Maybe the Storied Institutions Do Need to Die

The last month has been jarring to many parts of the media ecosystem. Whether it’s Condé Nast, Forbes, Business Insider, Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, etc., people have lost their jobs. Heck, the publisher of numerous papers in my county abruptly announced last week that it had suspended publication and was looking for solutions to bring them back to financial sustainability.

Even the more successful media companies are seeing changes. The Wall Street Journal has trimmed its DC bureau, letting go of 20 people (though providing them an opportunity to apply for different jobs). It would appear that no one in media is safe if you look at all of the press being written the last few weeks. Exhibit A: The Atlantic published a piece this week that asks Is American Journalism Headed Toward an ‘Extinction-Level Event’?

And so, it does beg the question: is journalism dying? It’s something we were discussing in the AMO Slack last night. I would argue the act of journalism is not dying. That doesn’t mean the institutions that have gotten us to this point will be the ones that take us forward. One reader offered an interesting point:

Maybe a longer time scale perspective is worthwhile: things rarely fundamentally change without hitting rock bottom. Maybe news needs to “die” so that it can be reborn?

I think this is right. We lament the loss of so many of these institutions, but perhaps it’s time for them to die. For so many years now, the media industry—at least the big, mainstream media industry—has been in a state of decline. Executives are not investing to build; they are just trying to keep the lights on for as long as possible. How uninspiring.

And so many of the decisions that have been made over the last 10-15 years show that. Search started to dominate, so publishers moved hard into that. Social started taking over? Let’s pivot to doing that. That’s where the ad dollars are. Video is what everyone wants? Tens of millions of dollars invested in overpriced studios despite the fact no one is watching. Comscore numbers. Pageviews. More, more, more.

And let’s be clear: journalists aren’t blameless either. They also got addicted to the scale and believing that they were being read by tens of thousands or millions of people. Why write for 1,000 die hard fans when you can write for 100,000 anonymous nobodies. I was talking with an executive the other day who asked me: “How do we break it to our editorial team that they’re not going to be read by as many people as we tighten our paywall?”

Here is an executive who wants to make the business more sustainable and the fear is reporters being upset. It makes no sense. The reality is, we all got addicted to this scale. I remember being at CoinDesk when crypto prices were skyrocketing genuinely believing that the 12 million monthly uniques were our audience.

The problem is, all of these major media companies have become rotten with this addiction. They took brands that might have stood for something once and incrementally destroyed them. The game became financial engineering and boosting numbers for the short-term rather than building institutions that would survive for years. And the reality is, many of these publications should have died years ago.

So, if it’s happening now, so be it. As the reader said above, maybe news needs to die so that it can be reborn. What does reborn mean, though?

In many respects, it means less of the same kind of content. People are shocked that The Los Angeles Times has shut down its DC bureau, especially in an election year. But that’s exactly what it should do. It can barely invest the resources it needs to serve the LA community; why is it also trying to cover DC politics? That is a strategy from pre-internet when major newspapers had bureaus all over the world.

There is simply too much redundant coverage of the same story. As the time of me writing this story, if you did a search for Joe Biden, you’d see dozens of stories about an executive order in Israel. Each of these stories is written by a journalist, but do we actually need each of these stories? Or are they all chasing the same pageviews?

Or what about culture reporters? What are you reporting on exactly that social media can’t do faster? Prior to the internet, culture reporting made sense. But now, telling readers what a celebrity is doing is likely days slower than the celebrity telling you themselves. Social media won that war and yet there are so many reporters who pay major journalism school student loans with the dream of being a culture reporter. Maybe it’s harsh, but this strategy is from a different era.

This rebirth also means the failure of some of these roll ups. Recurrent acquired a number of different publications—many with strong brands—and then systemized them all. An AMO reader reached out to me and said this:

From a media operations perspective they don’t actually care about their assets on the title level, so they bought a bunch of stuff thinking they could just put their “best practices” for monetization on it … they don’t have any leaders for the titles which is why they failed at Field and Stream, shut down at least two titles they acquired and probably other titles are going to underperform from an audience perspective.

That strategy hasn’t been working. It sold Saveur back in April and, according to sources, the business is doing very well. It brought back its print product, though it’s unclear if this is going well. Field & Stream was just acquired by two country music singers. In their announcement, they wrote:

However, we all face seasons of change, and the last few years have included plenty of that for Field & Stream. With changes in how its legendary stories were told and where its products were sold, Field & Stream’s legacy in the outdoor space was at risk. The brand meant too much to us to let that happen.  

And that’s why we teamed up to preserve Field & Stream. To lend our voices to this iconic American brand so that it can continue to inspire future generations to experience and enjoy the outdoors, just as it has for us and those who came before us. It’s time to return Field & Stream to its rightful home: into the hands of those who love the outdoors and the tales that come from being there.  

Oh yeah… it’s also bringing its print product back. And if I were a betting man, other Recurrent brands will also sell over the coming years.

Even my beloved b2b industry will need to have some losses. There are some publications that only have editors. There are no reporters. They regurgitate press releases and hope that’ll actually keep people happy. They provide zero value.

Even the death of local news will see a rebirth. Instead of the big newspapers with their bloated infrastructures, we’ll see teams of reporters cover the local stories. Because the reality is, the internet has made it easier than ever to spin up a publication. And it’s a thankless job and few people will get rich doing it. But going directly to the audience, figuring out what they want, and charging for it without all the bloat is a strategy.

It’s important to remember that at one point, all of these big businesses were startups. They were not the massive institutions we know today. And so, somewhere in this rebirth, there will be new companies that can one day grow into bigger, more impactful organizations. Because the reality is, people are always going to want good content. The formats may evolve and how we consume information may change, but people will want it.

Journalism isn’t going extinct. The dinosaurs are. And in their place, lots of new players will arise. And it’s for all of them that I continue to write.

Thanks for reading. Hit reply if you have thoughts or join the AMO Slack. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.