The Business of Content with Simon Owens

There’s a common misperception that many non-lawyers have about how legal contracts are written. Most people probably assume that a lawyer writes each contract from scratch, but in reality the lawyer…

Over the past year, dozens of writers have left their mainstream media jobs to launch their own standalone newsletters and publications. In almost every case, the writer monetized his content through…

Max Rofagha didn’t have a background in media prior to launching Finimize. He also didn’t have a background in finance for that matter. It was while conducting research on how to manage his own inves…

Per Grankvist had the kind of media career most journalists only dream of. He was a high-profile columnist for a leading newspaper and a regular face on one of Sweden’s top broadcast networks. But ov…

Peruse a newsstand full of men’s magazines and you’ll probably notice a few common themes. The cover either features a bikini model or a suit-clad male celebrity. Inside, you’ll find stories meant to…

Lon Seidman didn’t launch on YouTube with the goal of becoming a top gadget reviewer. In fact, he stumbled upon that aspect of his career while struggling to run a video local news startup in Connect…

If you had to make a list of technologies that are most important to the average person’s day-to-day life, data centers would sit near the top of that list, and yet chances are you know very little a…

Back in late 2019, nearly all the writers for the beloved sports site Deadspin resigned en masse after butting heads with the private equity executives who owned the website.

After they left, there w…

Abby Glassenberg runs a trade association called the Craft Industry Alliance. It has over 1,600 paying members who work in the arts and crafts industry. It hosts conferences, schedules networking eve…

In just about every article about TikTok, it’s portrayed as a video repository created by and for teens. Indeed, nearly every single one of its top-earning creators are under the age of 20, and polls…

If you traveled back in time 100 years and perused your average newsstand, you’d find dozens of magazines that published serialized fiction. Millions of subscribers eagerly awaited new installments f…

Polina Marinova had the kind of media career that many journalists dream of. After a brief stint at a media startup, she landed a job at Fortune Magazine and eventually got the role of head writer fo…

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

So the format to this podcast is pretty straightforward and consistent. I bring on a media entrepreneur or executive and interview them about their cra…

With the journalism industry in freefall, there’s a good chance that your local newspaper is experimenting with some kind of digital subscription offering. In many cases, this involves some kind of m…

When Naoise McNally and her business partner launched One Fab Day, neither of them had any experience working for a media company. Naoise didn’t even have much knowledge of the wedding industry outsi…

Quick question: how big do you think the global freight industry is? If your guess is in the billions, then you’re aiming too low. According to some estimates, global logistics generate somewhere in …

When Terrell Johnson launched on Substack, he had no intention of rolling out a paid newsletter. He was just trying to escape Mailchimp’s expensive fees and liked that Substack would send his newslet…

Josh Spector was blogging before most people even knew what a blog was. Over the span of a decade, he started and abandoned several of them, often before they had a chance to amass much of an audienc…

A year ago, Jesse Singal had a very traditional freelance writing career. When he wasn’t working on his book, he’d write articles for places like The Atlantic and New York magazine. The mixture of bo…