Introducing Digiday Live, our new podcast

Publishers are going podcast crazy. We’re not immune. For the past 15 months, we’ve recorded a weekly interview series, the Digiday Podcast, which features leaders from the media and marketing industries.

Now, we’re complementing the Digiday Podcast with Digiday Live, a compilation of the best sessions from the 18 summits we’ll put on this year. The first batch of podcasts on Digiday Live come from the recently completed Digiday Publishing Summit, held in Vail, Colorado, from March 30 to April 1. The summit focused on the challenges and opportunities publishers face in the sudden shift to a platform era.

Here are some highlights:

• Justin Smith, CEO of Bloomberg Media, spoke on why publishers are making a mistake in chasing scale — and becoming over-reliant on platforms like Facebook. “I’ve never understood a fully distributed business model, where your owned and operated traffic is a tiny minority,” he said. “It’s an exciting idea conceptually. It’s exciting, this notion of being able to reach hundreds of millions of people. There’s a rush to this scale, but what is the business model at the end of this rush?”
• Philippe von Borries, co-CEO of Refinery29, discussed why the upstart women-focused media company doesn’t want to build multiple brands. “Building 10 brands at once is almost impossible,” he said. “Building one brand that means something for a long time is hard enough. Our vision is not to build a portfolio of brands but to build one umbrella brand, just Refinery29.”
• Kim Lau, gm of The Atlantic, gave that publisher’s experience on Facebook Instant Articles. “It’s a mixed bag,” she said. “I think the jury’s still out. It’s interesting because one of my assumptions going into it — and one of the reasons we went all-in — is that one of the big value proposition was this was going to be a better user experience and we’d see better performance on all of our content. [But] it’s all over the map.”

Over the next week, we’ll roll out eight more podcasts of key sessions from the Digiday Publishing Summit. Then we’ll have session episodes from the Digiday Video Anywhere Summit, which concluded yesterday.