Journalism faces unprecedented challenges, from dwindling ad revenue to technological disruption. Yet its importance endures. Outpost, a cooperative venture, aims to empower publishers with tools to thrive in the digital age.
Why is journalism important?
A free press is vital to an open and democratic world. At it's best, journalism exposes abuses, prevents corruption, builds empathy towards people different from ourselves, and aids in the never-ending quest for the world to be better.
What are the problems journalism as a whole faces today?
- On the economic front:
- It is difficult to make much money from 3rd party ads because news is competing with every other page on the internet for attention and ad rates keep dropping.
- The news industry largely gave up on subscription-based products in the digital age, and are now scrambling to catch up to build the technology and loyal user base so that publications can be funded by their readers and not just advertisers.
- It's a tough business: the story of journalism is one of newspapers and legacy outlets shrinking, journalists losing their jobs, and having to transition to new careers while the new crop of journalists and writers enter an industry where the pay is quite low and career advancement is difficult when the industry is shrinking.
- Technologically:
- Many publishers got addicted to the fool's gold of social traffic, particularly Facebook, which is increasingly drying up. Very few publishers emphasized building relationships with users where they controlled the distribution, such as email lists, leaving them at the mercy of social sites, search (particularly Google), and algorithms.
- Now, with the rise of AI snippets in Google search, it's not clear whether Google will continue to be a reliable driver of traffic to publisher's sites or just simply a parasite that rewrites content so that people don't even have to come to a publisher's site anymore.
- Sites that are trying to transition to membership-centric publishing systems are often burdened with a mishmash of content management systems, email sending systems, and CRMs that are inelegant, inefficient, and hold them back.
What inspired you to create Outpost?
When I was a reporter and then editor at Wired, I grew extremely frustrated with how the publishing tools weren't built to serve readers or build loyalty. In particular, the recommendations at the end of the posts were manual and weren't intelligent. When a new story about an event was published, we could link back to the older stories, but the older stories wouldn't get links to the new story.
To help give readers better ways to dive deeper in to stories and to find more things to read, I left Wired to create Contextly, which built smart internal content recommendations with the goal of helping sites turn drive-by readers into loyalists.
Contextly is still running, and built into Outpost for Luna level and above, but we were never able to build out the full vision at the time of founding, in part because the content management systems publishers were using didn't have the right architecture to do that.
When I came across Ghost, which was shifting into building a membership-centered open-source CMS, I saw the opportunity to actually build the kind of tool I've been wanting to build for a decade: one that would help publishers build a publishing system that was member-centered, intelligent, integrated, and extensible.
For the simplest examples, Ghost allows publishers to publish and send and article in one click. An article can be both published to the web and sent to the correct subset of members at the same time, with no copying/pasting or extra steps. Because memberships are built-in, privileges are automatically enforced. Free members will never see paid subscriber content, and paid subscribers get all of their benefits automatically. With Ghost, none of the usual tricks work because memberships aren't bolted onto Ghost like they are with most content management systems. They're elegant (not janky).
What we realized with Ghost is that publishing is more than content management, so we set out to build the pieces that will help growing publishers grow their membership and subscription revenue with tools that don't belong in a CMS.
Outpost complements Ghost, much as Wordpress is extended via plug-ins, with the benefit that Outpost services work off of Ghost's API and are built with a modern cloud-hosted services model.
Unlike with Wordpress and plugins, there's no constant updating or plugins that slow down your site, create security holes, or go obsolete and stop being updated, or conflict with each other. With Outpost, you have one interface, not one interface for every single plugin.
Why is Outpost a cooperative?
On a practical level, we chose the cooperative model as a way to ensure that it can't be sold to a for-profit company (such as selling out to Google or Meta). Being a cooperative a deliberate organizational choice to give our publishers the assurance that we're not going away or flip to a giant company that will most-usually alter, enshittify, or shut down our service. That happens way too often. Take Revue, for example: a newsletter publishing platform, similar to Substack, that was bought by Twitter and then shut down in less than 2 years.
The decision was more than just practical, the cooperative structure speaks to Outpost's vision. We believe it's possible for creators and publishers to have technology that is built for them, and serves them in a way that's affordable and that is part of the larger effort to build a thriving, independent media ecosystem.
Cooperatives aren't novel for journalism. The Associated Press is a global news service, funded by its publisher members to cover news around the world. Publisher members then get the right to use that coverage to fill out their own coverage.
Why not do the same for journalism technology, where we can build technology that used by many publishers, keeping the costs low for all?
And then you can use group buying power to get lower prices for other commonly used technologies, which Outpost already does this for its members with the analytics provider Plausible.io and the recommendation tech of Contextly.
How would you like to see journalism evolve?
I would like to see more viable paths for small newsrooms to thrive and serve their communities, and for more newsrooms to have tools that help them do their jobs rather than get in the way of doing their jobs. I would like to see journalism become more innovative in how they serve their audiences and information needs, less reliant on external venture capital funded enterprises for their distribution and ad sales.
On the social side, I'd love to see the continued trend of people becoming more willing to spend money to support outlets, writers, artists, cartoonists, and creators of all stripes.
What can readers do to support journalism and creators?
Those of us who are writers, photographers, or artists are also fans and readers. A huge number of people over the last decade have come to the realization that if they want the artist/blogger/news site they appreciate to stick around, they need to support them as much as possible. That can be in the form of paid subscriptions, one time donations, sharing links, and encouraging people to check something out: it's the only way for independent publishers and artists to be able to thrive outside of corporate media.
To learn more about Outpost, visit our homepage, drop us a note at info@outpost.pub or just start your free, no credit-card-required 21-day free trial of Outpost.
Photo by Luis Cortés on Unsplash
