The Quality Edit’s Lauren Kleinman and Lee Joselowitz on performance publishing

This week Media Voices hear from Lauren Kleinman and Lee Joselowitz, co-founders of The Quality Edit. The Quality Edit was founded in 2021 when Lauren, Lee and their co-founder Scott Silver felt there was no digital publisher providing high-quality recommendations around fashion, travel, and beauty products, so they decided to launch their own. The Quality Edit has quickly become a force to be reckoned with in the media landscape.

Lauren and Lee tell us about a technique they are terming ‘performance publishing’, about how they persevered through the early years, and how the digital publishing ecosystem rewards authenticity.

In the news roundup Chris and Esther discuss the news that the Independent is in talks to take control of BuzzFeed and HuffPost in the UK, ask what the demise of Vice.com means for digital publishing, and ask if scale is well and truly dead.

Episode Highlight

Building trust with an audience…

“Last year we did a reader survey that showed that over 90% of our audience trusts our recommendations. For context, as a baseline, a lot of the very top tier most trusted publications… might be something a lot closer to 80-85%. We’re very proud of that, and are going to continue to try and make that stat even higher.

“A lot of it goes back to the authenticity of the content, and our true investment in the quality of our content – we’re named The Quality Edit for a reason! We really do try to put out the highest quality content. I think, especially in an ecosystem where you have a lot of the top tier publishers using ChatGPT, doing the very bare minimum, just trying to fulfil either getting clicks using a flashy headline without an interesting article… we pride ourselves in being proud of every single piece of content that we put out.

“We put out a lot of content, usually a couple of pieces a day. But 99% of our content is not sponsored, it’s editorially driven. We maintain very high editorial integrity, every editor authentically tries and reviews every product that we test and write about.

“I think it comes down to the recruitment of our editors… and then the other thing is consistency. Trust isn’t earned overnight, it’s earned every single day. So whether that’s across our newsletter touchpoints, or our social media touchpoints, or our editorial and on-site experience, just making sure that we’re building those one-on-one relationships with our readers, and delivering on the content that they’re asking for, as well as just maintaining that very high bar of integrity in terms of the types of content that we’re putting out.”