What’s after the social media era in news, with Ben Smith on this week’s DecoderPod.
to publish the Steele dossier. You talk about this extensively in the book. This leads into the classicquestion. You’ve had all these experiences. You’ve made some monumental decisions. You’re now atI guess I think of journalism much more as a trade than as an abstract theoretical framework, and so I think a lot of, in each situation that I say is a great example, is so different. In the big abstract, should people see a document that’s being talked about? I don’t know. By whom? Exactly.
But good reporters want a great editor. They want great colleagues. They want a great newsroom. And I think there’s a reason there are people breaking news on Substack, but it’s not really what Substack is for. It’s pretty hard to be out there on Substack getting scoops, and you don’t see a lot of that.
I mean I think it’s something we’re thinking about all the time. We’ve found people really like the format and what the format is doing in terms of saying, “This is the factual part. But this is a sophisticated reporter who’s been on the beat for a long time. They’re, in fact, an expert. They don’t need to quote an expert,” although they can. And I’m interested in what they think of all this stuff they gathered, but they should know the difference between facts and opinions.
That’s a good question. Yeah. I think people are, but honestly, I don’t think... I have not found that journalists are making career decisions based on that. Maybe they should. We all should be thinking more about our long-term—We should all be thinking more about our long-term financial prospects. But I think, in fact, many of us enjoy the work.No. And that is actually a lesson I learned. I just think this isn’t an industry that ought to be promising massive returns on a four-year timetable.
So right now, advertising and events are how we’re making money. And I think we didn’t explain this perfectly when we launched, and we are in this situation where we have this very long-term ambition to be global, but we’re also experienced people who have some experience with biting off more than we can chew in the past and don’t want to do that again. At least I have that experience.
Oh gosh. We aspire to be in a place where we don’t have dependency of that scale. It’s not as simple a world. It’s not a single-channel world anymore. Certainly, right now, many, many media companies are going to have to navigate an ad market that’s heading into a recession, a place we’ve probably both been before, and the ad market is cyclical, and that’s not a dependency in the classic sense, but I do think it’s something everybody’s girding their loins for.
Do you think it’s generational? Do you think that the millennial audience has now grown up, and they’ve got some money, and they’ve experienced this weird unbundled atomic news, and they’re like, “Can someone just do the work for me?” One thing that really struck me in the last cycle was Donald Trump and Joe Biden both had the same position on Section 230, which is that it should be repealed, which is just a blunt instrument, right?Right, but they’re like, “We’ll just wield this weapon until Facebook adjusts its moderation to our favor, or we’ll threaten them with an existential risk,” and then that’s all they were doing, and that’s why you end up in the same position.
Chatting through this, you have just a very pragmatic view about all of these things. You’re a realist. I think you’ve gotten some scars that make you less prone to hyperbole than others. But I look at what’s happening to Fox News and to CNN to some extent. I look at the future of the cable industry writ large and where Gen Z attention is going, and I say, “Oh, this center of American politics has been cable news for at least my lifetime.”It’s still here.
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