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.

Comments

that's a joke

[phantomfive]

From the article:

So what will matter in the next age of media?

Compelling voices and stories, real and raw talent, new ideas that actually serve or delight an audience, brands that have meaning and ballast; these are things that matter in the next age of media.

No, that's a pipe dream. Talent doesn't matter. Compelling stories don't matter. New ideas don't matter, and brands don't matter.Click here to find out the seven things that a mom discovered that matter!

"Quality news" has a real but small audience. Most people are looking for the next thing to click on to feed their buzzing squirrel brain.

Re:"we used to"

[Penguinisto]

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!