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The Hill bucks the trend | California Post launches into 'news desert'
And Ben Smith tells Press Gazette about how Semafor reached profitability in three years and its plans for expansion
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Welcome to the Press Gazette Future of Media US newsletter on Friday, 30 January.
📈 The Hill was one of very few major US news sites to grow their Comscore audience reach in Q4.
As a politics news site it’s been able to make the most of a relentless news cycle in the past year. But not all news and politics brands have benefitted in the same way.
The Hill’s SVP of editorial content Bill Sammon told me why the breaking news team has been expanded from two to seven frontline reporters.
That leaves other members of the team free to dig deeper into the issues.
Sammon also believes the non-partisan nature of The Hill is increasingly important as audiences - both policymakers and the general public - want a simple first take on the news.
You can read my full interview with Sammon here.
👨💼Another publisher that has been bucking the trend is Semafor.
In October 2022 Semafor came fresh into a market that was already moving away from the traffic era based around digital advertising. Rather than being saddled with a legacy way of doing things, Semafor started from scratch.
You can also listen to the full interview with Ben, which touches a lot more on the state of the media as a whole, in our Future of Media Explained podcast on Apple, Spotify and other podcast platforms.
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☀️ Meanwhile, the New York Post is one of many newsbrands that have seen falling traffic in recent years. But nonetheless this week it launched a new sister title for California.
I spoke to New York Post Group editor-in-chief Keith Poole and California Post editor-in-chief Nick Papps about why they were making this big bet.
It’s quite something to see this level of investment - creating a team of around 100 people to produce a print and digital product - at an unforgiving time with what feels like a steady stream of job cuts.
Clearly News Corp sees a gap: Poole characterised California as a “news desert” with “one of the lowest professional journalists per capita in the country, despite being the second biggest media market”.
But my favourite line from Poole was that “it took 221 years for the New York Post to turn a profit. We believe that the California Post can do it a bit quicker.”
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This week the updates included evidence from actress Sadie Frost and UK politician Sir Simon Hughes, as well as the claimants’ legal researcher Dr Evan Harris who denied paying witnesses for testimony.