What's New in Publishing May 2026

Speaker A: Welcome to the High Value Publishing Podcast. Discover digital revenue, audience development and technology strategies to help grow your publishing business. Access show notes and all of our previous episodes@nearviewmedia.com and uh, now here's your host, Eric Shanefeldt.

Speaker B: Hey gang. Welcome to this week's High Value Publishing podcast. I'm really excited. This is our first week of the month and it's time for June. Jez Walters with what's known publishing to join me and we're going to take a look at what are the most important things that we think have happened over the past month that you should be aware of as a media operator. Um, Jez, how you doing my friend?

Speaker C: Yeah, great to be with you again, Eric.

Speaker B: Good deal. Um, let's just dive on in. I think we've got some really good stories you and I were talking about earlier today. Um, let's dive on in and talk about your first one.

Speaker C: All right, Eric. Well, I'm really excited to share this story. I think it's a really, really good one. So walk which is the World Advertising Research Council came out with a paper ah last week and it was Consumer trends. What's front of mind for consumers and what is that 78% of people now want AI generated content to be clearly labeled. Now how does that impact publishers? Well there is an opportunity here to differentiate your content and away from commoditized AI generated content. Now a third of websites now coming on stream are AI generated. Now what I really like about the story as well is the alliance for Audited Media which is comes out of Schaumburg in uh, Chicago. They are now doing an AI certification and they've got a whole rule book about what they're looking for, etc. You don't necessarily need to go down that route. You can do your own seal and tell your audience what you are producing and how you are generating your content. It's just about differentiating your content and letting your audience know whether it's AI generated or human generated and the judgment behind it.

Speaker B: I love this quote by Nadar. Not AI is great at summarizing but we can't replicate as human judgment.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker B: Uh, and then I, I just noticed this quote in your article too here on what's new in publishing Jazz that talking about Google Danny Sullivan urging authors to create unique, authentic non commodity content. You and I didn't plan this but this is going to tie into a story we're going to talk about later.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly that Eric. So I just think you know, it's another way of making your content more special. And the audience needs to know that.

Speaker B: I think that's absolutely brilliant. And I think that, um, I mentioned this before. We have a radio station here, a talk radio station, 850 KOA in Colorado. Um, and they specifically every, at the beginning of every one of their news segments they will say, you know, 100 human, no AI generated. So, you know, I think those kind of things are coming into play that, um, those outlets that uh, that people can trust, um, and it only takes one or two times to destroy the trust of a reader and lose them. So I think this is brilliant. Um, so my second one is kind of more of a practical tip and it's something that actually was released a little bit ago, but I'm starting to see it more and more in play in mainstream now and is basically how publishers can, can ask their readers to choose them as a preferred source. So basically, um, we'll put this link in the, in the show notes, um, uh, on, on the blog. But bottom line, here's how it works, right? So here's um, uh, a site I work with, BizTimes Milwaukee. You can see this set us as a Google preferred source. What this means when someone does it is when they click it and set you as a preferred source when they do a search in Google, your content is more likely to appear much higher in the page, right? So when you click it, it literally takes people to a page like this. And you know, there's the exact syntax, if you want to know, there's the exact syntax of how you create the link. Um, but then they can say, okay, yeah, I want to set Milwaukee Biz Times as a preferred source. So now how's that play out? I then went out and I did a search for i794, which is a big project going on over in Milwaukee right now. And as I did it, look what the top source was in the Google News pack. Biz Times, Milwaukee Business News, i74. So they're showing up as a preferred source in there. So I think this is brilliant. It's very easy to implement. Uh, you can do it up here. Folks like the Times, they've integrated this prefer us on Google right next to their social sharing. Um, so I think this is a, to me, this is definitely worthwhile integrating for publishers to get people to prefer you as a source in Google to grow your overall search traffic. And I believe it also, I don't have proof of this, but I'm pretty sure it's going to affect news and Google News and Google Discover too. So ah, that's my story.

Speaker C: Eric. When did that come out roughly? Was that over the past few weeks?

Speaker B: I haven't, no, I think it was late last year that that came out. But I've been just seeing it a lot more and more especially over the past couple of weeks. So it's kind of an older story but it's, it's, I don't, I'm not seeing a uh, lot of publishers have implemented it yet and I wanted to bring it to the forefront.

Speaker C: Yeah, no, that's brilliant. I haven't seen any news publication or in the trade, you know, the, the trade press talk about this at all. So it's news for me. So I'm going to be running that next week. I think it's a brilliant story.

Speaker B: There you go, There you go. I'll uh, be putting up a how to article on my site here very soon.

Speaker C: Yeah, great. Okay, well I'll link to that as well Eric. So are you ready for my next story?

Speaker B: Let's do it.

Speaker C: All right, so this one's about newspapers and magazines, but the printed version. I know that we focus really on digital pretty much primarily but you know, media posted a very good article this week and it was just saying that um, there is tight supply coming downstream as mills cut newsprint production and ink and etc. So it's a problem with ink, it's a problem with paper, it's a problem with distribution. Is it a major problem now? Now, no, but inflation's running hot. What they're thinking is that ah, in a couple of months time if the geopolitical problems don't improve, things might get much, much tighter. And so really it was just a heads up for people with a printed magazine or a printed ah, newspaper variant of their um, publisher portfolio to make sure that they lock in the prices now and do an audit of where they are with newsprint and talk to their suppliers and just make sure that they're buffered for the next few months and perhaps leading on a little bit further into the future about preparing now for what could possibly come in in two or three or six months time.

Speaker B: And this affects not just newspaper but other types of paper that magazines would be using too.

Speaker C: Absolutely. It affects all, all aspects of a publisher's print, physical, um, um, product, whether that's newspapers, magazines, it doesn't matter. They're all going to be affected by this. And it's a very, very good article on Media Post. And they're just saying look, if you're a publisher and you have that in your portfolio, a printed product. Just make sure you're. And talk to your suppliers now so that you're buffered. It will be the people who are talking to their suppliers now and just making sure there's contingency in place that you know are going to be in a good place. And also you know, it's an opportunity to talk to your readership as well and perhaps prepare them if you feel that things are really going to tighten up. Perhaps, you know, there's a few editorials that can be a paragraph in there just informing them. But um, that's probably a uh, plan

Speaker B: B. I know that in the case of a lot of B2B trade publications, um, print has gone away. There's a few B2B trade publications that still have print and they're still profitable and it's actually a competitive advantage for them. I know that for a lot of news outlets, um, local national print has become obviously less and less of a thing. I do think that where print is still going to play a uh, big piece is going to be in premium paid publications. Um, like especially city and regional publications.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: You know, 5280 magazine out of Denver or D magazine out of Dallas or something like that. I think those are going to still. Those premium print publications that, that are paid I think are still going to be able to afford that. But it's going to be very difficult for purely ad supported businesses to I think um, yeah. Survive on print much longer.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. I think it's sign of a wider trend, isn't it? But um, yeah, it's good that point, you know, if publish still have that not to get caught out.

Speaker B: Yep. All right, well my, my next story is going to be something uh, again something more, more kind of practical that I've been uh, working on with a lot of my clients for example. And. But it's where I think AI is really going to have the biggest impact on publishers that I'm not seeing a lot of coverage on. We've talked about all the generative AI impacting search traffic for large folks. We've talked about whether media companies should or should not optimize for generative AI if they block, should block AI bots from their site licensing to AI. We talk about all that stuff. But to me where AI is have the biggest impact on media companies is in the operations side of things, um, both editorial and other operations. So I'll share with you a couple of things that um, I've done for a couple of my clients. I'LL try to keep it really short, but I wanted to share, for instance, this. One of my publishing clients, um, publishes a lot of regional business news. Um, but, uh, they also, um, are tagging content not only by category, but they're tagging content if it's about a specific person or about people or key companies that are mentioned in the, in the article as well. So they've been doing all manually for several years on, on that. And it's great because it has a nice little index of people, index of companies you can cross reference. And it's, it's, it's a, uh, it turns their, their stories into also a database. Not just, uh, not just, not just news items. However, big problem. We would have a lot of duplicates of different entities. For instance, um, for people. Um, sometimes it would include a suffix like junior. Sometimes it would not include it. Sometimes you'd have doctor so and so. Sometimes it wouldn't include doctor. Sometimes it would be doctor period, doctor without a period. Sometimes it would be right. There were all these different iterations. Um, in some cases the same entity may have five different iterations that editors had tagged it with, not realizing there was already, ah, a duplicate entry in there. And so we did this for both people and for companies. And here's what's fun. I worked with the editor, with the editor on this particular publication. And within one afternoon we vibe coded this using claude code and created a whole plugin that we dropped into their WordPress website. Now, we tested on a staging site first, but we tested. And I'll walk you briefly through how it works, but I'm only putting this out because this may not be applicable to every publisher. But I want you to begin to think about what could you do in your publication? What are the things that you need to, uh, better operationally utilize AI? So we broke into five phases. Phase one, let's scan for duplicates, right? So we scan for duplicates. Uh, when we did the first run through this, there were like tons of them. Um, now we're getting down into like kind of the bottom of the barrel and duplicates. But it's like, you know, is it Kate Hill or Katie Hill, possibly Anthony Rossi Jr. Anthony Rossi Senior. Are those the same person? John Stolen work. John Stolen work, Junior. Are those the person? So it would find these different things that would say, okay, whether it's a high or medium confidence. Then we'd say, okay, let's go to the merge duplicates and let's find out. So this is where the editors can actually do action and they would, they would say, okay, um, if they already know the answer, they could choose whether to leave it alone, whether to merge this one into that one, whatever it may happen to be. If they didn't, they could click this little Research Online button and it used Anthropic Claude's API. It would go out, it would search the Internet for all the information you could find about John Dye and Jonathan Dye. And it came back and said, these are actually two very different entities. Do not merge them. And what's even cool is they even overrode these settings over searches. So don't leave alone, leave alone. Um, and then the editor could just click Apply. And it would, in the case of where it's merging them, it would keep the right entity, merge all the posts from that, from the uh, duplicate entities to the proper entity, and then delete the duplicate taxonomy items automatically. Then we could go out and we could scan posts, whatever range we want, whatever categories we want, scan posts, find companies, find people that in the post automatically using AI. AI would read the story, look at the taxonomies, assign it. If it found a new person, it would recommend a new person or recommend a new company. Editors could say yes or no. It would apply those tags. And then the last step we said, well, okay, now we have this index of all these people. Um, but let's say, you know, we have an index for air, Aaron Bilyeu, what about Aaron Billy, who is he? And we would have an index with these stories about that person, but no information about that person. So he said, hey, let's go out using AI. Let's go out, let's research this person. Let's write a business, ah, reporter type summary of who this person is. The editor can, and then bring it in here, the editor can override it and then click Save Description and it writes that description to that person's, um, profile. By the way, we also keep track of when that description was last updated. So we can go back in, let's say a year later and show me, hey, show me all the ones that we haven't updated in last year. Let's re update them. So this is an example of a plugin that neither the editor nor us normally knew know how to code plugins, but Claude does. We just put this together. We knew that how it wanted to work, we knew what we want to do. We vibe coded this, created this plugin, put it in. I wanted to share that as an idea. The other thing I wanted to share was a couple of kind of reporting things. Um, so One is an email deliverability report where we have Claude go out once a week, like look at all, uh, you could do this for your own entity. Uh, you could do this for, you can look at all your analytics, all your metrics and say, hey, create an overall report. But this was an email domain reputation deliverability report and it actually identified my own domain. New Year View Media has critical action required because it found that there was an entity out there at hostpapa who was trying to spoof my domain and send emails out as if they were me. Now good news is I'm already at a, uh, DMARC quarantine policy. But uh, we're going to move this to our reject policy because we're not, we're not getting any information back. We've reached out to abuse at Host Papa. They won't even talk, they won't even respond. So for all the things they say, they'll do this. They don't. Um, so we're just going to take some steps to quarantine this all out. But this is an example. Had we not been running this report on a regular basis, I wouldn't have known about this and taking steps to protect my email reputation. And so we're doing this for all of our uh, media clients we work with. And then last one was we created another report. Again, Claude happens to be my favorite tool right now. Chat GPT is very capable as well. Gemini is getting there. Perplexity, um, is not yet, um, Claude happens to be my preferred tool. But this is an Ad Ops report and we have a lot of publishers we work with who say they're running website ads through Google Ad Manager or Broad street ads. They're running uh, meta ad campaigns on behalf of their advertisers or LinkedIn ad campaigns on behalf of their advertisers. They're running sponsored content that they're tracking in Google Analytics. Um, eventually we're going to bring in email systems and be able to track sponsored emails or email advertising and put that in. But literally we created a prompt that would went out to Broad street, went out to Meta, went out to Google Analytics, found all the, all the elements we've done for this particular client who we've redacted, um, and pulled together a report for everything that this client had done with this publisher over the last year. And there's every single campaign, every single impression, clicks, ctrs, there's their meta campaigns they did, here's their sponsored content with the views and active users. This would have taken, you know, an ad Ops person three hours or so to put together three minutes once we got the prompt right. So these are some of the examples of AI impacting media organizations at the operations level, editorial, ad ops, audience development that I think are going to be fantastic. And I'm hoping in next month I may even have an example of some great AI interactions for readers and even for advertisers. So there you go. That's, that's, that's my next story.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's another fantastic operational story. Okay, you ready for my next one?

Speaker B: Let's do it.

Speaker C: All right, so this is a, uh, story from out of Spain. Actually. It's a publication called Diario Vivo. And um, what they've done is they've turned their journalism into a live experience. So what they would do is they would go to a cafe and talk about on stage, they have a little mini stage set up and they would talk about the stories they were working on and why they ran them and a little bit more in depth knowledge about these stories. Anyway, these have become so popular with their audience that they're now into 1,000 seater venues all across, um, parts of Spain. And they've done very, very well with it. And there is now a live journalism network. Um, I'll provide Eric with the, the link. But it's just good way in a, you know, in an age that's really heavily digital of people going out in a night. And Diario Vivo doesn't even tell the audiences what they're going to talk about, but they've become such a theatrical event. It just really binds the publication to its audience and really forges a much deeper connection. And um, Collective in Germany is doing that for their investigative reporting and actually going on stage and saying why they're doing their particular investigation, how far they've got to it. Now that's a little bit more serious. But the whole live journalism network and all the publications doing this is just another way of creating another product within the portfolio that's perhaps a little bit out of the box and actually creates really good community engagement.

Speaker B: I love this, Jez, because to me it's a new way for media companies to diversify into events and create something, you know, face to face events. I, uh, could see this possibly even working in a webinar format, but I think that the face to face adds something to it. Um, I think this is a brilliant idea. It also ties into the whole trend in the um, kind of the individual creator space where we can turn our editors, for example, into stars and really let them integrate, let them Talk, let them, uh, you know, interact with our, with our readers. I especially see, I think, see this working well for local media companies. Local, regional, absolutely. Like you talked about, d' Audio Vivo specifically focused in Spain. Um, you know, I could see this working for a regional business publication or a regional news outlet or even like a city and lifestyle publication. I think this is, this is a fantastic, neat idea to take our editorial expertise and turn it into a whole event product.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. And you know, 10 years ago I did one of these for Bob Sachs in London. He came to London and I thought, right, we'll get our audience involved.

Speaker B: Oh, that's awesome. I love Bob.

Speaker C: Yeah, I know you know him very well, Bo Sachs, and many of you do subscribe to him, I'm sure. And, um, you know, in the top of London Tower, it was open air. It was the summer we, we, we did an event just like that and we got some really good people and they really enjoyed it. It's that sort of thing, you know, that's fun.

Speaker B: I absolutely love that. Um, so I'll go on to my next one. Quickly here. My next one. Again, not really a story, but something that I thought was brilliant. Um, got to catch a little bit of, um, some of, some of what, uh, Danny Sullivan presented on at uh, Google Search Central in Toronto last, last month. Um, so Danny Sullivan, you know, is kind of the godfather of SEO. He's kind of a spokesperson for Google on there. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant guy. Um, but what I thought was really interesting here was talking through all of. He brought it down to the absolute core. So a lot of media companies are very worried about generative optimization. Are we optimizing our content to be found in generative search results? Right. Google search summaries, you know, Gemini chatgpt, whatever may happen to be, are we optimizing it? Uh, by the way, that's a whole separate discussion. Go check my website. I have a whole discussion I did with Local Media association on whether media companies should actually allow themselves to be indexed by generative bots or not. Hint, it's not really good for most media companies. Um, but go check that out. But if you decide that there's a whole new industry out there now of these generative, uh, engine optimization, GEO or as he said, or AEO or AI SEO or LLM SEO. Right. All these different acronyms are coming out there, but it's all about, hey, how do you optimize your content for generative engines? And I thought this was actually brilliant. If you want good generative optimization, do good Search optimization, there is no difference. If you're doing the really good job of good search engine optimization, you will be discovered by the generative engines, period. It's not a separate discipline. Even though all, every expert is coming out of the woodworks trying to tell you that generative is different. Generative is different. You need to do this and oh, you need to freak out because you're not yet optimized for generative optimization. Um, but I, I love what we got into here. Then the whole thing of good. What is good SEO. The, the, the, the heart of good SEO is having great content for the people you serve. That's at the heart of this. And this is kind of tying back into some of the things you talked about previously. And another story we'll talk about a little bit later, but he was talking about, okay, if you want to show up in AI, here's what you got to do. Follow SEO fundamentals. Make good use of structured data. That's an SEO tactic. Have great page experience on their SEO tactic. But more than anything else, unique, authentic, non commodity content, that is the absolute key to success. And that by the way, for any media company is going to be your key to success. And riding out this whole generative and AI change, if you can have unique, authentic, non commodity content, you will find a way to win. And then he defined what non commodity content is. I won't go too deep into this, but then he gave some examples which I thought were brilliant. Right? Commodity content. Top 10 things to consider when buying running shoes versus why this customer shoes collapse after 400 miles. A wear pattern analysis or 2024 kitchen trends. You need to see commodity or marble versus grape juice. Why I refuse to install stone for a family of five that's non commodity. So I just thought this was actually brilliant. Even though he was talking about generative search engine optimization. Generative engine optimization, Geo. It came back to say, look, it's all about SEO. And I'm still going to all publishers I talked to today and say, don't worry about generative other than whether you want to block it or not. Focus on really good content that is unique, that is authentic, that is non commodity and focus on really good SEO tactics around that and you will win. So that's my soapbox. I'll get off my soapbox. But it was really good to see, um, Danny Sullivan re emphasizing that.

Speaker C: You know, that's a really good segue into my story. It's exactly the same actually. It's a theme throughout this podcast. So, um, as you know I'm based in Europe and Stern is one of Germany's most famous iconic media brands. It's a celebrity lifestyle magazine, but over the years it's broken some huge scoops in Europe. It's one of the top actually, uh, publications. It's very famous. So there are essentially a print magazine. And uh, what they've been doing, of course, is going into the digital space, but they haven't been doing it well. And um, what they haven't been able to do, particularly in a, uh, in a landscape where celebrity news is really commoditized now you've got such a big landscape of influencers, creators, etc. YouTube channels, they haven't been able to monetize their digital version. So whereas as a print product they were incredibly successful, now as a digital product they haven't been at all. So what they had to do was not look at the, the paywall, the funnels, the optimization. Uh, they had to go back to scratch. So they did focus groups. They re looked at their content from the ground up, uh, because it, you know, at a time of ubiquitous content, what was making their content stand out? It turns out, not a lot. So they went back to the drawing board and they looked at what and how they could make their, their content stand out. Which goes back to what you've just been saying. So that once they got that content right, then the digital subs came in. So what the lesson of this whole article was about was that, uh, yes, paywalls, funnels, optimization, tactics, onboarding, it all matters. And it matters a lot. What matters more is getting the content right. So that when people are getting, you know, engaging and subscribing, they'll stay. So I really like that. And um, for a, a publication of Stern's reputation to have to do that says that essentially all publishers are having to look at what makes their content stand out.

Speaker B: I'm gonna, I wasn't planning on doing this, but I'm sure a little something that I, that I use, um, I call it my, one of my money slides. So if you're out there, take a screenshot of this. This is one of my money slides. And um, this is what I consider to be, uh, the SEO or Traffic foundation. Right? This is, this is how things are built. It starts with compelling, useful content. If you don't have compelling, useful content like you've talked about here, that Stern just did, like Danny Sullivan talked about, like we've talked about before, everything else collapses, you gotta start with this. Then there's technical implementation, the site experience Schema stuff. And then there's stuff the other editors can do. This is SEO stuff, content optimization, author optimization. This is all your, um, eeat, your experience, expertise, authority, trust stuff. How shareable the content is and what you're doing to distribute that content and make people aware of that content. All of this builds upon each other and it starts with the compelling, useful content. Like you just said Stern did. If you don't have that, then you don't have a media property. So I think that's brilliant.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker B: Um, which again, I guess we didn't plan this theme. It just kind of came up. But it leads us into my last story, which is, um, which I got out of the Press Gazette last, uh, week. And it was talking about, uh, the Times and how their mantra of fewer, better stories has grown to, has grown their audience. This is getting back to the unique, compelling, non commodity content that serves your audience needs. So I'll kind of, um, share this in a nutshell. Bottom line, they cut 25%. They cut their editorial output by 25%. Not as a cost savings measure, but they wanted to focus on better quality content. So they. Less content, better content. Fewer, better stories is their mantra. Fewer, better stories. And what has it happened to, it says, three consecutive months of record breaking audience growth. So here's what, here's what it's showing here. Organic search traffic. Remember we're talking about geos killing us, generatives killing us. Not for these guys. Organic search traffic to the website was up nearly 30% year on year, nearly 30%. Google Discover traffic was up 150% year on year. Social referral traffic up a hundred percent year on year. It's back to that same thing of fewer stories, better stories. Compelling, unique, non commodity content that serves the needs of your audience. So I just thought it was really interesting that this happened to just be this theme that we had throughout this entire, uh, session. Jess.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. No, it's been, um, it's been fun. Are you, are you ready to listen for my AI tool of the week? I wanted to.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're, we're, Jez and I were gonna throw out here, uh, hopefully in each session, an AI tool that we've discovered that we kind of, that we kind of dig. So tell me about your tool.

Speaker C: Yeah, so this is one that's come out this week, really made the noise this week. It's called Anijam AI A N I J A M M AI and with a single prompt you can make an animated video. Not only that, it'll create a storyboard, it'll create the characters, it'll create a script, it will lip sync them, it will create the whole show and this is where things are going. And if you test it out or look at the, at some of the explainer videos for this technology, it is a real wow. And if it's happening now, you can only imagine what will be happening in a couple of years time. So I just wanted to alert publishers about what's happening in the audio visual space. And um, of course, you know, for publishers they might want to storify a few of their articles or whatever or make it, make it their own. But I think it's an exceptional technology and it just shows where things are going.

Speaker B: Things are going to continue to grow and evolve. Uh, this is another good use of AI I think publishers can do is how can we use AI to, to create timelines, to create animated versions of stories and that's going to tie into the whole video aspect of things down the road where video is growing very rapidly. Um, so yeah, I love that, I love that Jaz. That's. I'm have to check out that tool.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker B: Well, I think that's about it for this week. We probably hit our time limit. Anything else?

Speaker C: I think that's it. Uh, I think there was a really good strong theme throughout the show that

Speaker B: was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. So I appreciate this so much. Always a lot of fun doing these for you here. And until next time, we will talk to you guys later.

Speaker C: Thank you. Goodbye.

Speaker B: Bye bye.