I'm curious who will report the news and do investigative reporting, when all people seem to want is opinion shows that reflect their own perspective. And of course, much of the "new media" (and the "old media" too) has no allegiance to the truth. It's all about what inspires outrage and views, so conspiracy theories and outright lies are the currency of the day.
Catherine herridge is doing investigative reporting right the hell right now. She posts it on Twitter. Currently, she's doing a series on Guantanamo Bay.
Furthermore, Jillian Michaels on Twitter just broke the story about how the 17000 signatures of doctors against RFK Juniors nomination is phony.
Yeah, I look at the New York Times pretty much everyday. I'm not a subscriber, if I find a story I'm interested. Interested. I just copy the web page address into archive.ph and it blows right through their paywalls. It doesn't happen much cuz of the avec cassie journalism, the New York Times adheres to.
In a nutshell, I look at Twitter every morning to get my daily headlines.
As far as I'm concerned, as someone who is 66 years old and used to pride themselves on being a subscriber to the New York Times and I mean every single fucking, one of the current mainstream media news outlets are meaningless.
They they destroyed their brand. And as far as I can tell, the younger generation don't even look at anymore.
I believe this to such a degree that I doubt very much that the New York Times actually has 12 million readers. As they claim they do.
And the current media landscape once you break your readers. Respect, you never get it back. I think they're all going to go on under with the New York Times being the last of Survivor.
Sorry for the typos but I'm dictating and I'm too lazy to edit. I think you got my point anyway.
I have also had doubts over the NYT claim to have 12 million readers. Younger people are getting their news from X, TikTok or YouTube. I have mostly stopped looking at the corporate legacy press as well.
No, literally who will go overseas to report on a war or natural disaster? New media usually just feeds off of the information provided by CNN, ABC, NTY, WSJ, etc.
On the one paw, if the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at co-opting dissenters.
On the other paw, I am not sure that a PMC establishment outfit like the NYT can successfully cop the style and vibe of a Rogan, or that the WaPo could do a Substack.
It's like asking a suburban high school principal to front an industrial metal band. Even if he really makes an effort to "hang" with his "fellow dude students", his rage is not convincing, even if he is genuinely outraged that his 401(k) is taking such a beating this quarter. Or that time grandma drank too many blueberry daiquiris and grabbed the waiter's ass, it wasn't transgressive or sexy at all but just sad and creepy.
Yes, this. The world isn’t full of Joe Rogan equivalents. There’s Joe Rogan, and really no second place.
It reminds me of when Louis CK’s show became a huge hit. standup comedians started writing shows “like” Louie. I get the impulse, but sometimes it doesn’t work like that. If you want a “show like Joe Rogan’s” you have to hire Joe Rogan.
Indeed. Many in the legacy media will try but likely none will succeed. Because it will come off as inorganic and too corporate. It is not authentic and people can tell the difference.
When the old media starts fighting the establishment instead of fighting heretics, wake me up. Changing location is irrelevant. Most big substackers are old media saying the same old NYTimes things in a new place.
They've been serving the establishment for 200 years, and I doubt that they can ever be objective..
Why do I feel like I've been teleported into a pre-socratic hellscape of rhetoric and sophistry? Why does everyone crave a parasocial social media actor to pretend to be their friend and to tell them what they want to hear? Why is being seen as right, or the winner of the argument the only thing that matters to people now adays? Why is there no true pathway to just listening, learning, knowledge, and truth? Conspiracy theories and political bombast are in, science, journalism, and the law are out.
Intellectually, I haven't even the energy to scream.
You’re right. There’s lots of grandiosity (lack of modesty) and lots of posturing. There’s proclamation of “lies,” “truth,” name-calling, dubious conclusions, and Manichean tribal thinking. Then when folks are asked, as Socrates asked, what they mean by their terms or how they arrived at their conclusions, it’s cliches, bombast, innuendo, or more name-calling.
It's really quiet amazing. You can be absolutely, completely, 100% in agreement with people, but when you ask them to explain "how" the way they see the world actually works - not just the associated value judgement, it's like beating your head against a brick wall.
Ask anyone why the economy seems to have gotten worse - Why? How? And the discourse begins and ends with "greedy bad people," without the slightest curiosity as to by what means the change has been affected. You ask about technology - it's the same thing. It's like people don't even want to know what the problems they're complaining about are.
People are looking for authenticity in their news coverage. The legacy media will attempt the copy the new media but most will not succeed to the same level because it will not come off as authentic.
Exactly. Once you see it, you can't not see it. Fake news is fake news. So no matter how they try to rebrand themselves, it will be futile. All trust is lost. The people will go elsewhere. With independant journalism, substack, and more, we can.
Most mainstream podcasts are doomed to fail, and that's because they announce ideas like, "We need the leftist version of Joe Rogan." That already alienates a lot of people because Joe Rogan is in no way a right-wing podcast. He's just a guy talking to people. I agree or disagree with him on various topics, but that doesn't change the fact that I enjoy the honest, loose-cannon conversations he has with his guests.
The Times will never have a chance. They're all doomed—even if they smoked crack during the interview, nobody would care. They've gone too far in disappointing their readers; the spell is broken. Nobody looks at the NYTimes and sees it as important anymore.
The Rolling Stone could create as many podcasts as they want, but nobody would care—they're not the Rolling Stone of 20 years ago. Why? Because they’ve also gone too far in disappointing their lifelong, loyal readers.
There are millions of podcasts already, but slightly fewer than a handful have Rogan's numbers. Nobody is waiting for the mainstream to create a successful podcast. The trust is gone—forever.
I think they only have a chance to regain trust if they come up with something that doesn’t exist at the moment. Forget the podcast—that train has long since passed for them.
Yes, doomed — and no mention in article about them changing their political bias, because no one would believe them anyway. Did the Founding Fathers ever envision a “mainstream” media? No indeed, it was like guerilla warfare in the tiny (often one-man) presses of colonial America.
Additionally, if you look at the comments on the Yarvin interview, the biggest complaint is that it's edited. Legacy media can't ever walk the polish back, and will not regain trust until they do.
1. The legacy corporate media is being reactive because they blatantly lied, distorted and hid facts, and have shown their bias.
2. The infotainment model backfired and the audience saw through that. While in this reactive post-election / mea culpa state, mistakes and disingenuous copy/paste will happen.
3. The talented and ethical journalists have left the corporate media and have consolidated their audiences and subsidy models on substack, YT and others. Their incentive to move back to the belly of the beast is very low.
4. The public has gotten used to more independent channels, maybe also consolidating their opinion bubbles. Who wants to get back to the boomer corporate media?
sorry, but if you don't know what i'm talking about, then my comment is lost on you. The corp media model is advertising based... consider their incentive for a moment. It's like trying to enjoy jazz from the easy listening radio.
Mainstream ( corporate) news has served as official government propaganda for so many years now, people are finally waking up and the genocide in Gaza just put things over the edge.
When people can see babies blown to bits on their X feed every day and then turn on CNN and hear that the Israelis are doing nothing wrong that wakes people up.
Also when is the last time you saw someone on the MSM (host or interviewee) that wasn't very wealthy.
Thanks for mentioning the wealth/class issue. That feels particularly true with media based in the Beltway, NYC, LA, and most TV news. They don't seem to recognize their own bubble.
I think this disconnect shows up in the choices they make about WHAT to cover and -- importantly -- what it doesn't cross their minds to regularly cover at all (e.g., consumer issues, corruption, corporate manipulation for profit, infrastructure collapse, middle class, labor, health insurance until Luigi forced them to, etc). And when they do cover those topics, they generally follow an MBA framing, centering the needs of corporations.
Sometimes you just want the news of the day, the unadulterated, accurate, non-sensationalized reporting without having to sit through the chit-chat doused with personality. The new media is great, but I would kill for good old fashioned 1 hour news broadcasts of content by actual journalists.
The problem is that many of the MSM opinions are still tired and regurgitated and increasingly being rejected, as the election results demonstrated. Is Jennifer Rubin going to be saying anything interesting at "The Contrarian" that she wasn't saying at WaPo? (Kudos to her for the most ironically hilarious Substack name ever.) Simply moving the same propoganda onto an online format will have some success, as there's a market for that with Boomers and mentally ill single ladies, but there's only so far you can go before your demographic runs dry. Interesting times. We shall see.
The Yarvin interview suffered from David Marchese's constant need to prove his bona-fides to his audience rather than just asking questions and letting Yarvin dig his own grave (or not, as the case might be). Marchese seemed embarrassed even to be talking to him, and it showed big time. This is a good start, but the old guard needs to get better fast. Better at accepting the valid critiques against them and better at being sufficiently informed about history and other areas where their interlocutors currently surpass them to be able to reveal the limitations of their views.
About 35 years ago, I met the mother of a work colleague. She had recently retired after 30+ years with the Cleveland Plain Dealer and other papers. During a fantastic unexpected conversation on media, she noted two red flags for when media wasn't shooting straight with their readers. Trends she saw then as concerning and increasing.
First, was the overuse of anonymous sources. Anonymous sources were necessary in limited circumstances that were reasonably obvious she said - national security stories, corporate whistleblowers, those kinds of stories. Situations where people are at some clear personal risk. Beyond those limited use cases, any reporter knows she said that a source requesting anonymity is indicative of a risk that the person is potentially being untruthful or trying to steer opinion while hiding in the shadows and not revealing themselves - or their motives. It’s a red flag to a good journalist.
She said those many years ago, when you hear something like "a source high up in the Administration who requested anonymity tells NBC News tonight that..." you should be wary of what follows. Today, we are awash in amorphous anonymous sources with clearer agendas.
The second red flag she referred to as "substantiation by attribution." Good journalism she said requires outlets to dig and verify claims made by another outlet before being run. Often, she would call up the other reporter and asks questions to get a feel for how solid the story was...or wasn't before deciding on whether or not to run it. She decried the rise in substantiation by attribution where a network will do no verification but say, "The New York Times is reporting tonight that..." and try to extricate themselves directly should the the claim later prove to be inaccurate.
Consider how commonplace these two specious aspects of reporting are today. Consider how in former times, editors mattered a whole lot as a gatekeeper to ensure information was substantiated and more balanced and truthful before being green lighted. In 1981, criticism of Ben Bradlee for allowing Janet Cook’s false story in the WAPO, “Jimmy’s World,” to be published was public and intense and led to multiple public mea culpas by Bradlee. That sort of accountability just doesn’t exist any longer in the media. Today, the editors are gone and maybe you get a retraction.
Old media isn’t failing today because of style, or the length of the content or people standing instead of sitting down. The Washington Post had been failing for years when Jennifer Rubin was walking through its doors every day. It's failing because over the many years - particularly after the accelerant that was the first Trump Administration - it lost its mission and true north that was journalist integrity. Not surprisingly, the public has lost confidence and faith in old media as credible truth tellers. They no longer see the old media as journalists but as propagandists unconvincingly posing as journalists.
New media in its many forms reflects the free flow of pent-up demand to new avenues that will give people what they want whether it be Joe Rogan or Jennifer Rubin. Janey B. and other commenters below are on to something...
new media is built around individuals, while old media revolves around publications or channels. people don't just tune into a podcast or channel—they follow specific personalities like Joe Rogan for his style.
old media can hire these talents, but then must take a back seat to the individual's personal brand. I don't need NYT to learn what Andreessen thinks—he's already sharing his views everywhere. I want someone that I already have a connection with doing an interview, it’s like bringing someone new to the clubhouse. The old media brands need to become a lot more personally connected if they want to be relevant. Maybe the Walter Cronkite analogy is more spot on than we realize.
Exactly. My point being old media (eg media brands like cnn) can’t compete just by offering interviews with interesting people or utilizing the podcast format. They need to establish a connection with the younger audience that mimics how the majority of people engage.
Many old media brands have podcasts but the host can change or the tone is still very institutional. My comment was to agree with Ted and make a very specific point on branding that I’m not sure old media is ready to make. Music is a decent example: labels used to be front and centre (eg people bought Blue Note releases because it was blue note) but my guess is that few listeners know what labels are distributing their favs right now. Labels are basically a financing tool outside specific niches (I see you Southern Lord!)
Note, Rogan gets huge numbers on YouTube. His Trump interview set the platform ablaze in record time.
Indeed so. And one can be like my husband who still only goes online at all from his desk. That tends to limit one. We even forget how good it is to have a “real time” audio conversation on the phone with a distant friend or relative. It almost seems as good as being there. Imagine that.
I don't think the style of news delivery is as important as the content. MSM has diluted there content with things like false-equivalency to the point little trust in there reporting remains. I can spend 30 minutes reading Substack reporting, which is essentially the same content as the MSM, and feel more satisfied merely because I can avoid the misleading headlines and buried ledes.
These are such good points. Lack of trust is a big reason people of all political stripes are moving away from traditional media. As you note, MSM news has increasingly become diluted -- vacuous -- in an attempt to sound neutral. Often the content sounds more like stenography than reporting. Who wants that?
And YES to the problem with misleading headlines, which leave us increasingly pissed off (and distrusting) as we read the article that isn't what we thought it was. And important takeaways are buried -- usually under piles of outrage-bait.
I think Ted is right in saying MSM should also embrace newer styles, platforms etc. But possibly the biggest roadblocks aren't old vs new. Content doesn't equal form. It's that if people distrust the content -- and associate that distrust with traditional media -- then they'll look to other options. That's where we are now.
We haven't even mentioned that thousands of Post readers unsubscribed last fall due to Bezos over-reach and the resulting distrust. That had nothing to do with old vs. new.
Looking ahead, I think most people won't be able to find all the good Substacks and alternative channels. How can we track all that, let alone afford to pay for more and more and more individual subscriptions? There's still a need for one-stop-shops like the Times or Post, but they're dropping the ball.
This piece was good food for thought but there's so much more to it.
I'm curious who will report the news and do investigative reporting, when all people seem to want is opinion shows that reflect their own perspective. And of course, much of the "new media" (and the "old media" too) has no allegiance to the truth. It's all about what inspires outrage and views, so conspiracy theories and outright lies are the currency of the day.
Catherine herridge is doing investigative reporting right the hell right now. She posts it on Twitter. Currently, she's doing a series on Guantanamo Bay.
Furthermore, Jillian Michaels on Twitter just broke the story about how the 17000 signatures of doctors against RFK Juniors nomination is phony.
Yeah, I look at the New York Times pretty much everyday. I'm not a subscriber, if I find a story I'm interested. Interested. I just copy the web page address into archive.ph and it blows right through their paywalls. It doesn't happen much cuz of the avec cassie journalism, the New York Times adheres to.
In a nutshell, I look at Twitter every morning to get my daily headlines.
As far as I'm concerned, as someone who is 66 years old and used to pride themselves on being a subscriber to the New York Times and I mean every single fucking, one of the current mainstream media news outlets are meaningless.
They they destroyed their brand. And as far as I can tell, the younger generation don't even look at anymore.
I believe this to such a degree that I doubt very much that the New York Times actually has 12 million readers. As they claim they do.
And the current media landscape once you break your readers. Respect, you never get it back. I think they're all going to go on under with the New York Times being the last of Survivor.
Sorry for the typos but I'm dictating and I'm too lazy to edit. I think you got my point anyway.
I have also had doubts over the NYT claim to have 12 million readers. Younger people are getting their news from X, TikTok or YouTube. I have mostly stopped looking at the corporate legacy press as well.
I dunno, legacy media did much the same, just a different set of lies and better credentials.
No, literally who will go overseas to report on a war or natural disaster? New media usually just feeds off of the information provided by CNN, ABC, NTY, WSJ, etc.
Does "hanging out at the Interconti" count?
Meanwhile, Vanessa Bealey, Jonathan Cook, Chris Hedges and many others have plenty of eyewitness in-country experience and are ignored by the MSM.
We unherd seems to be the best of both worlds, I can easily imagine some proper investigative stuff from them.
Try Tangle - they do a great job of unbiased reporting
On the one paw, if the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at co-opting dissenters.
On the other paw, I am not sure that a PMC establishment outfit like the NYT can successfully cop the style and vibe of a Rogan, or that the WaPo could do a Substack.
It's like asking a suburban high school principal to front an industrial metal band. Even if he really makes an effort to "hang" with his "fellow dude students", his rage is not convincing, even if he is genuinely outraged that his 401(k) is taking such a beating this quarter. Or that time grandma drank too many blueberry daiquiris and grabbed the waiter's ass, it wasn't transgressive or sexy at all but just sad and creepy.
Yes, this. The world isn’t full of Joe Rogan equivalents. There’s Joe Rogan, and really no second place.
It reminds me of when Louis CK’s show became a huge hit. standup comedians started writing shows “like” Louie. I get the impulse, but sometimes it doesn’t work like that. If you want a “show like Joe Rogan’s” you have to hire Joe Rogan.
Well, some DNC types were moaning about how Team D needs a Joe Rogan.
They had a Joe Rogan. His name was "Joe Rogan". They chased him off.
Absolutely
Indeed. Many in the legacy media will try but likely none will succeed. Because it will come off as inorganic and too corporate. It is not authentic and people can tell the difference.
When the old media starts fighting the establishment instead of fighting heretics, wake me up. Changing location is irrelevant. Most big substackers are old media saying the same old NYTimes things in a new place.
They've been serving the establishment for 200 years, and I doubt that they can ever be objective..
Why do I feel like I've been teleported into a pre-socratic hellscape of rhetoric and sophistry? Why does everyone crave a parasocial social media actor to pretend to be their friend and to tell them what they want to hear? Why is being seen as right, or the winner of the argument the only thing that matters to people now adays? Why is there no true pathway to just listening, learning, knowledge, and truth? Conspiracy theories and political bombast are in, science, journalism, and the law are out.
Intellectually, I haven't even the energy to scream.
You’re right. There’s lots of grandiosity (lack of modesty) and lots of posturing. There’s proclamation of “lies,” “truth,” name-calling, dubious conclusions, and Manichean tribal thinking. Then when folks are asked, as Socrates asked, what they mean by their terms or how they arrived at their conclusions, it’s cliches, bombast, innuendo, or more name-calling.
It's really quiet amazing. You can be absolutely, completely, 100% in agreement with people, but when you ask them to explain "how" the way they see the world actually works - not just the associated value judgement, it's like beating your head against a brick wall.
Ask anyone why the economy seems to have gotten worse - Why? How? And the discourse begins and ends with "greedy bad people," without the slightest curiosity as to by what means the change has been affected. You ask about technology - it's the same thing. It's like people don't even want to know what the problems they're complaining about are.
People are looking for authenticity in their news coverage. The legacy media will attempt the copy the new media but most will not succeed to the same level because it will not come off as authentic.
Exactly. Once you see it, you can't not see it. Fake news is fake news. So no matter how they try to rebrand themselves, it will be futile. All trust is lost. The people will go elsewhere. With independant journalism, substack, and more, we can.
Most mainstream podcasts are doomed to fail, and that's because they announce ideas like, "We need the leftist version of Joe Rogan." That already alienates a lot of people because Joe Rogan is in no way a right-wing podcast. He's just a guy talking to people. I agree or disagree with him on various topics, but that doesn't change the fact that I enjoy the honest, loose-cannon conversations he has with his guests.
The Times will never have a chance. They're all doomed—even if they smoked crack during the interview, nobody would care. They've gone too far in disappointing their readers; the spell is broken. Nobody looks at the NYTimes and sees it as important anymore.
The Rolling Stone could create as many podcasts as they want, but nobody would care—they're not the Rolling Stone of 20 years ago. Why? Because they’ve also gone too far in disappointing their lifelong, loyal readers.
There are millions of podcasts already, but slightly fewer than a handful have Rogan's numbers. Nobody is waiting for the mainstream to create a successful podcast. The trust is gone—forever.
I think they only have a chance to regain trust if they come up with something that doesn’t exist at the moment. Forget the podcast—that train has long since passed for them.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, Rogan was regularly lambasted from being a "Bernie Bro".
Yes, doomed — and no mention in article about them changing their political bias, because no one would believe them anyway. Did the Founding Fathers ever envision a “mainstream” media? No indeed, it was like guerilla warfare in the tiny (often one-man) presses of colonial America.
Additionally, if you look at the comments on the Yarvin interview, the biggest complaint is that it's edited. Legacy media can't ever walk the polish back, and will not regain trust until they do.
Business is booming for TDS slop merchants. They are whipping up hysteria with propaganda that would make their MSM former employers blush. Their audience and engagement numbers are quite suspicious, how astroturfed are they? https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/trump-derangement-substack-profit-analysis
The slop business is booming everywhere.
Respectfully disagree there Ted.
1. The legacy corporate media is being reactive because they blatantly lied, distorted and hid facts, and have shown their bias.
2. The infotainment model backfired and the audience saw through that. While in this reactive post-election / mea culpa state, mistakes and disingenuous copy/paste will happen.
3. The talented and ethical journalists have left the corporate media and have consolidated their audiences and subsidy models on substack, YT and others. Their incentive to move back to the belly of the beast is very low.
4. The public has gotten used to more independent channels, maybe also consolidating their opinion bubbles. Who wants to get back to the boomer corporate media?
not going to cite any of the alleged lies specifically, apparently...
sorry, but if you don't know what i'm talking about, then my comment is lost on you. The corp media model is advertising based... consider their incentive for a moment. It's like trying to enjoy jazz from the easy listening radio.
Mainstream ( corporate) news has served as official government propaganda for so many years now, people are finally waking up and the genocide in Gaza just put things over the edge.
When people can see babies blown to bits on their X feed every day and then turn on CNN and hear that the Israelis are doing nothing wrong that wakes people up.
Also when is the last time you saw someone on the MSM (host or interviewee) that wasn't very wealthy.
They have no credibility left.
I want to amplify that: they have no credibility left. None!
Absolutely, ‘reporting’ on Gaza was a turning point for many of us: blatantly denying the truth that we could before our eyes.
We could SEE, sorry.
Thanks for mentioning the wealth/class issue. That feels particularly true with media based in the Beltway, NYC, LA, and most TV news. They don't seem to recognize their own bubble.
I think this disconnect shows up in the choices they make about WHAT to cover and -- importantly -- what it doesn't cross their minds to regularly cover at all (e.g., consumer issues, corruption, corporate manipulation for profit, infrastructure collapse, middle class, labor, health insurance until Luigi forced them to, etc). And when they do cover those topics, they generally follow an MBA framing, centering the needs of corporations.
Sometimes you just want the news of the day, the unadulterated, accurate, non-sensationalized reporting without having to sit through the chit-chat doused with personality. The new media is great, but I would kill for good old fashioned 1 hour news broadcasts of content by actual journalists.
The problem is that many of the MSM opinions are still tired and regurgitated and increasingly being rejected, as the election results demonstrated. Is Jennifer Rubin going to be saying anything interesting at "The Contrarian" that she wasn't saying at WaPo? (Kudos to her for the most ironically hilarious Substack name ever.) Simply moving the same propoganda onto an online format will have some success, as there's a market for that with Boomers and mentally ill single ladies, but there's only so far you can go before your demographic runs dry. Interesting times. We shall see.
The Yarvin interview suffered from David Marchese's constant need to prove his bona-fides to his audience rather than just asking questions and letting Yarvin dig his own grave (or not, as the case might be). Marchese seemed embarrassed even to be talking to him, and it showed big time. This is a good start, but the old guard needs to get better fast. Better at accepting the valid critiques against them and better at being sufficiently informed about history and other areas where their interlocutors currently surpass them to be able to reveal the limitations of their views.
...they have enough money to stay relevant for now...but not enough relevance to stay relevant forever...the new media is forming...hopefully here...
About 35 years ago, I met the mother of a work colleague. She had recently retired after 30+ years with the Cleveland Plain Dealer and other papers. During a fantastic unexpected conversation on media, she noted two red flags for when media wasn't shooting straight with their readers. Trends she saw then as concerning and increasing.
First, was the overuse of anonymous sources. Anonymous sources were necessary in limited circumstances that were reasonably obvious she said - national security stories, corporate whistleblowers, those kinds of stories. Situations where people are at some clear personal risk. Beyond those limited use cases, any reporter knows she said that a source requesting anonymity is indicative of a risk that the person is potentially being untruthful or trying to steer opinion while hiding in the shadows and not revealing themselves - or their motives. It’s a red flag to a good journalist.
She said those many years ago, when you hear something like "a source high up in the Administration who requested anonymity tells NBC News tonight that..." you should be wary of what follows. Today, we are awash in amorphous anonymous sources with clearer agendas.
The second red flag she referred to as "substantiation by attribution." Good journalism she said requires outlets to dig and verify claims made by another outlet before being run. Often, she would call up the other reporter and asks questions to get a feel for how solid the story was...or wasn't before deciding on whether or not to run it. She decried the rise in substantiation by attribution where a network will do no verification but say, "The New York Times is reporting tonight that..." and try to extricate themselves directly should the the claim later prove to be inaccurate.
Consider how commonplace these two specious aspects of reporting are today. Consider how in former times, editors mattered a whole lot as a gatekeeper to ensure information was substantiated and more balanced and truthful before being green lighted. In 1981, criticism of Ben Bradlee for allowing Janet Cook’s false story in the WAPO, “Jimmy’s World,” to be published was public and intense and led to multiple public mea culpas by Bradlee. That sort of accountability just doesn’t exist any longer in the media. Today, the editors are gone and maybe you get a retraction.
Old media isn’t failing today because of style, or the length of the content or people standing instead of sitting down. The Washington Post had been failing for years when Jennifer Rubin was walking through its doors every day. It's failing because over the many years - particularly after the accelerant that was the first Trump Administration - it lost its mission and true north that was journalist integrity. Not surprisingly, the public has lost confidence and faith in old media as credible truth tellers. They no longer see the old media as journalists but as propagandists unconvincingly posing as journalists.
New media in its many forms reflects the free flow of pent-up demand to new avenues that will give people what they want whether it be Joe Rogan or Jennifer Rubin. Janey B. and other commenters below are on to something...
Wow I love your points. Just spot on. Thank you!
Wonderful post, thank you!
Many thanks for taking the time and offering your generous comment.
new media is built around individuals, while old media revolves around publications or channels. people don't just tune into a podcast or channel—they follow specific personalities like Joe Rogan for his style.
old media can hire these talents, but then must take a back seat to the individual's personal brand. I don't need NYT to learn what Andreessen thinks—he's already sharing his views everywhere. I want someone that I already have a connection with doing an interview, it’s like bringing someone new to the clubhouse. The old media brands need to become a lot more personally connected if they want to be relevant. Maybe the Walter Cronkite analogy is more spot on than we realize.
Exactly. My point being old media (eg media brands like cnn) can’t compete just by offering interviews with interesting people or utilizing the podcast format. They need to establish a connection with the younger audience that mimics how the majority of people engage.
Many old media brands have podcasts but the host can change or the tone is still very institutional. My comment was to agree with Ted and make a very specific point on branding that I’m not sure old media is ready to make. Music is a decent example: labels used to be front and centre (eg people bought Blue Note releases because it was blue note) but my guess is that few listeners know what labels are distributing their favs right now. Labels are basically a financing tool outside specific niches (I see you Southern Lord!)
Note, Rogan gets huge numbers on YouTube. His Trump interview set the platform ablaze in record time.
Indeed so. And one can be like my husband who still only goes online at all from his desk. That tends to limit one. We even forget how good it is to have a “real time” audio conversation on the phone with a distant friend or relative. It almost seems as good as being there. Imagine that.
I don't think the style of news delivery is as important as the content. MSM has diluted there content with things like false-equivalency to the point little trust in there reporting remains. I can spend 30 minutes reading Substack reporting, which is essentially the same content as the MSM, and feel more satisfied merely because I can avoid the misleading headlines and buried ledes.
These are such good points. Lack of trust is a big reason people of all political stripes are moving away from traditional media. As you note, MSM news has increasingly become diluted -- vacuous -- in an attempt to sound neutral. Often the content sounds more like stenography than reporting. Who wants that?
And YES to the problem with misleading headlines, which leave us increasingly pissed off (and distrusting) as we read the article that isn't what we thought it was. And important takeaways are buried -- usually under piles of outrage-bait.
I think Ted is right in saying MSM should also embrace newer styles, platforms etc. But possibly the biggest roadblocks aren't old vs new. Content doesn't equal form. It's that if people distrust the content -- and associate that distrust with traditional media -- then they'll look to other options. That's where we are now.
We haven't even mentioned that thousands of Post readers unsubscribed last fall due to Bezos over-reach and the resulting distrust. That had nothing to do with old vs. new.
Looking ahead, I think most people won't be able to find all the good Substacks and alternative channels. How can we track all that, let alone afford to pay for more and more and more individual subscriptions? There's still a need for one-stop-shops like the Times or Post, but they're dropping the ball.
This piece was good food for thought but there's so much more to it.