TITLE: We Need Your Email Address
https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-address/
EXCERPT: When sites like Buzzfeed, Gawker, and VICE were growing, there was the pervasive dream that it would be possible to make huge sums of money by simply getting as many pageviews as possible and advertising against it. Overall, this strategy has not worked for a variety of systemic, technological, and mismanagement reasons, as evidenced by the fact that nearly every digital media company that chased scale has lost vast sums of money, have collectively laid off thousands of talented journalists, and have watched ad revenues dry up as Facebook and Google dominate the industry and ad-tech platforms systematically drive down rates on good journalism with concepts like “brand safety.” While we would like as many people as possible to read our articles and for the experience to be as frictionless as possible, we are unwilling to make the exact same mistakes as failing media companies that have convinced both readers and their staffs that their work is worthless and their labor is expendable and interchangeable. We are unwilling to gamble our livelihoods or our company’s future on the idea that we can build a successful business model by focusing exclusively on collecting a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a penny every time someone clicks one of our articles.
We do have some programmatic ads on the site, which paid members do not see, but they bring in pennies. The purpose of them is more to make ends meet if something happens to another of our revenue streams, and so we can cover essentials like our podcasting software, for example. Having these ends-meeting ads doesn’t mean we shy away from covering the advertising industry, either. If anything, we’re more aggressive than anyone, exposing the brand safety industry for the journalism destroying machine it is, and investigating shady ad-based surveillance platforms (with our work then directly leading to connected companies being cut-off).
We have found in the last week that when we require people to give us their email addresses, our email list grows (obviously), and more people quickly become paid subscribers. (In part, this might be because when you sign up, our site will send you a welcome email showing you all of the changes we’ve made in the world in just a few months with our journalism). This email list makes our journalism and our company more economically viable, and allows us to keep doing the work that we’re doing, at a time when good websites are shutting down and good journalists are being laid off for reasons like “We were notified by Authentic Brands Group (ABG) that the license under which the Arena Group operates the Sports Illustrated (SI) brand and SI related properties has been officially revoked by ABG. As a result of this license revocation, we will be laying off staff that work on the SI brand,” and “the billionaire who owns this company doesn’t understand it and is tired of losing money.”
So, again: We need your email address, because it is, at the moment, the way that we can best ensure that real people like yourself see and read our work.
TITLE: The Death of the Washington Bureau
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/death_washington_bureau_local_news_la_times_layoffs.php
EXCERPT: As the San Francisco Chronicle’s Shira Stein noted, these latest cuts leave just herself, two people from McClatchy, and the five people at the LA Times as the only journalists covering DC for California-based newspapers. That’s eight print reporters covering the entire federal government—for a state of thirty-nine million people.
That’s still better than much of the country. Most states don’t have a single reporter covering Washington on the ground anymore.
This is corrosive to democracy in many ways, some more obvious than others. The most glaring problem is that lawmakers aren’t held to account. There’s no one to confront congressmen on a daily basis or make sure they’re not breaking the law. Local issues don’t get scrutinized. And with the exception of camera-hungry congressmen and national figures, most lawmakers barely get covered at all.
This worsens polarization. Without local coverage, the only times most Americans hear about their representatives is from campaign ads or when they’re on national news talking about partisan issues. That makes it harder for politicians who break with their party to get something done to survive politically—and it makes it harder for issues of local importance that might have crossover appeal to gain any traction. If the only way to gain attention (and raise money) is to talk about national issues on Fox News or MSNBC, why bother taking a political risk to cross the aisle and try to solve problems that actually matter to your district?
In this environment, a few loudmouths become national stars and fundraising powerhouses. Everyone else is just an anonymous Democrat or Republican, easily caricatured and attacked by their opponents come election season no matter what they’ve done for the people back home.
It wasn’t always like this—even recently. In the late 2000s, the New York Daily News, which then had a robust DC bureau, led the drumbeat to get healthcare and financial compensation for the first responders and victims of the 9/11 attacks. Members of Congress had to be publicly shamed for months by cancer-ridden and dying firemen, EMTs, and police before they eventually created the program. Most of the bill’s opponents were Republicans, but it got passed partly because members from the New York tristate area from both parties, who fought hard for bipartisan support, got local recognition—and credit—from the Daily News. The paper’s crusading editorials won a Pulitzer; beat reporter Michael McAuliff’s reporting played such a key role that Democratic senator Chuck Schumer gave him one of the pens he said President Obama had used to sign the measure into law.
McAuliff is now at a healthcare trade publication.
“Fewer reporters are paying attention to their local lawmakers and the more mundane but really important things they do,” he told me, “while more reporters are tasked with following the loudest and most controversial lawmakers. It means local readers don’t understand what their representatives do all day—that they often agree on many basic things like funding local hospitals and roads—or when and why those lawmakers fail to help them. It would be hard to hold someone accountable for failing to pass 9/11 laws if no one knew who failed.”
TITLE: The News Business Really Is Cratering
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/27/is-the-journalism-death-spasm-finally-here-00138187
EXCERPT: There has been no shortage of commentary about the harm that will befall democracy as the watchdogs get sacked, but should we believe them? Writing in the 1880s, Ambrose Bierce pierced this pretention. “From whom, my friends, do you hear all this talk about the great good wrought by the press, its vigilant guardianship of the public interest, its conservation of the public morals? From the newspapers, and from those who accept their word without analysis,” he wrote. No matter which side you stand on the democracy-requires-a-free-and-vigorous-press proposition, we’re about to test it.
The ongoing flood obviously won’t sweep all journalism away. But except for a few big players, will it become more of a cottage industry than an economic and cultural force? If great cities like Los Angeles, with its many prosperous, educated and engaged citizens, can’t support a decent daily newspaper, what hope is there for the rest of the country? Are we belatedly learning that the great journalism empires — the Times-Mirror chain, Knight Ridder, Gannett, Scripps-Howard, Tribune, McClatchy, Advance Publications, Hearst, Freedom Communications and the rest — weren’t journalism empires as much as they were advertising colossuses, and that they became doomed when they lost status as the best advertising vehicle?
Journalism will survive, of course, even if the business falters as the advertising subsidy that made it viable erodes. Publications for readers who depend on market-moving news like you find in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News and other business titles will endure. So will the aforementioned New York Times, which provides news that moves political markets and has established itself as a national voice worth paying for. So, too, will the gossip and lifestyle magazines remain, as will publications like the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, which serve, boutique-style, a loyal, educated readership. But like the animals that persisted after the great comet struck the earth, most publications will be tiny and eke out an existence in the shadows. Perhaps organized labor and political parties will step forward to sponsor news. But could you trust either to produce real news? That would be like expecting General Motors or Citibank to give you the honest lowdown on the automotive and financial goings-on.
Will journalism become a hobby like scrapbooking or street busking, done on the cheap or for donations, but one without much of a career path? Will we become increasingly dependent on solo, opinionated practitioners on Substack like Matthew Yglesias and Glenn Greenwald and city newsletters like the ones from Axios to keep abreast of news not produced by the giants?
The journalism party might not be completely over. It’s human nature to interpret any bad news as the coming apocalypse. But let’s get drunk anyway and then sober up for what’s to come next.