Another brutal year for the media industry. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Matthew Yglesias

12 Dec 2023

14 - 18 minutes

The media industry saw several waves of high-profile layoffs in 2023. We had layoffs in January, Gawker shut down in February, Buzzfeed cut 15 percent of its staff in April, Condé Nast laid off staff (including at the New Yorker), NPR cut ten percent of its workforce, and Vox Media laid off four percent of its staff on November 30, after a prior round of layoffs. Last year also closed with a bunch of media layoffs, which came on the heels of pandemic layoffs, so it’s been a brutal few years.

Because the journalism industry is so high profile relative to its economic significance, the business of journalism tends to attract a lot of bad takes.

On the one hand, people who don’t like the product for various ideological reasons want to attribute any economic struggles to their (often somewhat imagined) political beefs with writers. On the other hand, because the average person working in journalism is to the left of the average American, there’s a lot of internal disdain for the idea of taking basic business issues seriously.

Last week, for example, the Washington Post union called for a one-day work stoppage as part of its efforts to secure a better deal for its workers. I fully support the right to bargain collectively, and as a writer myself, I want everyone in the industry to secure high pay and good working conditions. That said, the Washington Post loses tons of money. It’s true that Jeff Bezos is a very wealthy person and he could sell shares of Amazon to cover losses indefinitely if he wanted to. But “rich guy covers our losses” is still a business model, and you’d still need to think of some way to make that model work. After all, why would Jeff Bezos want to do that? He’s often accused, falsely I think, of having bought the Post as a kind of stealth deep lobbying play. When in fact, the Trump administration sought to punish Amazon financially for the Washington Post’s coverage. But certainly the Post could try to configure itself as a publicity arm for Bezos’ personal interests, and that could be a reason for him to keep covering its losses. Or they could pitch themselves as a charitable undertaking that wins him esteem in the eyes of people he cares about. Or they could try to be profitable (or at least break even).

But these are all business models.

And I think people who work in or aspire to work in media should learn and think more about the business side of the industry. Both because if you want your career to prosper, it needs to fit into someone’s business model, and because if you want the industry to thrive, it needs business models that are viable.

Whatever your personal feelings about the Post or Jezebel or Vox, it’s crucial to understand that the issues the industry is contending with are systematic. Have there been management errors? Yes. Have there been publications that hurt themselves by being too left-wing? Sure. But the sinkage in the industry is broad, and it has broad causes.

The biggest one is that the internet has dramatically increased competition.

This largely takes the form of things that are not “journalism” competing with journalism. It used to be that if you wanted to know tomorrow’s weather, you would rely on a newspaper or local television broadcast. I don’t really think publishing tomorrow’s weather forecast constituted journalism, but journalism businesses earned revenue from this function. Same with sports scores and stock prices and movie showtimes. The traditional newspaper bundle was a very clever business model that derived a lot of economic value from its control over the distribution of commodity information. Most people know about how Craigslist killed off the classified ad market, but it’s bigger than that. When I first moved to DC and apartment listings had not yet fully moved online, there was a print bundle that was just apartment listings. It was published by the Washington Post because they already owned a printing press and the means of distributing newspapers to newspaper vending boxes citywide. So they would piggyback on that infrastructure to distribute the print apartment listings, and people would pay them money to have their apartments advertised.

Woodward and Bernstein probably did not spend a lot of time thinking about the economic miracle whereby their extremely low margin work created an infrastructure that supported the incredibly high margin business of apartment listings and movie showtimes. But that’s how it worked.

That’s all gone now.

And on top of that hollowing out of the core business model, the internet forces news businesses to compete as an ad sales platform with the likes of Instagram and Google, which are much better at targeting. They also have to compete for attention with everything from Netflix to Premiere League Football to TikTok. And the outlets still have to compete with each other. We have every outlet in the world at our fingertips, which is great for readers — as much as people grouse about “the media,” nobody is bored or actually runs out of good articles to read — but from the standpoint of producers, we are all living in a world of constant content glut. It’s genuinely nobody’s fault that the industry keeps sinking under these pressures; the industry has experienced an adverse structural shift.

What has bothered me, personally, about Bezos’ stewardship of the Post is that through the process of first growing and then shrinking the newsroom, he’s left coverage of local issues worse off than it was before. His aspiration upon taking over was to make the Post a “national and even global publication,” and during the growth years, his investment priorities reflected that. Perry Stein used to cover DC Public Schools, and I think DC residents with school-aged children really appreciated her work. But when she got a promotion, it wasn’t to do something bigger covering DC government or regional issues, it was to cover the Justice Department, where she’s churning out Trump trial stories.

And that reflects the difficulty of the mission Bezos has given the paper.

The Post’s politics coverage is very good, but it’s not as good as the leading politics-only publications. And as a “national and even global publication,” it’s good but it’s not as good as the New York Times or the FT. It’s hard to win those races because the competition is so tough. Whereas to be the best source of information about local government in DC and its suburbs and even state government in Maryland and Virginia is a much lower bar. The reason I subscribe to the Post is because it’s still the best local coverage, even though local coverage has become increasingly threadbare as a result of institutional priorities.

Unlike most US cities, DC is still experiencing spikes in many kinds of crime, which has become an increasing concern for residents over the last three years. The crimes themselves (and occasionally arrests and trial outcomes) are covered in a kind of rote way under the public safety tab, but the story of why shootings fell in almost every major American city in 2023 while soaring in DC isn’t really covered. People interested in the topic of local crime have instead followed Alan Henney’s police scanner tweets and the part-time anonymous amateur Substack DC Crime Facts, which has published great analytical piece on everything from DC’s lack of a crime lab and collapsing 911 system to the scandalous situation in DC youth detention and the US Attorney’s office’s weirdly low rate of prosecutions. That last line of reporting has finally led the USAO to start telling their side of the story in terms of complaints about the courts. I would love to see these issues covered by a full-time newsroom that could also take on basic news-gathering assignments like:

    Interviewing some crime trend experts who can offer some structural theories as to why one city might go in a different direction from the rest of the country.

    Talking to the police union in detail about exactly what they mean when they blame the city’s police reform laws for the crime situation.

    Interviewing the progressive council members who pushed the reforms for their view on whether things are working out as planned.

    Reporting on how the January 6 prosecutions have influenced the resources available to the US Attorney to handle “normal” crime in the DC Superior Court.

    Reporting on the unusual and opaque process through which DC Superior Court judges are selected.

    Talking to law professors about whether the Proctor and T.W. rulings from the DC appeals court are in line with national standards.

    Looking into crime trends in the DC suburbs to help us understand if the “DC crime exception” is specific to the city or also applies to the region as a whole. 

Of course, there’s more to local news than crime.

The crime story is striking, though, because it’s why for the last two years, I’ve been consistently hearing from peers that they actually want to be reading more local journalism. The basic observation that the real gap in internet-era journalism is state and local news is so banal — it’s what everyone has been saying for 10-15 years. The reality has always been that those areas were losing out in competitive internet-era journalism because (sadly) there just wasn’t as much audience interest in those topics as in national politics. Now, though, for the first time in my life, it’s not that readers think “someone” probably ought to be doing more local journalism, but that we personally wish there were more good articles to read about what’s happening in our city — and that the existing coverage, while fine, is simply too thin.

It really seems that the supply of local news coverage has at long last slipped below the actual demand threshold.

Almost everyone claims to be annoyed that the tenor of national media coverage has become more opinionated. This, though, is a consequence of the market becoming more competitive. If you go back to the analog era, the British newspapers operated in a highly competitive national market, while American newspapers were geographically segmented monopolies. It’s not a coincidence that the UK papers were more opinionated (occasionally irresponsibly so) while the American papers were more staid and boring. The internet has pushed us into an era of nationalized competition, so the incentive is to give the audience what they want: biased, high-attitude stories.

The audience says they don’t want that because, of course, most publications don’t align with your personal biases, which is why traditional newspapers erred on the side of blandness. But in a competitive market, everyone is trying to find and appeal to a particular niche rather than minimize annoyance of the average reader.

That’s all fine as far as it goes. But one reason new media startups haven’t done quite as well as those of us involved in starting them hoped is that the NYT has proven really adept at co-opting a large share of the best talent from those publications — and it’s becoming less staid as a result.

But I think for local media to reconstitute itself, it’s probably beneficial to revert to the older approach of more down-the-middle journalism for exactly the traditional reason that business model made sense. The potential audience for local news is smaller than the potential audience for national news. What you’re banking on is fewer direct competitors, so you’re really trying to minimize the number of people you alienate. And I think it’s worth being really realistic about this — the “balanced” news report is a business strategy, not an epistemology. All the things the critics of that approach say about its limits as a truth-seeking heuristic are correct, and any possible way to put the news together would involve biases.

The virtue of a bias toward trying to be as neutral between major political factions as possible is that, under certain circumstances that do apply to local news but don’t apply to national news, it maximizes the number of people who might read and pay for your factual reporting. This also entails, in practice, a bias toward the interests and values of the potential audience rather than the interests and values of the young college graduates on the staff. If that’s not what people want to do, I certainly sympathize. But it’s still a job.

After I was no longer in management at Vox, the formerly independent website Racked, which was focused on retail culture, was brought under the Vox.com umbrella and renamed The Goods. The basic logic of this made a lot of sense to me: There was a strong audience for Vox’s coverage, but the kinds of stories that drove traffic weren’t necessarily advertiser friendly. The Goods would operate in a more challenging market from an audience standpoint, but an easier one from an advertiser standpoint. By rolling it together, we could generate valuable cross-subsidy where political coverage increased the size of the audience for the retail coverage, which would in turn generate excess revenue that could finance the loss-leading politics coverage.

As with anything, there were a bunch of reasons this might or might not have worked out in practice. But what really surprised me about this venture was the extent to which the writers for the presumably ad-friendly section wanted to churn out anti-capitalist content.

If that’s how you feel, then God bless. But as a business proposition, it doesn’t really make sense. And I think all across the industry, as there have been more and more rounds of unionization and also more and more business troubles, there’s been a reluctance from the rank and file to take the business model questions seriously. A publication can be supported by subscribers or by advertisers or by a mix of the two. It can be a donor-financed nonprofit or it can be subsidized by an ego-driven rich owner. And even in the nonprofit or ego-driven scenarios, the scale of the financial losses is a relevant consideration in terms of what can be done. And it’s pretty unlikely that you writing only the articles that you like, with only the spin that you like, on only the topics you think are important is going to add up to a viable business model. Whatever you come up with is almost certainly going to involve some biting of the tongue for the sake of making things work.

As a high-openness, low-agreeableness cranky writer, I don’t like this any more than you do. At every job I’ve ever had, I’ve found myself at one point or another fighting with the bosses about some version of the tension between “Matt wants to say what he thinks” and “Matt’s boss has ideas about how the business should be run,” and I feel incredibly lucky, 20 years into my career, to have landed on a business model that approximates “Matt says what he thinks.” So I try to say this from a place of honesty rather than complacency, but there is no revenue model that doesn’t involve compromises. Which is probably true not of just journalism, but of every business under the sun. And to the extent that journalism is in some ways a uniquely important line of business, that makes it more important, not less, to work toward viable business models.