Squiz Media founder Claire Kimball penned this essay for Pandamedia: How COVID Changed Journalism, edited by Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang

To explain the unfolding impact of COVID on The Squiz over the last few years, it’s best to first explain a bit about how we emerged as a small disruptor in Australia’s increasingly fragmented media environment.

In the years before COVID, I set up the Squiz Today email newsletter which quickly led to its accompanying short-form weekday news podcast. It was in response to four things that, as a highly engaged news consumer and communications professional, were becoming clear and, I believed, presented a strong opportunity. 

The first was that as someone whose core work was advising politicians and corporate leaders about media management and reputation, the restructuring of newsrooms and the significant reduction in journalists, camera operators and photographers meant I was running out of ‘media’ to ‘manage’. Finding ways of communicating directly with an intended audience was not just desirable, it was necessary. Gaining those skills by setting up The Squiz was, in some parts, a professional development exercise. No matter whether the business was successful, the experience would help with future employment options in my chosen fields.

The second was frustration with the increasing slant mainstream sources of media were taking. Prosecuting that argument isn’t the intention of this exercise, but conversations with news-savvy friends and my employers kept gravitating to how our media outlets were covering the big stories and issues of the day. Regularly, that was secondary to the details of what they were covering. Producing an agenda-free product seemed like a smart space to be in.

The third was a commercial opportunity that I observed during my time leading corporate communications and PR at Woolworths Group. Large companies were struggling to find ways to support initiatives related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) – or environmental, social and governance (ESG), as it’s known now. But surveys, including our own, showed engaged news consumers were interested in what businesses were doing about the big issues of our time. Not only have these executions provided quality content, the approach has underpinned our revenue model.

And fourth, in the unrelenting 24-hour news cycle, I saw an opportunity for products that decluttered the environment for people who don’t have oodles of hours to make sense of the information coming at them.

It seemed obvious to me that educated women who are time-poor were our ideal target audience. I picked them because 1. you need to know who you’re trying to connect with to make a connection, and 2. as a busy woman, I have a firm appreciation of those challenges, and it’s that nuance that’s part of our secret sauce. There are a few other things in our approach that highlight how we made it work.

• Being clear about our target audience dictated our tone of voice – an engaging friend talking directly to you.
• We picked the time of day we knew that the audience wanted to hear from us (at 6am) and the channels they wanted it on (email and podcast) so we could seamlessly become part of their morning routines.
• We removed the assumed knowledge in the stories we covered in a way that didn’t talk down to readers/listeners.
• We made sure the stories we picked in each email and podcast served up a balanced cross-section of news and conversation starters. The difficult and complicated news stories are there each day, but the tone is never sensational. We also ensure there’s something fun – and the things our audience gets a thrill out of being the first to tell their friendship groups about.

The reason to lay all of that out is that when 2020 rolled around, we were already three years into building trust and, importantly, habits with our audience. We did that by showing up each day, delivering what we’d promised – to be that smart friend who helps you navigate the complex issues of the day while also leaving you with something to smile about. We also built the infrastructure for them to share us with their friends, family and colleagues who were looking for an easy way to stay on top of the news.

In March 2020, our weekday Squiz Today newsletter and podcast reached about 150,000 Australians each month. Since then, we have seen about 55% audience growth per annum, in line with our pre-COVID expectations. What that means is that COVID did not knock us off course, nor did it see us surge in newsletter sign-ups and podcast listens.

On newsletter subscriptions, what we did see was a shift in how readers discovered us. Until COVID, roughly a third came from referrals, a third via paid social campaigns, and a third from ‘other sources’ like media mentions. When COVID hit, that mix changed in favour of reader referrals which allowed us to reduce our spending on paid acquisition campaigns  – a welcome development given the uncertain times. However, knowing what we know now about the post-2020 Facebook algorithm changes – a big issue that’s made things significantly harder for small publishers – we would have kept those acquisition campaigns going while the going was good.

Our referral system allowed us to see exactly what subscribers were saying about us to their people, overwhelmingly that we were a non-sensational/punish-free way to stay up to date with the latest developments. For us, that was validation of our content model, and it gave us the confidence to stay the course with little change to our offering.

Where we have seen the biggest growth – in audience, engagement and commercial – has been in podcasting. There is no doubt we benefited from being in the right place at the right time when we started in 2018. The Squiz Today was the first Australian short-form morning news podcast when it launched – a claim we’re proud to make given the proliferation of products based on our format from media outlets big and small. It continues to be the market leader – and our main source of revenue.

During COVID, our host-read ads increased as marketers shifted their budgets around. Our experience was that advertisers’ budgets didn’t evaporate, although it’s true that many reduced their spending. One major shift we saw was the reallocation from outdoor campaigns to other untried channels, like podcasts. The inverse is also true – we are just one small publisher noticing the shift back to pre-COVID marketing campaign channels, sometimes making small audience buys harder to secure.

Our model is underpinned by securing and maintaining an engaged audience. We do not want to be the biggest publisher, but we do seek to have the most engaged audience. To that end, we consider ourselves more of an engagement business than a media company.

The peak-pandemic period showed us that trust and routine from our audience will hold us in good stead as we continue to push for growth. It also demonstrated that delivering growth into the future will require the same discipline that many other publishers would consider limiting. For example, we do not pepper our newsletter subscribers with emails all day because we are very protective of our subscribers’ experience and our proposition to be useful and not annoying.

In the second half of 2022, The Squiz conducted a survey of our audience to see how they were feeling about a range of things, including engaging with the news. Almost 90% of women aged 18-24yo said mainstream news made them feel anxious, 60% of total respondents said they had taken steps to limit their news consumption, and 12% said they felt optimistic about the state of the world. They are an alarming set of numbers that mirror other major studies – but they also underline the audience-first opportunity we have identified and started to probe.

In that survey, we asked why, if news is so difficult to countenance, do they come to The Squiz. ‘I consider it a form of learning. It opens my eyes to the world, helps me explain life to my children. It helps in forming a viewpoint, opens my eyes to other views, prompts me to look into and learn more about topics and current events,’ said one of the 2,600 respondents. In a nutshell, that’s what we aim to do – and will continue to get up at 3.30am each morning for.

Pandamedia: How COVID Changed Journalism has been published by Monash University Publishing.