Breaking out of the legacy media's death spiral

The niche-ing of news presents new opportunities for those who care about reporting the news

I deleted all of my news apps.

I watched David Perell’s How to Use Your Phone Better than EVERYONE Else and decided to shift my media diet.

The majority of content we consume, Perell says, has been produced in the last 24 hours. But we aren’t designed to be drinking from the proverbial news hose pipe, it being impossible for us to have a well developed, well sourced opinion on everything. We kid ourselves if we say we’ve never had a headline, article or social media snippet define our opinion on a particular subject. I wanted to think better, with more clarity, and less urgency.

“If you see or read something online and it upsets you, you’ve just made someone money”

Louis CK

The internet gives us access to more information beyond anything our ancestors could have imagined possible. Never has more material been created about the world, and it has completely changed the playing field for so many industries, and the news is not immune...

Ben Thompson:

Newspapers liked to think that they made money because people relied on them for news, furnished by their fearless reporters and hard-working editors; not only did people pay newspapers directly, but advertisers were also delighted to pay for the privilege of having their products placed next to the journalists’ peerless prose. The Internet revealed the fatal flaw in this worldview: what newspapers provided was distribution thanks to infrastructure like printing presses and yours truly.

- The AI Unbundling on Stratechery

Traditional media companies no longer possess the same economic values nor do they hold the same geographical monopolies they once did. Following the advent of the consumer internet, they unwittingly created the expectation that online news is always free. While display ads were quickly added to the content, you can only earn so much advertising revenue on a free product.

The relevance of these media empires continues to diminish, as they find themselves with a case of the Innovator’s Dilemma, scrabbling to maintain once substantial market share and revenues, while also desperately trying to survive into the future. Many have waited too long.

A clear sign of this predicament was the firestorm unleashed on Joe Rogan during the pandemic. Rogan’s podcast has become so influential that he is now a version of news. His long form approach, in contrast to the bite-sized form we are so used to, allows his guests the platform and the time to air their point of view.

So when he posted an Instagram video of himself describing his experience of contracting Covid-19 and the treatments he had used, the media went all in on an attempted takedown, changing the colour of his video to make him look more ill than he was, publicly discrediting his guests and more.

If that wasn’t enough, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and other artists later threatened to pull their music from Spotify due to Rogan’s position on the Covid-19 vaccines. There was a lot more behind that cancellation attempt, but Rogan bunkered down, let the storm blow over and in the end, gained more than two million subscribers.

Genuine journalism, that which calls power to account and remains an essential ingredient to a free society, is also under threat thanks to an industry that is increasingly reliant on producing divisive content to satisfy a broken financial model. Young journalists face an uphill battle with opportunities dependent on their Twitter following or their sensationalist tendencies as much as their journalistic skill and integrity.

Once again, we can credit the internet for its ability to expose the weaknesses of a well established system. What results is trust in media being at, according to Gallup, an all time low…

Journalism, like the rest of culture, coupled with low distribution costs, is being subjected to the internet’s indefatigable niche machine. People have begun seek their own niche news. Some are helpful, and some are not. The real problem though, is that there is too much bad, and not enough good.

While on a podcast tour to promote his latest movie, Fourth of July, Louis CK talked about the concept of enough. Louis has been creating and distributing his own content for a number of years. He has now written, edited and produced his last five comedy specials himself and made them available only on his website. He maintains full creative control and has no need to pursue big money deals at the cost of that control.

This is where news, and those who make the news, appear to be heading as well.

The aforementioned Stratechery, by Ben Thompson, who lives in Taiwan and writes on the intersection of tech and business, charges readers for extra content. Breaking Points, Johnny Harris or FriendlyJordies have adopted the same model on YouTube. Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald use Substack as their platform. They undoubtedly have a smaller audience than the New York Times, but their journalistic content is often all the more impactful, incentivised not by divisive, click driving news that satisfies their advertising masters, but by the quality of content their subscribers pay for.

The danger of this new movement is the lack of editorial oversight and the opportunity for bias. But not only does the internet accelerate the race to the bottom, so too does it allow the cream to rise to the top. Those who do it well have a far greater opportunity to be rewarded for being good at what they originally trained for.

Instead of being churned through the education system to be picked up by one of the giant media organisations around the world to remain trapped in the legacy media death spiral, what if budding journalists, were taught how to investigate thoroughly and ethically, to create their own content, and be able to fund themselves?

As one industry falls, the internet ushers another into it’s place.