How the Founder of ‘Broadsheet’ built our go-to city guide

0:04Nick Shelton:Shameless Media. We're back with another installment of our mini-series Face to Face, proudly brought to you by Dan Murphys. In this three-part episode series, we're inviting you to sit down with three tastemakers making a mark in their industry. They're the kind of people we'd love to sit down for a drink or two with. Within each episode, we'll deep dive into their business and career journeys, lessons they've learned along the way, and what's next for them. It's all in the name of great drinks and even better conversation. This series is made possible by Dan Murphy's, the ultimate tastemaker bringing us the next generation of delicious, low-alcohol and non-alcoholic drinks.

0:44Head in-store or to the app to be inspired and find your new favourite. And remember to choose to drink wise.

0:57Hello, I am Madison Sullivan-Thawkes, Stylish's Wednesday and Friday co-host, and welcome to Face to Face. Today, we are very excited to be talking with Nick Shelton. Nick, I'm going to do an introduction for you. And as I said to you before we started recording, I'm going to do one hell of an intro. This is very impressive. Nick, you are a media visionary. you started broadsheet in 2009 after noticing a gap in and I guess an absence in city guides that catered to people who wanted to know where to find the best food drinks cultural events going on in their cities since that time broadsheet has expanded dramatically I feel like that's the understatement of the century but you are Australia wide now and as of last year you are now in the UK as well.

1:43With 3 million website visitors each month, a job specific website scout for roles in creative industries and hospitalities and an exclusive membership program with broadsheet access. I don't think we have the same 24 hours, by the way. Your cultural impact is undeniable, both in the media landscape and in cultural landscape. And there's even the broadsheet effect that has been termed within the industry. In Australia, you have no doubt become the go-to website for all of those who want to know about food, drink, fashion, design and travel, all while remaining 100 % independently funded. Nick, you can probably tell by my beaming smile, I'm very excited to have you here.

2:24I think our audience are going to absolutely lap up all of your golden insights. Great. But what a CV. Thank you. Thanks for having me. We love a rec here at Stylish. every week, every episode, we swap in something. We are so excited to have your recommendation and your swap today. So what is your swap for our audience? So I was thinking about this and I've sort of been thinking of it through a new mindset or developing this kind of like mindset as we've been building London over the last sort of six months to a year. And that's about the role of taste. So in this world where we have Instagram, we've got TikTok and, you know, Pinterest and Tumblr before that, there's this idea that you You can kind of like everything's very visual, everything's very aesthetic.

3:05So people feel like you can kind of borrow taste or I can take taste or I can buy taste. And this is, you know, not a new phenomenon, but it's something that's been supercharged, I think, with these visual platforms. And so we've been thinking about what is taste and how you hone taste and how you develop it, because you're not born with it either. So what I'm taking to the role that we're playing in the London market as a new entrant is how can we demonstrate true taste? How can we help people inform their taste? I just think it's something that's actually now a differentiator. It looks like everyone's got taste and it's homogenized, but that's actually not true.

3:37Having real proper true taste is something to be considered, thought through, and really I think the cream rises to the top. Yeah, I love that. That may be one of our best swaps yet. Good. Now I'm like, do I have taste? I'm really going to sit on this one tonight. Nick, you lived in the UK when you were in your early 20s and worked for a very influential Australian-owned cafe called Flat White. What was your experience like working at Flat White? and your time in the UK? Well, I mean, I was doing that thing that so many Aussies do, which is finish uni, wasn't really sure what I was going to do.

4:08So got a working visa, went totally by myself to the UK and found a job. And I was lucky to sort of find a sort of network of people. I'd already been making coffee and working hospitality through uni. So I knew what I was doing a little bit. But back in those days in London, you couldn't get like a flat white. Like there was old caff coffee or there was sort of the Starbucks equivalent, sort of like a Costa coffee. So you literally had like in the entirety of London, and there were maybe five places you could go. And one of those places was Flat White in Soho. So I had the time of my life. I was 23 or something.

4:38I had nothing to do other than meet people, get to know this big new city, make a bit of coffee, and just enjoy myself. So it was a real high point. Yeah, I mean also introducing people to great Melbourne-style coffees. Yeah, it was a phenomenon. There were queues out the door every morning from like 7 a.m. until 11 a.m. through that rush hour. Like people just couldn't get enough of it. I mean, having been overseas, it's no surprise that people loved having Australian style coffee. It was really part of that, like that Australian coffee export kind of at the time. Yeah, that real boom. I feel like it happened in the UK and in New York as well.

5:11It's like they finally discovered great coffee. Yeah, exactly. What do you think drew you to the hospitality scene as a whole? I really like just something about the way I'm wired, really like being a part of community. So if I'm sitting at home having a bowl of pasta that I've got myself after, you know, long days work, I'm kind of still itching. I'm kind of like I still want to sort of get out and sort of see people or I'll go for a walk around the block or I'll pop into a local wine bar and say hello. I just sort of love being a part of where communities and culture and cities come together.

5:42And I find that there's no better place than that than hospitality, whether it's a restaurant, it's a cafe, it's a wine bar, it doesn't matter. And so you love this idea of community. You've worked at Flat White. You have this idea to start Broadsheet in 2009. At what point did you go, Hunt, this might actually work? Yeah, living and working in London, it was the frustration. It was, I'm new in the city. I want nothing more than just to get a part of it and meet people and go out and be part of this community. But London's a city of, you know, 15 million people. And it was impossible. So this is 2000 and let's say seven or eight.

6:14So the internet was definitely a thing. But publishing and media on the internet was still very like leftover from what was in print. So people, the publishers would print and then they would sort of put some of that content online.

6:25Nick Shelton:Yeah. So online was less of a resource than it is now. Hard to believe. And I found that I was waiting every week for the newspaper supplements to come out, like the Sunday magazine or whatever. And what I'd find was there'd be like, for example, a restaurant review or here's a bar. But as a 22-year-old, 23-year-old, I couldn't afford the Gordon Ramsay restaurant or whatever they were going to talk about. So I was just like frustrated by like, okay, but what do I do? Where do I go? And what I found was I had to actually talk to people, meaning I had to know people to figure out where to go. I had an experience where I was having friends over for dinner and I wanted to go and get some meat or something from a butcher.

6:57and I was like, I have no idea where a good butcher is. Like there are butchers everywhere, but where's the good one? Like where's the, how do you sort of get in the know in the city? So that was a frustration I had. And then when I came, I actually lived in Paris after that for six months and found the exact same experience and then came back to Melbourne and Melbourne was going through this cultural boom. So what we take for granted now, like we're also smug about how amazing Melbourne is as a culture city, as a food city. In 2009, that was really just emerging. So Anne McConnell opened Cumulus, Mark Dunn was opening Seven Seeds, like the coffee culture was really taking off.

7:25Chin Chin Open, this idea of kind of like no reservations, high quality, fast, fun food was really booming. And my experience was that the media wasn't talking about it, but everybody else was. So you'd talk to a friend who was an accountant and they'd be talking about like, oh, see that police sign? Such and such a chef is going in there and going to open this restaurant. And I'm thinking like, this is a real moment happening, but there's no way to go and get information about it. So as a kind of, I guess, naive 24, 25-year-old, I was like, I'm just gonna give this a go, give it a crack and set it up and built an audience really fast and quickly.

7:59And it took off. I love that you brought up you at 25 because I remember being obsessed with broadshade years ago and being like, who even created this? So I must admit, I did do a deep dive on you many, many years ago, but you were 25 when you started broadshade and you went into it without any entrepreneurial media experience. Do you feel that your lack of experience hindered you or helped you? I mean, definitely both. If I had too much experience I probably never would have done it because you I didn't know what I didn't know and so what I didn't know was probably scary if I'd known it but at the same time you make lots of mistakes you don't know what you're doing it is hard so there's a there's a slowdown or a hindrance but I sort of treated the whole thing as just a big learning experience like this was my the the opportunity of a lifetime to learn it's better than any university course it's it's better like it's the best training you could possibly get is by actually doing it but at the same time, I remember someone saying to me, I was getting advice from over a coffee in the very early days.

8:55And he said, you probably have two years where being naive is going to be working for you. And people will want to give you a leg up and give you an opportunity and see that you're sort of a plucky young person going for it. After two years, you're gonna have to know your shit. Yeah, it's not cute after two years. Exactly. And I think that turned out to be true. And I actually I've shared that that advice with other people as well. It's like people will want to give you a crack and give you give you a go. But after a while, you've got to figure it out and know what you're doing. Do you think that applies to any age or do you think that is something that's relevant kind of in your, you know, 20s?

9:24I think it's particularly relevant in your 20s or when you're young and people want to support someone who's young and give you a crack. I think if you come in at 40 and say like, I've got no idea what I'm doing, people might think like, well, why don't you? But at the same time, I think I'm really encouraged by people and I really value people who will give people a crack. And going to London, for example, like we know what we're doing in London, like we've been doing this 15 years, but it's a new market. We don't know everyone. So there's definitely a sense that we're feeling of being welcomed there.

9:52And people like wanting to give us a crack. I don't think it's because we're naive, but I think it's because we're new and we're giving it a crack. And I think that energy is positive. Yeah, very much like Australia, the UK in that sense that they do love the underdog as well. I mentioned in the intro, the broadsheet effect, which having friends who work in hospitality, own within the hospitality industry, I know they speak about it very, very often. it's essentially the effect where customers flock to somewhere that your publication has recommended or when it's been featured on site when did you sort of first notice this and how did you feel when people started talking about the broadsheet effect it's a good question it was it was fairly early and i remember in the in the early days we did one newsletter a week and that was on wednesdays and we would kind of every once in a while we just hear someone say that they were they'd open the venue.

10:41It was going pretty well, people coming through, having a good time. And then at Wednesday at about one o 'clock, there's a queue out the door and around the corner. Like what the hell is going on? And someone would say, oh, you were featured in the, in the broadsheet newsletter today. Yeah. And that was, yeah, when that sort of idea of the broadsheet effect started taking shape, taking effect, getting around. And that's, that's still how I look at it and judge, do we still have the influence we've always had? So I still love hearing those stories. I used to work at Mecca and a lot of the time we would have brand founders and their teams come out from different, you know, cities across the world.

11:09And a lot of the time they would come and the first thing they would ask is where do we eat and where do we get coffee? And I would go, have you guys been on Broadsheet? And it kind of became this word of mouthing that overseas, all of these international beauty brand founders and all of these like colleagues would be like, okay, no, you've got to go on Broadsheet when you go to, you know, the different cities across. So know that it's even, you know, hitting New York, Paris, London, they're all talking about it. That was nice. I was talking to Josh Wood, who's doing the hair at the new Mecca HQ.

11:38I was talking to him in London, and he was saying that he'd been on Broadsheet, and him and Joe had been going out and sort of in the town. That was fun. Yeah, it really becomes like a checklist for them where they want to go to as many as possible, and Broadsheet is their main source of directory. That's nice. Is there, I guess, a Broadsheet effect story that you have the most affinity for or that kind of warms the shackles of your heart the most? There are hundreds, hundreds and hundreds. There are stories like we didn't think we were going to make it as a restaurant and then this happened. Or there's the story of a florist, an online florist, and they were doing pretty well.

12:11And then I think we wrote about them for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. And their sales shot up like 1 ,000%, making that number up. But they really shot up. And then they never came back down. And the founder of that business commented to me that we wouldn't have a business if it weren't for Broadsheet's Impact. That has to feel pretty nice. It feels nice. That is, you know, when I talk about before, like, I love community and I love being a part of a city and a part of a culture. To have that impact is really nice. And in fact, our brand mission is about enriching culture. So what that means is any community that we're a part of, we want it to be better because of us being there.

12:48So when we're going to London, we're thinking about, like, how can our presence make London a better city? You know, it's not just us. thousands, millions and millions of contributors to London or Melbourne or Sydney or anywhere else being a great city from a cultural perspective. But we want to make sure that our role is positive and net positive. So when we hear those stories, we think actually it's working. This is, you know, we're having an impact. That's a beautiful brand mission. I also feel like that could just be a really nice individual mission for people to have too. It's a really nice mindset.

13:14Nick, we're going to get into the rest of the interview right after a word from today's sponsor. Call it a New Year's resolution or a pure coincidence, but at this time of year, many of us commit to healthier choices. And for many of us, that means reducing our alcohol intake. Maybe we're ready to dial back the cheeky midweek wines, or we opt for a pack of bougie sodas for the weekend barbecue instead of our usual seltzers. Still, no one wants to feel like they're missing out. And with the current crop of low alcohol and non-alcoholic options at Dan Murphy's, we don't need to. If this is your first foray into the low alcohol section, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

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14:31Nick, we want to do a bit of a rapid fire Rex and it would just be remiss of us not to ask you for some of the best recommendations. Selfishly, I'm glad I do get to listen back to this recording because this will now become my checklist if I haven't been to some of these. But our audience love a recommendation, hence where the swap came from. But we've got some hospitality-based questions. The first is, who do you think serves the best coffee in Australia? I mean, that's a really hard one because they're so good now. Like it's now we're so spoiled as a country and as cities that we can go so many places.

15:04My personal every day, every morning coffee is Margaret Lane in Carlton. I'm at that coffee window when I'm in Melbourne. every morning bright eyed looking for my coffee. They're great. Yeah. Okay. Fantastic. Add it to my list. I haven't actually been there. The next one is Melbourne specific, which selfishly I'm thrilled for. Where do you think does the most top tier sandwich in Melbourne? Again, that's really hard. I know. We're asking you to pick favorite children. Okay. So I would say Nico's on Kerr Street in Fitzroy is great. I think Hector's Deli, what Dom's doing at Hector's Deli is like, everyone knows it, but they know it for a reason.

15:38It's just so great. I have to ask, what is your favorite at Nico's and at Hector's Deli? Nico's, I get the chicken's initial. The morning after a big night, that's a good one. After a few Chablis. Another Melbourne-specific question, but where is the best date spot in Melbourne? Probably Napier Quarter. My wife and I still go on date nights there. Like when we're in Melbourne and the sun is out, we're like, let's go to Napier and have a wine. It's a really good spot there. It's a good spot, yeah. What's a recipe you always return back to? I am obsessive about a metriacana. That's a Roman pasta dish.

16:08I had one a few years ago in Rome and I was like, I have to be able to make this. And so I go back to that again and again and again. Can I ask, did you get the recipe while you were in Rome? No, I mean, it's such a classic. Like, it's just a few ingredients. And so it's really just about, like, what time do you bring different ingredients in? How long do you let the tomato sit for? How long do you let the guanciale sit for? So it's really just about, like, tinkering with the specifics. Yeah. I find I often get tripped up by the most simple of recipes, though. It feels to me that that is... Because you can't hide.

16:34It's all about crafting and honing that. Who's a food content creator that you're loving right now? We're working in London with a writer named Jimmy Famarewa. He was the restaurant reviewer for The Evening Standard a couple of years ago. And he's now a columnist for us. And he writes a column called The Counter every Tuesday. I love Jimmy's writing. Like being able to work with such a huge talent is really phenomenal. And he's got a big following. So that's exciting. I love that. And then best night of the week to eat out. I think a Wednesday. Yes, I very much agree with this. I love a midweek Wednesday when it's not like, it's not a party night every night.

17:10Not everyone's there to let loose. It's just a very nice crowd. The people who want to be there are there and who are sort of like that, you know, dedicated restaurant audience. Okay, Wednesdays it is. Hot take. Watch every restaurant in Melbourne and Sydney, Adelaide, you name it, be buzzing for Wednesdays. They need to be full on Wednesdays. Okay, back to a little bit of business chat. Obviously now you are running a really large team. and as a leader in your field, I imagine you're called upon for advice pretty frequently. The irony, we are also calling on that advice. What's a piece of advice that you always give that people maybe dislike hearing?

17:44What I go back to a lot is don't accept conventional wisdom. And it's not that people don't like hearing that, but it challenges people. So if it can be within our business, it could be with someone I'm just talking to or giving advice to in life generally. The idea that like, well, this is what people say. This is like, this is what you're meant to do. This is how you're meant to do it. I always say like reject that. And I think that comes from the very core of like when I started the business, people would say, you're crazy, you're 25, media is hard, it's only getting harder, don't do it. Like I had people literally tell me, like, don't do this.

18:13Okay, great. We understood each other, you're not gonna do this great. And of course, I just went on and did it. And I'm so glad that I did. Because I could have easily listened to that advice and thought like, okay, this is gonna be too hard. I don't know what I'm doing. But we even say that within the business. So we have this this idea that the thing I hate hearing the most within our business is, oh, well, that's not how we do it at Broadsheet. Because if you're saying that, it might be the case yesterday. That's not how we did it, and we didn't do it for a particular reason. But today it might be the right way to do it because the environment is shifting so quickly, whether it's audience appetites, advertiser appetites, it's the distribution platforms like Google and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and what their algorithms are doing.

18:47We have to be so adaptable all the time. So the idea, and we know this, the world is changing so far so quickly all the time, that the mindset of adaptability and entrepreneurial, It doesn't matter how big, how established, how long you've been going, you've got to be able to sort of shift and change. Yeah, which is such a perfect segue because, as you mentioned, the media landscape is changing so rapidly, whether you work in publication or on brand side or in media, like the way that the algorithms are changing, the way that the audiences are interacting. What have you, as a publication, found the most challenging in that space?

19:22Well, I guess the challenge, it's not about the most challenging, but the challenge is always that it's changing. It's literally that you can, you know, as publishers coming up through the sort of 2010s, I guess, we all built these businesses on Facebook. And then Facebook one day was like, actually, we're going to do something different now and sort of change a corner. And so that destroyed loads and loads of media publishing businesses. They had built themselves entirely on Facebook, BuzzFeed being the kind of the shining example. But the way we thought about that was it's not about the algorithms.

19:49It's not about the platforms that disintermediate your relationship with the audience. It's really about what is your brand, in our case, Broadsheet, connecting to the audience about? Like what's the conversation we're having? And yes, we can have that via a, or within sort of a Facebook environment or an Instagram environment or TikTok environment or Google environment. But really it's about that connection. So that means that if those environments change, if the algorithms shift, if they want video instead of written or instead of imagery, instead of audio, what happens to me, it doesn't matter.

20:16It's about that relationship. And so again, adaptability. If you're adaptable as you sort of ride the waves of those algorithms and what they need, but you're keeping your eye on that relationship with your audience and are you giving the audience what they have come for, then I think you're good. That's brilliant advice. It's been so interesting watching it as an outsider, the way that media landscapes changed. And I love what you're saying about adaptability because it does feel like, you know, two people who might on paper look so similar, one loves video content that's like snackable in 15 seconds on TikTok and someone loves long form sub stacks all of a sudden.

20:49And it must be so hard to cater to all of those people. But it's like what you do. So you've got your audience of stylish. They want the information you guys are providing with them. They want to hear the conversations. It could be audio. It could be video. It could be written. It could be an event. It could be a pop-up. It could be a book. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that they want that information and they want it in the style that you guys are providing it. So that's the way we think about it. I'm glad you listed basically every pillar of what we offer at Stylish, except a book.

21:15But you know, never say never. You can do it. We did it. You can do it. Okay, good to know. We'll earmark that one. What do you think was most important when you launched the brand initially? For us, it was about establishing credibility really quickly and being absolutely steadfast about delivering that. So I kind of came to this conclusion really quickly that if our audience could trust us, they would keep coming back to us and keep reading us and keep using us. And then advertisers would come and they would sort of also leverage that credibility and we could build a business off it. So for us, from day one to now 16 years later in the UK, as we're growing a new business again, it's all about like, how can you get the audience to trust you?