Sam Koslowski’s success is a lesson in tenacity. He co-founded The Daily Aus, an Australian youth news platform that started as an Instagram page. Now, TDA is a major media brand with over 220,000 newsletter subscribers, 563,000 Instagram followers, and growing across several channels. Sam speaks openly about the ups and downs of building a news platform and the challenges and successes of shaking up how young people consume news today. We loved our chat with Sam, and think you will too. Read on!
Q: Kia ora Sam! Tell us about your career path and what led you to founding the Daily Aus?
I grew up in a family of journalists. My dad was the sports editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and I have an uncle and a grandfather who are journalists too. My sixth birthday party was newspaper-themed – it’s in my blood.
I started working at Fox Sports as a sports journalist the day after my final year 12 exams. I worked there for five years while studying law and journalism before deciding to focus on law after a bit of media burnout, so I worked as a corporate lawyer for two years. I absolutely hated it.
Throughout that time (this was in 2013), I had the idea to do the Daily Aus; I wrote a business plan and took the name on Instagram. So it was an idea and in the background for a long time, but in 2017 I went through a bad breakup. I was seeing a psychologist at the time who said, ‘You need a project.’ And so, I put something on LinkedIn, asking if anyone wanted to start a news business with me, and Zara (co-founder of The Daily Aus) was the only person to reply. The next day, we went to have coffee in Bondi and left each of us with 50% ownership of a company that didn’t yet exist.
Covid was really the turning point for the business. We’d been publishing every single day for four years, but had only really been publishing to 500 of our friends. The audience came with the daily Covid updates, which is just the weirdest circumstance ever. We raised a really small financing round, quit our other jobs, and got a little office. That was February 2021, and here we are in August 2024 with a whole newsroom, heaps of different assets, and a massive audience.
Q: At that time, was there a problem that you felt like you were trying to solve? What was the intention around launching?
Well, the problem is twofold. From the industry perspective, media and journalism have been dying slowly for probably 20 years now, accelerated by social media. On the consumer side, that slow death has come from the fact that young people don’t consume traditional news at all; worse than that, they don’t trust news at all.
I was hearing a lot of my friends saying, “I don’t read the news. It’s too sad, too boring, I don’t understand it; there are too many things that I don’t care about.” But then they would message me and say, “Hey I’m going on a date with a girl. Can you quickly tell me what’s happening in North Korea?” I realised there was this knowledge gap, and there was room to introduce little news briefings. The problem I was trying to solve was a similar problem that Netflix and Spotify solved for movies and music, which is to bring stuff to where people are, rather than making them go somewhere else. So, instead of saying to people on social media, “Click out here and go read an article over there,” bring articles straight to them. Then work out how to build an audience and kind of let monetisation figure itself out later.
Q: You are described as “youth news”. What do you think makes those audiences different? And why do you think bigger companies are misunderstanding those audiences?
Well, this is probably something that every generation says, but I do think that Gen Z and younger millennials are really grossly misunderstood. And I think the roots of that probably lie in some of the failings of an education system that doesn't quite prepare people for the realities of the world around them.
For example it's really hard to figure out what GST is, what superannuation is, and what a tax return is. We’re expected to know all these financial ideas, but nobody taught us. So when we read an article that says interest rates went up, how are we supposed to know exactly what that means? Part of our job at the Daily Aus is representing our generation in a news context. News execs look at our generation and think we just want celebrity pop culture and gossip, and they think that is what youth media is - clickbait, grabby headlines, and bad writing.
We’re proving that young people actually want really high-quality journalism on stories that matter. On the federal budget night here in Australia, for example, our public broadcaster got 607 - 100,000 views on their TV broadcast. We reached 1.8 million people on social media. It’s a dense thing, right? It’s a federal budget. It’s boring. But if you do it in the right way, people really care about these issues that affect their lives every day.
Q: The Daily Aus thrives across multiple channels, social media, website, newsletters, and a podcast. How important is that kind of multichannel approach to you?
Well, it's never been more important than it is right now, given the regulatory uncertainty we're experiencing in Australia. Diversifying our channels has been the single most important factor for us in our business growth over the last 18 months.
We started as a native Instagram product and it was only when we quit our jobs that we expanded the suite, purely because of resources. The key lesson we've all learned is that you cannot build a business that relies on another business.
The issue with building a business on Instagram is that it relies on Meta and its policies to provide growth and a steady future outlook for your business. So, something that I really enjoy about the newsletters is that they remove that third party and you have somebody's email; you can control when they're going to receive your newsletter.
TikTok, Instagram, etc – these platforms are totally at the mercy of the tech owners that run them.
Q: Australia is obviously in the front line of a big tech battle and you're in the rare position of arguing against that news bargaining law. Can you explain what the stakes are for you?
This isn't just an Australian issue – it's spreading globally. In Australia, companies like News Corp and Nine, which dominate 80% of the media market, claim social media has destroyed their ad revenue. They've pushed for laws that force big platforms like Facebook and Google to pay for news content. The idea is if they don't, the government can step in and force a payment or even ban them from the country.
When this law was introduced in 2021, big players like Facebook and Google made deals with politically powerful media companies, leaving smaller ones like us out. These deals were worth about $100 million each. But earlier this year, Meta decided not to renew these deals, signalling they don't care about news anymore. In Canada, a similar situation led Meta to block all news channels, and that block is still in place. So if I went on a holiday to Vancouver, my Instagram wouldn't be able to see the Daily Aus.
Our fear is that if the government pushes for arbitration, Meta might just block news in Australia too. This would hit us hard, not only financially but also by cutting off access to news for young Australians, 70% of whom rely on us as their primary source. And so to take that primary source of news away from a demographic, it’s a serious issue for a society. We've been arguing that media companies shouldn't rely on tech giants for funding – innovation should drive sustainability. But with AI now entering the scene, the same issues are emerging.
So it’s been a really interesting couple of months. I would say that it is likely that the arbitration will go ahead, and we will lose Instagram. So the worst case scenario will likely happen which would have a huge impact on our business and audience. We're just waiting to see when and how this will all unfold.
Q: How do you feel about the future of the industry?
I feel really positive despite the huge challenges. We’ve got a newsroom full of journalists, salespeople and software developers who are all under 30 and who all really believe in the future of media in Australia. We’re building really cool shit and we're doing stuff that people have said young people aren’t interested in and proving that idea wrong.
For example, this time, a year ago, we had 40,000 newsletter subscribers and the average age was probably 28. Today, we have 220,000 newsletter subscribers and the average age is 25. We’ve actually attracted an audience of young people and got them to read a daily newsletter. That just flies in the face of people saying young people don't read email. And so even if we do lose Instagram, we have that audience still to talk to.
Q: And what are some of the kind of biggest challenges you've seen since founding the Daily Aus?
At the moment, the biggest challenge is scale. It’s presenting itself as an internal issue, now that we can't fit around a table in a café to talk about the next month. So it’s looking at how we implement systems and processes that allow our company to keep scaling, to keep growing our revenue, to keep growing our channels, to keep growing the number of pieces we're doing, and maintaining that quality that we're famous for.
The other big challenge is the fact that we are in such a cut-throat sector, that often our competitors will aggressively outbid us for talent. The challenge is how to be a really valid part of the media landscape, to keep your distance from those guys, but also try and work together and model different behaviour.
Oh, and for me, personally, the biggest challenge is always going to be work/life balance too. I work insane hours. The news doesn’t sleep, but TDA employees have to.
Q: Are there any trends or changes you're expecting to see in the future related to news media and technology?
To be unoriginal here, AI and automation are the big ones keeping me up at night. The challenge is how we incorporate AI in a way that enhances, rather than replaces, the work of journalists. We're focusing on tools that make the job quicker, like automating tasks without taking away the writing itself.
Another trend is the idea of a revenue tax on social media companies to fund journalism, similar to how mining companies pay a tax in Australia. This could provide much-needed support as the media's commercial model faces a crisis. But with government funding comes the concern about the media’s ability to still be critical of the government. It’s a tricky trend but one to watch closely.
Q: Is there any advice that you'd give your younger self as a founder?
Pace yourself a little bit more, and try to understand whether a problem is an existential threat or a ‘no one will be thinking about this in two weeks’ type of problem. We have had so many crisis meetings and big discussions late at night because we got a photo wrong or we lost a pitch – so many small issues that have felt like the biggest thing in the world at the time.
And now they happen, and I just don't even blink. I’m just like, ‘Yeah, sweet, whatever, this is what we have to do.’
