The Inevitable Future of Journalism

Matthew Yohe at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

For all of the history of journalism (and it isn’t really that long a history), there have been two barriers to entry:

The first was the complexity and cost of producing the product. As AJ Liebling wrote in 1961, “freedom of the press is limited to those who own a press.” And owning a newspaper, or starting one was expensive. So if you wanted to be a print journalist, it meant working for The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post. You got a job, got paid a salary, and were free to report, write, and have your work published, all at no expense to you.

The second barrier to entry was distribution. Even if you wrote a great article, if no one saw it, what was the point? So you needed a company like The New York Times Company to invest in not just printing the paper, but also putting it in the hands of readers. This meant fleets of truck, newsstands, supporting the advertising to drive subscriptions and of course, the subscriptions themselves, plus selling the advertising that paid your salary.

The broadcast model was even more expensive and far more complicated. Making a piece of TV news required a broadcast quality camera ($70,000), an edit suite (up to $1m), a team of highly qualified technicians to operate all the expensive gear.

Then, even if you bought the gear, the cameras, the microphones, the light kits, the wiring, the edit suite, you had to get it into people’s homes. This required a massive investment in transmission equipment, studios, microwave trucks, broadcast towers, and later satellites, as well as relationships with cable companies such as Time/Warner or Comcast. If you wanted to broadcast over the air, you needed FCC approval.

In short, all of this was impossible.

You could, of course, simply mimeograph your work and sell it on the corner for $1, but that generally did not work out very well. so you were trapped, in a sense, by technology, as an employee.

Now, in an instant, all of this has changed, and it is going to change the news business in a very radical, but ultimately inevitable way.

The confluence of two new pieces of technology has and will continue to re-write the basics of the news business. The iPhone that you have in your pocket or hand or is currently laying on your desk next to you has all the media firepower that CNN has, but for a whole lot less money. A whole lot less.

The phone shoots broadcast video, it edits, it adds music and graphics and it can go live from anywhere in the world at any time for virtually no cost (so sell you stock in those satellite or microwave truck companies). In a nutshell, the media firepower in your phone would have cost you upwards of $10 million to put together not very long ago. Now, it is for all practical purposes free, and anyone can now have the same technical ability as a CNN or Fox or NBC News. Right now.

The other barrier to entry has been distribution. Thanks to the Internet, you (and everyone else) now has access to some 8 billion potential viewers worldwide for no cost whatsoever. This is a rather amazing turn of events and it is going to completely upend the entire media world. All you need do is put your stuff online. (This is how Netflix works, by the way, and they have a valuation of $371 billion.)

This also applies to print (which is what we are doing here). And this is the future of journalism. Some people think the only future of journalism is hoping for a billionaire to buy the newspaper. Recent history has proven that this is not going to work. Others think the non-profit route. I think not. Rather, I think there’s another and in some ways more obvious way.

Why do people go to Fox News, for example? (OK. You don’t but just go with me here).

They go to Fox News to see and hear their favorite ‘journalists’ (and I use the term loosely). ‘Journalists’ like Tucker Carlson, who, upon leaving Fox News went live online (charging $9 a month) and has by some accounts as many as 40 million viewers (115 million on his first day). That’s a whole lot more than he used to get on Fox where he averaged 3.25 million viewers a night, which is a whole lot better than Fox’s 1.75m average.

As Tucker Carlson might say, “who needs Fox News?” And he would be right.

I think now of Jennifer Rubin (who I used to read every day in The Washington Post) who has left that paper, (along with cartoonist Ann Telnaes), both of whom have come here to Substack.

This, I think is only the beginning, and it makes sense. The Digital world has allowed a disaggregation of content creation. In many ways, Tucker Carlson and Jennifer Rubin are no different from the millions of people who now prefer to work at home. Giant office buildings are no longer necessary (we moved our entire business online 3 years ago and now operate with worldwide clients without ever leaving home). Soon, with 3D printers, factories may go the way of office towers.

It’s a whole new world of journalism, and I think it is actually pretty inevitable.

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