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https://twitter.com/gbrumfiel/status/1639661514398244864 It's been a rough time in the media business. So many national media outlets in the US have announced layoffs in the past few months: NBC, the Washington Post, NPR, Vice, BuzzFeed, Vox Media, News Corp, Gannett, not to speak of the bloodbath across regional and local media. Part of this is because the media industry is contracting with many other sectors in the economy due to inflation and fears of a recession. With so much media funded through advertising, a decline in consumer confidence necessarily will ripple out to the media. (I thought this piece did a good job of explaining the business psychology driving layoffs: https://www.thediff.co/archive/how-companies-think-about-layoffs/) Part of this, I suspect, is due to a relaxation of alarm following Trump and the Covid-19 pandemic. The furious pace of news developments and three years of people being cooped up inside has ended and fewer people are glued to their newsfeeds. There was an unnatural spike in readership/viewership and we're seeing a regression to the mean. But there is a secular decline in media as well. Whether your company is for-profit, non-profit, family-owned, billionaire-owned, venture-backed, hedge fund managed, subscription-based, ad-supported, odds are you've seen a decline in your business over the past two decades. A lot of this has been fueled by the internet collapsing traditional business models. Internet ads don't pay anywhere near as much as print, and craigslist obliterated the classifieds sections of local newspapers, which once provided up to 40 percent of their revenue. The internet has also democratized the tools of news-gathering. Anyone with a cameraphone and a data plan can start live streaming from press conference or protest, but does that a journalist make? Another factor is that the gate-keepers are no longer the media outlets themselves, but search engines and social media. News items live and die by algorithms beyond their control. I recall hearing from people complaining that the media wasn't covering the East Palestine chemical spill, but national media outlets like the Washington Post were there the next day. People's social media feeds however were overflowing with Chinese spy balloon coverage, and national TV outlets didn't give the disaster much airtime (it's probably worth drawing a distinction between television and print/digital/radio news outlets in this discussion). Attitudes toward media also played a role in its decline. In the early days of the internet, media outlets put their content up for free and only past few years, long after the horses left the barn, are outlets starting to raise paywalls. Readers however developed the expectation that news should be free. And some outlets even feed into this - during natural disasters or public emergencies, many outlets make their coverage of these issues free. Imagine any other business that would make its products free just when they are at their most valuable. It shows that news media isn't just a business but a public service, an ethos that even private for-profit outlets try to uphold. Even before the internet though, there has been a widespread decline in public institutions, mainly in government, but in the media as well: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/06/when-americans-lost-faith-in-the-news (Great piece, btw) All the while, politics in the US has evolved and mutated far more rapidly than the norms of journalism can keep up with, particularly the idea of "objectivity": From the New Yorker article: quote:In the memoir slash manifesto “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life” (St. Martin’s), Margaret Sullivan argues that objectivity is not so much impossible today as meaningless, and that the press ought to stop striving to achieve it. The events of 2020 and 2021 showed that the press’s values were in the wrong place. “The extreme right wing had its staunch all-in media allies,” she writes. “The rest of the country had a mainstream press that too often couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do their jobs. Too many journalists couldn’t seem to grasp their crucial role in American democracy.” Perhaps this mode of thinking is obsolete. Witness the rise of hyper-partisan media outlets, mostly on the right. That leads to extremely divergent epistemology, which can manifest in the real world with life and death consequences: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/10/01/for-covid-19-vaccinations-party-affiliation-matters-more-than-race-and-ethnicity/ That leads to the larger question of how can you operate a democracy without a common set of facts. Now there is another threat to journalism: AI. With language models now integrated into search engines, Google and Bing can assemble a personalized new brief for you by scraping news outlets, but not passing any traffic or ad revenue through to the outlet that produced the underlying information. These language learning models are very good at plagiarizing. But they may also be able to start replacing journalists as well. CNet and BuzzFeed are already doing that. Here, I think, is where the greatest contrast and value-add of journalism can be drawn: https://inthesetimes.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-journalism-chatgpt-media-ethics quote:Human journalists are flawed too. But we are accountable. That’s the difference. Institutions in journalism live on credibility, and that credibility is granted as a direct result of the accountability that accompanies every story. When stories have errors or biases or leave things out or misstate things or bend the truth, they can be credibly challenged, and credible institutions are obligated to be able to demonstrate how and why the story is how it is, and they are obligated to acknowledge and fix any deep flaws in their reporting and writing and publishing processes on an ongoing basis. If they don’t do that, they lose their credibility. When they lose that, they lose everything. This process of accountability is the foundation of journalism. Without it, you may be doing something, but you ain’t doing journalism. To me, it seems there is money to be made in media. I posit that you can run a media outlet as a *profit generating* entity, but not a *profit maximizing* entity. Most media outlets have an inherent limit of consumers and after they hit saturation, there isn't much room for growth. It makes for a good family business, but it's terrible for shareholders or hedge funds. Journalists genuinely do provide a socially beneficial service and I think it's worth fighting for. You can needle the New York Times all you want (and there's a lot to criticize) but what other institution is infiltrating slaughterhouses to find exploited child workers? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html To this forum I pose the following questions: Be honest: Where is the first place you usually hear about news? Facebook? Twitter? Your groupchat? Or do you actually pick up the paper every morning? How do you support people doing the kinds of journalism you find valuable? Do you pay for any forms of media? Why? Or if you used to, what made you stop paying? Do you have an idea for a media business model? What's an obscure or non-mainstream source of news you found to be useful or reliable? Should there be government funding for media a la BBC? Or a bailout for ailing local news outlets? How do you think the news media industry will actually shake out over the coming years?
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Mar 31, 2023 03:39
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Necrobama posted:
I think this is an interesting dilemma. And I actually do kinda agree with twitter's stance on labeling outlets NPR as "government" funded, though NPR obviously has a few layers of abstraction and isn't as directly funded as, say, Al Jazeera. On one hand, if you have media funded by a democratic government, you can have outlets with a public service mission at their core. On the other, it can be an even greater instrument of Chomsky's propaganda model for news by circumscribing the boundaries of acceptable discourse. With BuzzFeed News and FiveThirtyEight folding this week, I'm still wondering how the hell do you make money with the news?
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Apr 26, 2023 03:14
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Silver2195 posted:I’m not super familiar with Hedges specifically, but I think the general distinction you’re drawing is thinner than you think. Seymour Hersh, for instance, was definitely a genuine anti-war investigative journalist back in the day, but is clearly a crank at this point. In general, I think a lot of investigative-journalism-adjacent people need active editors to push back against them occasionally and make them do more to verify what their sources are telling them. This is why I think it's really important to preserve news outlets as institutions rather than aggregations of individual reporters. Editors protect reporters from their worst impulses and channel them toward their best. Recall that Hersh's My Lai and Abu Ghraib reporting came at the New Yorker. Institutions do bring their own biases, but those can be useful too. There was some chatter recently that NYT had an institutional line was hostile to tech and Silicon Valley, but I think it was a useful corrective to the fawning coverage in the rest of the media of Zuck, Elizabeth Holmes, Musk, etc. at the time. OTOH, Iraq. Conversely, when "brand name" reporters strike out on their own in places like substack, they often see the quality of their work deteriorate and devolve into litigating petty grievances. zoux posted:
I think this a la carte model is a really interesting idea. Or maybe a cable TV model where you get access to a package of news outlets for a fixed rate. I'm curious: For you (and anyone reading), what do you think is a reasonable amount of money to spend on news media, say on a monthly basis?
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Apr 27, 2023 02:35
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zoux posted:I was kind of dismayed to see a bunch of people dogpiling this idea because it's another gently caress Elon feeding frenzy, but this is basically the idea I was talking about earlier, and Twitter would've been the ideal platform to test it on. Not anymore, now that Musk has completely destroyed the credibility of Twitter both in real terms by transferring verification from news organizations to literally the dumbest people on the planet, and in reputational terms. Also Elon has never successfully implemented anything he's promised for Twitter, so I don't expect outlets to sign on or for the feature to be offered at all. But if Twitter was run like a real company I think this would've been a good idea. Ideally, twitter and the substack notes/mastadon/bluesky clones would harness the current moment to try out a bunch of different monetization models. Gumball Gumption posted:I'm stuck on the end of this and I really think the question is "can you make money with the news?" And the answer feels like no and also you never could. Profitable newspapers never sold you the news. They sold you a place to publish and read information. The product was their platform of the newspaper and the internet has superseded that in a lot of ways. Now that advertisers have many more options and the platform itself is free they're back to selling just the news and that doesn't sell. Good point, though I think "never sold you the news" may be overstating it. If you look at some "pure news" products out there, namely industry trade journals, business intelligence, and newswires, those can be pretty stable and profitable, depending on the sector. They depend on a dedicated audience willing to pay a premium for information, but those audiences exist. Witness the Bloomberg media empire with its half-dozen subscription products, mostly without ads. And the fact that during emergencies and disasters most newspapers drop their paywalls I think shows that they are selling the news otherwise. Also, if we expand beyond newspapers, some forms of news media were historically quite profitable. 60 minutes is CBS' most profitable show ever ( https://theweek.com/articles/528690/legacy-60-minutes) . To your point, yes it was likely because it was a great vehicle for ads, but it's the information in the show that gave the platform its value. Maybe it's useful to frame the question more narrowly - Can you turn a profit selling the news to a general audience? Or, can the news media profitably perform a public service mission? I think you can, but it requires some shielding from the predations of capital: DeathSandwich posted:
I think the ongoing WGA writers strike is an interesting parallel. Entertainment companies are also struggling to stay afloat and their writers are trying to cope with changing landscape and business model. I believe WGA also represents some journalists, but I don't believe many of them are involved in the strike. T Zero fucked around with this message at 04:14 on May 4, 2023 |
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May 4, 2023 04:11
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ExecuDork posted:
Australia is an interesting case study. They passed a law last year that forced Google and Facebook to pay about $200 million per year, which then used to fund news outlets. I'm wondering if you've noticed any effects on the media you follow in Australia. : https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/australia-pressured-google-and-facebook-to-pay-for-journalism-is-america-next.php quote:The legislation, known as the News Media Bargaining Code, has enabled Australian news organizations to extract more than $200 million (almost $150 million US) in the year since it went into effect. As a result, the public Australian Broadcasting Corporation can place at least fifty new journalists in underserved parts of the country, while the McPherson Media Group, which publishes such papers as the Yarrawonga Chronicle and the Deniliquin Pastoral Times, expects tech money to fund up to 30 percent of editorial salaries. Monica Attard, a journalism professor in Sydney, says she can’t persuade many students to take internships these days because it’s so easy for them to land full-time jobs—and that change coincides with the gusher of code money: “I swear to God, I have not seen it like this in twenty years.” Canada recently passed a similar law: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/google-online-news-act-1.7043330 Probably too soon to tell, but I'm really curious how forcing platforms and gatekeepers to pay for content will shake out.
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Dec 8, 2023 02:13
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To turn back toward the business for a moment, it looks like things are still pretty grim for the industry in the US. In just the past month, Washington Post had 250 buyouts, The Messenger laid off nearly 10 percent of its staff and contemplated shutting down altogether, Conde Nast and Vox media also had layoffs. It's a bit surprising given that the overall economy is otherwise doing well. The ad industry hasn't fully rebounded (and maybe never will) so everything downstream will suffer. We might just be in a permanent realignment, especially for digital media. It might be premature, but I don't think we're ever going to see the online news industry as robust and diverse as it was in the 2010s again. I think some of the more interesting developments are with Axel Springer. They recently struck a deal with OpenAI to get paid for them to use their content (Welt, Bild, Politico, Business Insider) to train AI models. quote:Axel Springer said the deal was important “strategically for us as this creates a revenue stream from an AI provider to us as a publisher — taking a more considered approach than back in the day when Google, Facebook and the likes came into the fold and publishers were deers in the headlights”. Somewhat related, Axel Springer seems to be bowing under pressure from Bill Ackman because of their investigation into his wife's plagiarism. A pretty troubling development, IMO. Even Rupert Murdoch didn't interfere with reporting at his outlets directly. I've also heard rumors that there are going to be more layoffs in big tech companies in the coming weeks, so I expect that will ripple into news media again as well.
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Jan 8, 2024 03:46
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Typo posted:I wonder if they went through the same thing as tech, which bloated their headcount during COVID and did layoffs post-COVID to it back down to earth I think most news outlets were cutting staff the whole time. First it was sports and dining coverage, followed by broader newsroom cuts. But media outlets definitely go through hiring and firing binges, I've noticed. Thought this was a useful window into the Washington Post, legacy media, and TV (sub or trial required): https://puck.news/post-modernism-theories/ Seems pretty grim. Interestingly it draws a distinction between "linear" and streaming content: quote:In addition to churning subscribers and losing $100 million a year, the Post is also failing to engage audiences. Four years ago, the Post boasted 139 million monthly visitors. By the end of last year, it had less than 60 million, according to sources familiar with its internal numbers. Of that audience, less than one in five read more than a single article per month, while less than one in 500 actually convert to a paying subscription. And quote:That said, CNN remains a highly lucrative business at $700 million-$750 million in annual profits, and its digital product continues to reach more than 160 million monthly users around the world. And Thompson has made it very clear that he intends to pursue an ambitious digital-first strategy without wasting time on assuaging the anxieties of linear natives. CNN needs to think of itself as an “entirely digital organization,” he said on a staff call earlier this week. My guess is TV networks are going to fill some of the online void left by the retreat of digital and print media.
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Jan 9, 2024 03:37
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