How many things are you subscribed to right now?
How many news organizations or writers or blogs or podcasts do you pay for every month?
How many do you plan on being subscribed to at this time next year?
The growth of the subscription model has been one of the biggest developments in online journalism in the past few years. In the sports world, where my research is situated, this is most clearly seen by the growth of The Athletic, the subscription-only site that’s expanded into every major pro market in the U.S. and in November received $40 million in venture capital funding.
But in 2019, it feels like there’s a bit of a reckoning coming. There’s a subscription-pocalypse looming. And newspapers are going to get hit by it.
The subscription model makes a lot of sense for publishers. The advertising-based model that supported the industry for 100 years doesn’t work in a digital world where Facebook and Google swallow nearly 60 percent of all online ad revenue.
A subscription model provides a steady stream of income that is not reliant on traffic. In theory, this incentivizes better stories because publications don’t have to chase clicks. This is The Athletic’s model and it’s working well for them.
But the answer for newspapers is not to throw everything into a subscription model. In fact, the subscription-pocalypse is a potential two-pronged problem for newspapers.
The first lies in 50-years of institutionalized practices. What we’re seeing in the digital world is that subscription models make the most sense when they target readers of a specific writer, topic or voice.
The implicit promise of a subscription site is that you are getting something worth paying for, something you can’t get anywhere else. It’s what my friend Dr. Andy Billings called the HBO model — as long as it has one thing you can’t live without, you’ll keep paying for it.
The problem for newspapers is the idea of giving people something they have to have. Newspapers are mass media outlets, which mean they have to reach a broad audience. In sports, that means they have to have a game story because somebody might not know who won. That’s not the audience that a subscription-only site is after.
And that leads to the second potential problem for newspapers. Eventually, consumers’ subscription budgets hit a wall. We can’t assume people are going to subscribe to everything. You can’t expect people to subscribe to their local paper (which is vital to democracy, we tell them) AND The New York Times and the Washington Post (because Democracy Dies in the Dark) AND Netflix AND Hulu AND HBO Go AND The Athletic AND ESPN Plus AND their favorite podcast on Patreon AND …
You get the idea.
How many things are you subscribed to?
How many will you be subscribed to one year from now?
The subscription-pocalypse is coming.
If you’re running a newspaper, what are you doing to make sure you make the cut in that crowded field? Obligation isn’t enough.
Brian Moritz is an assistant professor of digital media production and online journalism at SUNY-Oswego and the author of Sports Media Guy.
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Joshua P. Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
AX Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Millie Tran There is no magic — you’ve got this
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Cherian George Fake news wins in Asia
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Tushar Banerjee Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
Tshepo Tshabalala Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers
Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Mandy Velez Putting the social back in social media
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Axie Navas The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Cory Bergman Journalism as a technology service
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing
Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
Elva Ramirez News — but make it cinematic
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Juleyka Lantigua Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Moreno Cruz Osório Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Whitney Phillips Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail