"Media Landscape Brightens with Sprouts of Hope"

Despite a gloomy outlook for the news business, a small group of for-profit digital media start-ups, including Puck, Punchbowl News, The Ankler, and Semafor, have found success by prioritizing careful spending, hiring top journalists, and focusing on niche newsletters with broad appeal. These companies have learned from the failures of their predecessors, which relied heavily on investor money and chasing large audiences. The shift in conventional wisdom about making money in digital publishing reflects the challenges of relying on social media traffic and digital ad economics, as seen in the recent closure of The Messenger.