Episode Transcript
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0:02
All Zone Media.
0:05
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm
0:07
your host ed Zeitron.
0:20
Now.
0:20
Look, I'm just a simple country podcaster,
0:23
but at my heart, I'm a writer. I've
0:26
been writing since I was sixteen. I wrote about video
0:28
games that are now defunct magazine called CVG
0:30
and then another called PC Zone. And
0:33
there's been one theme, one thing that has hung
0:35
around my entire media career, and
0:37
that thing is that the people running the media
0:40
do not read or write. And
0:42
I must sound a little dramatic, but really
0:44
I'm not kidding. The majority of the media executives
0:47
I've worked for and the ones I've met, just
0:49
did not understand or create any
0:52
media of any kind. There
0:54
were publishers who ran games publications who
0:56
didn't play games, and didn't write, and hadn't
0:58
written, didn't contribute any to the magazines,
1:01
and they routinely made decisions that just
1:03
made the publications worse. There
1:06
were executive editors at newspapers I've read
1:08
and worked for that hadn't written a word
1:11
in decades, and they made calls about the tone
1:13
and direction of writers that they didn't even
1:15
bother to read, and they were always
1:17
looking for ways to increase readership. Without actually
1:20
focusing on what made readers read things.
1:24
When I went into PR in two thousand and eight, which
1:26
by the way, I did to move to America, I
1:28
didn't really understand the job. Pretty good at
1:30
it now, though, I was still able
1:32
to keep a lot of my media connections, both at
1:34
home and the ones i'd met on various press trips
1:36
to America. And I saw
1:38
this sudden and dramatic change that was
1:41
happening to the industry, and it was
1:43
all thanks to the advent of mass social media
1:45
and digital publishing and of course digital
1:47
advertising. And then over
1:49
the years, I saw the same cycles repeat
1:51
themselves again and again and again. These
1:54
media executives, they'd see a trend, get
1:56
very horny for it, they jump on it, and
1:59
nothing would happen, and so they'd move on to the next one,
2:01
and they'd move on to a next one, and they'd keep
2:03
going, and they'd keep dragging media
2:06
entities into these vast, unprofitable,
2:09
unsustainable quagmires, all
2:11
in pursuit of you guessed it, growth.
2:14
They were always chasing growth.
2:17
But what they were actually chasing was
2:19
the magic of the startup valuation. Startups
2:23
were suddenly being valued at fifty million, one
2:25
hundred million, a billion dollars, and they
2:27
wanted a little bit of that magic. They wanted
2:30
to get even richer than they already were.
2:33
Practically speaking, this meant that outlets were
2:35
forced by the idiotic executives to chase
2:37
the dragon of social media and search traffic,
2:40
and they'd optimize their content not for
2:42
a person or a living being of any kind,
2:44
but to please algorithms that they didn't control,
2:47
run by companies like Meta and Google who didn't
2:49
give a shit about them. As
2:51
a result, it's been a fairly apocalyptic
2:54
decade in journalism. Multiple outlets
2:56
have grown into these massive, unwieldy, unprofitable
2:58
businesses and then relapsed under the
3:00
weight of executive malpractice.
3:03
In the last three years, over thirty
3:05
thousand people have lost their jobs in
3:07
the media industry or while executives
3:09
received these massive paydays
3:11
for what appears to be accelerating the Titanic
3:14
into the Iceberg. As
3:16
private equity and venture capital money is flown
3:18
into the media industry, so of the
3:20
rotten demands for eternal growth. Brands
3:23
that you read as a kid, magazines
3:25
and newspapers that inspired you, they've become
3:27
shells of the former selves. Or
3:29
because they've chased these growth metrics, which naturally
3:31
ostracize and then eventually lay off
3:34
the journalists that made these outlets
3:36
famous, until, of course, the outlet has to shut
3:38
down due to unforeseen market conditions,
3:41
which is a euphemism for we are
3:43
too stupid to run a business. Sadly,
3:46
at this point, you'll probably realize
3:48
that things are not going well in the media industry,
3:51
and indeed, twenty twenty four has been one of the
3:53
darkest years in this industry I've ever
3:55
seen. The
3:58
first high profile media cas twenty twenty
4:00
four were Sports Illustrated, formerly one
4:02
of the most important brands in sports journalism,
4:05
and it was slowly choked to death after being
4:07
sold twice, first to Meredith, which
4:09
acquired it as part of its one point eighty five billion
4:12
dollar acquisition of Time magazine in twenty
4:14
seventeen, and then it was sold again when
4:16
the intellectual property was licensed to Authentic
4:18
Brands Group, which is a holding company, which
4:20
bought it for one hundred and ten million
4:23
dollars. Now you did
4:25
hear me, Ray, They sold the intellectual property,
4:27
the name Sports Illustrated in the logo, and
4:30
their goal was the insane prospect
4:32
of branding things like medical clinics
4:34
and gambling businesses. This
4:37
is actually kind of weird precursor to the amount
4:39
of sports betting you'll see in modern sports
4:41
today now. Meredith Corporation
4:43
would continue to publish Sports Illustrated
4:46
until about twenty nineteen, when Authentic
4:48
Brands Group would license the editorial operations
4:51
to a company called The Maven as
4:53
part of a ten year licensing deal, and
4:55
then laid off forty people and shifted
4:58
the editorial strategy away from the deep
5:00
thoughtful analysis that people actually gave
5:02
a shit about, towards focusing
5:05
on breaking news, the things that people could
5:07
literally get anywhere. And
5:09
while they were doing this, they flooded Sports Illustrated's
5:12
website with this kind of noxious, empty,
5:14
generic contributed content, all
5:16
from affiliate sites run by these poorly
5:18
vetted contributing bloggers. Now
5:21
no offense to the world of contributing
5:23
bloggers. There are some good ones out there, but in
5:25
this case this was chop shop
5:28
work. This was done specifically to
5:30
fill the site, it was not built
5:32
to inform people. Thanks
5:35
to this, Sports Illustrated had spend a few
5:37
more years deteriorating until around December
5:39
twenty twenty three, when they published
5:41
a piece by a man called Drew Autis, except
5:44
Drew didn't exist. He was one
5:47
of multiple non existent pseudonyms
5:49
given to content generated by AI.
5:52
While Sports Illustrated initially denied
5:54
the claims of using AI, they'd fire their
5:56
CEO, Ross Levinson a few weeks later.
5:58
Now Levinson's of real piece of shit. He's
6:01
a scumbag. He had multiple
6:03
accusations of sexual harassment against him
6:05
when he was at the La Times, their CEO,
6:07
and while he was there he quite literally tried
6:09
to do exactly the same thing. He
6:12
tried to make the La Times take external
6:14
contributors. Thankfully, strong unions
6:17
and the eventual acquisition of The Times
6:20
managed to get rid of him. He
6:22
still managed to get paid millions. In
6:25
twenty twenty four, the maven now
6:27
called the Arena Group would lay off
6:29
most of Sports Illustrated staff after failing
6:32
to pay the licensing fee to Authentic
6:34
Brands Group, which is insane.
6:36
By the way, you can't publish on the website
6:38
because you didn't pay the dairy queen franchise
6:41
thing. You have to to be called Sports Illustrated
6:44
anyway. The Arena Group
6:46
claims they'll still keep publishing Sports
6:48
illustrated, but it's not really clear what that's
6:50
actually going to look like considering how
6:53
unprofitable the Arena group is. They
6:55
had a net loss of fifty million dollars in
6:57
the first three quarters at twenty twenty three, and
6:59
Sports ill Frustrated, well, they
7:01
fired everyone. What's
7:04
really pissing me off though, and this is this
7:06
whole subject fills me through my veins
7:08
for unearthly poison. Sports
7:11
Illustrated used to be profitable. It
7:13
was profitable for decades, and
7:15
the reason it got profitable in the fifties was because
7:17
the managing editor was a sports writer.
7:21
It was also profitable when it was acquired in twenty
7:23
nineteen, and it stayed that way through twenty
7:25
twenty, a year when pretty much every
7:27
business suffered. Its value.
7:31
Just to be clear, over one hundred million dollars didn't
7:33
come from the fact that a private equity
7:35
group sold it to another private equity group,
7:38
though I realized the agree in a group probably
7:40
wouldn't like being called that. Its
7:43
actual value came from writing important,
7:46
meaningful sports writing from writers
7:48
like George Plimpton, Curry Kirkpatrick,
7:50
and Emma Bachelari. And
7:53
it died. It died at the hands
7:55
of people that don't read, don't write,
7:57
and don't understand business journalism
8:01
is being killed by non journalists that
8:03
are desperate to turn it into another shitty
8:05
startup ecosystem.
8:15
Less than a month after Sports Illustrated
8:17
started to collapse, there was a new media
8:20
entity that was actually already working on
8:22
dying. The Messenger was a news
8:24
outlet that raised fifty million dollars in VC
8:26
money and hired about three hundred people, many
8:29
of them were reporters. In
8:31
many respects, it was not really a news
8:33
outlet, though it was focused
8:35
on churn. It thought that
8:37
volume, velocity and just lots of stuff
8:40
was the way that you make a big media out
8:42
there, rather of course, than building a rapport
8:44
with readers and adding their trust and making them
8:46
like the writing, you know, writing
8:48
good stuff for people like no, no, no, no. You
8:51
just need lots of things. And
8:53
despite this hefty war chest, it shut
8:56
down on February first, twenty twenty four.
8:59
And this is the discussing part. Workers
9:01
were left unemployed and uninsured
9:03
and they didn't even get severance. And
9:06
it's all because, guess what, the
9:09
executives running it didn't know what they
9:11
were doing. The
9:13
Messenger was doomed from the beginning. The
9:15
people behind it were just complete idiots.
9:18
Their CEO, Jimmy Finkelstein, made
9:20
nine hundred thousand dollars a year and they spent
9:23
eight million dollars on office space in New
9:25
York, DC and Los Angeles, which
9:28
is just crazy. This is the year twenty
9:30
twenty four. Why do you have office
9:32
space for a thing you can do at any computer
9:34
anyway? Anyway, sorry, let me calm down.
9:37
But what really drove it into the ground was that
9:39
they had this very aggressive and extremely stupid
9:42
editorial strategy, and it was all driven
9:44
by people who didn't know what they
9:46
were doing. All they thought was that traffic
9:49
was good. This goddamn thing didn't
9:51
have a site map. The Messenger,
9:53
a modern media property, was run by
9:55
people who barely knew how to use a computer.
9:58
Well, let me give you some insight in to some of the
10:00
rot inside this company. So after the
10:02
company collapsed, Eli Walsh, who love
10:05
them or hate him, He was a writer at The Messenger,
10:07
and he built his career in California
10:10
journalism, primarily local stuff.
10:12
He described this constant pressure to
10:14
produce more content with a lot of it
10:17
just actively ripped off from publications
10:19
like The Daily Mail and The New York Post, two
10:22
routlets I would not describe as esteemed.
10:25
After eight months of working at The Messenger, Eli
10:28
Walsh claimed that he had no usable
10:30
clips for his portfolio as a result
10:32
of how crap the editorial strategy was.
10:35
Now listeners, if you're wondering why that's
10:38
so bad, even at the worst place
10:40
I've worked, even the crappiest
10:42
freelance out there, I still get a clip I can
10:44
use, because usually good
10:47
writing is still published, even
10:49
if it's published and edited in a way that you
10:51
don't like. But what The Messenger
10:53
would publish was this very bland,
10:57
mass appeal, mass produced
10:59
journalist didn't really say much. And
11:02
it's funny to steal from the Daily Mail considering
11:04
how much of their stuff is viral
11:06
content stuff or very shittly
11:08
written headlines. It's actually really
11:11
weird that The Messenger didn't die quicker, and
11:14
honestly, the Messenger's chop
11:17
shop mentality was completely nonsensical.
11:19
But seriously, the demise
11:21
was avoidable had the people
11:24
in charge actually known what they were doing, or
11:26
say, I don't know talked to a journalist
11:28
about how journalism works. When developing
11:30
the bloody business model. Fifty
11:33
million dollars is actually quite a lot for a
11:35
media organization. You could have done
11:37
it a really great job.
11:40
You can run an incredible newsroom
11:43
with ten, fifteen, twenty people fifty
11:45
million dollars. You'll be able to sustain
11:47
that for a long long time. But
11:50
they didn't understand that. And
11:53
the problem is that none of these media
11:55
executives really understand how great
11:57
journalism or great anything in media
12:00
is built. They don't understand
12:02
that trust, reputation, and
12:04
loyalty are actually very hard to quantify.
12:07
What is easy to quantify, though, is
12:09
revenue growth and page views. You
12:12
can look at page views if you're a colossal
12:14
Dingus and say, wow, number
12:16
go up. Oh, money come
12:18
in now? Is
12:20
it profitable? Is it actually stuff
12:22
that people like? Are people returning
12:25
after they click it? Or did you just convince
12:27
them to do so through Google? Who
12:30
knows the messenger is dead now
12:32
they deleted the whole website. But
12:35
putting that aside. Because
12:37
these people have no active participation
12:40
in the process of making journalism
12:42
or creating media, they don't
12:44
understand how media outlets are built.
12:46
They may have been participants, they may
12:48
have been the money, but they
12:50
were not the writers, the speakers, the
12:52
photographers, the illustrators. They
12:55
had no part of them. But just
12:57
to be clear, the people involved have names.
13:00
The Messenger was founded and destroyed by a man
13:02
called Jimmy Finkelstein. He's a media
13:04
tycoon with close ties to Rudy Giuliani.
13:07
And you know what he did at the Hill, which
13:09
he sold for one hundred and thirty million dollars.
13:11
By the way, he used to lean
13:14
over the shoulder of editors and tell
13:16
them not to be so critical of Donald Trump.
13:19
Fucking gross. It's disgusting that these people
13:21
are allowed to get so rich Finkelstein.
13:24
And by the way, former staff, when talking to
13:27
The Daily Beast, referred to this guy as a sociopath.
13:29
That was deliberately cruel. He paid
13:31
himself nine hundred thousand dollars
13:33
a year while running
13:36
a newsroom like a sweatshop and
13:38
not giving people severance. Fuck
13:42
you, Jimmy, You're a wrinkly scumbag. I
13:44
can't legally wish anything upon you, but
13:46
I'll laugh if it happens. Sadly,
13:50
Jimmy Finkelstein isn't the only con
13:52
artist choking the life out of the media industry.
13:55
There are some much worse freaks out there. I
13:58
don't know if you've been looking at and it's quite
14:00
painful to watch, but for years I've been watching Vice
14:03
die. Vice used to be
14:05
one of my favorite publications. Motherboard
14:08
did some of the best tech journalism out there, and actually
14:10
four or four Media is a lot of the former
14:12
motherblog. People go pay them money. But
14:15
on February twenty second, twenty twenty four, Vice
14:18
announced it would no longer publish written
14:20
content to any of its flagship
14:22
publications, which included Vice dot Com,
14:24
their regional sites, or indeed Motherboard.
14:28
Hundreds of people lost their jobs as a result.
14:31
It's a disgraceful end to this
14:33
publication. It was once like
14:35
this indie punk magazine built in Montreal.
14:37
It was something cool, it was something weird. You
14:39
could kind of mock it, you kind of laugh at it. But
14:42
Ice did cool share and
14:44
then over the course of years, it was infiltrated
14:48
and rotted out by private equity
14:50
adjacent freaks that don't write or
14:52
read or create anything, and it
14:55
turned into this giant, unprofitable,
14:57
unsustainable, seven billion dollar behemoth.
15:00
And you'd think that growth for it would be good,
15:02
that more people would be reading Vice's
15:04
journalism. Yeah, that would assume
15:07
that journalism was the product that Vice actually
15:09
wanted to sell. Though people
15:11
do make fun of Vice's kind of foe gonzo
15:14
I took drugs and walked down the street style
15:16
journalism. Actually a lot of their stuff
15:18
was incredible reporting. Simon
15:21
of Strovsky's coverage of the earliest
15:23
days of the Russo Ukrainian War culminated
15:26
in him being arrested and held captive
15:28
by separatists in Dombas. It
15:31
was really important work at a time when
15:33
you really understood what was going on with that conflict.
15:36
Ostrovsky's work ended up getting Vice
15:38
to Emmy nominations as well as a couple of webbe
15:40
awards, and it was seen quite
15:42
rightly by the way as a time when digital
15:45
journalism was finally challenging broadcasts
15:47
kind of monopoly over
15:50
conflict and foreign policy reporting.
15:52
It was a really impressive thing that Vice did, and
15:54
it was at a time when people, I don't know what
15:56
kind of surprised by Vice's ability to do it,
15:58
and they shouldn't have been. They were a home
16:01
to some amazing journalists. I
16:03
said, n uncanny ability to get into
16:05
some of the world's most isolated and frankly dangerous
16:08
places and even make it out alive. Good
16:10
example is they did a story on Siberian lumber
16:13
camps where North Korean workers were being worked
16:15
to death to make money for the country. They
16:17
did another one on the Syrian city of Raka, which
16:20
in twenty fifteen was the capital
16:22
of the Islamic States self proclaimed caliphate.
16:25
Weis did important work every single
16:28
day, and then they did fun stuff, because
16:30
not all journalists needs to be world
16:32
changing. It just needs to be interesting
16:34
and fun and full of love. And
16:37
unlike many so many outlets,
16:40
ICE actually made money and
16:42
it could have been profitable, but it never
16:45
seemed to get there. And
16:47
while there's no single reason why,
16:49
it mostly comes down to pursuing growth
16:52
and executive greed. Weiss
16:55
as it grew into this seven billion dollar
16:57
creature, it took on all of this debt.
17:00
It wanted to be a global media empire and
17:02
expanded in an aggressive, deeply unsustainable
17:04
way, and it made these terrible, awful
17:07
bets branded content, shitty video
17:10
or while doing this ridiculous
17:12
dance of paying their executives
17:14
insane money and laying people off
17:17
at the same time. And
17:19
this was a big problem for this out there executive
17:22
compensation was always high, even
17:24
when the company was not paying its utility
17:26
bills or paying out severance. It
17:29
would take these deals with investors where they
17:31
guaranteed dividends regardless
17:33
of how the company was doing. Just to be clear,
17:35
on a business level, that is insane. You don't
17:38
make a deal you can't reliably pay
17:41
very basic business unless,
17:43
of course, you don't really care about the business
17:45
succeeding or surviving. And
17:48
then they would do these very annoying
17:50
branded content deals. Good example of one
17:52
is they did a twenty fourteen deal with Absolute Vodka,
17:55
which kind of made everyone feel
17:57
a little greasy, and then they did a partnership
17:59
with the South Government. It's not
18:01
particularly punk rock, and it's definitely
18:03
not suggestive of any great editorial
18:06
independence. To be clear, the
18:08
people writing Advice were victims of this. If
18:11
you're looking for somebody to blame, you can start
18:13
with Corey Haike, who is Vice's chief
18:15
operating officer. Before joining
18:18
Vice, she co led Mike a publication
18:20
she drove into the ground, and she did
18:22
so by moving it away from this kind of hip.
18:25
Young really actually beloved
18:27
journalism. People loved Mike, and
18:30
then she took it and said, ah, well,
18:33
Facebook is saying that we're getting
18:35
all of these views and all of this engagement
18:37
on video on Facebook, so let's
18:40
pivot the entire thing to video.
18:42
Now, the pivot to video that Facebook
18:44
pushed is enough for an entire
18:47
episode, But the long story short
18:49
was that Facebook incorrectly
18:51
showed massive growth metrics that did not
18:53
exist to publishers. This led
18:55
publications like Mike and actually Mashable
18:58
to massively move their traditorial strategies
19:01
around to make video content. Now
19:04
you may think, huh, couldn't
19:07
you just avoid this by seeing
19:09
if it made any money? And
19:12
no, she didn't do that. She wrote an
19:15
empty headed Vox article about how the future
19:17
of journalism was visual, and
19:20
then she laid off most of the staff
19:23
and sold the IP to a company called
19:25
bust All that is best known for buying
19:27
IP and running crappy journalism
19:29
on them. There are some good publications
19:32
that run on the bus or network. It certainly
19:34
wasn't doing what Mike was doing at the time. Corey
19:38
Hike is an example of the media world's failure
19:40
to police itself. She is a
19:43
career failure. This is now the second
19:45
publication she's driven into the ground
19:48
because she does not understand what she is
19:50
doing, and that op ed I
19:52
previously mentioned the twenty seventeen Vox
19:54
one she claimed that we were
19:56
in the early stages of a visual revolution
19:59
in journalism. To be clear,
20:01
Corey Hike is not a journalist. She's not an
20:03
editor. She's not a creator. She's not a
20:05
creative. She doesn't write things, she doesn't
20:08
speak things, she doesn't take photos, and she doesn't
20:10
draw things. She is a parasite.
20:13
And these walking stains on the earth. They
20:16
got rich. They got rich
20:18
as hundreds of people lost their jobs.
20:21
Bankruptcy filings showed that Vice executives
20:23
paid themselves eleven million dollars
20:26
between May twenty twenty two and May twenty twenty
20:28
three. Corey Hike paid herself over
20:30
seven hundred and twenty six thousand
20:32
dollars, and former chief people officer
20:35
Daisy Orga Dominguez made over seven
20:37
hundred and forty eight thousand dollars during
20:40
this period. By the way, writer Joseph Cox
20:42
said that he was unable to pay the ten cent
20:44
fee to pull a court record because Vice
20:46
wasn't paying their bills. If
20:49
you want to blame someone for the destruction
20:51
of modern journalism. People like Corey
20:54
Haike and mis Orga Dominguez.
20:57
They're the people to blame. These
20:59
are the people that are being allowed to make the
21:01
cause on these vacuous pools
21:03
of data that don't make sense. And
21:05
they don't make sense because they have no connection to
21:07
the newsroom. They're not writing anything,
21:10
they're not reading anything. They're not part
21:12
of the media other than the fact that
21:14
they are in commanding positions in
21:16
the media. They are landlords
21:18
by another name, and they're
21:20
rich. They're unfathomably rich,
21:23
all because they conned their way into
21:25
different jobs that allow them to fail
21:28
upwards again and again. Worse
21:30
still, they don't have any ideas,
21:33
which is why they so often do stupid
21:36
things. It's why they're doing
21:38
this same ridiculous cycle again
21:40
and again where they take a media out
21:42
there and they try and run it like a tech startup,
21:45
and they don't see the difference between running
21:47
an app that sells a service and a media
21:49
company that makes content that people consume
21:53
or creates a relationship with the audience. Trust,
21:56
authenticity, These are the things at
21:58
the heart of the media, and readers
22:01
are very sensitive to changes. They
22:03
are not stupid, and I think that these executives
22:06
believe they are. They believe that readers
22:08
are little pigs that will come and click anything
22:10
that can be tricked and conned. Executives
22:14
that believe readers are like that deserve to not
22:16
have jobs, by the way, But
22:19
what they don't realize is that media
22:21
outlets are also delicate. If
22:23
you mess with the formula of media outlets,
22:26
you're going to alienate the people who actually read
22:28
them, the people who pay your bills, either
22:31
by subscribing or by proxy by clicking
22:33
and looking at ads. And
22:35
it sucks. It sucks because all of this is
22:37
very obvious. I'm sure many of you listening are
22:39
like, Yeah, that makes sense. Surely
22:41
you would not run an outlet by making
22:44
worse stuff but lots of it. Surely you
22:46
would make a good outlet that makes good
22:48
things. But that's the thing.
22:51
Look, if you're no longer concern with loyalty, and you really
22:53
only care about people who accidentally find
22:55
a page by being tricked by so
22:58
sure they see a headline they like, or perhaps
23:00
they search for something, you don't really
23:02
care about alienating readers. You
23:04
can do whatever you want. You can experiment Willy
23:07
nilly. You can underminde editorial standards,
23:09
you can lay off people, you can promote
23:11
your friends, you can force
23:13
people to do stupid shit that nobody
23:16
likes, because all
23:18
you care about are analytics. All
23:20
you care about is that ephemeral, random,
23:22
spontaneous traffic that you can show
23:25
to your idiot rich friends and say, wow,
23:27
my outlet's popping off. And
23:31
when all you give a shit about is visits
23:33
and impressions, all you're really going to focus
23:35
on is what's going to please the big tech firms
23:37
like Meta, Twitter and Google, and
23:40
these social networks have been very
23:42
clear in how little they care about news unless
23:44
it helps them get traffic. And indeed,
23:47
the early days of these social networks were heavily
23:49
dependent on media outlets creating content
23:51
for them so that people stayed on them,
23:54
and then they choked that traffic the moment they
23:57
didn't need anymore. The network
23:59
effects that these executives are chasing,
24:01
the social virality, the Google
24:04
search positioning, they make the number
24:06
go up. And if that's all that matters, well,
24:09
you don't really care about having a lasting
24:12
web presence. You don't really care
24:14
about a sustainable media outlet. You're
24:17
just an online marketing company that publishes
24:19
words or videos, and
24:22
frankly, I can't think
24:24
of a more damaging part of
24:27
the media than the chase of these metrics,
24:29
and specifically search engine optimization.
24:33
The allure of search traffic, especially with the
24:35
drop of traffic from social media websites,
24:38
has just poisoned so much of the media,
24:41
and now publishers create content. It's
24:43
not really there to serve an audience, per se
24:45
or build a relationship, but to kind of get
24:47
this spurious traffic. The when
24:49
does the super Bowl start? What
24:52
time does this go live? Where
24:54
can I buy something? You've
24:56
probably seen these and wondered why
24:59
so many out let's publish the same thing.
25:02
I'll get to that. So
25:13
if you see all of these websites
25:16
that have like when's the super Bowl start? And
25:18
top ten televisions, all of these things, and
25:20
you see them, you're like, this doesn't make sense. I'm
25:22
used to reading long form things on here. It's
25:25
because those have embedded links, sometimes
25:27
to Amazon or Walmart or Best Buy. Those
25:30
outlets get a slither of money
25:32
every time you click, and they get a little more as you browse
25:34
around the site if you buy something. Now
25:38
there are very trustworthy outlets engaging
25:40
in this, and it's a way to make money for the media
25:42
out there. There are some like the Wirecutter who actually
25:44
do a phenomenal job. They do very
25:47
deep product testing. Later
25:49
on in this podcast, I'm actually going to get into some of the scumbags
25:51
in the industry, but there are trustworthy
25:53
folks that make money on this. The
25:56
problem is you can also make money by not making
25:58
any effort at all, and I will
26:00
get to that. And the result
26:02
of this chase of metrics is a media
26:04
industry and crisis executives
26:07
and editors that don't really read or write
26:09
and don't remember the last time they published anything.
26:11
They're twisting reporters coverage to
26:13
make Google happy, and all
26:16
they want to do is improve traffic and get advertising.
26:19
That's all there is to it. And yes, I
26:21
understand that there's money
26:24
that needs to be made to pay people's salaries,
26:26
but so much of the Internet
26:28
is becoming content that looks and sounds the same.
26:32
And like I said, those affiliate marketing
26:34
deals, they make money even when you just do a
26:36
half fast effort of saying I like this TV.
26:40
And what happens when everyone chases
26:42
the same dragon is nobody's really
26:44
happy. People aren't really coming
26:47
to your website for the top ten best
26:49
apps. They're not coming to be told,
26:52
hey, these are the best deals. They
26:54
might enjoy those, they might use them, but that's not what's
26:57
keeping them there. And yes'
27:00
seeing so much of that because those
27:02
in power are not actually looking
27:04
at the outlets. They're not reading these
27:06
websites. They're not even really consuming
27:09
the media. They're not on social media, they're
27:11
not on anything other than maybe
27:13
the New York Times and CNN. The
27:15
people running the media don't
27:18
participate, not as
27:20
customers and frankly not as workers.
27:23
And these people they only really understand
27:26
the media as a series of symbols, shadows
27:28
on the cave. They don't
27:30
really see it beyond the numbers, and they
27:34
think that at some point money comes out
27:36
due to words and writing and video.
27:38
Maybe they don't really care well how
27:40
that forms, as long as the money keeps coming, even
27:42
if the money stops one day. This
27:45
poor decision making almost always
27:47
leads to overstaffing and frankly,
27:50
general mismanagement. Any
27:52
form of creative media, anything you see,
27:54
any great outlet you have seen, requires
27:57
a very basic understanding of audience
28:00
and an audience. Takes time, and
28:02
it takes energy, and it takes working
28:04
on this. I am sure in fifteen episodes
28:07
I will be a lot better than this. I'm
28:10
sure fifteen after that, I'll be better than that. And
28:12
thankfully, I hope I'm good enough now
28:15
for you to listen to and you'll stick around and hear
28:17
me get better. But because of the way that
28:19
Cool Zone media works, I will have that
28:21
chance. I'm not being told I have
28:23
to hit a quota. I'm being told
28:26
to get in this studio and talk and
28:28
produce great things, hopefully. But
28:31
that's the problem. That's the problem when
28:33
you don't create anything, when you're a parasite, when
28:36
you're someone that steals from others. The
28:39
Messengers a great example here, by the way. So
28:41
they hired about three hundred reporters, and a lot of them
28:44
were very well established, well respected
28:46
reporters from like major outlets, and
28:49
then they took these great, skilled,
28:51
wonderful people and they said, please repurpose
28:54
other people's work. Mentioned
28:56
already the Daily Mail, New York Post as examples
28:58
of place they took from. This doesn't
29:00
really make sense to even a regular person, But
29:03
when you're a kind of soft brain
29:05
media executive, and all you care about is short
29:08
term growth, and you want to see number go up immediately.
29:11
All you care about is scale, So all you're going to do
29:13
is put out masses of chum. And
29:16
it sucks. It sucks
29:18
because they're so wrong. And
29:20
what's insane is these executives they're blind to the
29:23
actual success stories of the media.
29:26
I'm thinking of worker owned outlets like
29:28
Defector four O four media Aftermath,
29:31
and I don't know many of the successful,
29:34
profitable newsletters like Newcomer
29:36
and Platformer that have done incredibly
29:39
well with incredibly small staffs. Because guess
29:41
what, people don't want the
29:43
same shit in a different flavor. They
29:46
want informed opinion. They want it
29:48
from fallible, imperfect people.
29:50
They want to know they're hearing from a person. They
29:52
want something that has emotion in it. That's
29:55
why people pay for journalism,
29:57
That's why people read. While there is a degree
30:00
of service journalism to tell you what happened,
30:02
a lot of great writing is emotional. Defector.
30:07
They're actually a really interesting one as
30:09
well. They're successful, they're profitable, and
30:11
they cover more than just sports. Despite
30:13
being a sports website, their sports and culture
30:16
and their staff came from a website
30:19
called dead Spin. Now, dead Spin is hilarious.
30:21
I used to write there. I love dead Spin. Dead
30:23
Spin was a sports and culture site. They
30:26
wrote about sports and then other things. Drew
30:28
McGarry did a famous thing about the time when
30:30
he collapsed and something was wrong with his
30:32
brain. For example, there were some wonderful
30:34
things on there that were completely unrelated
30:37
to sport. When the
30:39
private equity shuffles as a result of Peter
30:41
Teal's lawsuit against Gorka happened,
30:44
a company called Geomedia took over. And
30:47
they're complete moron
30:49
of an executive. Jim Spamfeller he fired
30:52
Barry to pachet Ski because
30:54
he refused to make Dead Spins staff
30:57
stick to sports. Now, Jim Spamfeller
31:00
is a complete moron. And I know you shouldn't
31:02
just insult people in the podcast, but he's a he's
31:05
a dingus. He's a complete numpty. And
31:08
you may ask, huh, well,
31:10
based on looking at Defector
31:12
and indeed based on being able to look at the
31:15
economics of dead Spin when he owned it, wouldn't
31:17
you, spamfella just want to let them keep
31:20
writing and doing stuff in the exceedingly popular
31:22
way that everyone loved and the answer is that Jim
31:24
Spanfeller is a fucking idiot that doesn't understand
31:27
journalism or business. And indeed,
31:29
many times you will see stories like this, he'd
31:31
be like, I don't get it. How did it fall apart?
31:33
And the answer is usually that Jim
31:36
Spanfeller he wanted dead Spin to
31:38
be like any other sports out there. Yet
31:41
the whole reason people read dead Spin, and
31:43
indeed read and pay for Defector,
31:46
was because it approached sports without the kind
31:48
of very strong boundaries
31:51
that restricted the outlets like ESPN or NBC
31:53
Sports, which they have their place now.
31:56
Jim Spaanfeller and his type of people,
31:58
they'll never understand that the well doesn't need
32:01
another content meal. We don't need more
32:03
aggregations of aggregations of aggregations
32:05
of another outlet's aggregation. And
32:08
though this content, when engineered
32:10
in the precise way that Google likes, may
32:12
indeed get traffic from search, and
32:15
it may be quote unquote popular, it
32:17
doesn't mean that anyone's coming back. You're
32:20
not building loyalty another
32:22
In March, Deadspin was sold again, this
32:25
time to a startup called line Up of Publishing.
32:27
A little bit painful when you think about the raw economy
32:30
there, and they're based in Malta, which is a business
32:32
retreat for tax dodgers but also known for cryptocurrency
32:35
startups and more worrying
32:37
in this case, European gambling firms.
32:40
An investigation by Sean Keeley over
32:42
at Tedium found numerous connections
32:44
between Deadspin's new owner and various
32:47
online casinos, which heavily suggests that it's
32:49
going to become not a sports website but
32:51
a website for affiliate marketing for gambling
32:54
sites. And what sucks about
32:56
that is kind of the way that sports
32:58
in general is going. You're going to be able
33:00
to bet on MBA games from their app,
33:02
for example. It's a terrible press
33:04
them, but also a terrible thing
33:06
to happen to one of the greatest
33:09
sports websites to ever run. Ever, but
33:12
don't worry, Jim Spanfeller still
33:14
has several other websites to fuck up, and
33:16
in this case, he's currently working on destroying
33:19
Kataku now. Kataku
33:21
was previously one of the most well respected gaming
33:24
publications of the world, and they were sold to Geomedia
33:27
as part of the Gorka lawsuit last
33:30
week. As reported by Aftermaths, Gita
33:32
Jackson and Riley McLeod. Kataku
33:35
editor in chief Jen Glennan resigned
33:37
after Geomedia executives decided to change
33:39
Kataku's remit from publishing news and
33:41
opinions about video games, the whole thing that
33:43
made them famous, to creating and this
33:45
is the real number, by the way, fifty game
33:48
guides a week on a staff of seven
33:51
people. Kataku
33:53
is or I guess was an institution
33:55
in the gaming industry, and it was built off the back
33:58
of publishing thoughtful, timely about
34:00
games and very personal personal
34:02
pieces about video games, an industry
34:05
well known and pretty much the only other one other
34:07
than sports that can really have a
34:09
genuine feeling of nostalgia and the writing.
34:13
They're turning away from that, and
34:15
they're turning it into what will
34:17
just become another seo chop
34:20
shop. And it's all
34:22
thanks to Jim Spanfeller, a man who cannot run
34:24
businesses. He's going to turn Kataku into
34:27
just another seo slop dump, another
34:29
place where you can answer questions about
34:32
where to go in a game when you're stuck, Oh,
34:34
how do I make cloud Strife go nude? Oh
34:37
how do I beat Sefrov. At some point in
34:39
FF seven, Jim Spanfeller has never played
34:41
a video game at any point, so I
34:43
don't think he knows that there is no way to make
34:45
cloud nude, but indeed doesn't know anything
34:48
about gaming. He doesn't know anything
34:50
about games. He doesn't know anything about
34:52
writing, because like all of these
34:54
people I've been talking about, Jim
34:57
Spanfeller does not actually
34:59
know anything about the company he runs,
35:02
and it's disgraceful. Gaming is a multi
35:05
trillion dollar industry. Gaming
35:07
is something that's so important to culture. You
35:10
have the weirdest, most reclusive
35:12
people and incredibly popular sports
35:14
stars who all play the same games. This
35:18
is one of the most dominant forces in culture.
35:21
And this idiot is
35:23
taking Kataku, which has
35:25
had a crazed history.
35:28
It has had a lot of controversy, but
35:30
it's popular, it's meaningful. Writers
35:33
from Kataku have gone on to found things like
35:35
Polygon, another influential and
35:38
in this case, Vox Media owned property.
35:40
After Math was founded by several people who
35:42
have written at Kataku. This
35:45
outlet created in some level modern
35:47
games journalism, and now it's going
35:49
to have the same value as game FAQ's,
35:51
except worse because people on Gamefaq's
35:54
actually play games much
35:58
like sports Illustrated, Darkland,
36:00
Deadspin. They're going to become something I call
36:02
a shit of theseus situation when
36:04
an illustrious brand has its guts ripped
36:07
out, replaced with the thoughts and
36:09
the feelings and the ideas of a
36:11
huge moron. And it's
36:13
so stupid, it's so frustrating,
36:17
and until something changes, it's only going
36:19
to get worse. And
36:23
I know I'm angry, and you should be angry to I'm
36:25
furious these people, those
36:27
of them who are not my friends, are just people I've enjoyed
36:30
reading. People have lost their
36:32
jobs because the media industry is being run
36:34
into the ground by people that do not know how
36:36
to read, write, or even run a
36:38
business. Every outlet that you read
36:41
today that kind of feels like a shadow of its former
36:43
self, there's a reason it's got
36:45
there because the people in charge don't read,
36:47
don't write, they don't contribute. They're not
36:50
media creators. They are parasites,
36:52
as I've discussed, and their remit is
36:54
not to create a lasting legacy, to
36:57
make something that people read for years. They
36:59
are trying to turn that outlet into
37:01
a shitty startup that they can flog to someone.
37:04
Except these things never sell ever.
37:07
And that's because, on top of being idiots,
37:10
they do not understand any kind of business
37:12
at all. And the reason that a
37:14
lot of these executives just can't understand
37:17
it and they can't understand why things
37:19
succeed and their properties fail is
37:22
because they don't really want
37:24
to accept that. You can't grow a media
37:26
business like a startup or
37:28
like any kind of regular business. You
37:31
still need a profit and a loss, but it
37:33
takes time and you have to invest that time
37:35
as much as you have to invest that money. Media
37:39
outlets grow and I'm paraphrasing Coulso
37:42
Media's Robert Evans, they grow by
37:44
hosting the work of journalists that people love
37:47
and giving them the time to develop
37:49
a following and make it, make
37:51
that great stuff, to refine
37:53
their craft to be great
37:56
even if they're not quite there. Through
37:58
mentorship and through just doing the
38:00
work. Our sister show,
38:02
better offline sister Show, it could happen
38:04
here. It took years to develop it into what it
38:06
is today, which by the way, it's a profitable
38:09
podcast and it gets millions of downloads a month.
38:12
And it got there because Robert and Sophie
38:15
put in the time and the money, and
38:17
so did iHeartRadio of course, to
38:19
give these voices the chance to grow and to
38:22
help them grow comfortable, especially with
38:24
media that involves you being exposed
38:27
to the world by talking or by being on video.
38:30
So much of that is growing comfortable with the format
38:32
and finding what works specifically
38:34
for you. And then once you've
38:36
done that, you have to build a rapport with the audience. So I hope
38:39
I'm doing today, and none of this can
38:41
be forced. You can't accelerate this
38:43
process. Perhaps, as Roberts
38:45
also said, you can get these big, unique scoops
38:48
that get people through the door, but you
38:50
have to keep making stuff and you have to keep refining
38:52
it too, And none
38:54
of these executives like that because you
38:57
can't tell that to a private equity firm.
39:00
You can't tell a private equity firm to wait
39:02
and be patient. They're not in the business
39:04
of patients. Venture capital
39:07
doesn't want to hear that it's going to take a
39:09
while, and a non specific while at that to
39:11
get their money out. They want money now,
39:14
money me, money now. And what's
39:16
really sick and ironic about this is
39:19
they're not making money from this. BuzzFeed
39:21
went public, it was horrible mess. Vice
39:24
has been running too the ground. And sure, these people have made
39:27
a bunch of money off of the back of others, but they've
39:29
also destroyed something meaningful and this
39:32
will color their legacies for the rest of their lives. Maybe
39:34
they don't care. I don't know. I hope they
39:36
do. Hope they don't sleep at night. Jimmy
39:39
Finkelstein gets visited by the ghosts from
39:41
I'm Up at Christmas Carol, specifically Maley
39:43
and Marley. I think that'd be kind of funny putting
39:45
that joke aside. Though these people shouldn't
39:48
be allowed to walk down the street without geting yelled
39:50
at in a perfectly legal way. That I'm not encouraging
39:52
anything illegal, of course, but I find
39:55
within myself a great
39:57
deal of poison for
39:59
them. I find them
40:01
disgraceful because Motley,
40:04
they had a good thing. Had Wece been run
40:07
sustainably, had they really focused on making
40:09
it a profitable out there, they could have what four
40:11
O four Media is doing today. And then
40:13
some four or four Media is worker owned business
40:15
made by people Jessin Kobler and Emmanuel
40:18
Maiberg who left Wess,
40:20
who left Motherboard. Weis
40:23
used to own four A four Media. They used
40:25
to these people used to work for Vice, and
40:28
now four o four Media has had major scoops
40:30
that are changing the entire tech industry. They
40:33
are the ones that published the Google Search
40:35
is getting Worse story. They are continually
40:37
getting these scoops doing great journalism, and
40:40
they're going to probably become a very successful
40:42
and profitable business. Weiss could
40:44
have had that Vice literally had that, Jim Spamfeller
40:47
had dead Spin. None of these people
40:49
realize what they've got even after it's gone.
40:51
And maybe they just want that short term bang.
40:54
May they just want a little tittle of money
40:56
so they can feel rich and nasty and
40:59
hang around with their other asshole friends. And
41:01
I find them despicable. If I meet any of them, I
41:03
want to make some very creative noises in their
41:05
faces. And
41:07
it sucks. It sucks because the real
41:10
human consequences fall upon the
41:12
actual people making them rich, the people
41:14
creating stuff, the people talking, taking
41:16
photos and drawing things and writing things. They
41:19
are the victims of this. The
41:21
people who should be the victims, the people who shouldn't
41:23
make a dollar, are the ones making the money.
41:26
They are the ones who stay rich, stay
41:29
powerful, and will probably fail upwards
41:31
into another media job and
41:33
that's the thing. Thanks to
41:35
these people, the media
41:37
industry is spent over a decade
41:39
fucking around, and now they're finding out and
41:42
the journalists are paying these
41:44
executives. They've spent this time
41:46
and they built this foundation, this
41:49
massive search and social
41:51
based foundation, and it's made on top
41:53
of sand. And they're desperate,
41:56
so they change strategy, and they change strategy
41:58
again, and they do so to please algorithms,
42:01
not people. They've completely
42:03
forgotten or maybe they did not know
42:07
that every success, every previous
42:09
success in the media has pretty much
42:11
come from a small group of opinionated people
42:14
with good ideas who create cool shit.
42:18
And really that's the only salvation
42:20
for journalism. Mon Journalism
42:23
can be rebuilt, but rebuilding it will
42:25
take reinforcing the relationship between writers
42:27
and their audiences, and media
42:29
properties need to help foster that and empower
42:32
that relationship instead of trying to get rid
42:34
of that, instead of turning everything into
42:36
a brand to be sold to private equity. We
42:39
can work back. We can get back what has
42:42
been lost by supporting
42:44
unions in newsrooms, by supporting
42:47
and paying for worker owned journalism,
42:51
you can bring back great
42:53
journalism. You can turn this tide
42:55
the private equitis will eventually lose
42:58
because at some point that
43:00
right now they're exceedingly dependent on Google
43:02
Search. Everyone chasing search
43:05
engine optimization is dead in the water.
43:07
Eventually, Google and Facebook
43:10
they turned on the news before. You
43:12
don't think they'll do it again. You
43:14
don't think that Google will eventually tweak the algorithm
43:17
in some obscene way to turn away from
43:19
this generic slop. When that happens,
43:22
sadly, once again, journalists
43:24
will be the ones that suffer, which
43:27
is why right now journalists should unionize.
43:31
It's tough, but if it possible, they
43:33
should join worker owned co ops like
43:35
Flaming Hydra. They should join these
43:37
great organizations. Look up to things like
43:39
Defecta and see the wonderful journalists
43:41
and they're doing day in, day out, People like Ray
43:44
Rato. He's a fantastic
43:46
journalist, an esteemed Bay Area reporter,
43:49
and he's done some of the best work of his career at Defector
43:51
and he's done so because it's owned by
43:53
him and the rest of the writers. The people
43:55
building are the people that should own stuff.
43:59
Now. I feel we are a bit crazy whenever I
44:01
talk about this subject, and I think it's because
44:05
great journalism and great writing
44:07
is foundational the culture. Hearing
44:10
an informed opinion doesn't
44:12
matter where they're at, if they're at a blog, if there are
44:15
a newspaper, if they're on TV. Hearing
44:17
someone who actually knows what they're talking about, speaking
44:19
from the heart, who's developed a relationship
44:21
with you as a reader, is transformational.
44:24
It changes people's lives,
44:27
and great opinion journalism does. On top
44:29
of that, and everything that I am
44:31
doing my PR firm, my newsletter,
44:34
my podcast is a result of having
44:36
great mentors in journalism like
44:39
Will porter Over at PC Zone and
44:41
log and Steve Hogarty, people
44:44
that were there to help me as an early writer, to
44:46
help me, encourage me to develop
44:48
my voice, the voice you were hearing today. None
44:51
of this crazed confidence comes from myself.
44:54
It comes from having great mentors like Sophie
44:56
and Rob Over at caols OH Media, like
44:59
David Roth, a defector. These
45:02
people are the reason
45:04
that people read websites. It's
45:07
the reason they listen to podcasts. It isn't
45:09
because of virality or search
45:11
engine optimization or any other
45:13
little bits of bullshit that people like Jim
45:16
Spanfeller and Corey Height claim is the case.
45:20
The answer to fixing journalism
45:22
is simple. It's just annoying to
45:24
growth at all cost. Catalysts. Profitable
45:28
sustainable journalism or any content
45:30
really is built off the back of letting people
45:32
with defined voices build and sustain
45:35
an audience. Every single
45:37
success story, every single great
45:39
newspaper and website was the result of
45:41
letting great creators create great
45:44
things and giving them the space and
45:46
platform and time and funding
45:48
to do so. If you want
45:50
the next great media outlet, it isn't
45:53
going to come through tricking Google
45:55
or Twitter or Facebook or Instagram
45:57
into reading your stories. It's about making
46:00
great shit and getting people to see
46:02
it, and making sure that the people making
46:05
it feel supported and
46:07
mentored and helped to
46:09
make more of it. I
46:12
believe there is an absolute mountain
46:14
of money right now in journalism
46:17
for investors capable of thinking more than six
46:19
seconds ahead of course, give
46:21
writers the space and the time, and
46:23
that time may be measured in years, to build
46:25
audiences and develop relationships
46:28
with their readers. Embrace their individuality
46:30
and pay them well for the privilege of having
46:32
them speak on your behalf. Build for readers,
46:35
not investors, and you will make way
46:38
more money than you ever would licensing a
46:40
brand like a god damn Denny's franchise.
46:43
Things can get better for journalism.
46:46
I promise you they will if only the money
46:48
and the power is put in the hands of actual
46:50
writers and actual creators rather than
46:53
career failures and private equity dipshits.
46:56
But until there is a significant realignment,
46:58
that something meaningfully changes in media,
47:01
one that puts the power back in the hands of
47:03
the people actually creating stuff and focuses
47:05
on the things that they create, We're gonna
47:08
see this cycle repeat again and again
47:10
and again, and I'm gonna get angry. And
47:12
you should be angry too. I hate to
47:14
tell people to be angry. I hate anger
47:17
in general, but in this case it's
47:19
justifiable. This is a singular
47:21
force damaging culture and
47:24
enriching assholes. Do
47:26
not believe them, Do not trust
47:29
them that any of this was caused by market
47:31
forces or anything other than
47:34
the mass incompetence of assholes running
47:36
media into the ground. Thank
47:39
you for listening. Thank
47:50
you for listening to Better Offline. The editor
47:52
and composer of the Better Offline theme song is
47:54
Matasowski. You can check out more
47:56
of his music and audio projects at Matasowski
47:59
dot com. M A T T O
48:01
s O W s KI dot
48:04
com. You can email me at easy at
48:06
better offline dot com or check out better
48:08
offline dot com to find my newsletter and
48:10
more links to this podcast. Thank you so much
48:12
for listening.
48:14
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone
48:16
Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit
48:18
our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or
48:21
check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple
48:23
Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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