Media

Independent, publicly listed podcast hosting, distribution and advertising marketplace representing thousands of shows across markets. The main platform-neutral alternative for creators who do not want their business inside Spotify or Amazon.

The cloud publishing platform built inside The Washington Post and sold to publishers, broadcasters and brands, combining headless content management, delivery, personalization and commerce. The clearest example of newsroom software becoming a standalone revenue line.

The number-two US radio group, with news, sports and music stations, the Audacy streaming app and a podcast network. Emerged from Chapter 11 restructuring in 2024 with a lighter balance sheet — a case study in what happens when local advertising declines faster than the debt amortizes.

Austin's legacy daily, now part of Gannett, covering city and state government, business, UT athletics and the Austin FC and music beats behind a digital subscription. Its contraction and consolidation into a national chain is the local face of the metro-daily story playing out nationwide.

Part of American City Business Journals, covering Austin real estate, tech, venture funding and executive moves behind a high-priced subscription, with lists, awards and events as major revenue lines. The template for B2B local media: small audience, high willingness to pay, events attached.

A nonprofit daily focused on Austin city hall, land use, zoning, transportation and county government, funded by memberships, donors and sponsorships. A working example of narrow-and-deep civic coverage that a general-interest outlet cannot afford to duplicate.

Austin's PBS member station, longtime producer of Austin City Limits, running local documentary, education and civic programming from its Moody Center studios funded by members, sponsors and grants. Demonstrates how a public broadcaster turns one iconic franchise into national brand equity.

Built on Smart Brevity newsletters, a paid Axios Pro tier and a network of Axios Local city newsletters, and acquired by Cox Enterprises. The clearest working proof that a format discipline plus email ownership can build a national and local business without depending on search traffic.

Founded by Morning Brew alumni, it pairs newsletter publishing with growth tools, a recommendation network, an ad marketplace and website hosting. Positions itself as the monetization stack for newsletter operators rather than a mailing tool, and competes with both Substack and legacy ESPs.

Video hosting, live streaming, monetization and analytics for media companies and enterprises, including FAST channel creation and server-side ad insertion. One of the long-standing answers when a publisher needs a video business rather than an embedded player.

Real-time dashboards, engaged-time measurement, headline testing and historical reporting built for newsrooms rather than marketers. It popularized attention rather than pageviews as the working metric on the desk.

Vogue, The New Yorker, WIRED, GQ, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest and Bon Appétit, converted from print titles into video, commerce, events and subscription brands. Among the first magazine groups to license content to OpenAI while also restructuring editorial operations around fewer, larger global brands.

Daily coverage of publishing, advertising, media buying and platform economics, plus Digiday+ research and its confessions series. The standard read for how ad revenue, programmatic yield and platform deals are actually behaving inside media companies.

An open-source, nonprofit-governed publishing platform with native memberships, paid newsletters and Stripe payments, and ActivityPub support for the fediverse. The main self-hostable answer for publishers who want Substack's economics without Substack's ownership of the audience.

Local television stations across roughly 180 markets, heavily weighted to top-rated news operations in small and mid-sized cities, rebranded from Gray Television. Its business is the purest expression of local news plus retransmission plus political advertising economics.

A privately held mix of magazines, dozens of daily newspapers including the Houston Chronicle and San Francisco Chronicle, Hearst Television stations and a large business-information arm covering healthcare and financial data. The B2B data businesses now fund the consumer media, which is the diversification story most publishers wish they had started twenty years ago.

Sets and maintains the technical and measurement standards the ad-funded internet runs on — ads.txt and sellers.json, the podcast measurement guidelines, OpenRTB, and the transparency and consent frameworks. Cite it for definitions rather than for opinion.

The largest US broadcast radio group by audience plus one of the biggest podcast publishers, selling audio across broadcast, streaming and podcast inventory. Restructured its debt in 2024 and reorganized around digital audio — the clearest example of a tower business repricing itself for on-demand listening.

The International News Media Association, running research initiatives, benchmark reports and executive programs on subscriptions, product, data and AI for news companies worldwide. Its case-study library is the most practical cross-market benchmark source for reader-revenue operators.

Video delivery, player, CTV ad insertion, contextual video intelligence and programmatic demand for publishers and streamers, operating at a scale of billions of monthly plays and ad impressions after combining JW Player and Connatix. Sits precisely where publisher video meets ad yield.

KUT 90.5 for NPR news and local reporting and KUTX 98.9 for Austin music, licensed to the University of Texas at Austin, producing statewide programming including the Texas Standard alongside podcasts and live sessions. Membership plus underwriting plus a live-music brand is a combination almost no commercial station can match.

A long-form interview show recorded in Austin, distributed on YouTube and every podcast app, funded by sponsorships rather than a platform exclusive and reaching audiences that rival national programs. The clearest local illustration of the creator-owned model that legacy media now competes against for both audience and talent.

Supports local newspapers, broadcasters, digital and nonprofit outlets with revenue labs, philanthropic funding initiatives and collaborative journalism programs. The most useful authority for anything involving local advertising, sales transformation or funding models outside the national tier.

Enterprise podcast hosting with dynamic ad insertion, targeting, brand-safety controls and access to Spotify's audience network. The default infrastructure for large publishers and networks monetizing back catalogs as well as new episodes.

Content, subscription, advertising and audience-engagement software built specifically for news publishers and broadcasters, descended from the Newscycle and Saxotech lineage. The back office — circulation, billing, ad order-to-cash — that most local publishers actually run on.

The scale leader in SVOD, now with a fast-growing ad-supported tier past ninety million monthly active users, plus live events, games and a shift to reporting engagement rather than subscriber counts. Sets consumer expectations on price, churn tolerance and recommendation quality that every other video service is measured against.

Owner of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Times and Sunday Times, Australian mastheads, HarperCollins and a stake in REA Group. Its multi-year OpenAI content agreement, reported in the hundreds of millions, set the benchmark price other publishers now negotiate against.

Represents roughly two thousand US news and magazine publishers on copyright, AI training, platform bargaining and postal policy. Its research and advocacy filings are the industry's collective position on what AI companies owe publishers.

The largest US television station owner, plus The CW, NewsNation and The Hill, with Austin's KXAN among its stations. Its agreed roughly $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna would extend that lead and is the bellwether for how far relaxed ownership caps let local TV consolidate.

Harvard's Nieman Foundation project covering the business and technology of journalism, including the annual Predictions for Journalism series. The most-cited independent read on where news-industry money and strategy are actually going, and unusually willing to publish numbers publishers would rather bury.

CBS, CBS News and Stations, the Paramount film and television studios and Paramount+, following the completion of the Skydance merger in 2025. The post-merger company has been restructuring aggressively and hunting further scale, making it the most unpredictable buyer and licensor in the market.

Content analytics for publishers and brands, now part of Automattic and integrated with WordPress VIP, covering conversion attribution, audience segments and long-tail content value. Strong at answering which content actually earns subscriptions rather than which got clicks.

Recurring memberships, tiered perks, gated video and podcast feeds and community for creators across podcasting, video, music and writing, with billions paid out cumulatively. The default answer for a show or channel that wants revenue without advertisers or a platform algorithm in the middle.

Rigorous US data on news habits, platform use, local news attitudes, newsroom employment and search behavior, including the 2025 analysis quantifying click-through loss when AI summaries appear. Nonpartisan, methodologically transparent and free — the safest statistical citation available.

Dynamic paywall orchestration, subscription commerce, segmentation and analytics used by large publishers and broadcasters, built out with the former Cxense data stack. The category leader in deciding which reader sees which offer at which moment.

Covers the publishing business itself — traffic and referral data, subscription counts, layoffs, ownership and AI deals — with regularly updated rankings of the largest news websites. Its search-traffic and platform-referral trackers are among the few public longitudinal series on publisher distribution.

Oxford's annual survey of news consumption across dozens of markets — the canonical source for trust levels, news avoidance, platform dependence, payment rates and AI-in-news attitudes. If a claim about how people consume news needs a citation, this is the first place to look for it.

Owns or operates around 185 television stations across roughly 85 markets plus Tennis Channel and a growing digital and streaming portfolio. Retransmission consent fees and political advertising drive the model, and it is an active participant in the current wave of station-group consolidation.

Music, podcasts and audiobooks in one subscription, plus the Megaphone hosting and ad-serving stack and a video podcast push with a creator partner program. Competes for listening time, for exclusive shows and for podcast ad dollars simultaneously.

Publishing, payments, app, notes and video for independent writers on a flat platform cut, with more than five million paid subscriptions and roughly $100 million raised in 2025. Competes with publishers directly for named talent, because the writer keeps the list and the relationship.

Austin-based since 1973 and a National Magazine Award mainstay, extended from print into podcasts, video, events and a digital subscription. The strongest local proof that a regional magazine brand can charge premium prices when the storytelling is genuinely distinctive.

Austin's alternative weekly since 1981, covering music, film, food, city politics and culture, and historically intertwined with the founding of SXSW. One of the few surviving free alt-weeklies with a durable local advertising and events base.

High-priced subscription-only reporting on technology and media dealmaking, with no advertising at all. Doubles as an authority to cite and as the proof case that a small newsroom can sustain premium pricing when the reporting is genuinely exclusive.

The reference case for reader revenue at scale: a bundle of news, Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic carrying more than eleven million subscribers, with a stated target of fifteen million by 2027 and advertising now a minority of revenue. Also the highest-profile litigant against OpenAI and Microsoft over training data, while licensing content to Amazon — the clearest statement that an archive has a price.

Founded in Austin in 2009 and now the most-copied nonprofit news model in the country, funding statewide politics and policy coverage through member donations, major gifts, corporate sponsorship and a large annual festival, with all content free to republish. Its revenue diversification and republishing strategy are the reference playbook for civic news anywhere.

Disney+, Hulu and ESPN's direct-to-consumer service alongside ABC News, ABC stations, the studios and parks. Its streaming segment reached profitability by bundling and raising prices rather than by chasing subscriber growth, which reset the whole industry's definition of success.

Vox, The Verge, SB Nation, Eater, Polygon and New York Magazine plus one of the larger podcast networks, after absorbing Group Nine. Its move to put The Verge behind a subscription was a public admission that ad-funded scale alone no longer supports quality digital publishing.

HBO Max, the Warner Bros. studios, CNN and a large portfolio of cable networks, in the process of separating its growth streaming and studios business from its declining global networks. Also the owner that shut down Rooster Teeth in 2024 — a reminder of how quickly conglomerate portfolio math ends a beloved creator brand.

The open-source CMS behind a large share of the web plus Automattic's managed and enterprise WP VIP tiers, Jetpack, WooCommerce and Newspack for small newsrooms. For most publishers the practical question is not whether to use WordPress but how to run it well at scale.

The largest single distributor of television-screen viewing time in the US and, by Edison's measurement, the most-used podcast service in the country, with more than a billion monthly podcast viewers. It pays creators a revenue share rather than a license fee, which makes it simultaneously the biggest audience opportunity and the biggest competitor for every media company's talent and attention.