How to fix the media industry

(Commissioned for the public by Balaji Srinivasan)

Hi there!

I hope you all are having a great summer (despite the apocalypse). Entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan invited me to write this month about the key problems I’d like to see solved in the media industry. So, as a treat, I’m publishing the August newsletter a few days early. This should give us more time to discuss the topic throughout August!

Regardless of the bitcoin bounty he mentioned, which I would love to see proliferated for other types of reporting, it is my pleasure to shout from the rooftops that our modern communications system has an incentives problem.

In this newsletter, I will also address the question asked by a fellow anonymous subscriber. He asked me to describe local vs. global and niche vs. general business models. What happens when a business tries to attract a new audience vs. focusing on a core audience. That’s a lot of ground to cover! 

So, we’ll begin with the creator’s incentives. For the most part, a creator, whether it is a podcaster or a writer or a TV personality or a model, generally wants to be paid well for work he or she feels proud of. There is no secret media dungeon where all purveyors of information cackle at the glee of misinforming the masses. Now that content is cheap to spread, but still requires lots of labor to make, it’s common for institutions to slash editorial staff down to the bone and rely on freelance competition to keep wages low.

It’s common for me to be one of thousands of applicants when I’ve applied to media jobs, and I’ve never applied for a job with a base salary over $100,000. Sometimes, even if I make the cut, I don’t continue the interview process because I don’t like a company’s metrics system nor feel the price matches the demands. 

When it comes to old school reporting, people aren’t doing it for the money. That’s what Hollywood is for.  Some people operate in the borderlands between industries, like author and podcaster Gaby Dunn, who built her career with Youtube series and also culture writing. But, for the most part, people like Dunn, and even Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal, are called “talent” (see the url), while people like me are not in that category unless we transition from editorial to broadcast. 

Very few editorial roles, like being the New York Times opinion columnist or an editor at Vogue, can command the kind of salary that “talent” can. Talent’s job is to be the face of the brand and this was traditionally very separate from editorial. Some anchors are more performers than researchers, and that’s okay.

Many outlets still won’t allow their reporters to speak freely on any controversial topic, and I understand why. At the same time, these days, other contexts require editorial to fill both roles at the same time. We live in a state of constant contradiction, which is detrimental to our mental health.

Yet creators still flock to institutions because they offer higher wages and job security. And health insurance! In addition, legal and tech support are crucial to my work. An investigative reporter can require monthly legal services. Defending free speech is expensive.

Plus, when I contact important interview subjects at places like the World Economic Forum in Davos, the first thing they want to know is which paper I represent. If it’s not in the top 20 legacy brands, then forget it. High profile people who might give me an interview for one outlet won’t agree to go on record with me for a smaller outlet. 

I freelanced for many years, earning my daily bread this way. People who say an independent reporter can afford the resources to do the same quality work have never tried it. I did produce freelance work of the same quality, but I usually lost money doing it, or was able to reach just a few hundred readers at most. (With an institutional brand, my articles can reach millions of readers.) 

If you produce high quality work, but no one reads it, does it really matter?

(On assignment in Spain, writing a piece that took 6 months to earn $250. It was one of the best pieces I ever wrote. I’d estimate a few hundred people read it.)

Niche vs. mass audiences

The media industry’s dirty little secret is you don’t have to optimize for growth. 

Startups like Business of Fashion, The Information, and even legacy outlets like the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, manage to survive by selling high quality content to a narrow audience, rather than trying to become the next unicorn. The tradeoff is, such organizations need to stay lean, and deliberately choose low, yet sustainable, profits, rather than scaling aggressively. This speaks to milkyway16’s question. What happens when media companies focus? Sometimes it works! 

It’s easy to imagine a more decentralized media landscape using tools that already exist. For example, freelance journalist Janine Römer offers a great example of using GitHub for reporting with public transparency, in addition to distribution direct to a niche audience through multiple channels. 

Now to address Balaji’s question, I would like to see a robust communications ecosystem with many niche media outlets and platforms in addition to a few institutional giants, like the BBC or NPR. The large organizations can afford the unprofitable labor costs of civic coverage. Few people will click on an article about a local infrastructure debacle. Even so, such information should be searchable and updated. Sadly, the only way the media industry has managed to do this so far is by subsidizing service journalism with sensationalist trash. There must be a different model for providing broad, accessible journalism. 

The reason you see so much garbage media is because that is what the platform algorithms surface. The system optimizes for engagement, not learning (when you’re rage tweeting you’re probably not listening), and shock instead of intimacy. Even the content of the media must be optimized for search and mobile. This is not conducive to the quality of information the tech industry claims it wants to spread.

Journalists are frustrated because they are demonized for operating within the system technologists have set. While we did not choose these incentives, we simply meet them to keep our jobs and food on the table. And there are literally thousands of people waiting to take your place if you walk away from a staff job in the media. Consequently, reporters are treated like disposable labor because the market is saturated. 

Accuracy 

Some people opine that the lack of accountability and the prevalence of misinformation can be solved with software. It cannot. 

Fact-checking is manual labor and we don’t have computers that are sophisticated enough to do it without extensive human involvement. 

It’s very common for me to field multiple complaints about the same article that different readers believe is biased in opposite ways. Even if I use numbers, people don’t agree on how to interpret the numbers. Sometimes there are other numbers, which were not found before, that offer a better representation. Complainers are often outraged at the spread of what they believe is a deliberate lie. But, not everything we disagree with is a lie. 

For example, I highly respect the work of The Jerusalem Post’s veteran political reporter Lahav Harkov. We have different opinions on almost everything. Sometimes her interpretation of the correct numbers make me so outraged I want to flip a table. Even though I would prefer she use other metrics, and interpret the information to support a different meaning, I understand her reporting is not wrong. In fact, the quality is very high! There is this wasteland between “wrong” and “right” that computers can’t navigate yet. 

Labor costs

Even in a digital world, it requires substantial labor (man hours) to produce quality research and manage broadcasts to a responsive audience. 

Contrary to popular belief, traffic is not a sign of delivering real value to the reader. Hate clicks and bot engagement can be manipulated to count as traffic. Trump content performed amazingly during 2016, perhaps, in part, due to propaganda campaigns on social media. Venture capitalist and prolific writer Sam Lessin tweeted my precise sentiments, arguing “if we don’t get a grip on identity and learn to write off all other ‘noise’ fast our key institutions will shortly fall.” 

I’ll never forget when I was a fresh-faced reporter in New York called in to her first disciplinary meeting. At the time, I was on staff at a hip and mainstream media company with an office in one of the world’s most famous landmark buildings. My coworkers were interviewing world leaders and I’d recently returned from covering my first porn conference. This was what it felt like to make it, right? This was why so many writers flock to New York, hoping to be the next Carrie Bradshaw.

My editor was there to defend me, to say I was a good reporter, because I was in trouble for requesting too many updates after publication. We told my bosses that updates were good for accuracy. If they wanted anything beyond aggregation, then I needed time to put in the work. However, the executive editor told me my output would need to increase if I wanted to keep my seat at the table. There would be new directives coming from the board. We needed to scale up. They wanted more viral content at any cost. 

Although the strategies we had begged the executives not to implement eventually backfired, the executive editor who sat across from me that day is still one of the leading editors in New York. I think the editors were doing the best they could at the time to ethically follow orders. It’s just that the collapsing media industry is a game of musical chairs where only people who can afford to gamble can keep their seats. 

Of course creators want out of this elite, prep school popularity contest. The question is, can readers bear the direct costs? 

Some of my best articles have cost thousands of dollars to produce, even without accounting for distribution and promotion costs. Sometimes it takes months to find an answer. For example, how many subscribers would it take to recoup the $4,000 needed for a single article?

To check my numbers, I asked freelancer Sulome Anderson, a Lebanese-American journalist, whose reporting is published by some of the world’s most prestigious magazines. Turns out, we’ve got roughly the same rates, and we both concluded it’s a money-losing gamble. Freelancers reduce the costs of reaching the right audience by selling content to brands with established audiences. A war reporter might earn $300-$600 on a piece without any expense budget. 

“You need quite a few things to do that work safely and successfully, like a fixer and safety equipment. I’ve never had a news organization give me a flak jacket, for example,” said Anderson, who reported during the revolution in Egypt and did war reporting in Iraq. 

Ultimately, unless you are independently wealthy or have someone else financially supporting you, it is difficult to sustain a career with investigative freelance writing. I think tools like bitcoin could make it easier to hire local reporters and photographers, whether on location or working remotely. This reduces exploitative coverage. These local contributors don’t always have the writing skills to publish themselves. Outsiders need to work with locals, not just distribute Arabic translation to the cheapest option on Fiverr, because cultural competence is valuable to the process.

(Working on location with an Arabic translator/ Photos by Idit Keren Moshel)

Regardless, of the opportunities that technologies like bitcoin create, algorithms impact the types of pitches editors want. Fewer editors are commissioning investigative news these days, unless it’s a trendy topic. 

“If you don’t report on Trump, you might as well not report,” Anderson joked. I can relate to that. It’s one of the main reasons I’ve tried to avoid reporting on American politics for the past few years. 

Thus, incentives are the crux of the problem in our industry.

“I think a big part of the problem is that people now expect to get their journalism for free, and that business model is breaking down in every sector of journalism,” Lahav Harkov told me. “I've been at JPost for 10 years and I've seen too many talented people leave journalism entirely. It's hard to retain talented people with these salaries. You have to be a little crazy to do my job, between the hours and the pressures and the low pay.” 

She added that freelancers are rarely offered the same budgets as staffers. 

“I don't think publications can afford to take those risks anymore. There won't be a Hunter S. Thompson in the 2020s,” Harkov said.

The answer

Both Anderson and Harkov agreed there is still a market for quality journalism. 

There is no shortage of people who want information. There’s no shortage of people with the skills to do great reporting either. 

Solutions must address the manipulated market with more meaningful measures of price, distribution and aggregation. 

Aggregation is how brands scale up, but it also leads to misinformation as the data move further away from its context. If there are buyers willing to pay for the information they want, it can be found and delivered. When I used to freelance, I also worked with a few private clients. I was equally satisfied with the experience, as a writer, because I was compensated fairly. The right readers got what they needed and I did my best. That’s all most creators want. 

Reporters chase traffic because that’s usually what pays. Most creators rely on a brand for distribution. Many outlets are still profitable and well-regarded by their audiences. Distribution isn’t just about getting online. It is also about delivering the information to the right audience in a way that is useful and offers a positive experience. That’s what most journalists want to do. 

The lucky few who get decent jobs cling to them. Even for wealthy staffers, rage clicks aren’t ideal for anyone but the guys peddling “number go up” charts to ignorant investors. Brands like the New York Times are not built at a startup’s pace. 

“People don’t pay bills with likes, retweets and followers,” Anderson said. “I’m the daughter of two journalists who also did war reporting in Lebanon...Freelancers used to make a good living. Staffers used to have expense accounts...considering the context now, it blows my mind.” 

Harkov said the best way to fix the sensationalist media trap is to pay for people to do original work and focus on their core value-add. It takes time in a new beat to understand it. Media musical chairs will inherently promote the spread of misinformation. 

No technologist would knowingly hire a frontend JavaScript developer to do something completely outside his skillset, then rage on Twitter about how the bad quality was proof the worker had bad ethics. We set people up to fail, then blame them when they do.

“Because of shrinking budgets, reporters are expected to take on multiple beats and write breaking news and enterprise stories and, in a situation like that, no one is working to his or her full potential,” Harkov said. “I think that as long as there are people who are very passionate about news or the topics they are writing about, there will still be good quality journalism. But I don't know what to do about the business side of things.”

That’s pretty much where I’m at too. What do you think? 

It’s always easier to start from scratch than to iterate wisely on a broken system. But that’s what society needs! Readers already have expectations and habits. Considering the current norms and needs, how do you propose people should incentivize ethical journalism in the present moment?

Leave me your thoughts in the comments! I’ll try to address them next month. One subscriber also asked me about data centers, so that’s another topic we’ll cover in September.

Until then, take care everybody!