Publishing Is Back to the Future(stratechery.com)
stratechery.com
Publishing Is Back to the Future
https://stratechery.com/2021/publishing-is-back-to-the-future/
7 comments
Discussion from last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25930096
Good discussion of economic issues against purity of journalism.
Sometimes I feel perverse about doing this, but I take real pleasure in deciding what things to pay for. When I find small time video bloggers and also organizations that I believe have a useful message, I enjoy subscribing. I decide how much I want to support them and set a calendar reminder to cancel after a few months. Some news like PBS, Democracy Now, and The Guardian are on a permanent donation list for me.
Same thing for services. I am a critic of big tech in general, but I enjoy paying for services that I find of value, like Office 365, Google YouTube Music, and cloud platforms. I find high value in Apple’s privacy policies, not because they are great but because of comparisons to other FANG, so my wife and I indulge in lots of Apple gear.
Sometimes I feel perverse about doing this, but I take real pleasure in deciding what things to pay for. When I find small time video bloggers and also organizations that I believe have a useful message, I enjoy subscribing. I decide how much I want to support them and set a calendar reminder to cancel after a few months. Some news like PBS, Democracy Now, and The Guardian are on a permanent donation list for me.
Same thing for services. I am a critic of big tech in general, but I enjoy paying for services that I find of value, like Office 365, Google YouTube Music, and cloud platforms. I find high value in Apple’s privacy policies, not because they are great but because of comparisons to other FANG, so my wife and I indulge in lots of Apple gear.
This isn't the first century in which the press has skewed its coverage of its own business to serve its business interests. For decades, the Associated Press and Western Union had a symbiotic relationship in which the AP got favorable rates in return for, among other things, forbidding its subscribing papers to criticize the Western Union telegraph monopoly. (Here's where I'd link to a reference if it was on line, but it's not: Paul Starr, "The Creation of the Media", ch. 5, p. 184.)
In business, the survival motive becomes the profit motive. For content creators, the profit motive then manifests online as attention grabbing content. However, virality and truth are highly specific properties that rarely overlap. Clickbait is the author stretching virality to somewhat overlap with their message which hopefully holds some truth, but the entire piece can also just be an attention grabber.
If you work at a news source that values truth, sadly you're still not immune to the profit motive, so long as the content at any level is still required to make money. Hypocrisy arises when they begin to deny this.
But without the profit motive, outlets can easily become ideology driven. As hard as NPR may try not to be this, to some their bend is obvious. And then their is ideology as part of the profit motive. Like Fox.
What I would love to see is a platform that simply collects and sorts the events of the world as they unfold. Covid sites are one example. No agenda, no authors. Just the information that accurately describes the world as it unfold, or at least in theory. Another example would a police log published live at every department aggregated at the national level. No decisions would be involved in the publishing except that the post is accurate. The rest is each officer simply doing their job, and hopefully a great job. But the leap is in considering this a more valuable form of news. From attention grabbing to accurately exposing the state of affairs for easy consumption.
The problem with this of course is politics. When the events are what these representatives say, and what they say is dishonest, then even the honest news is the state of the dishonest affairs.
If you work at a news source that values truth, sadly you're still not immune to the profit motive, so long as the content at any level is still required to make money. Hypocrisy arises when they begin to deny this.
But without the profit motive, outlets can easily become ideology driven. As hard as NPR may try not to be this, to some their bend is obvious. And then their is ideology as part of the profit motive. Like Fox.
What I would love to see is a platform that simply collects and sorts the events of the world as they unfold. Covid sites are one example. No agenda, no authors. Just the information that accurately describes the world as it unfold, or at least in theory. Another example would a police log published live at every department aggregated at the national level. No decisions would be involved in the publishing except that the post is accurate. The rest is each officer simply doing their job, and hopefully a great job. But the leap is in considering this a more valuable form of news. From attention grabbing to accurately exposing the state of affairs for easy consumption.
The problem with this of course is politics. When the events are what these representatives say, and what they say is dishonest, then even the honest news is the state of the dishonest affairs.
Police logs only seem easy to consume because they don't contain context. Context is prone to bias or intentional distortion, but it's still necessary for non-experts.
Does a recent spike in bar fights mean your town is in hard economic times, or was there a giant music festival nearby that attracted thousands of people? That influences whether I should worry the next time I go to the bar; if it's the economy, this will keep happening, but if it's the festival, we'll be fine once they leave. That context also helps me decide how to act on the information. Do I petition for downtown revitalization or for neighboring towns' police to help with events?
It's on the audience to demand good evidence to back up the context (e.g., did the guys in the fight recently lose their jobs or just came from the festival). That's hard, but I have yet to see another good way.
Does a recent spike in bar fights mean your town is in hard economic times, or was there a giant music festival nearby that attracted thousands of people? That influences whether I should worry the next time I go to the bar; if it's the economy, this will keep happening, but if it's the festival, we'll be fine once they leave. That context also helps me decide how to act on the information. Do I petition for downtown revitalization or for neighboring towns' police to help with events?
It's on the audience to demand good evidence to back up the context (e.g., did the guys in the fight recently lose their jobs or just came from the festival). That's hard, but I have yet to see another good way.
> ... news, the moment it is reported, immediately loses all economic value ...
That sounds like a critical error. News has been transitioning to subscription based patronage and pay to release models. In the current environment any interest especially including popular articles generates value in potential additional coverage and follow up pieces. The key thing to remember is that the value is no longer in distribution but in new features such as influence over what subjects are covered and special features like live on location interviews. Now that distribution is free patronage, influence, and specials are what generate value.
That sounds like a critical error. News has been transitioning to subscription based patronage and pay to release models. In the current environment any interest especially including popular articles generates value in potential additional coverage and follow up pieces. The key thing to remember is that the value is no longer in distribution but in new features such as influence over what subjects are covered and special features like live on location interviews. Now that distribution is free patronage, influence, and specials are what generate value.
"We are not trying to maximize clicks and sell low-margin advertising against them. We are not trying to win a pageviews arms race. We believe that the more sound business strategy for The Times is to provide journalism so strong that several million people around the world are willing to pay for it"
I'm having trouble separating a pageview arms race from crafting the kind of content that appeals to the kind of people who would pay for a subscription. I get that the New York Times isn't writing clickbait articles, but they are producing articles of the same substance on a daily basis. You get columns from Paul Krugman, Michelle Goldman, Gail Collins, etc. and it's always about misgivings with Donald Trump and the Republican Party. I rarely find anything substantial about non-political topics from these folks. I suspect that's because what they write is quite popular with the "Three-L" people who pay for this kind of content (Leafy, Liberal, Loaded).
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I find it really pigeonholes the kind of content you see from The Times.
I'm having trouble separating a pageview arms race from crafting the kind of content that appeals to the kind of people who would pay for a subscription. I get that the New York Times isn't writing clickbait articles, but they are producing articles of the same substance on a daily basis. You get columns from Paul Krugman, Michelle Goldman, Gail Collins, etc. and it's always about misgivings with Donald Trump and the Republican Party. I rarely find anything substantial about non-political topics from these folks. I suspect that's because what they write is quite popular with the "Three-L" people who pay for this kind of content (Leafy, Liberal, Loaded).
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I find it really pigeonholes the kind of content you see from The Times.