THE STATUS OF MEDIA IN AMERICA

 

The Oct. 21 issue of New York Magazine, in its usual sensationalist style, did a deep dive report titled “Can the Media Survive?” The magazine interviewed 57 of the most influential people in the media industry to determine what is going on and where media is headed. I found this mashup of opinions greatly entertaining and decided to use it as a basis for exploring the status of media in America.

According to Radhika Jones, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, the new environment is “like the fire swamp in the ‘Princess Bride’. It is treacherous in places, you could go up in flames, you could be attacked by a rodent of unusual size, but you can always be a bit of a pirate and anticipate those threats and figure out how to defuse them.”

Media executives agree that the Internet crushed the traditional advertising business. Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, sums up this digital “creative destruction:” “All newspapers lost their classified ads, the local newspapers lost their monopoly on distribution for certain regions, and the magazines lost their monopoly on distribution among certain interest groups. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to sell golf balls, you bought an ad in Golf magazine. Now you buy a Facebook ad targeting people who have re-upped their golf-club membership.”

It is interesting that several digital brands like news websites Buzz Feed and Vice followed the fate of many print publications and failed. These entities often forgot that the simple task was to make content and sell sponsorship against it. They became too dependent on venture capital. They also placed themselves at the mercy of Facebook and Google. Eventually the media giants strangled many of the small companies that depended on them for success.

The media mantra today has returned to the simple concept of “make something worth paying for.” Bloomberg editor-in chief John Micklethwait summed it up this way, “If you don’t have a system whereby you have consumers paying for your content, then you are generally in a perilous state.”

Subscription revenue through a paywall is now an important business model. But being an all-things-to-all-people digital news site is difficult to pull off. In 2024, the executives who run Conde Nast and People magazines spent $50 million to reach a massive national audience with a news website (The Messenger) and failed. There was no clear vision of who they were trying to reach and why they were relevant.

On the other hand, many niche news sites with limited viewership and low overhead are doing well. Betsy Reed, editor of the Guardian US, sums up this new perspective: “My generation was wired completely differently. We wanted to be read or listened to by as many people as possible. And now this new generation is like, I’m totally cool with having 9,000 die-hard fans.”

The New York article describes a number of small media sites I had never heard of. For example, Puck is a pricey digital newsletter that aims to cover our country’s four centers of power: Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street. The stories appear to be gossipy, provocative, and interesting.

What other niche players are having a good year? The article gives several examples. Mark Halpern founded a startup video platform called “2WAY”. He curates nightly live Zoom calls for an eager audience. “The Ringer” is a sports and pop culture website and podcast network acquired by Spotify in 2020. Ezra Klein co-founded a news website, VOX and is now named one of the best podcast hosts.

“The Daily Wire” is an American conservative media company founded by political commentator Ben Shapiro. It has expanded beyond the traditional audience that consumes only political content. Lastly, “Barstool Sports” captured the attention of young men. This “bible-of-bro-culture” started out in 2003 as a weekly print publication distributed for free and now generates yearly revenue of $90-$100 million.

When discussing the legacy newspapers, the article claims that “everybody is jealous of the New York Times.” The Times became relevant and wildly successful by pivoting from “the” newspaper for everyone to “the” newspaper for their core readers. The paper sits on 10 million paid subscriptions that are unlikely to dwindle. In the opinion of former CNN boss Jeff Zucker, “They figured it out first – how to make a killing off recipes and games like Wordle that could sustain the rest of their journalism.”

Many believe that the new Wall Street Journal editor, Emma Tucker, has taken the newspaper into the firm number two spot behind the NYT. On the outside, the L.A. Times and the Washington Post fight over the same educated, liberal readers.

Recently, the legacy newspapers have gotten into the social media game by launching email newsletters, driving traffic back to their paywalled websites. Legacy newspaper editors still seem to care about their print editions. At the same time, it is not where their focus is going forward.

Most of the executives interviewed expressed anxiety over how artificial intelligence will affect the media industry. Established media businesses can either sue AI companies for copyright infringement or strike a deal to license content for training AI models. Either way, if consumers get used to asking an AI interface for the news, AI could displace traditional journalism.

For those seeking to learn about cutting-edge media in our changing “age of information”, this wide-ranging article has much more to offer.