Bookie, bootlegger, restauranteur

by

Bookie, bootlegger, restauranteur (August 31, 2026)

BY LIZ MOOREHEAD

Howdy, all. It’s me, Liz Moorehead, head of content here at Beeler.Tech. Rob is taking the week off from newsletter duty so once again, you’re stuck with me.

For most of human history, if you wanted to tell someone something and they weren’t standing in front of you, you had two options: send a person or write it down. (Or, if you were living 4,000 years ago, you chiseled your grievances over a shady copper merchant onto a clay tablet.)

Then the whole game changed in the 1400s when a German goldsmith figured out how to cast individual letters in metal, arrange them on a page, ink them, and then press them onto paper over and over and over again. Thanks to this invention called “movable type,” suddenly one person could say something once but have it read by hundreds, if not thousands of people.

Humans are hard-wired discourse machines. We tell stories. We exchange opinions. We share news. We complain. And, most of all, we document. That’s something that’s never going to change. What has changed and will continue to change is the mechanism of this documentation.

That’s why, like Rob, I find the whole “publishing is dead” narrative to be completely exhausting.

In my lifetime, we’ve moved from newspapers and evening news blocks on one of four broadcast networks, to 24-hour news channels, to newspaper websites, to social media. And whatever comes after social media, we’ll tell our stories through that mechanism, too.

In fact, our obsession with documentation is the only reason I know anything about my family.

Last night, armed with a Newspapers.com subscription and too much time on my hands, I discovered my great-grandfather, Alfonso Perruso, was a bit of a notorious character in the 1920s-1930s Italian neighborhood of Swampoodle of Washington, D.C.

In the back of his barbershop, he ran an illegal gaming house and speakeasy. Next door, he owned a restaurant called Perruso’s Cafe, which later sponsored an almost undefeated amateur basketball team in the 1940s. (He also parlayed that love of sports into a career as a prolific bookie, often cited in the Washington Times-Herald sports gossip column.)

After he passed away, my grandfather (Vito), along with his two brothers (Anthony and Jimmy) attempted to restart the family restaurant business up the street on Georgia Avenue. It only lasted a few years, though. Troubles with the law, can you believe it?

Nobody who loved my family kept these records. A city that published everything did.

So, is publishing dead? No.

The only thing I’d argue is that the term “Publisher” has started to mean too many things. Sure, it’s the Times, but it’s also the independent legacy journalist now making waves on Substack and TikTok, the local media company two people started when their community newspaper went under, the podcast that became a network… you get my point.

That’s why we’ve expanded our tent here at Beeler.Tech by adding “original media” alongside “publishers” on our homepage and new about page.

I know things can feel very doom-and-gloom, as we can’t seem to go a day in our industry without at least one long-cherished norm getting completely upended. And if the piece I published last week about content provenance is any indication, we have some serious existential questions we need to answer for ourselves before someone else does.

But we need to remember “publishing” is a human condition that predates the business of publishing by thousands of years. It’s not going anywhere, folks. So the question was never whether people will keep writing things down for strangers they’ll never meet. They absolutely will.

The question is whether the people doing it can build businesses that last, and that’s the only thing we’ve ever cared about here. So the tent gets bigger, the name on the door changes, and the work stays the same: helping the people who make things worth reading get paid for it.

(If you get bored and want to say hi, I can be reached at liz@beeler.tech.)

Here’s what you need to know this week… 

  • Have you seen the Base.Camp La Jolla agenda? For veteran Base.Campers, you know the agenda is a living document. That means we work closely with our community members to refine it, leading up to the event, based on what we really need to cover. But if you haven’t checked it out recently, now is the time to do so. We’re adding more each day. 

  • We’re only a little over a month out from Base.Camp La Jolla! We’re excited to share that leaders from Mirror Digital, Netflix, TextNow, Crazy Games, Ebony, CVS Media Exchange, American City Business Journals, Business Insider, Capital Weather, Edmunds, Sightline Media Group, Paradigm.AI, Blavity, Advance Local, The Weather Company, and MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing are now in the list for October. Raise your hand today if you want to join us. Time is running out!

  • Publishers from Time and Date AS, PGA TOUR, Reach PLC, Skyscanner, Planet Sport Limited, Dexerto, Telegraph Media Group, Better Collective, The Washington Post, Skyscanner, Dow Jones, Bauer Media Audio Portugal, Live Nation, Schibsted Media, and The Independent have committed to join us this November at Base.Camp Madrid. Now it’s your turn. Note that hotel rooms are limited due to an NFL game that has been scheduled in Madrid on that Sunday. Let us know you’re interested today to secure your spot.

  • Join us this week for Camp.Fire on September 3 at 2 p.m.! Dennis Colón, Head of Agent & Automation Strategy at boostr, will join us for an open conversation where publishers, vendors, and other industry participants can join, learn, and share perspectives on what it takes to get seller-agent ready. This is a publisher- and In View-only event. 

  • Then on September 10 at 2 p.m., we’ve got another one… Camp.Fire: Prebid on Mobile: Does It Hold Up? Jared Siegal, Founder and CEO of Aditude, breaks down how Prebid fits into the mobile stack today, why some publishers are moving away from traditional mediation, and what questions you should be asking before you make the switch. This is a publisher- and In View-only event.

  • And finally, on September 17 at 1 p.m, Camp.Fire: Business Insider’s Ad Telemetry System! Business Insider has an internal Ad Telemetry dashboard and they are going to share what they have built. This is a publisher- and In View-only event.

Want to get caught up on everything we’ve published? Start here.

Here’s the latest…  

  • Publishers have a content provenance problem, but C2PA is only part of the conversation (by Liz Moorehead)
    Publishers are watching the economic scales of their content tip even more out of their favor. AI “solutions” can ingest, summarize, excerpt, repackage and serve information without ever sending people back to the publishers who created it in the first place. So now we’re all trying to figure out (with admittedly varying degrees of interest) how to tell what came from where, who owns what, and which players are trying to skirt attribution entirely without anyone noticing.

  • Start ’em, sit ’em: The publisher priorities that deserve attention in H2 2026 (with Craig Leshen of adops.com) 
    Publishers are making decisions in a market that feels less predictable than it did a few years ago. Search traffic is under pressure, buyer expectations are sharper, and more of the audience journey is happening inside platforms. For example, Reuters reported that social media and video networks are now go-to news sources for 54% of respondents globally, ahead of news organizations’ own websites and apps at 51%.

  • Programmatic risk: Why elevated exposure is now the baseline (with Confiant’s Danielle Koffler)
    While programmatic has delivered unprecedented scale for publishers over the years, it’s also handed them a supply chain they cannot fully see. Malicious and low-quality ads travel through the same trusted pipes as legitimate demand, and when something harmful reaches a user, it lands under the publisher’s brand, on the publisher’s page.

A full list of our 2026 events we’re involved in, all in one nice little package:

Chicago AdTech Happy Hour

📅 September 1, 5:00 pm CT

📍 Parlor Pizza Bar in West Loop @ 108 N. Green St., Chicago

The next Chicago AdTech happy hour, sponsored by adops.com is coming up. Melissa and Jeff will be there!

Join the Community!

Thousands of professionals, of all ages, worldwide turn to Beeler.Tech as their meeting place for all things publisher revenue operations. Join the Beeler.Tech Community here! Your teams and colleagues are welcome, too. 

Join the Women’s Space

Our Women’s Space continues to grow, and we’re developing a Code of Conduct for all Beeler.Tech events: something every attendee will agree to, and something we hope the wider industry adopts. The goal is simple: raise the bar on respect and professionalism for everyone. We have a Slack channel and a WhatsApp group. The WhatsApp chat is more active, but you’re welcome in either (or both) if you want to be part of the conversation.

Please reach out to Melissa if you would like to join one or both.

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