REQUIEM FOR THE MEDIA
When was the last time you read a newspaper? An Op-Ed? An Investigative report? Where do you get most of your news today?
Chances are your responses to the first is long ago. Like anyone in crypto, you probably get your news from Telegram channels, X, or through industry friends. Those often contain a link to an article, but I bet that 90% never go there.
News has become just another piece of content meant to entertain. It is squeezed between cat videos, memes, or gaslighting from crypto bros on the feed. There’s little appetite for something that would actually challenge us and our worldviews.
“Our natural reaction is to seek out culture that embraces nothingness, that blankets and soothes rather than challenges or surprises.” - Kyle Chaya, Filterworld.
That’s why you might have missed that:
- 66% of Newspaper jobs have been lost in the last 20 years
- 2.5 Local Newspaper shut down on average every week in the US in 2022
- Buzzfeed is dead, Vice is dead, Sports Illustrated is dying
Now, you might ask: why is that a problem? I get all I need from the feed: impressions, entertainment, and a sense of self-worth. The Media, you might say, is just an evil bunch of people trying to drive their own narrative to manipulate us into thinking in one way or another.
That’s one way to think of it. As someone working in a “trust-less” industry, this is not a surprising stance. After all, we’re trying to bring greater transparency and accountability to the world. But maybe you should re-consider because what’s happening to media at the moment is a dynamic we won’t escape even with decentralization.
“Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.”
— Graham Greene.
Why is the Media Dying?
Big Tech
There are different dynamics at work. The newspaper as an organization has faced competition from new technologies since the invention of the radio. Nevertheless, as pointed out by Matt Pearce, a previous journalist at the LA Times, people like him would often be the ones doing the investigative work, which would spread through to other outlets such as radio and later TV.
The internet came with a new maxime: information wants to be free. Marx might be happy about that, but for a media outlet, it’s a challenge when they have huge costs associated with delivering high-quality investigative journalism. After all, who’s going to pay for the journalists’ salary?
An increased reliance on targeted advertising and optimizing for keeping viewers on-screen (clickbait) has done little to contribute to maintaining trust in media. When Google was created, the founders recognized that advertising would not deliver the best user experience. Yet, here we are, with outlets forced to give into the AdWords monarchy for a little revenue flow.
The advertising business model doesn’t require a website to be informative or engaging; all it takes is to sustain attention, and, as we’ve witnessed, the ends seem to justify the means for many.
Of course, there are things that Media could do to adapt to an online presence, but there is just one good example intern is aware of: The New York Times.
Their playbook worked because they had an established big audience, were well-funded, and had the resources to experiment and build a reputation in different niches. This is not feasible for a local newspaper facing extinction.
Even with a more healthy business, the New York Times still faces off against the Big Tech giants. Google and Meta dominate the advertising market; their concern is their bottom line, not informing the public.
The only consolation is that Monopoly Theory suggests monopolies destroy the market (arguably, that’s well in progress) and then themselves. It’s enshittification that kills them.
Unfortunately, there is another big driver behind the current decline.
Capitalism
A major issue with the media is that they produce a public good but do so privately. Of course, state-funded media exists in some countries, such as the BBC in Britain or the ARD & ZDF in Germany. However, one can’t expect those to cover everything, nor do they convey the whole spectrum of diverse perspectives that might exist in a country.
Unfortunately, when a public good is produced privately, anyone can benefit from it without paying for it. You can read an article from a paid media source and then use it to create your own content, distributing the benefits without anyone else receiving it or paying for it. That’s a beautiful thing, but it’s hard to finance economically.
Then people with money stepping in should fix it, right? Right?
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, and the LA Times is billionaire-owned. Both have shed staff and are struggling. It’s also not a great setup to have influential, wealthy individuals with different incentives be in control of what information is published.
“He who controls information controls the world” - Dr. Stephen Franklin
To their credit, at least they’ve kept the publications somewhat alive.
The same cannot be said about the Arena Group. Arena Group was a PE firm that took over the once-beloved American outlet Sports Illustrated and quickly ran it into the ground through aggressive downsizing, publishing low-quality content, and even using the brand name to launch a casino. To replace some of the loss in content, they started using generative AI and tried to pass it off as human-written.
“The tragedy of AI is not that it stands to replace good journalists but that it takes every gross, callous move made by management to degrade the production of content — and promises to accelerate it.” — Brian Merchant
Sports Illustrated was just another cash cow to milk until its demise for the Arena Group. But the precedent they set might be a dangerous one. This brings us to interns’ last point: YOU.
All of us
The more our lives are dominated by screens and curated by algorithms, the less we might be able to think for ourselves and appreciate great writing. Great writing is heavily driven by a writer’s consciousness and, in the case of journalism, their human lens on the events. A human cares. An LLM does not.
I’m afraid the Arena Group isn’t the only one believing that an LLM can do the exact same job as a journalist, so more publications will likely be run into the ground this way.
But it’d be too easy just to blame “Big Tech” and the evil PE firms that ruin everything they touch. We, too, have some responsibility.
In some cases, distrust in the Media is warranted. I always encourage people to form their own opinions and think for themselves. When you do that, though, you might find the media quite useful. Good journalists will have multiple sources for their stories, unlike Mario Nawfal and others, who simply tweet whatever gets them the most clicks.
If you believe we’ll eventually enter a Creators’ Haven facilitated by Web3, maybe you’ll say we don’t need the Media. But is having 5 million independent writers on Substacks with unclear credentials and schooling so much better? They might just further existing fragmentation if there is nothing bigger that brings a common sense of what is happening in the world to people.
Let’s assume you still believe creators will flourish despite all the current evidence against it. What are you doing to support independent creators and the new “media?” ?
You pay for Netflix but don’t support your favorite YouTuber.
You have Spotify Premium but no paid subscription for a podcast you listen to weekly.
You complain about AI content but don’t pay for the human-created content.
Maybe we deserve the death of media then. Perhaps we should just let algorithms determine all the things that get written and be done with other humans.
But just think briefly about all the stories that’ll go untold then. There’d be no Assange or Snowdens left warning us credibly about wrongdoings. It’s well-established that the loss of local media decreases voter turnout and civil engagement while increasing corruption on both government and corporate levels.
There’s a good reason why step one for authoritarian regimes is imprisoning or doing worse to journalists.
For those of us in crypto for the right reasons, surely, watching those holding our states and corporations accountable fall apart can’t be something we cherish. A loss of collective understanding of the world is a loss for all of us.
Maybe there is a path where some of the web3 infrastructure can support media efforts by making a public good funded by a broad collective.
But then again, if we’re all too busy yolo-ing into dog coins and unwilling to even pay $2 to the creators we love, I’m not sure if that’s realistic.
Next time you listen to your favorite content creator, ask yourself what value you’d put on what you just received. Then, proceed accordingly.
“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Written by Near Intern / @NEAR_intern
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