Inside the major media experiment to end email
Inside the major media experiment to end email
Future News 172: The British comms-tech firm making a big splash
Some of the UK’s biggest publishers are taking part in an experiment which could significantly reduce email traffic and potentially boost productivity amongst their editorial teams.
Reach, National World and Newsquest have signed-up to a new platform called Synapse.
The service, which describes itself as the “stories marketplace”, was soft-launched near the end of September and it already has more than 1,100 journalists signed up to the platform, Future News has been told.
The business is the brainchild of Charlie Russell, who has prior experience in the communications-tech world thanks to his time at Gorkana and Dow Jones.
The company also has influential shareholders in the media industry, including Rupert Howell, an ex-Managing Director of ITV and former executive at Trinity Mirror (now Reach), and Carl di Cicco, who has held senior positions at BT and served as an editorial manager at the FT.
The platform connects journalists with communications experts through a marketplace, thus cutting out a laborious back-and-forth email exchange in the process.
Synapse has partly seen a surge in users after some junior journalists claimed they were mandated to use the platform and ignore all PR emails.
Russell has strongly stressed that this isn’t the case, but there was still a minor raucous in the British communications industry which Synapse has ultimately benefited from.
Beyond Reach, National World and Newsquest, Future News also understands that journalists at The Mail Online are trialling Synapse in small numbers. And other hacks are free to join the platform.
The ,main attraction is that journalists could save considerable time and avoid their inboxes getting clogged by unwanted pitch emails.
On the other side, PRs are able to map their interactions with journalists and it also means they don’t have to send out streams of emails. In theory, and it’s still very early days, it should be win-win on both sides.
As for Synapse itself, the business is currently seeking to raise further capital and continue its expansion. And though the platform has potential to go international, Russell is concentrating on the UK market for now.
Synapse is expected to move to a subscription payment model in the future to generate highly visible revenues.
Synapse stats to date:
1,100 journalists onboarded
1,800 PRs onboarded (+80% growth in 7 weeks)
650+ pitches
250+ journalist interactions with pitches (hide, irrelevant, flag, accept)
(2) A coup for Citywire. Talk to your local finance bro and he’ll likely tell you that ‘The Terminal’ is everything. Given the vast array of information on the platform, he’s not wrong to be fair and that’s why even non-Bloomberg outlets try to get on it. Citywire, which specialises in all manner of investment-related news, commentary and analysis, has been able to achieve this, signing a deal with Bloomberg which will see the publisher’s output be accessed on the platform.
(3) Will the MGU overtake the MCU? Every critic and their dog has dumped on Marvel’s most recent TV and film adaptations. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is on the decline, we are told. But what about the Marvel Gaming Universe? Well, Spider-Man 2 has become the fast-selling title in PlayStation Studios' history and developer Insomniac Games is currently working on Marvel’s Wolverine. A perineal reminder that the video games industry is arguably the largest media sector.
PS. For a nostalgia kick, you can spend almost two hours watching a full walkthrough of the original Spiderman game thanks to YouTube.
(4) It’s looking tough for Time Out. Losses have grown at London-listed The Time Out Group to more than £24 million, up from £19.4 million last year. This is despite the company’s top-line growing by 37%. Divisional operating expenses also increased by 34%, while corporate costs also weighed on the business, according to its full-year results announcement. But the company, which has a market cap’ of over £160 million, did report some notable positives for its media division. Digital revenue was up 44% in the 12 months to the end of June as its global monthly online audience grew to 82 million, up from 72 million the year before.
(5) The media bellwether spreading optimism. Amidst a tough macro-economic market, Smith News, the UK's largest wholesaler of newspapers and magazines, recently beat analyst expectations and posted a profit before tax of £31.8 million, a 14% increase on the prior year. The business cited higher cover prices, the World Cup and Royal media interest for a boost in sales. CEO Jonathan Bunting said that his team had “worked tirelessly to maintain service, find sustainable cost savings and secure new long-term publisher contracts”.
(6) The BBC’s next crisis? Michael Grade, chair of UK media watchdog OfCom, made a serious intervention in the debate over the future of the BBC this past weekend. He effectively described its funding model as being wholly supported by a “regressive tax”. The licence fee brought in £3.7 billion for the BBC last year, down from £3.8 billion in the prior year. But the costs of enforcing the licence fee (largely through outsourcer Capita) grew to £137 million.
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