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Email has an intimacy that TheSkimm has used to build a loyal base of 7 million subscribers. Digiday has a weekly podcast about the business of digital media, and two recent interviews with founders of startups had nuggets of wisdom applicable to any media startup. Digiday's editor-in-chief, Brian Morrissey , interviewed The Business of Fashion 's Imran Amed about its move to a subscription model , and the founders of TheSkimm , Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg , about how they used email to build a loyal community. Elements of their success formulas 1. Passion for a topic that you can develop in a way that no one else is doing . a) Amed, then a consultant for McKinsey &. Co., began writing a blog in 2007 that talked about fashion as a business. He felt that no one was exploring the meaning of the numbers behind the leading fashion businesses. Over time, he developed a loyal audience who began suggesting ways he could monetize that audience. b) Zakin and Weisberg were...

Readers now supply more than half the site's revenue. Josh Marshall started out as a political blogger in 2000, made a business of it in 2003, won a George Polk Award, and has managed to stay independent through all the wild swings of the digital pendulum. So his reflections on how to transition from an advertising business model to paid subscriptions have a certain authority. He talked about the evolving business model of his site, Talking Points Memo , in a 47-minute podcast with Digiday Editor Brian Morrissey. Among Marshall's observations that are relevant to other would-be news entrepreneurs: Small, independent news sites cannot rely on scale to drive revenue. They need a strong relationship with their users. Many digital media organizations that have massive audiences will not be able to make the transition to paid subscriptions because they don't have that relationship, he believes. Many of the 26,000 paid subscribers to TPM, which are now supplying just over hal...