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Hello!
I hate goodbyes and I always drag them out so I’m back in your emails one more time.
It’s for a good reason though: As the 2024 season comes to an end, we’re here to reflect on the year that was! Every Friday in the office, The Daily Aus team goes through our highs and lows of the week. It’s a time for each person in the company to reflect on the learnings and successes of the week.
On this final Friday before our shutdown, we thought it would be nice to share with you TDA’s highs and lows of 2024.
The highs
Podcast
November was TDA’s best month ever for listenership – in fact we doubled the number of listeners from November the previous year.
We also turned our podcast into a video every day over on our YouTube (we’re coming for you, Mr Beast.)
We like to joke that we are Australia’s #1 daily video news podcast, which can mostly be attributed to us being Australia’s only daily video news podcast… that we know of.
New hires
This year we’ve had so many new people start with TDA!
We now have sports journalist George, who eats lunch at 10:30am, and Multimedia Journalist Achol, who is always available to distract you. Video Editor Orla, who has the most perfect locks of hair, and Video Producer Elliot, who has a new nickname for us all every day. Partnerships Executive Skye, who is currently weaning herself off coffee (it’s not working) and Editorial Coordinator Rosa, who moonlights as a professional soccer player.
Here’s everyone who started at TDA this year!
Expanding our newsletter offering
Gonna keep this short and sweet. We launched our good news and sport newsletters this year.
Think of sport as the middle child (because people underestimate it, but it’s actually the best one), and the good news as the youngest child (no matter what it does, it can never disappoint).
Ok, now for the lows…
The lows
Our font
We started off this year strong by launching a re-brand. We had new fonts, colours, logos and a new tagline: ‘Now it makes sense’.
But as I’m sure many of you saw, people hated our new font. The feedback came in thick and fast. Even the Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan commented on our posts, telling us she wasn’t a fan.
Initially, we decided to stick with it, but in the end, the audience feedback reigned supreme. It was hard to admit that the haters were right, but 11 months on, we can finally say: the font sucked.
This is our old font. We don’t speak about it.
Near-miss with Meta
Ok, now for the serious stuff. In February, we learned that the government, media companies and Meta were arguing over news on Instagram and Facebook. For most of the year, there was a chance Meta would ban all news pages from posting to Instagram, like they have in Canada.
Thankfully, it didn’t eventuate.
But a silver lining: it led us to launching TDA+U! If you’re not familiar, it’s a way for our audience to make a voluntary financial contribution to TDA.
TDA+U
Here at TDA, we are committed to building a media company that will deliver accessible and digestible news to young Australians for generations to come. With your support, we can keep doing just that.
If you’d like to contribute, you can do that here. Even if you contribute the price of a Matcha a month – it all helps.
Now, onto the next year! May it bring more of the good stuff.
Have a great break!
