Hope for Jonah

An Admirer Squirms Uncomfortably

“Know why Welles modeled Citizen Kane on William Hearst?
Because to do so on Marcus Loew would have lacked drama.”

-me

A few months ago, a colleague pointed me to Jonah Peretti’s interview on the a16z Podcast. Today I pay it forward. It’s great.

I responded days later, voluminously, as is my wont. Another colleage on the chain encouraged me to post it more widely. As he put it:

Well, this sounds like a near final draft of something to be posted on a blog (ahem, medium) with a title like “Open Letter To Jonah P: manifest destiny”.

I hadn’t thought about it for a while, until I attended the School of Mass Communications Charrette at Jackson State University last weekend. Another post thereon will follow shortly. Let this suffice: an esteemed panel of academics and practitioners within the modern mediascape—journalists, publishers, on-air talent, and others such as myself among them—met minds, matched wits, and melded perspectives on how the college could best prepare the students coming through their program to create outsize impact on the media industry. It was….colorful.

In the wake of that conversation, my colleague’s encouragement to go wider felt somehow more pressing.

So here’s that. You’ll forgive the tone, I’m sure.

Jonah is an inspiration, and his bona fides are undeniable. I’m so happy he took this shot after HuffPo.
I throw roses at this guy’s feet. He’s a superlative thinker. Doer. Businessman. And evermore, network head.

As a statesman however, he could better appreciate and account for his impact beyond his individual pursuits. I’m confident Jonah read Kant…and even if not, he knows deep down that news—real, informed-citizenry-hanging-in-the-balance news—is too delicate a flower to be subject to market winds and trade-secret algorithms.

Surely he foresees what will happen if the news desks all follow his lead, and tune content development to the shallow metric of share-through. Even in the near-term, it incentivizes hack coverage, false starts, and under-researched pablum. But when you over time acquire the influence to sway industry practices, you add an exponent hereto. We see this drama play out every day, in real life, as well as in our modern artists’ warnings of its natural conclusions (however condescendingly).

NET NET: the better Jonah does at reshaping real news to the “wisdom” of the crowd, the more the truth implied within is imperiled. Not from his troops necessarily, who ostensibly, he can fire, force to retract or otherwise; but from the legions of others who, due to the performance he’ll post, will be forced to follow suit—and almost assuredly without the same fidelity to journalistic standards (we hope) he’d keep. In other words, he’s jumped the shark—now, he’s one of those precious few responsible for broader happenings, off his domain…though, crucially, less clearly accountable.

A native-only platform succeeding at news creates an incredible amount of pressure on other providers, who, for various reasons, can’t or won’t mimic the native model…for the broad majority of them, sound reporting will need to be fiscally underwritten (and physically abutted) by sheer provocation. This because they won’t know how to raise a sufficient audience to stay in business otherwise…and of course, JP and others are degrading the consumer palate as we go.

These poor dinosaurs, keeping church and state lines, monetizing through display and preroll, are being painted into a corner where they (sadly, but reasonably) will come to see “opiate reporting” as their best hedge against the wane of the business of informing the public. Remember the days before Mashable had the gall to tell you How to Step Up Your Fashion Game? Now imagine how the same economic drivers that spur this overreach will affect those who actually gather news—secrets held close, by powerful people even—not just those merely compiling Youtube links. Jonah sees this too…hence the off-color joke herein “…or hope a billionaire buys your newspaper.”

However:

Jonah can help relieve that pressure; he’s a boy wonder.
Jonah can coach his competitors so they don’t tumble into oblivion; he’s a pragmatist.
Jonah can help us crack what a post-display world really should look like, and how it could be funded; he’s a visionary.

And Jonah will do these things…if he’s what a poet would call a patriot.

None of these may we ask of the businessman; but all we must ask of the citizen. And a true patriot—that patriot the poet would acknowledge as such—will answer our call.

My hope for Jonah is that when he’s not on a lead investor’s podcast, blowing breath to his competitive edge, he’s scheming on the multifold ways he can be an usher to truth, rather than a warden of audience.
…that he lies awake at night wondering what his #Muskmove is going to be.
…that he’s growing up faster than he reasonably should.

Here’s to Citizen Peretti.

Here’s to Patriot Peretti.

On the return flight from Jackson, that relentless Johnny Cash hook still running laps in my headphones, the thoughts above calcified…and became, to me—for today at least— truth.

Leave yours at the beep.

…

*beep*

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

—Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals(1785)