The Cleansing of the Digital News Media
Layoffs at self-regarding media outlets may be part of a positive process that could heal the broken relationship between press and reader
Within two weeks, the news media saw nearly 1,000 cumulative layoffs at places including BuzzFeed, Vice Media, newspaper publisher Gannett, and Verizon Media, owner of HuffPost, AOL, and Yahoo. Last year, a slate of other New York-based outlets experienced similar cuts.
As digital media in particular takes stock of what is happening to it, blame has been directed at Facebook and Google, “contraction” in the industry, general institutional distrust — anywhere except the media itself. That speaks to a lack of self-scrutiny which is rooted in the aversion to risk embedded in the industry’s business approach and insulation from the public. Until the digital news media as a business and culture faces risk and scrutinizes itself, it will not be on solid financial ground and will continue to foment public distrust.
Why is the media so reluctant to do real self-criticism? In part, it is a privilege that stems from wielding an unprecedented amount of constitutionally-binding power in American life and from never having to directly earn public trust to exist. The public respects professionals who tie their livelihood to a proximate means of accountability, workers with skin in the game. The public respects those who accept risk, because incurring risk binds oneself to achieving a goal, especially when the goal centers around serving the public. Mechanics, bakers, balloon artists, investors, comedians, farmers, plumbers, hairdressers, and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz all have skin in the game. Their survival depends on maintaining precarious public approval, and they earn respect by slowly building something great for lots of people to buy or use.
The news media, conversely, operates within a perverse incentive structure — specifically, a dependence on ads and venture capital that have had three adverse effects. First, investor pressure for growth over stability which places at risk thousands of jobs. Second, the pursuit of ad dollars and venture capital revenue widens the distance between journalists and public accountability. And third (as a result of the second), digital media companies are just as incentivized to produce mere “content” as real journalism.
The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson writes that the news media business is largely headed back to the patron-funded model of the 19th century. “Mid-century newspapers were as broad and unobjectionable as department stores because department-store advertising was their business,” Thompson writes. “News media of the future could be as messy, diverse, and riotously disputatious as their audiences because directly monetizing them is the new central challenge of the news business.” I think Thompson is about right, though I’d argue there already exist rowdy and “disputatious” outlets on either side of the spectrum, and I think there will remain a market for tempered sources.
That isn’t to say ads and venture capital are inherently dangerous. Nor is this to minimize the difficulty of diversifying revenue streams in news media. Smaller newspapers across the country are trying desperately to do just that.
But there is something basically unmeritocratic about the funding models that have ruled in the media business, and it has created legitimate problems in public trust, not just in rates of journalists’ employment. It’s one thing for a newsroom to mostly survive by patronage, grow based on its audience, and have a bullhorn commensurate with the size of its operation. It’s another thing to raise enough money to buy a bullhorn that’s disproportionate in size to the number of people willing to pay for the product and then to take it into the public square. In this sense, digital media leverages the principle of the free press to break the iron law of merit all other businesses live by to survive.
Where barbers primarily seek to impress clients, many of today’s journalists are primarily occupied with impressing other journalists. Mutual professional feedback is beneficial in creating a common set of industry-wide ethical standards. But if an outlet’s survival doesn’t ultimately depend on consumers, it winds up reinforcing a revolving-door monoculture within news media that isn’t self-aware enough to create journalism that is reflective of the country — and I’m not just talking about Trump country.
Media companies are, well, companies. To acknowledge this is to invite the reprimand that journalism is different and sacrosanct, even that it ought to receive preferential treatment in the way of government funding because the need to inform the public and right of the free press is so critical. But this conflates the right to a free press with the idea that all free press has a right to exist.
BuzzFeed raised over $500 million in venture capital over 10 years to come up with a long-term business plan. By all appearances, that plan was going to be to bake ads into relatable content. Some were inclined to see this as an asset. But from a risk management standpoint, this is an enormous liability. After all, why shouldn’t it have been? Ad revenue has long been journalism’s only reliable revenue source. The stumble or fall BuzzFeed took was going to be from higher up. In hindsight, it’s hard to believe that only four or five years ago that this plan was touted with such conviction.
Conservative digital media have seemingly been able to do more with less. The Daily Wire and The Daily Caller, for example, generate traffic comparable to progressive outlets like Vox and BuzzFeed News without the pressures that come with venture capital and while maintaining leaner mastheads. Part of the appeal could be that conservative media taps into a demand for content and story angles that the digital media establishment do not provide. But it could also be because these sites garner attention for departing ideologically from mainstream narratives, and they are often cited by mainstream outlets to gauge conservative reaction.
According to the anti-bourgeois rhetoric of the self-excusing narrative certain journalists adopt, digital media is faltering because billion-dollar companies like Facebook and Google have absorbed the majority of ad dollars and roadblocked traffic to many digital media sites by tweaking algorithms that are designed to curb sensationalist clickbait. And some media figures do admit that the industry failed to adapt its models from mass to social media. This explains why BuzzFeed has been missing revenue targets each year since 2015, well before Facebook enacted new content regulations. Sites like BuzzFeed, Mashable, and Vice have depended more on social media to drive traffic, but in recent years have made improvements to “diversify away from social” which platforms like Slate, Bustle, The New Yorker and The Atlantic have done fairly successfully.
Could the decline of digital news simply be that audiences have become fatigued by a paralyzing stream of “content” each time they check the appendage that is their smartphones? Google or no Google, the smartphone and the social media revolution were coming, and they would have resulted in the same industry pain.
Apart from the billions of dollars raised, national news media have been insulated from the public in other ways. The closure of regional newspapers and move of media jobs to coastal digital upstarts has tracked political polarization in the country. Meanwhile legacy outlets like The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, and The Los Angeles Times have all been revitalized thanks to billionaires.
That polarization is reinforced by the environment in which members of the national traditional and digital news media work and live. Seventy-two percent of the people who work in newspaper or online publishing work in a county Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and those who work in news media skew overwhelmingly to the left. Earlier this month, Pew Research found that 58 percent of Americans said news organizations do not understand people like them. Among those “very interested” in the news, 71 percent of Republicans say they do not feel understood compared to 21 percent of Democrats who felt the same. This aligns with the dominant view held by the 64 percent who say the media favor Democrats over Republicans.
Last November, Morning Consult found that 64 percent say the national news media is dividing the country. Fifty-six percent said the same of Donald Trump.
In an August Ipsos poll, 59 percent said the mainstream media is more interested in making money than telling the truth. Yet, 85 percent of Americans say the press is an essential part of democracy which seems to indicate something initially subtler, but upon closer examination a much starker, difference between the press they respect and the media they distrust.
How to square this circle? People have multiple ideas in their heads when they think about the media. Many in the press have skin in the game, such as war correspondents, crime reporters, and those who face credible threats of retaliation in the pursuit of uncovering pressing truths. “The media,” as the term is used most negatively, however, comprises the primetime cable partisans, the airbrushed multi-member panels, the self-aggrandizing White House correspondents, content farmers, facile “explainers.” The press humbles itself in the face of a complex world filled with people with mixed interests. The media, by contrast, presume disparities are caused by disparate treatment, mock working Americans from the comfort of high-rise buildings, and trivialize wrongdoing. The press produces journalism. The media produce content. The press earns trust. The media expect trust.
Vanity Fair reported last year that there were clashes at The New York Times between experienced journalists protecting long-held customs and a newer, more activist generation which began its careers at upstart digital outlets and were hired to run social media and online engagement for older ones. Industry-wide pressure to use Twitter to keep tabs on public officials, promote work, and remain competitive on a platform that rewards instant gratification can make Twitter feel like emotional VR. The results include journalists who draw conclusions without evidence, misinterpret static data, and grossly miscalculate the reach of a false claim and so proceed to engage in petty rebuttal journalism. What the public sees is mere opinion being branded as analysis and fact-checking.
Twitter — a platform grossly unrepresentative of the public and one the overwhelming majority of Americans do not use — has at worst become an assigning editor of stories that otherwise wouldn’t merit journalistic inquiry. In digital media, non-controversies serve as proxies to channel political and cultural opinions and generate traffic. Such “nontroversies” as those over the Chinese prom dress, along with the Pepsi, Gillette, and Nike ads, are but a few examples. Literal fake news also spreads on Twitter, because of careless, politically-motivated reporting. Just recently, the Covington-Phillips situation, the original Jazmine Barnes murder claim, and the Senate popular vote come to mind.
Nine months ago, the left-wing sports site Deadspin cut a video that went viral on Twitter mocking Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the conservative local television company. The video depicts dozens of anchors during separate broadcasts reading ominously from a script warning about “fake news” and media bias. Deadspin’s video was picked up by every national media outlet and triggered a cascade of questions about media bias. Six months later, the entertainment website Super Deluxe published an analogous video supercut of cable news figures, over the course of 22 months, declaring Donald Trump’s imminent downfall in identical language. No script was required.
If the BuzzFeeds of the internet fall, then new companies will emerge. Hopefully, those new companies will return to rebuilding the local and regional news infrastructure consumers desperately need. Or perhaps they will build a national platform that constructively tackles the shortcomings of today’s self-regarding media. Bad journalists disinterested in meeting the sobering responsibilities of the trade can find another line of work. The sooner fragile media companies close because of their own misjudgments, the clearer the signal will be for newer, smarter, and thriftier outlets to emerge — ones that don’t blow $200,000 on rent in the World Trade Center like Mic did before announcing massive layoffs.
As for the public, they should feel empowered to criticize the media.
At a rally on the National Mall in Washington eight years ago, the comedian Jon Stewart gave an impassioned speech after organizing tens of thousands of Americans to restore sanity and reason to our politics.
“The image of Americans that is reflected by our political and media process is false. It’s us through a funhouse mirror,” Stewart said.
We hear every damned day about how fragile our country is, on the brink of catastrophe, torn by polarizing hate, and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done. The truth is, we do. We work together to get things done every damned day. The only place we don’t is here or on cable TV. … The press is our immune system. If it overreacts to everything, we actually get sicker.
Hopefully if we get sicker, it will only be before we get better.
