The Guardian ventured to Austin to promote its forthcoming daily show, Stateside with Kai and Carter, giving me an opportunity to catch up with its chief advertising officer Sara Badler and its head of North American marketing Vanessa Fontanez Pauley.
There, they and others impressed upon me the growth The Guardian has seen, as its newsroom continues to expand, its audience continues to grow, and it manages to do both profitably and without a traditional paywall. The publisher has a distinctly partisan perspective, something it touts as an advantage, and its new video podcast aims to own the emerging white space of daily video news products.
I wonder if any of this momentum has come as a result of the readership exodus at The Washington Post, which abandoned its resistance mindset and has seen its subscribership nosedive.
12. Chess.com is a sleeping giant
I mean this as a compliment, but Chess.com reminds me of Weather.com in that both are widely used but rarely considered.
While at a Vox Media party Sunday night, I spoke with Chess.com cofounder Danny Rensch about the success of the brand. Rensch, whose life story is more fascinating than The Queen’s Gambit, claims the sport is in the midst of a cultural resurgence, and the evidence is compelling.
It has become a wildly popular source of live-stream content, a devoted app user base, and counts more celebrity endorsements than you would imagine. (I suggested to Rensch that they make a show unmasking famous celebrities as closet chess devotees. I knew Victor Wembenyama and Gus Wenner were in the fan club, but I had no clue about the Wu-Tang Clan fandom.)
Perhaps there could be a board-game roll-up in the future? Only Chess.com knows its next move …
13. Vox Media is a creator collective
The most chic party of the weekend was undoubtedly the one hosted by Vox Media, which packed a room with media executives and podcast talent so tightly that I could barely bring my canapes to my mouth.
Of course, Vox Media is reportedly looking to spin off its podcast network, so it makes sense that the company used the party to fete its talent, including folks like Kara Swisher, Esther Perel, and Astead Herndon. Still, such a spinoff is more complicated than it might sound on paper, and how CEO Jim Bankoff structures such a deal will be of immense interest to would-be buyers.
But the company must be patting itself on the back for making its name nearly synonymous with podcast, a once-fledgling format that is now the center of the content ecosystem.
14. Media works best as a wrapper
As media analyst Brian Morrisey recently noted, the most stable media companies are those for whom media is only the entryway to a different business with better economics.
Morrisey and I originally discussed this thesis when talking about Outside Inc., but I have thought about it a number of times since then. It is true with Hearst, Dow Jones, The New York Times, Semafor, and Time, and I imagine such logic will only extend further in the coming years.
