You couldn't move in the British creator economy over the last week without bumping into Launch Discourse. Launch Discourse is quite lethal; everyone - me included - wants to decompile and analyse every post, cough and spit like it tells us something transformative about where the media industry is headed. This is pretty unfair when most new projects without such famous faces lift off with far less fanfare and scrutiny, and are generally better for doing so. Every creative wants to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, and that's harder to do when outlets are obsessively covering you.
Anyway - what on earth am I talking about? I'm talking about Amol Rajan of the BBC and Marina Hyde of The Guardian, who have almost zero content overlap with each other, apart from the fact that they both like to comment on the news. But they're being bunched together because they happen to be legacy media journalists who have launched new creator ventures at similar times, with entirely different structures supporting them and - it transpires - different approaches to building audiences. I'm not here to pit them against each other, because that's mean and I'm not really interested in doing that. I'm more interested in what they decided to do, rather than how each strategy ending up working out for them.
In time, I'll have a better idea of how these stories will function for clients of mine, who come to me for vertical video strategies and launches just like these ones. Will Amol and Marina become blueprints - or cautionary tales?