Joshua Topolsky provides his answer to The Problem
AUGUST 3RD, 2016 — POST 212
If there’s one sure-fire way to get people in, around, and adjacent to the media riled up it’s to talk about how broken the state of media is. Framing the novelty addiction and scale fetishism of (mostly news) publications today as The Problem, Joshua Topolsky back in April wrote ‘Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved’.
Such a well-received decry of the news media industry had a lot wondering if Topolsky had a solution. Even the producer of Tomorrow with Joshua Topolsky Ryan Houlihan once remarked he thought the piece was building to position Topolsky as the saviour in the wasteland he was laying out. But it wasn’t. And he didn’t. Topolsky had no product to launch, nothing more to provide than a hint that this is “what I’ve been working on for the better part of a year.”
This week, however, we got our first glimpse at what exactly Topolsky sees as a solution to The Problem.
Topolsky’s solution is The Outline. The existence of the company was made public by a The Wall Street Journal piece earlier this week detailing the $5mil investment Topolsky has secured for his news media startup. In a Medium piece published in the wake of the story, Topolsky outlined the talent he has secured in building the first stage of The Outline which includes notable alumni of The Verge and Gawker in Adrianne Jeffries, Billy Disney, Jordan Oplinger, John Lagomarsino, and Leah Finnegan. But other than knowing what Topolsky sees as a successful size of readership (10–15mil), and an initial plan to produce 15 to 20 stories a day, we’re mostly left to build our own idea of what, precisely, The Outline even is.
“It’s not a tech blog,” Topolsky emphatically stated when speaking recently with Recode about The Outline. For a man who left Engadget to help found The Verge and launch Vox Media — as well as having an instrumental role in the current look and feel of Bloomberg’s Digital presences — knowing what The Outline isn’t is helpful. The WSJ story calls it a “digital publication”, but Topolsky, careful in his choice of words, said “I’m loathe to use the word publication because I don’t think it’s right.” Conceding language will be inherently limited, Topolsky pitched The Outline as follows:
“What I’d say is that we’re a publication focused on telling a story of the way the world is now, and the way the world will be for a modern reader.”
Despite “blog” and “publication” proving inaccurate at capturing how Topolsky conceives of The Outline, one word is useful: “brand”. It’s blindingly clear that for The Outline to be successful in the way it has been set up to be successful — specifically through driving a dedicated readership to the site, not just making up the numbers in a social feed — brand will need to take supreme importance. What’s most exciting to any news (really, any kind of web content) consumer, is the ways Topolsky hopes to garner brand strength.
In a very real sense, what The Outline seems to be uniquely capable of doing is the kind of work we’ve seen in the “greatest hits” of Topolsky’s past ventures. A short film about a guy leaving the internet for a year? The Outline could do it. A single 38000 word piece as a whole print issue and online “event feature” about code? The Outline just might be the place.
Topolsky’s professed love for Monocle — “ostensibly they are just a monthly magazine, but they’ve created this universe of products,” — illuminates how we should be thinking about The Outline. All the things we tend to think of as “extracurricular” to a news publication — events, physical products, television-esque programming — look to very well be exactly what The Outline will be delivering. “Digital media has millions of colors to paint with,” Topolsky is quoted as saying in the WSJ piece. “Most of the time we only use like four.”
We won’t know exactly what to think of The Outline until its launch sometime in the fall. But if Topolsky’s track record is any indication of future success, The Outline might not just be one answer to The Problem. It might just be the answer.
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