Noah Davis
Cofounder, Three Point Four Media
Rethinking the business of journalism through sponsored content
Noah Davis is a freelance journalist and cofounder of Three Point Four Media, a creative agency that produces feature videos and print content for companies trying to tell their own stories.
Davis initially wanted to be a music journalist, but he said he quickly learned that the business side of media has a way of determining one’s beat. As his career progressed, he worked on a handful of side projects like editing scripts, creating advertising content, and copywriting to subsidize his more traditional journalistic pursuits. Eventually, though, he realized the side projects were more lucrative than the articles he wrote.
That experience led him to launch Three Point Four with Bill Bradley, a fellow freelancer who’d worked on projects for Deadspin, Vanity Fair, and Vice. The duo now put their journalism skills to use by creating branded content for clients like Google and the Tribeca Film Festival.
By Robert Davis
It’s just the nature of the business these days: There is more money to be made in sponsored content than in journalism.
When I say “sponsored content,” I mean anything that’s editorial in nature but is paid for by a non-editorial entity with the ultimate goal of raising the profile of that entity. But I also think that term isn’t really accurate for what Bill and I do at Three Point Four Media, the creative agency we co-founded. We use the skills of journalists such as reporting, writing, interviewing, picking a story angle, and developing narrative arcs to help people and companies tell their stories.
Journalists often don’t realize there is real value in the corporate world for reporters who know how to tell stories and have the skills to find sources and interview them. Knowing how to communicate and tell stories is a valuable skill — it sounds cheesy but it’s true.
Some people are scared of words and scared of writing. But words aren’t a big deal for writers. I think that’s why I’ve been seeing a lot of journalists go into marketing and sponsored content. The opportunities are seemingly endless because of how valuable the skills that we journalists have are becoming to companies.
Turning a Part-Time Gig into Full-Time Work
Bill and I started Three Point Four in 2017. We’d meet up and go running at Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, and talk about the pay disparity between our editorial work and our sponsored-content gigs.
My portfolio was split into something like 75% editorial and 25% marketing back then, but the pay was the exact opposite. We decided to name the business Three Point Four because that’s the length of the running track around the park: 3.4 miles.
Initially, we thought it would be a part-time gig, but we quickly noticed there was a real need for our skills in the sponsored-content space. It’s been a full-time job ever since.
There are two main differences between working in a newsroom and an editorial agency like Three Point Four. First of all, we pitch ourselves to land sponsored-content work whereas a freelancer would pitch a fully fleshed out story idea to an editor.
We also tell our clients that sponsored content is different from public-relations marketing. It’s just not how PR people think. We don’t use the language of journalism like “magazine-style feature” because a lot of business people don’t really understand what that means. Instead, we say we’re going to tell the story of their business by talking to the stakeholders and do a couple of interviews.
Second, the business and marketing world moves a lot slower. When I wrote for ESPN, I was used to, for example, pitching a story to my editor, getting the go-ahead within a day or two, reporting it, and seeing it published quickly. Now, we’ve gone a full year from our first conversation with a potential client to signing a contract to starting the work. It makes sense: Since the budgets are bigger, there are more decision-makers involved.
How to Make a Living as a Journalist
I never really faced any internal struggles after jumping into the so-called “dark side” of journalism. I loved being a freelance journalist, but it’s exhausting and relentless. I did okay, did some cool things, wrote some cool stories, and got pretty good at the grind. But it was time to move on.
Even when I was full-time freelancing, I was doing some “dark side” stuff like sponsored content because it pays so so so much better, and doing so allowed me a bit of freedom to take on more ambitious work elsewhere. Almost every successful freelancer that I’ve talked to had some sort of side project, unless they were independently wealthy.
Maybe 25 or 30 years ago, magazine writers could make a living and not worry about what was going on behind the scenes. It just isn’t like that anymore, and it is exceptionally difficult to make the economics work otherwise.
There’s a greater appetite for nontraditional publishers now than ever before, and a lot of companies are hiring former journalists to do content marketing work for them. Thirty years ago, companies like Airbnb and Gillette Razors would never have started a magazine; they would have just bought ads. Now, they have their own content arms. It’s a form of marketing, but when it’s done well, the marketing touch is a bit lighter.
For example, Three Point Four helped launch Where to Next, a publication that examines systemic issues such as the wealth gap and the future of workers, with social-impact investment firm Acumen America.
There’s a greater appetite for nontraditional publishers now than ever before, and a lot of companies are hiring former journalists to do content marketing work for them.
We’ve also worked with tourism nonprofit Visit California on a series of Q&As with celebrities who had connections to California, including Zlatan Ibrahimović, Kristen Bell, and Mario Lopez. We put out a call to a handful of freelancers in our network, asked them for any interviews they could deliver, brought the list to our client, assigned and edited the interviews, and got the writers paid decently. That’s a nice proof point for the business model.
We’ve recently been working with Dropbox on articles, videos, and eBooks, which has been fun. But in all of these instances, we’ve worked with veteran journalists and former managing editors at newspapers who either saw the industry declining and jumped ship or were laid off.
There’s always been this “church and state” divide between the editorial and business side of media companies, and I hope it stays that way. But I think there’s a tendency among journalists to treat their projects like art instead of like a business. Don’t get me wrong, good writing is important. But you also have to figure out how to make a living, and if you can’t do that then your career is going to be short.