ByMia Quagliarello

It’s tough being a media outlet these days. Audiences are fractured, referrals from search engines are dropping, and publishers are at the mercy of algorithms they don’t control.

Savvy journalists at forward-thinking newsrooms are not letting this happen to them. Instead, they’re doing the work that arguably has been most critical all along: building direct connections with their audiences. It’s common to do this through email lists and subscription models, but the open social web offers a new, more equitable ecosystem for quality journalism to thrive.  

Two people on the frontlines of this movement are Jason Koebler, a journalist and co-founder at 404 Media, and Ben Werdmuller, the senior director of technology at ProPublica. In this episode of Dot Social, the two talk about their fediverse experiences so far and why they’re hopeful for publishing in the future.

Highlights of this conversation:

  • Addressing online media’s biggest challenge 
  • Solving problems around discovery 
  • Core selling points of decentralized social media
  • Will Threads become the whale in this pond?
  • Ghost vs Substack
  • The threat of AI-generated content and how it plays algorithmically

We invite you to watch the podcast on Flipboard’s PeerTube instance at flipboard.video: 

Please follow us on PeerTube if you aren’t already. When you do, the videos become available via any other platform connected by ActivityPub. (It’s basically like having your YouTube, X and Instagram feeds and comments in one central, interoperable home feed. This is the beauty and the power of decentralized social media!)

You can find Dot Social on Flipboard, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, YouTube, anywhere else you might listen to podcasts.

We will continue to bring you new episodes with fascinating fediverse leaders as we record them. The best way to never miss an episode is to subscribe to the show. Please also rate, review, comment and share, especially if you like what you hear. 

See you in the fediverse!

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