Clippet-Founders — Clippet founders Grace Regan and James Macleod. Photograph: Clippet/PR

Murdoch’s grandson moves into millennial news market

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Could it be Clippet wot wins it? New online audio news format enters the race to capture millennials’ attention

Millennials are a mercurial market, proving particularly difficult to crack for media outlets. Technology evolves rapidly, platforms and services change, a new flavour of the month emerges, and millennials migrate. News outlets are adapting towards capturing the attention of the younger generation, but risk either being out of touch or lost among the noise.

Fittingly enough, it’s a pair of entrepreneurs belonging to the millennial crowd who believe they may have found the ideal medium for attracting a younger, content-savvy consumer towards news coverage. According to James MacLeod and Grace Regan, co-founders of news service Clippet, audio is the future.

Clippet provides short-form audio news, aimed at on-the-go 18-28 year olds, an age range which also includes the company’s staff. On listening to one of the broadcasts, the target demographic is evident. The style is conversational, colloquial and concise, with most clips lasting less than a minute. Clippet hopes to “make the news dynamic and engaging for the millennial audience” says Regan of their attempt to cater for a more mobile, time-stretched generation who are spoiled for choice in terms of video or online news formats.

It’s a bold undertaking. While mobile devices are being tailored to provide a better user experience for video on the move, there’s a temptation to write audio off as yesteryear’s news. However, Clippet believe that audio’s value remains as high as ever. Grace says: “2014 could be described as the year of video [online], Instagram and Snapchat started using it. They were doing exciting things, but the market seemed quite saturated. James came up with the idea for a short-form audio news service. It fits well with a mobile, on the go lifestyle, you can work-out, browse social media, all while getting their news fix. It’s the next step in media consumption.”

James MacLeod continues: “Audio has always had it’s place in the media landscape. It’s not as immersive an experience as video, but there are many situations when you can engage with video, we want to fill the gap for those who don’t want to look at their phones, they want to be involved with the world around them while listening to the news.”

The founders may be youthful, but one in particular is hardly wanting for media pedigree. James MacLeod is son of Prudence Murdoch and Alasdair MacLeod, and grandson of News Corp supremo Rupert Murdoch.

“They’ve all been tremendously supportive of the idea and my move into my own company and me being engaged in media,” says James. “I never felt that I’d end up in the industry, but Clippet fulfills a need in my life that was there because of the family I’m from.”

The backing of his family doesn’t extend to investment from his grandfather’s company however, Clippet has so far been funded through two rounds of angel investment: “We’re not taking direct support from News Corp, we’re conscious of maintaining an independent news voice for our generation”.

Despite the format’s independence from his family ties, MacLeod’s venture could end up being beneficial to the more traditional side of the family business. “One of the founding principles of Clippet was to help our generation break down a story and catch-up with news, and springboard them into traditional media. We’re working on a way to allow other publications to engage and create short-form audio for their own audiences.”

With only 18% of 18-24 year olds trusting mainstream media to address their concerns, would becoming involved with traditional, established outlets be beneficial? “We don’t see ourselves as competing. We want to enable established outlets to use the technology too. Traditional media has a long way to go in engaging a younger audience.”

Clippet is currently an ad-free service, but could the future may hold sponsored content? Grace and James are keen to make sure that any ads or sponsored content will be interesting for their audience, not just commercially beneficial “In the next one to two years we hope to implement sponsored content, we’ll be starting conversations soon. The whole ad-free argument is tricky, but you can still create good quality, engaging content that’s sponsored, it’s the nature of the business.”

With the Serial podcast capturing the imagination and bridging the gap between entertaining audio content and serious journalistic output, Clippet could be poised to take advantage. With 500 daily users and plans for a concerted promotional push following the next round of investment, they seem up for the challenge. Grace says of the possibilities: “There’s a lot more focus post-Serial on where you can take the medium. Audio is yet to have the same regeneration that video has experienced. We think its the right time.”