch a media company. A few years ago, he was fresh from selling a company he had founded and was looking for something else to do. He decided to recruit about a dozen ent…

While it seems like every publisher, from The New York Times to Vox, is making significant investments in podcasting, one could argue that Slate was the earliest to invest in the medium. It launched …

Chris Grady didn’t know much about the webcomic world when he launched Lunarbaboon, a semi-autobiographical comic about family and parenthood. But shortly after launching the comic, he started sharin…

Would you read a 1,300-word newsletter about garden sheds? What about a 1,400-word piece on lettuce? A little over a year ago, the business-focused publication Quartz made a bet that you would, launc…