Nick DiGiovanni’s Editor on the Key to Good Food Content

— Hannah Doyle 

Food creator Nick DiGiovanni hired lead editor Brandon Kaplan full-time in 2022. In the time since Kaplan’s been on the team?

• DiGiovanni grew from 5 million subscribers to 28 million.

• Videos Kaplan edited for the channel topped 1.5 billion combined views.

• And the team Kaplan is managing grew to three assistant editors.

Here’s what Kaplan has focused on as an editor to help grow the channel → 

Audio. “We might use 100 tracks in a 15-minute video and I can spend a full day just doing the music for one video, whereas when I started out I might only spend a few hours,” Kaplan told us. 

The goal? To create more emotion throughout the video. “If we want to inspire them when Nick finishes a world record or we want to emphasize a joke, we use music to underline those moments.”

Connection. Kaplan explained that DiGiovanni has a global audience, so he likes to emphasize physical humor and facial expressions that transcend language. 

“I like to find those little moments that someone else might say ‘this isn’t essential to the story, this isn’t meant to be in the video’ when really it’s those moments of authenticity and originality that create a human connection,” Kaplan said.

Originally published at https://news.thepublishpress.com/p/creator-businesses-take-center-stage

The Democracy Rocket

Marc Elias’ Democracy Docket has quietly become a pro-democracy media force, expanding its newsroom to 20 staffers as it surpasses 50,000 paid subscribers.

— Oliver Darcy 

Earlier this month, Marc Elias, the prominent Democratic lawyer turned media entrepreneur, was at his home just outside Washington when the milestone arrived. The outlet he founded in 2020, Democracy Docket—a digital news organization that covers voting rights, elections, and the courts from an unapologetically pro-democracy standpoint—had been inching toward 50,000 paid subscribers. The team didn’t expect to cross that line until after Labor Day. But a stronger-than-anticipated August put the number suddenly within reach, only 17 months after launching a premium membership program.

“Every day I would ask, ‘When do we think we’re going to hit it?’” Elias told me by phone on Thursday.

Then, on Wednesday, August 13, his phone buzzed with a text from managing director Allie Rothenberg. She sent a screen shot showing the paid subscriber tally at exactly 50,000. Elias, describing it to me as a “momentous and meaningful” marker, immediately emailed the team with the news. Two weeks later, Democracy Docket celebrated again, this time surpassing 500,000 subscribers on YouTube.

For Elias, the success has been vindicating. From the start, he believed there was a sizable audience hungry for in-depth coverage of the legal and political battles shaping American elections. “When Democracy Docket started,” Elias recalled, “I’d tell people, ‘I’m going to build a media company.’ And they’d shoot back, ‘You’re definitely not going to do that.’ And I’d respond, ‘No, I am.’”

Today, Democracy Docket is thriving. At $120 per year, its 50,000 subscribers translate to at least $6 million in annual recurring revenue, assuming all of the readers are paying full price. That figure does not account for additional revenue streams, such as sponsorships and YouTube monetization.

The outlet has grown to 20 employees across offices in Washington and the New York City area, and earlier this year it brought in MSNBC alumni Zachary Roth, a veteran voting and elections journalist, as managing editor. He now leads an expanded newsroom that includes reporters from Axios, Roll Call, Mother Jones, and the Houston Chronicle. The team has also invested in video, hiring Brandon Kaplan, who previously helped YouTube creators scale, as senior producer.

The operation runs seven days a week, producing written and video content. It publishes three free newsletters—a daily and two weeklies—and a near-daily premium edition for its 430,000-plus subscribers. It's not just analysis either. The newsroom has churned out a steady stream of scoops related to election integrity. Just this week, Democracy Docket broke the news that a leading election conspiracy theorist had been tapped for a new “election integrity” role at the Department of Homeland Security, a story later covered by more established outlets, such as the Associated Press. On social media, meanwhile, the outlet has built a combined audience of nearly one million followers.

Elected officials are taking notice. Elias’ "Defending Democracy" podcast has become a regular stop for prominent Democrats, drawing dozens of senators, representatives, and other officials. Recent guests have included Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and former Attorney General Eric Holder.

When asked whether that visibility worries him at all, given the climate he is operating in with Donald Trump as president, Elias brushed it off. "I do not envision legal challenges to our work, but we are careful and we are thoughtful in what we publish," he said. "But we are also unafraid. This is a weird thing to say as a lawyer who has litigated defamation cases: You can't let the lawyers handcuff you from reporting the truth."

Elias attributed a large part of the success at Democracy Docket to the fact that traditional newsrooms have allowed for a void in the market. He told me that he would like to thank The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and publisher Will Lewis for staying out of his lane, saying the newspaper presented "the greatest risk" to the outlet, given its focus on politics and branding as a pro-democracy institution.

"I might owe Will Lewis a cake," Elias joked.

Unlike many independent operations, Elias has built this media fiefdom entirely outside the walls of Substack. Democracy Docket runs on its own technology stack, a choice Elias indicated was partly accidental, since when he launched in 2020 he hadn’t even heard of Substack. But he now views that independence as a strength. It has allowed the outlet to develop its own brand identity, rather than being forced into a cookie-cutter template. And Elias is skeptical of Substack’s growth engine. Its recommendation algorithm, he argued, can artificially inflate subscriber numbers by pushing newsletter subscriptions to users who may never actually engage.

"The winner in Substack is Substack," he said, adding that "if you're a creator on Substack, you need to understand that the private equity are not interested in you, they are interested in monetizing Substack."

Rothenberg, the managing director responsible for increasing Democracy Docket's footprint, said that the outlet has instead started to experiment with running paid advertisements on social media platforms. So far, Rothenberg said, the results have been encouraging. But, ultimately, she noted that the organization's success "comes down to understanding our audience and our niche."

As for the long-term future, Elias said Democracy Docket’s trajectory will be determined by its readers. "We don't have any investors. There is no corporate backing. There is not venture capital," he said. "We will grow our coverage to meet our readership and so if people like what we are doing, we will grow. We will add more content. We will add more reporters. We will add more verticals. We exist to provide information for those who we want it."

Originally published at https://www.status.news/p/democracy-docket-marc-elias-newsletter