What Are They Thinking? Jim Brady’s Mobile-Millennial Philadelphia Local-News Adventure
“I’m not from Philly. Worse yet, I’m from New York,” Jim Brady told a recent conference audience in Atlanta. What’s more, which may or may not tell us lots about one of the leading digital news pioneers, he’s a New York Jets fan.
Much accomplished with his early work at WashingtonPost.com—which set an early standard among newspaper websites—and with later innovation at short-lived DC-based TBD.com and in building Digital First Media’s equally short-lived Thunderdome project—his persona is as much tied to those abortive travails as to his earlier success.
First published at Capital New York
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Now, as an outsider, he’s building, largely on his own big dime, Billy Penn. It’s a mobile-first, Millennials-reaching news product in and for greater Philadelphia. Though Billy Penn is only four and a half months old, Brady’s plan calls for two like sites in other big cities by mid-2016 and then a couple more after that. First, though, he’s got to prove out his editorial and business model, and secure some foundation funding (in progress), to stoke Billy Penn’s engines.
What stands out about this excellent Philly adventure is that it’s local. It’s hard to look in any direction in much of Manhattan and not see a Millennials-targeting news company (“The Newsonomics of the Millennial Moment”). But the Buzzfeeds, Vox-es, Vices and Mics all run national to global in target; it’s much harder to make a business work when it is largely circumscribed by old-fashioned terrestrial county limits, vastly limiting potential readership.
Billy Penn isn’t Philly.com, the long-time bundled Philadelphia Inquirer and PhiladelphiaDaily News website. A read through it also provides great contrast to two other newish digital news alternatives in Philly, Philly Voice and The Philadelphia Citizen. Said Philadelphiamagazine, “Of the three sites that have launchedrecently, this is the one that seems to know bestwhat it wants to be when it grows up. There’s a visionhere that tries to do something a little bit different.” In addition to those three sites, public radio WHYY’s NewsWorks is aggressively working the digital news landscape as well.
Brady can sum his critique of the local digital news opportunity in a slide, as he did recently at the 2015 Mega-Conference. Drawn from Brady’s experience and his take on today’s market, it can act as a great discussion guide or checklist in any newsroom in the country.
The results so far:
Overall traffic reached 100,000 unique visitors in February,
So far, 53.3 percent of readers are millennials, or twice their percentage of the local population. Given its birthdate, the site is mobile-first, with its web presence mobile-like as well, built on responsive design. Millennials and smartphones form an inseparable bond, and Brady likes to point to research showing that millennials value smartphones (93 percent) over toothbrushes (91 percent) and deodorant (87 percent). While 55 percent of Americans own smartphones, 86 percent of millennials do.
With the mostly-in-Philadelphia emphasis, Brady said 68.1 percent of readers are from Pennsylvania or New Jersey, or in-market. That’s in contrast to many local news sites that often receive 50 percent or more of their traffic from afar.
While the overall numbers are for its infancy, Brady is more concerned, properly, about engagement, or “time well spent“ as he calls it, emphasizing these points:
• Don’t chase page views;
• Don’t chase stories everyone else is chasing.
• Think of long-term impact of stories.
• Partner with anyone and everyone to get exposure.
Though, at 47, Brady exceeds his target cohort by at least a decade, most of his staff doesn’t: Reporter/Curator Mark Dent is 28; Community Manager Shannon McDonald is 27; Reporter/Curator Anna Orso is 22; Developer Chris Montgomery, 26.
Editor Chris Krewson, an alum of the Philadelphia Inquirer (as online executive editor), Variety.com and The Hollywood Reporter, is 38. “I’m the old man to see that they [his staff] watched the right movies.”
“How on Earth did you do this with six people?” an incredulous conference attendee at the conference asked Brady, after a presentation, two weeks ago.
“Everyone has to wear four hats,” he said. “There aren’t any boundaries of what people do.”
Brady and Krewson believe they understand what Millennials want and that includes lots of news—just news written and presented in more modern ways. That includes Weekly News Playlist, Emoji Storytelling (new mayoral candidate emojis) and local 101s.
It also means lots of features. “No one eats broccoli all day,” said Brady, offering another take on the high/low content philosophy that is au courant.
Conversational headlines populate the site, with the word “millennials’ frequently appearing, as in “The Great Philly Migration: Where new millennials are coming from (and where they go when they leave)” and “Easier booze, cheaper tuition and higher minimum wage: budget takeaways for Philly millennials.”
Krewson said he has found the site’s curation practices “freeing,” allowing Billy Penn to point to the news, written by others, and itself focus on explainers and longer-tail stories.
What about the deep enterprise stories newspapers have long thought synonymous with metro journalism? Billy Penn will fund more enterprise as it grows, said Brady. That’s a page out of the Buzzfeed and Huffington Post playbooks. Build an audience first, with higher-volume, lower-cost content, including well-leveraged curation of local media—and then invest in journalism as the business grows and can support it.
As Krewson put it, “Why would you invest a lot in watchdog journalism until you have an audience to see it?”
What you won’t find: lots of not-in-Philly clickbait. Billy Penn hardly mentioned the Oscars, for instance, since the Rocky franchise long ago proved noteworthy.
Why did a New Yorker pick Philly? Brady read the numbers and the market. Millennials now account for 26 percent of city population, up from 20 percent just five years ago, in what is the fourth largest D.M.A. and fifth largest city in the U.S. In addition, Brady believes that local media—newspaper, TV and radio—haven’t seized the opportunity in front of them.
If the tone and presentation is more Buzzfeed than Inquirer, the business model is a mix, predicated on current learning about local news: Don’t bet on regular old online advertising.
As it grows, Brady is building his revenue model on 1) membership, 2) events and 3) native advertising. Brady, like many, is highly impressed with the Texas Tribune’s membership success.
He is toying with the ideas of charging for “access to experts, discussion and events around issues that matter” for $20 to $50 a year. “You pay a little bit of money to get into a conversation with some chefs,” he said, and then extends that metaphor to topics from music to education to homelessness.
The events strategy, too, focuses heavily on Millennials. Billy Penn is sponsoring monthly “Who’s Next” events, each focused on different topics (Startups, young culinarians, community leadership) and with Who’s Next editorial features like “15 people under 40,” an old city magazine brought up to date with a digital twist: It also draws on the power of the highly sharable listicle. Get listed and you will likely help to insure that word of the listing—and Billy Penn—goes locally viral.
As he targets profitability, he believes the revenue model will be 55 percent membership and events, with 45 percent coming from native advertising. “BrandLand” and “BrandBox” native opportunities offer advertisers their own voices on Billy Penn. Ads appear after the fourth, eighth and twelfth stories in the scroll.
Brady said he aims for Billy Penn to get to break-even by mid-2016. This bootstrapped operation is on track to lose $225,000 this year and close to a half million dollars before turning profitable. Though the start-up is packed to the brim with good ideas, it will demand a kind of fanatical execution to succeed and turn a financial corner. It also requires every manner of partnership and friendship, such as cross-promotions with Fox 29 TV and the help of Greg Osberg. Osberg ran the Inquirer and Daily News under one of its previous ownership incarnations (with five ownership changes in eight years, the Philly dailies are a poster child of business chaos), and has introduced Brady to local ad agency buyers.
How does Brady put his career so far in perspective? He’s got more diverse experience on his C.V. than most of his mid-career peers. Given that experience and serial innovation, we can hope he has much to contribute to digital news in the years ahead. Yet, the short-circuiting of TBD.com and DFM’s Thunderdome have elicited some doubt about whether Brady can bring something home.
Brady knows the question is out there. He’s thought about and talks about the learnings along the way. He makes a related point that makes a lot of sense.
“Look at where the people from Thunderdome went,” he said, and then rattled off a half dozen names that have gone on to top media company positions.
Brady’s right on, on that point. In a sense, all that we’ve seen of the digital news business is early and interim. Almost by the nature of pixels themselves, the early business is transitory; few models or people survive, professionally, from the late ’90s or early aughts. In product, it’s all testing, still very much in progress. In people, though, the wealth of knowledge—and skill—that’s been gained is what really counts long-term.
In early projects, like WashingtonPost.com and its brethren, a huge capacity of talent has been built and now peoples digital news of every kind, from the freshest start-ups to the most legacy of legacy news companies. In that, Brady can rightly take pride, and we can put his challenges in perspective.
Looking ahead, though, is what Brady does best. As Thunderdome collapsed, with internal recrimination and the owners’ decision to sell, Brady knew he didn’t want a traditional job at D.F.M.—or elsewhere. He received numerous contacts on taking over newsrooms and remaking them, but decided that wasn’t what he wanted to do.
He got a good parachute from D.F.M. and invested it in Billy Penn. He lives and breathes its numbers. Take, for instance, the daily newsletter craze, on which Brady has jumped. The subscriber number, of course, is small—1,350—but the open rate of those subscribers is high at 43 percent. That’s a small building block indicative of Billy Penn’s goal strategy: Time well spent.
Spent is another work for Brady’s all-in push on Billy Penn. As much energy as he has expended on his other high-profile ventures, he said, “I’ve never worked so hard.”
