Unless we wake up fast, irreparable damage will be done to democracy and free markets.
This week brought the sad news that the Messenger, an online news site that aimed to be nonpartisan, was shutting down after spending $50 million over eight months of operation. This comes several months after Buzzfeed News shut down, and follows large-scale layoffs in recent days at the Los Angeles Times, which cut its newsroom staff by 20%. Major troubles are brewing at Sports Illustrated and Business Insider, the New York Daily News and Forbes magazine. You can bet there’s more to come.
There are a number of pretty well-known reasons for this. The digital age has given advertisers many more options of greater scale than content sites can offer, and many have floated away, in part because of alternatives but also because they are so often bad news platforms that attach bad karma to their brands. Then social media created echo-chambers of toxic anger and convinced many to distrust any whiff of an “establishment” — like professional journalism, or the concept of fact-based truth.
That means more of the funding – most of the funding — must come from readers and viewers. But people rarely want to subscribe — that was always the case. And the media has not figured out a way of paying a la carte — the micropayments kerfuffle. And many news consumers refuse to pay at all because there are free options.
But what are these free options? Mainly they are infotainment (that still can bring in ads), or brazenly partisan (so their hidden “revenue” is changing your mind or making you a nut), or they are brand exercises that want to sell you something (sometimes hidden), or they are gathering data about you, or they are clickbait that cater to the lowest common denominator (aka, bullshit). Sometimes, a combination of the above.
Less horrible scenarios do exist. One is quality media that serves an audience that is already informed and wants to stay that way and profit from it — and so is willing and able to pay a serious premium. That’s the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and they’re creating a two-tier society of the informed rich and the bamboozled others, skeptical of everything and always primed for grievance. Then there are philanthropic outlets, which are by nature unstable.
This is no way to develop an informed citizenry that is capable of intelligent decisions about society, politics and markets. Unless this changes, we are on the highway to idiocracy. The early signs are evident in the level and nature of discourse in our democracies. On more than one side of the political divide.
A simple move that anyone can make to help the world escape what is otherwise coming is to support media that does not promote idiocracy for its own short-term gains. If one platform’s politics offend you, choose another. But ditch the assumption that while cheeseburgers are not for free, information and analysis are.
If you dislike or distrust the mainstream media, I would urge you to reconsider. But you also have the choice of platforms like this one, that host independent publications that offer journalism and analysis which also might deserve your support.
At Ask Questions Later we will always be transparent – but we also don’t want to burn down the house, and we are not neutral on all things. We support the Liberal Consensus that emerged in the mid-20th Century. That does not necessarily mean today’s left, the extreme elements of which are at war with Western civilization and have become as illiberal as the far right (or today’s deeply twisted US Republican Party). It is the path of reason and rationality, of decency and discourse.
If you support that too, here are a few ways you can help:
- Forward this to someone you think would enjoy Ask Questions Later with a note to subscribe.
- Upgrade to premium now
- Gift a subscription
- Share this on social media
- Collect referrals and earn your way toward a premium subscription (email edition only)
While you think about that, and if the week’s news bothers you at all, please check out some recent articles on what bedevils the media.
- An examination at how professional journalism is especially critical in covering wars
- A look at how AI can be useful to the industry
- Will micropayments ever be viable as a revenue model?
- The flip side of a cliche: Information also wants to be expensive
- Why streaming TV models are in trouble
- Journalism, too, must reform
- Why big tech should pay more for news
- Is it curtains for foreign correspondents?
Last call for 2023 business and financial journalism workshop for Romanian journalists
