Fascinating telling of the last 20 years of the journalism industry, through in depth looks at four companies: The New York Times, the Washington PostFascinating telling of the last 20 years of the journalism industry, through in depth looks at four companies: The New York Times, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and Vice. I knew a lot of this having followed and worked on some of it (eg social media rise), but I still learned some things that made the book worth it. I also didn't agree with the way she characterized some of the things I knew about.
The story of the news industry in the last twenty years, is one of managed decline. The Posts revenue was ~30% of what it had been when Jeff Bezos purchased it, and their newsroom had shrunk by almost half. Similar trend for the Times. Print circulation provided all the revenue but it was declining, digital was growing but providing no revenue, and classified advertising, which used to account for ~40% of revenue, was taken almost entirely out by Craigslist, Monster.com and the internet. Shrinkage led to a shortage of young people working there, and a lack of a culture of innovation.
In recent years, the Times, Post, WSJ, and others have finally figured out how to embrace digital and make digital subscriptions work. Maybe people just needed a decade or two before they were willing to pay for online content, or maybe the publishers could have innovated faster, it's a very interesting question - but I tend to think innovation could have been much faster (but not overnight). But as of mid 2020, the NYT has 6 million subscribers, who provide 64% of their revenue.
One of the themes the book talks about a lot is the separation between church and state in a newspaper - the notion that advertisers should have zero influence over what journalists write or cover. Church and state have been separated for a long time for a good reason - if they aren't, the truth can be hidden by paying money. But the declining legacy print business and the loss of classified meant better online advertising needed to be figured out to save the papers. And upstarts like BuzzFeed and Vice led the charge in figuring out what it looked like - basically an in house ad agency that produced fully native advertising. These articles, which were paid for and thus positive, were mostly clearly marked but not in obvious ways. Church and state got intermixed, and the result at Vice and BuzzFeed has been that advertisers can control content. Less so at NYT/Post, but still a tension that you have to believe influences things.
But the biggest issue is that with online, we have ability to measure clicks, and clicks mean pageviews which mean ad dollars. So now we live in a world where editors value content that generates clicks, and a scoreboard can be created. Impressively, at Buzzfeed salaries were tied to how many clicks a writers pieces generated. And while the editors at the Times knew that human judgement mattered more as to what news people should know, even there clicks started to rule the day.
If even the NYT falls to clicks, and BuzzFeed/Vice/HuffPo/etc are all about clicks, this leads us to content that is good at getting clicks. More specifically, content that plays on our emotions, usually fear, anger, outrage. Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment Now talked about this trend. And then things like this can happen, where someone good at making clicks comes along:
I think clicks are the wrong metric. And optimizing for that metric has led our media industry astray. You combine that with a publishing industry that is cutting costs and thus not innovating as well as having to cut quality checks, and it explains a bit why the media is now so polarized and not as trusted as "the newspaper of record" should be.
And it's not just clicks, social media engagement is not the right metric either:
Side note on Vice - I must have not been in the target audience for them, and while I know I have occasionally read things on their website, I was wholly ignorant of their story, or the fact that they had and have a big video arm on YouTube and HBO - I don't think I've ever seen any of their videos! I guess I was never counter-culture... but I was glad to learn their story.
Side note - the author Jill Abramson was accused of lifting some of her passages from magazine articles about Vice/Buzzfeed/etc, and not crediting the original source. It looks like this is true for a few paragraphs at least, but the overall narrative constructed is not plagiarized, so I don't think this is a big deal at all in whether or not to read or trust this book....more
A fascanating history of the NY Times. Interesting tidbits were:
- The family was Jewish but so afraid of being dubbed a Jewish paper that they barelyA fascanating history of the NY Times. Interesting tidbits were:
- The family was Jewish but so afraid of being dubbed a Jewish paper that they barely covered the holocaust - most stories about the mass graves were buried on page 7 and didn't mention the fact that the victims were mostly Jews. - Adolf Ochs, the first of the family to own the times, bought it completely on borrowed money. He was so in debt it took him 20 years to truly own it. That guy had some large cojones... - The author really played up the stiff competition each generation for publishership. Seems as the the names (ie Arthur Sulzberger) always won.....more
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