In the publishing business, some of the smartest people—the people likely to help build successful companies—are those with the broadest perspective on the business. In many cases, these people are suppliers, who can offer advice based on the experiences of many customers. And they’re consultants, who can offer the the same perspective, with the added value of actual hands-on proficiency in the business of running a media company.
One of the longstanding practitioners—and one of the best known—is Eric Shanfelt, founding partner of Nearview Media, which helps consumer and B2B media, regional media, and event companies build their digital businesses. Prior to that, Eric served in senior roles in a variety of media companies. He has nearly 30 years in the industry. We recently had the opportunity to speak to Eric and seek his insights on the business. It was a great conversation. Here’s our transcript.
Fox Tales: How has the industry changed since the days of the old Folio: Show, and your time at Penton and other companies?
Eric Shanfelt.
Eric Shanfelt: Publishing is still about generating regular, unique, compelling content for your market, building an audience around that market, and then monetizing that audience through either advertising/sponsorship or subscription revenue. What’s different is the underlying technology, how you reach an audience, and who is publishing.
Technology has changed radically over the past 15 years. The tools have become far more accessible and less expensive. Almost anyone can start a media business with a laptop and very little capital.
At the same time, reaching an audience has become more challenging. It’s fragmented, spread across a growing list of channels (email, text, social, news aggregation, search, AI, etc.). Each has its own complex nuances and rules. Publishers have to weigh which channels actually drive their business objectives and focus their efforts.
Another change is the rise of the independent journalist. Over the past 5-10 years journalists have increasingly built their own direct audiences using tools like Substack and Beehiiv, or social-media platforms like Facebook and TikTok.
Here are a few examples:
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Dave Jorgenson built the Washington Post TikTok channel, then launched Local News International. It’s reportedly already profitable with hundreds of thousands of followers across YouTube and TikTok.
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Heather Cox Richardson: A Boston College history professor started a Substack newsletter, Letters from an American, back in 2019. She has over 3 million subscribers and generates an estimated $7-15 million per year in paid subscriptions.
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Kody Wilson, aka Kody the WX Guy: A University of Northern Colorado Meteorology graduate who built an independent weather brand across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, reaching a reported 2 million people per month and monetizing through local business sponsorships.
Fox Tales: How has the industry changed regarding digital media in particular?
Shanfelt: The biggest change is that digital used to be an add-on for most media companies. You had a print magazine, you had an event, and digital was something you bolted on. Now digital is the core of most media companies, and sometimes their only product. Industry Dive is a good example. They started as a digital-only B2B publisher with no print or events, and sold to Informa in 2022 for $389 million.
Fox Tales: Does digital media work best in conjunction with events? What about with print media?
Shanfelt: Digital media can work just fine on its own. Look at Industry Dive and the independent journalists I mentioned above.
That said, digital, print, and events can work very well together. Each can boost the others. A strong event or an established print product brings credibility that a digital-only publication has to build from scratch.
The key is not making digital subservient to print or events. You have to grow digital as its own channel, with its own business model, that then works with the other channels. What I see too often is the reverse. Digital is designed to protect print or an event. When that happens, it never gets the chance to become a real business on its own.
Fox Tales: How is AI scrambling media assumptions and the industry business model?
Shanfelt: The most notable impact is how AI is changing search and the traffic search drives to publisher websites. National news and national consumer publications are being hit the hardest and they’re the most vocal about it.
But AI isn’t impacting search traffic for all publishers in the same way. Search traffic across my niche publisher portfolio (B2B trade, regional business, and city publications) is largely holding steady.
Part of that is the content itself. Niche B2B news and genuinely local reporting can’t be derived from other sources the way national news can. Part of it is also a deliberate choice to block AI bots while we watch how the landscape develops. In the meantime, we’re building other channels to reach readers and evaluating other business models that work with AI. For example, Cloudflare is building systems that let publishers get paid when AI companies use their content, not just when they crawl it. It isn’t ready for prime time yet, but it’s the first real path for niche publishers to getting paid for use of their content within AI.
Sponsored content is also an opportunity to turn the AI disruption into revenue. A trusted publisher’s website can shape how AI describes a brand and its products, improving how it shows up in AI answers. One example is Informa TechTarget, which launched its AI Visibility Audit and GEO Topic Planner products earlier this year.
This does mean rethinking what content you block from AI. Some publishers that lean heavily on sponsored content are opening their sites to AI entirely. Others are looking at selective access, letting AI crawl sponsored content while keeping editorial protected.
Another opportunity is using AI inside a publishing business. On the reader side, we’re building AI-powered site search, customer-support assistants that answer subscription and account questions, and data tools built on a publisher’s own archive. Behind the scenes, AI is also speeding up content categorization, posting to social media automatically, and helping with other operational tasks.
Publishers are also using AI to generate content from structured data rather than from a prompt. For years, MaxPreps has been using AI to create articles for high school games with stats coaches report directly into their platform. This turns raw data into published articles at a scale no newsroom could staff.