The Guardian is a 195 year old British newspaper which expects to burn through £90m in 2017 after incurring damage of £200m the year before.

The Economist once described The Guardian as:

“[T]he most stylish paper in the hyper-competitive British quality pack, the wittiest and best-designed, the strongest for features, the one most likely to reflect modern life.”

At it’s peak it sold half a million papers per day. In June 2016, at peak Brexit-vote tension, The Guardian online claimed to have over 165m unique monthly browsers.

Yet, despite this history, reputation, and traffic, there are serious warnings that the money will run dry in as little as six or seven years.

If they can’t make it work, how can anyone? What future is there for journalism and traditional media?

In this article, we’ll explore a number of business models in use today on both a large and small scale, and begin to analyze their strengths and weaknesses.

We’ll break that down into 10 key recommendations for anyone looking to hop onboard the media startup bandwagon.

Then, for a bit of fun, we’ll delve into what could lie ahead for the future of print media.

Extra, extra! Read all about it!

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I didn’t used to see the point of surveys…

I’m much more comfortable with scraping data, using software and relying on trends based on in-depth studies. I didn’t understand how it could be beneficial to read unstructured feedback from a few hundred people until I conducted a survey myself.

It’s not easy to know if what you’re doing is important for your ideal user or reader. You might believe that a certain marketing campaign or product feature is going to be the next big hit that brings customers, but without hearing the opinions of your audiences, you’re making another shot in the dark.

In July, I sent out the first reader survey we’ve done at Process Street. I built the processes and learned the benefits as I went along, and in this post I want to share them with you.

As a result of the survey, we received hundreds of common problems to solve in our articles, allowing us to create relevant and high-converting content. And, speaking of conversions, the follow-up conversations with respondents landed us a few new users and customers!

For a quick email template and a few hours of data entry, I’d say it’s well worth trying. In this article, I’m going to show you exactly how we surveyed our readers, and how it’s helped us improve our marketing and product. But first, an explanation of what I mean by feedback.

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When I was about 7 years old, I made a deliberate decision to stop caring about math.

I remember the moment clearly. I started sitting closer to the back of the class, stopped answering questions, and, eventually, I stopped being asked questions by the teacher.

I told myself that it wasn’t worth learning because we have tools like computers and calculators. Consistently, I got mediocre grades in the topic and only scraped through the finals with a borderline passing grade…

It wasn’t until I started working at Process Street that I cared about data, charts, spreadsheets and correlations.

Research and data manipulation skills are extremely important for pretty much anyone that has to devise their own solutions.

Not only that, studies are incredible marketing tools. Original data attracts links and shares like nothing else because it’s one of the few newsworthy things a company can do. You’ve got product releases, funding announcements, and research.

And it’s not just my own theories that say studies attract high-quality backlinks…

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At Process Street, a lot of startup blogs are required reading for our team.

It makes sense, because your startup will be informed and improved by what it reads, and every team needs to stay on top of what’s being spoken about.

In this post, I’ve compiled the 55 best blogs for startups (plus one recommended article from each) in these categories:

• Venture capitalist blogs
• Marketing blogs
• Sales blogs
• UX & design blogs
• Customer success & support blogs

… All focused specifically on advice for startups.

Here they are:

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Over the last year working remotely at Process Street, I’ve been researching as I go. I survived on dumb luck and baseline writing skills.

However, in the last 30 days I’ve built a system to teach myself how to read more. I’ve built up a library of articles, authors, quotes, books, tips, and ideas I can draw upon whenever I need to write or find the motivation to keep going.

The best part is that I spent next to no extra time outside of work in order to do this, and it all boils down to five elements:

• Filling dead air with podcasts
• Setting up an RSS feed
• Always having a book on the go
• Productively procrastinating
• Following 50 people on Twitter

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You need a solid writing app.

It’s vital for practically every kind of company—whether it’s for drafting contracts, writing up website content, or just putting together internal documentation.

But team collaboration can easily become a huge nuisance.

The more people involved, the more difficult it can be to decide on the right edits and produce a coherent piece. That means the last thing you want is even more trouble dealing with a collaboration tool that doesn’t fit your workflow.

We delved into the features of three popular collaborative writing apps—Quip, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs—to help you decide upon which is best for your team.

In this post, we’re going to compare each app’s features in the fields of:

• Sharing
• Concurrent editing
• Revision history
• Chatting and commenting
• Organization

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Two weeks ago I had a brainstorm with my team to think of how to improve productivity; the 4 ideas we came up with increased my output by 375% and ensured that I no longer resort to 70 hour work weeks. Obviously, this was just too good to keep to the Process Street team alone, so stick around if you want to find out how I did it!

‘Being more productive can have an awesome positive effect on the rest of your life as you start to feel generally more positive due to lower stress levels and more free time to do what you really love to do.’ – Dr Jones

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Whether eye-catching, irritating, or actually useful, there’s no denying them. Gifs have never been more popular than they are right now.

Why’s this? It could be because mobile phones dropped Flash support. It might be because they’re so immediate and will automatically ‘play’ without the friction of a click. I think it’s both of these things, but most of all it’s because you can say more with a gif than you can with actual words. Gifs help us make connections with our audience, to explain, engage, entertain and tell stories. And, of course, boost reader engagement.

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When you’re planning blog posts, it can be hard to keep coming up with good ideas, let alone a good title.

Sure, you have a couple in the pipeline, and some other topics you’re itching to write about. But looking at the calendar a couple months down the line, you’re coming up blank. How is it that some places churn out insightful and well-written content every Wednesday at noon?

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Content marketing is built on beautiful principles.

Instead of interrupting people’s day to day lives with TV adverts, skyline-blocking billboards and glossy magazine ads, content marketers create useful resources for their customers and for each other. A strange mix of copywriting and journalism, content marketing has the moral edge over traditional marketing because the public don’t go out of their way to expose themselves to adverts, but they do voluntarily read content.

In case I’m interrupting your busy schedule, you can scroll down to the bottom of this post for the key takeaways.

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