The magical three-letter word that can help save 'Capital J' Journalism
When chasing coin, it helps to remember they have more than one side.
In 2014 I was hired by The Washington Post from ESPN to help reboot The Post’s national sports coverage. The new role was part of a mandate from new owner Jeff Bezos to stop thinking provincially and realize that The Post was a global brand, with a well-earned and renowned reputation, that could cover a lot more than just the events of Washington, D.C.
I still remember my first days walking into the newsroom that served as the setting for “All The President’s Men,” a movie that inspired a generation of journalists who watched the most powerful person in the world held to account by rigorous reporting.
I remember walking by the old printing press that sat at the entrance of the 15th Street office. I remember walking through the lobby, past the framed front page from the day Nixon resigned. And I remember one of my first questions to a fellow sports assignment editor as I planned our approach to win a national sports audience: “Do you guys do any fantasy football coverage?”
On Wednesday in this space, I shared why I thought doubling down on one of The Post’s biggest strengths was a mistake and unlikely to produce the kind of audience growth needed to boost its subscription base. The Venn diagram for political junkies and Post subscribers is a circle. And marginal customers who do swing by to read a bombshell scoop tend to bounce after reading the story — and that’s if they’ve bothered to click through from the synopsis in a social media post. Further focusing on politics doesn’t expand The Post’s potential audience.
Fantasy football on the other hand …
The Post is not known for fantasy football. Reactions, both inside and outside The Post, to my suggestion of starting fantasy football coverage in the House of Ben Bradlee ranged from skeptical to incredulous. (Like, do you know what we do here??? Do you even rigor, bruh?) I did, in fact, know the work The Post produced. And I knew the audience that came with it. And I knew that to grow that audience, we needed to start producing coverage people didn’t expect from The Post. And it made sense to start with a very popular topic I knew we could cover well with few resources.
One of the most common biases media companies have is they see their audience as a monolith. Moreover, they see their audience for what it is instead of what it can be. But even these existing users have all sorts of interests beyond the primary reason they come to a site, and the more of those interests a media company can serve, the more valuable it will be to those consumers.
So yeah, the typical Washington Post subscriber is a 60-year-old White guy with a white-collar job on the East Coast. The next ring out from that core audience, the marginal Post reader, is a slightly younger White dude, probably a lobbyist or a lawyer, taking the D.C. Metro to K Street and scrolling through the site’s headlines from their desk. But that dude may also like sports. And there’s a decent chance he has a fantasy football team.
Per Statista, 29.2 million people played fantasy football in 2022. To me, that’s a pool of consumers worth dipping a toe into. We did, and in August of 2014 our very early, very limited fantasy football coverage produced over 3 million readers.
Here is where we come to that “magic word” from this story’s headline. The Post didn’t sacrifice anything to acquire those additional page views. That summer, our national sports reporting team covered LeBron James’s return to Cleveland. We teamed with our FBI reporter to probe the NFL’s investigation into Ray Rice assaulting his fiancée. We covered Michael Sam’s first steps in the NFL as its first openly gay player. And we broke down the best players to draft to a fantasy football roster.
Ahhh, there it is. And. That lovely little conjunction that allows you to stitch two ideas together. You love to see it. It’s just so … so … enabling.
The Post can (and will) live off its reputation for political scoops and accountability journalism. That important work should (and will) always be a mainstay of the newsroom. But The Post can simultaneously hold the powerful to account and offer advice on who you should select with the fifth pick of your fantasy football draft. That is one way, a smart way, to reach a new audience and drive revenue.
As important as accountability and investigations reporting is, it is equally costly. It demands vast resources to chase stories with no guarantee they’ll even publish. Newsrooms need products that can help financially support that kind of investment. Finding smart ways to tap into popular coverage areas is a good way to do that.
The full story of Launcher will be told here at some point in the weeks ahead, but that was a primary motive behind its creation. We believed we could reach an underserved audience interested in video games and do so in a smart fashion that differentiated us from existing sites. We were right and it paid off. Over the course of its existence, Launcher earned multiple millions in revenue for The Post. That money funded operations beyond Launcher, and allowed The Post to do more of what it does best.
Too often leaders and decision makers limit themselves by thinking they can’t do something because it doesn’t fit with their image or their brand. That’s reductive reasoning, and it is limiting. In reality, they’re just not thinking hard enough about how a new idea or venture could fit with their existing image or brand.
Yes, The Washington Post is about politics. Yes, The Washington Post is about accountability. But what The Washington Post really is, at its core, is a collection of super talented, insightful people who can deploy their journalistic skills in a number of ways, on a number of topics. They can produce smart, satisfying stories/videos/podcasts to expand The Post’s footprint and help people start to think of The Post in a new light — and showcase the value of a subscription that can regularly feed a number of their interests instead of just one.
Some of our biggest traffic drivers at The Post came from instances where we’d post a story about video games or March Madness or Marvel Movies. People would be surprised to see it produced by The Post and that the writer so thoroughly understood the topic and why fans of that event/product were passionate about it. Those types of stories made The Post more relatable to audiences outside its traditional audience demographic. They grew the audience.
Next week, we’ll get into efforts to diversify content and how they played out both at The Post and elsewhere. In the meantime, if you enjoyed what you read, please take a second to like this post. And if you know someone who might enjoy it too, please pass along the link.
Coming Monday: The news they need vs. the content they want
Hi, I’m Mike. I’m a former editor for The Washington Post and ESPN. In 2024 I founded and now operate Launcher, LLC, a digital media consultancy operating out of Arlington, Va. Want to work together? Reach out on LinkedIn.