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'NATO for news' wants global publishers on board | Politico expanding into Australia
And Beehiiv CEO explains why his platform is very different to Substack
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Welcome to the Press Gazette Future of Media US newsletter on Friday, 27 February.
We’ve got a subscription discount running until the end of February so if you’re quick you can still get unlimited access to our website for a very low price:
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🤖 Last year Financial Times CEO Jon Slade suggested on a major industry panel that there should be a “NATO for news” via which publishers collaborate on creating industry standards around AI scraping and payment for content.
The founder members are all UK based but have a large international footprint between them: along with the FT, there’s The Guardian, BBC, Sky News and The Telegraph.
They launched yesterday with an open letter to global leaders of media organisations hoping to go beyond borders to sign up many more publishers to strengthen their collective voice.
They’re aiming to make an impact in future talks with the tech giants about how their AI content marketplaces and chatbots provide value back to publishers.
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🎙️In the week Politico revealed it is expanding into Australia for the first time later this year, we spoke to the publisher about its upcoming growth areas.
Audio and video is a “big part” of the strategy for going forward, with a Brussels Playbook podcast just launched and the Canada iteration likely to expand from weekly to daily.
Politico has done a great job of cementing its value among political geeks, and speaking their language directly through their earbuds is about as personal as you can get - exactly what publishers need to do in today’s media market.
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Beehiiv is not yet profitable, and does not expect to be until 2027 at the earliest, but Denk was honest that they are “going for growth over profitability”.
Newsletters have become a competitive space and he wants Beehiiv to be a major player in that ecosystem.
It already has Time, Newsweek, Techcrunch and the Boston Globe on board and it’s attempting to woo other publishers by emphasising its prices (lower than legacy newsletter companies), its ad network (extra revenue for little effort) and growth tools (like paid recommendations).
Although large publishers are likely to only want the newsletter side of the platform, as their website infrastructure is pretty baked in, having the whole gamut of tools is incredibly useful for individual creators and journalists going it alone.
That was demonstrated by Carole Cadwalladr, one of the founders of The Nerve journalism outlet on Beehiiv, who wrote a letter earlier this month to laid off journalists urging them to give it a go: “You can’t rebuild the Washington Post overnight but you can try.”