This past month, Digiday+ members had access to a number of exclusive benefits including our new intelligence platform, 10 research reports, an invite to our next members-only event, Slack town halls with executives from The Atlantic and Chive Media Group and more. Here's a sample of what you missed.

Digiday Research: For video production, 64 percent of publishers say cost is their biggest challenge
According to earlier Digiday research, 82 percent of U.S. publishers and 94 percent of European publishers plan to increase their video production in the year ahead. But we've found that it hasn't been that easy. 

The Rundown
Below is an excerpt from a recent edition of The Rundown, a weekly newsletter written exclusively for Digiday+ members.

Traditional publishers don’t have the skill sets needed to run a sophisticated subscription operation, so they have to hire them. Perhaps hardest of all, they have to change the culture. As Mary Walter-Brown, CEO of the News Revenue Hub, which is helping publishers develop membership programs, told me, publishers need to explain why they need readers’ help, which requires showing vulnerability — something that’s not in most publishers’ DNA. “We’re great at telling other people’s stories, but we’re not great at telling our own story,” she said.

— Lucia Moses

Slack town halls with industry execs

‘Part ego, part angel’: A Slack town hall with The Atlantic’s head of growth Sam Rosen
That a media company is building a consumer brand that needs a unified approach to growing audience and earning revenue from customers is a relatively new insight in the journalism world. And that a central group should also enable insights across advertising, edit, consumer marketing, etc., is also relatively new. Check out the full recap.

'Giving away your distribution is dangerous’: A Slack town hall with Chive Media Group’s Eric Spielman
When evaluating our video strategy, we thought a lot about how/where our audience watches TV and the distribution required to build a business. That’s more or less how we ended up at bars/restaurants. Blue-collar bros watch a lot of TV in bars/restaurants. What is our competitive advantage? How much distribution would we need for a business? I don’t see many bars showing BuzzFeed TV. Check out the full recap.

Digiday magazine
We're putting the finishing touches on the Year in Preview issue of Digiday magazine. Here's a peek at what's in store.

We’ve started work on what will be the eighth issue of Digiday magazine, which will reach subscribers before the holidays. Our theme for the second year: the year in preview, a look ahead to the big trends and themes our editorial team believes will define digital media in 2018.

One of the big themes is no surprise: the duopoly in the crosshairs. On Oct. 31, executives from Google and Facebook (along with Twitter) were on Capitol Hill to be grilled about their role in Russian meddling in the last presidential election. Not lost on many: The tech giants didn’t send their CEOs — they sent lower-level executives. In 2018, these questions will only intensify as a result of a shift in elite perception of tech giants not as infallible examples of American ingenuity, but as aloof and unaccountable nonstate actors wreaking havoc on many industries and democracy itself.

Become a Digiday+ member by December 4 to receive the Year in Preview issue.