Hi everyone. Welcome to Between the Lines, where we're gonna dig into what's said, what's heard, and what actually might be true. I'm Steve Lombardo, host and CEO of Adfero, and today I'm joined by Sara Fischer. Thank you for being with us, Sara.
Thanks, Steve. Good to see you.
You are an award-winning media correspondent at Axios. You're also the author of the weekly Axios Media Trends. You are also a contributor and analyst for CNN. You were one of the original beginning employees at Axios. How long ago was that?
Nine years ago. It was a wild time because it was right before Donald Trump took office, but right after he won the election, and Axios launched with the premise that we should offer nonpartisan, unbiased news, but do it in a really short-form, smartphone-friendly way. And that idea from our founders, Roy Schwartz, Mike Allen, and Jim VandeHei, whom you know, has proven to be wildly successful.
Because you went from New York Times, Washington Post, and Axios. Nobody knows it. Why wasn't it scary?
Because I wasn't at a point in my life where I had to be so concerned about risk. Everybody is going to be at different points in their life where they have to assess the risk of going to an unknown company or a startup, and that was the right time for me to do something like that.
Since you launched that and your newsletter, how have... it's nine years, a long time, especially in the world that we live in today. What's changed in terms of attention spans or the way you deliver information?
At the time, Axios co-founder Mike Allen had been writing a newsletter for a long while for Politico, but the newsletter economy was still nascent, and developing a media company based mostly on newsletter distribution was still sort of novel. Ten years later, it is not novel. Think about how many newsletter companies, whether it's Semafor, or Puck, The Ankler, or Punchbowl. They're all launching based off of newsletters, so it's a more crowded field. I also think that there's more tools, technologies, products that allow journalists to take more control and agency over their intellectual property. And so they're not as reliant on being a part of a big established newsroom. They can go launch their own business on Substack, and that has put more pressure on media companies to be innovative about how they maintain and work with talent.
And then I'd say the last thing in terms of the attention economy: in the Web 2.0 era, social media was really focused on connecting people to their friends. And what's shifted in the TikTok era, sort of Web 3.0 era, is social media is really focused on leveraging AI to promote what is going viral, and that often is from people you don't know. So social media is less social to an extent, and what's happening because of that is filter bubbles are becoming worse. People are being funneled to content that they personally like because of AI recommendations, not necessarily content that they're connecting with family and friends over. And if you're a creator and you wanna make money on your content, it's really hard to break through because you're competing with so much. So it's definitely a very different time. I'd say I'm still very optimistic about the future of journalism despite all of these changes. It just means that we have to continue to be really innovative.
Sure. Well, so at Adfero, we work with our clients, organizations, corporations, groups who are trying to break through and communicate and tell their story. From what you're seeing in the landscape, who's doing it right? What are they getting right? What are communications professionals getting wrong these days?
I think the communicators that are getting it right have a very clear point of view and they have a simple message. The communicators that get it wrong don't really know what they stand for, and so their message is muddled. How that translates in journalism and in news content: I see a lot of newsrooms that are trying to reach general interest populations. That's just so hard. The newsrooms that are really focused in niche, covering one topic like Hollywood or tech or Congress, and doing it really well, they have a very clear value proposition and message to their audiences, and that's why they've been successful.
You asked me about communicators and PR professionals and what they could be doing better. I think being very targeted and very disciplined and focused about what you're trying to achieve is hard sometimes, because there's a lot of metrics associated with success in communications. If your goal is to get really good quality coverage, it may be worth it to spend two weeks getting to know one reporter at one outlet and developing a relationship with them and educating them about the story, and then having one solid story that might be a stronger outcome than just blitzing 40 reporters and 40 mediocre stories.
What do they need to do to hook you?
The company needs to pitch alongside the agency. They need to be CC'd on the email. They need to reach out to me directly and say, 'We're interested in the story. We're working with our partner at X agency, who's gonna help us facilitate some of these interviews.' But if the company does not go that mile, I assume it doesn't matter enough to them. And if it doesn't matter enough to them, then it's not gonna matter enough to me.
