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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Semafor eyes expansion after first profitable year | AI cites 'narrow range' of top newsbrands
Plus Mill Media journalist faces £10,000 county court bill after exposé and Daily Star is fastest grower among 50 biggest UK news websites
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Monday, 2 February.
Today’s newsletter is supported by Q5 - experts in building healthy, high-performing organisations.
Explore their latest insights on where accountability for attracting and retaining high-value audiences really sits.
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💰 Just over three years after launch US newsbrand Semafor is in profit and turning over $40m a year.
With high quality analysis and scoops the title has found a lucrative audience of top business people, which it is monetising mainly through events and newsletter sponsorship (rather like the Press Gazette model).
We spoke to co-founder Ben Smith to find out how they have done it and what’s happening next.
🤖 If LLMs are the future of search this could turn out to be a terrible thing for media plurality.
The Guardian is used by 20% of Britons as a source of news but accounts for 58% of news citations on ChatGPT and 53% on Google’s Gemini.
The BBC is the most-cited publisher on Perplexity even though it blocks the company’s crawlers and has threatened to sue Perplexity for using its content without permission.
The research underlines another truth, which is if your content is freely available online, AI chatbots are likely to steal it and read it whatever you do.
📈 The Guardian was one of the big winners in terms of online audience in December, growing 18% year on year to reach 21.8 million people in the UK (according to Ipsos iris data).
This made it the most popular commercial newsbrand, just ahead of The Sun on 21.4 million.
In terms of time spent online, the Daily Mail was the most popular commercial publisher with 1.5 billion UK minutes (not including aggregator and email portal Yahoo! which was just ahead of it on 1.8 billion minutes).
Despite widespread concern over falling Google referral traffic, 26 out of 50 titles in the top-50 UK news websites grew their reach year on year.
The Daily Star more than doubled its audience year on year to 8.6 million making it the fastest growing site.
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🚨 And Mill Media has highlighted the high cost of conducting investigative journalism in the UK and the extent to which reporters themselves can be targeted.
His only interaction with Mill Media appears to have been in the form of repeated and varied legal threats.
Most alarming for me is a new legal tactic deployed directly against reporter Cormac Kehoe. De Giovanni has apparently sued Kehoe in a local county court (rather than the High Court) and secured a damages claim against them personally for £10,000 unopposed (the reporter was unaware the case was happening).