Save the media from itself
I haven’t read Julia Cagé’s book Saving the Media: Capitalism, Crowdfunding, and Democracy, but it sounds right up my alley. I think I’d enjoy it, and not simply because Serious Media Thinkers (which, alas, I am not) have panned it. Frederic Filloux has faint praise in front and a knife in the back: “While she opens interesting avenues to explore innovative media business models, her work is unfortunately filled with flaws and sometimes willfully disconnected from reality.” Jeff Jarvis is saltier: “Good fucking luck with that.” The Neiman Lab’s Twitter account posted — approvingly, I assume — Jarvis’s sharp-elbowed critique, which probably shouldn’t surprise me. “Entrepreneurial journalism” is à la mode these days.
And there’s something to be said for entrepreneurial journalism — or at least something to be said for hustle and scrappiness — and, to be sure, late-stage capitalism will force that upon you. But the virtue of hustle and scrappiness is in large part drowned out by the excesses of internet journo-capitalism, which is to say clickbait, hot takes, facile arguments, pieces about books where the reviewer hasn’t read the book in question (oops).
But I’m not really writing about Cagé’s book. Nor am I writing about the link between capitalism and media outlets behaving badly — I’ve already done that. No, I’m writing about the blinders we wear when we mistake playing capitalism’s language games for discovering that the truth is out there.
Speaking of books, Richard Rorty writes in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity that “Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things.”
The vocabulary of internet journo-capitalism is, I think it’s fair to say, in crisis. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a thinkpiece or seven about the current, sorry state of media. Newsrooms are spiraling — sloughing off staff that help produce good journalism (which, in turn means less good journalism, less money, and shedding more staff). Despite this, the “new models” dreamed up under its vocabulary amount to more of the same, but better.
Joshua Topolsky, formerly of the Verge, writes in a revealing piece at Medium: “All of a sudden all those old, fixed channels started falling apart. Papers didn’t sell. Magazines died. Networks scrambled. Local news meant a lot less. Local papers even less than that.”
Some of this Topolsky chalks up to the media being, well, not very good at capitalism. He writes:
But the media industry is a hulking, stupid, slow moving beast that has little awareness about its threats and surrounding environs. … So instead of the content creators and advertisers who paid them shifting their attention and understanding of user value towards the future (digital everything), they kept plugging away at the old system. … A broken model that is aging badly.
This is a fair critique. Media companies didn’t really get the web, and their intransigence bit them in the ass. But, in truth, there’s not too much to get. Or, rather, there’s not too much money to get — if you’re following the ad-supported model. Web ads are, generally, cheap.
The cheapness of the business model, and the scale it requires to make it work, mean that publications end up producing cheap work. The cheap work waters down the relationship between reader and publication, and then when, in desperation, publications try to paywall, well, why would readers pay for cheap work that they can find anywhere else?
Jarvis calls it, “the God Pay Wall,” which is a nice turn of phrase, but belies a complete unwillingness to imagine a different world. More revealingly, Jarvis, in a tweet about newsrooms laying off editors, writes: “Would you prefer firing reporters? It is economic reality.” And “Capitalism is not the enemy.”
I scoff, as any good reader of Rorty would, at the notion that there is such a thing as “economic reality” and we need some kind of correspondence model of truth to get at it. Perhaps capitalism isn’t the enemy, but believing that our current, hyper-capitalist paradigm reflects some kind of economic reality is.
Academic and internet pugilist Freddie DeBoer is less enamored of Topolsky’s piece than I am. He writes:
Topolsky shares with us a sage wisdom, like Prometheus carrying fire down the mountain: the media companies that survive won’t be the ones that put out the “cheap shit.” The media companies that survive will be the ones who put out the “good shit,” the “real shit.” Such is the insight on which empires are made.
Topolsky deserves DeBoer’s skepticism, if not his sarcasm. The Verge is hardly a paragon of quality (“good shit”) over quantity (“cheap shit”) any more than any one of the new media “upstarts” is about quality over quantity. (Note that this is not to say that The Verge can’t produce good work; it’s to say that the incentives and structure of journo-capitalism are such that good work is almost always adrift in a sea of #content.)
To an outside observer, it is not a revelation that coming up with a way to produce quality content is the central problem of any new paradigm. To those of us that work in media, however, that someone with Topolsky’s heft is proclaiming that scale is not the answer is rather revolutionary.
But the more radical thesis — the one I wish Topolsky had espoused — is that journalism is an incredibly valuable human endeavor that humans in the grip of capitalism can’t seem to figure out how to value.
Crossposted here.
