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Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved (medium.com)
Joshua Topolsky, co-founder of The Verge and Vox Media, and formerly Editor-in-chief of Engadget, has published an article on Medium wherein he analyzes the ongoing and long-term issues with digital media businesses and their increasingly growing thirst for more and more clicks. Topolsky says that the rate at which media outlets are adopting the new technologies and platforms (such as video, "bots, newsletters, a morning briefing app, a lean back iPad experience, Slack integration, a Snapchat channel, or a great partnership with Twitter") in an attempt to capture more audience -- and save its receding loyal reader base -- isn't going to fix the problem. Topolsky, who left Bloomberg news outlet last year amid his disagreement with Michael Bloomberg himself, writes: The Problem is that we used to have a really neat and tidy version of a media business where very large interests controlled vast swaths of the things we read, watched, and listened to. Because that system was built on the concept of scarcity and locality -- the limits of what was physically possible -- it was very easy to keep the gates and fill the coffers. Put simply, there were far fewer players in the game with far fewer outlets for their content, so audiences were easy to sell to and easy to come by. [...] The media industry now largely thinks its only working business model is to reach as many people as possible, and sell -- usually programmatically, but sometimes not -- as many advertisements against that audience as it can. If they tell you otherwise, they are lying. [...] The truth is that the best and most important things the media (let's say specifically the news media) has ever made were not made to reach the most people -- they were made to reach the right people. Because human beings exist, and we are not content consumption machines. What will save the media industry -- or at least the part worth saving -- is when we start making Real Things for people again, instead of programming for algorithms or New Things.
I tried both with and without an ad blocker and I see zero ads. Any wonder that I prefer reading articles there? Compare to Forbes, who won't even let me view an article without disabling my ad blocker or whitelisting it, which means I usually just skip the article or load it in something I don't bother installing an ad blocker on, IE/Edge. Which leads me to wonder, how is Medium doing it the "right way" for my preferences? Any money changing hands? Build now monetize later?
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Part of the problem is the bulk of that audience doesn't want real news, they want entertainment. When there was scarcity of outlets, they were mostly controlled by players who did both news and entertainment.
Today, much of what passes for "news" is really entertainment. Looking at what people I know pass around as news articles are really some blog repost, of a blog repost, of a (maybe) news article. The blog reposts contain opinionated rants, adding no inherent value other than confirming the already biased opinions of the readers. Frequently the original news article isn't actual "news", but a press release or FUD article that simply quotes a government statistic or celebrity/politician soundbite.
I'd appreciate it if the Slashdot overlords could contribute to the fight by editing submissions so they go to actual original articles and not click-bait blogs. (The ghost of Roland Piquepaille is watching you!)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
While this new economic environment could be very negative for many web properties, the new owners of Slashdot have a really good opportunity here.
Sites like Reddit, Hacker News and Stack Overflow have become known for their censorship and limiting of open discussion. Say the wrong thing at Reddit or Hacker News, and downmod brigades will take you out. Ask a question that's isn't deemed "good" at Stack Overflow, and it will be locked.
This is where Slashdot could really take the lead. Instead of being a site with rampant censorship and moderation gone wild, Slashdot could become the premiere tech-focused site where freedom of expression is king. People could post here without worrying about some tyrants censoring them, for example.
Of course, a lot of work is needed to take advantage of this opportunity. Just today we saw one topic where the modding was out of control. 7 of 28 comments were modded down to -1, including one relevant, insightful and informative comment that was wrongly modded down. Something is very wrong when 25% of the comments are downmodded. At one point is was closer to 50% of them being downmodded, when the submission was still young!
At the very least, we need to see downmodding comments below 0 removed completely. All comments at 0 should be visible by default, too. No comment here should ever be hidden. But downmodding should be kept around to counter abusive upmods. Sometimes there are comments at +5 that shouldn't be there, so downmodding is needed to fix up those mistakes.
After that, all of the moderation data should be released publicly. We should know who modded each comment, and what modding they gave. This data would also be available in bulk form so that further analysis could be performed by the community. We could collectively detect the various forms of mod abuse and then the Slashdot admins could stamp it out. Mods found to have abused their power would never moderate again. Any modding they had done in the past, including any suspected of being done through alternate accounts, would be undone.
Slashdot's current approach clearly hasn't been working. Traffic here has been dwindling for a long time, so big changes are needed. Revamping the mod system to promote discussion, rather than suppress it, would be a good start. Slashdot could undergo the revival that it as so badly needed for so long. It would be a revival spearheaded by freedom.
The traditional news business somewhat became a rentier business. One of the biggest revenue sources for newspapers was classified advertising. They would charge 20-30 dollars for something that cost them pennies. They also became the de-facto source of news. If they liked a politician or a party then they would not cover it negatively. If a friend of the owners got in trouble there would be no reporting. If one of their major advertisers got in trouble then little or nothing with lots of room for the companies to spin the negative news.
The business model was abusive and ripe for someone to do an end run.
The first sign I saw of this would be a local newspaper that carried just classifieds that were free for most purposes. They combined the online submission with print for the masses. I suspect that the news papers weren't happy with this.
The internet started to pick away at this. I would say the gut shot was craigslist and similar sites. Quite simply that was an instant lights out for an entire revenue stream.
The other was google adsense. Not that it is a great way to fund a site these days, but in the early days it was so damn easy to get started and your tiny site could instantly produce revenue. This allowed for some of the earliest web publications to make money and grow.
Google adsense wasn't just a slight revolution but it was a revolution in thinking. It had been proceeded by doubleclick. They were a huge pain in the ass if you were a nobody. They wanted to screen their prospective publishers to make sure they had the volumes and respectability. This translated to their preferring to land old media companies who were doing an online presence.
But what shocks me is that the old media companies have largely doubled down on what made them suck. They are still wildly biased. They don't seem to care about actual journalism such as taking down bad politicians or exposing evil companies. Then to add insult to all this they have adopted some of the worst practices of the internet such as clickbaiting or the various dark practises.
For instance, in my city there have been a spate of murders. Serious ones such as shootings on the core downtown streets. Reading the local newspapers they are talking about it in the general sense of a spate of murders. But no stories that paint a picture of who did what and why they might have had it coming, or not. Then I go on reddit and find eye-witness accounts, pictures, and stories about long running feuds between families. How is it that reddit has become the paper of record in a city of 1 million?
Then there are the autoplay videos. Wow what asshole came up with that gem. Not only do they autoplay, but they will follow you down the page, and even when paused will just start playing after a while. Then there are the videos that just keep streaming one video after another. These companies are wondering why we are all getting adblockers? Do they not understand that their cunning ways are effectively creating the drive and desire to dump them? That once dumped that we won't be coming back?
Yellow Journalism has always existed, granted.
However, the actual respectable papers, from the tiny one-horse-town paper with its sole proprietor, all the way up to the biggest papers in New York City, did have examples among them of integrity, responsibility, and a code of ethics that they strove to live by.
The reason why was simple - back then, the tabloid rags and propaganda-disguised-as-newspapers didn't last very long (W.R. Hearst was an anomaly, not the norm), mostly because getting the story too wrong too often came at a business-killing cost (in circulation, litigation, etc). People meanwhile figured out fairly quickly which papers could be trusted, and which ones were crap. The crap tended to fade away fairly quickly.
Was it perfect? Of course not. But at least they did manage to get it mostly right, and until recently, journalism courses did teach to a strict set of ethics and rules.
As far as story selection? Some of it is obviously due to bias, but mostly it is because the media craves one thing above all others - advertising dollars. In order to get that, they have to attract eyeballs and ears. In order to do that, they amp up the drama. After all, does the typical viewer (not you dammit, but Joe Sixpack) want to see...
* a long, complex, in-depth, non-partisan, and objective analysis of economic effects from some pending legislation in terms that require an IQ well north of room temperature, or...
* loud spasms of anger, fear, and mud-slinging between the President, protestors and Congress, all conveniently compressed into slogans and sound-bites that appeal to ideological bias, and oh yeah - conveniently fits neatly in-between commercials?
I mean c'mon - there's a reason CNN (for example) spews Nancy Grace and her ilk all over their primetime slots. People apparently don't want to be informed about events that may affect them long-term - they want the salacious and gore-filled howling, by vapid talking heads of course, over some little girl who got raped and dismembered just last week out in West Bumfuck, Nebraska!
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?