[on-hold music] You have to be prepared for problems to arise.
And instead of trying to find the perfect subsidy system or look for the answer that's gonna deliver us to sound budget principles, we should assume that we're never going to find that, and we have to continually develop new subsidies, uh- Okay, so I have an idea, Jay...
and, and be aware of them. Yeah. I've sol-- I've solved the problem. Okay. We're just gonna tax the tech platforms, and we're gonna pool it into a giant fund, and that's gonna be the subsidy for news.
That is a subsidy system, for sure, and I would love that. [chuckles] A tax on internet advertising that creates a kind of fund that funds public service journalism would be something that I think is worth a try.
[on-hold music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey. This week, I'm joined by NYU professor of journalism, Jay Rosen.
Jay is a scrupulous analyst of the journalism business, and he doesn't hold back, and I appreciate that very much.
In this discussion, we cover everything from the end of BuzzFeed News, the prospects for The Messenger and Semafor, why Trump hacked conventional political news coverage, as well as, uh, some promising efforts at building sustainable local journalism models, and the need to find new subsidies for news operations, as well as Jay's belief that Fox News is not a legitimate news organization.
He tries to convince my mom of this later on in the episode. The entire episode was a lot of fun, and we got into all of these topics and many more.
One note, we recorded this episode on Friday before Fox dropped the news that it was, quote-unquote, "parting ways with Tucker Carlson." Sure does sound like he got fired, but I can't say for sure.
Please check out this episode and leave a rating and review on Apple or Spotify or anywhere that takes reviews, and also send me a note with your feedback and episode suggestions.
As I mentioned before, I'm interested in trying new types of episodes and would love your feedback on things that you like, things you don't like, things you'd like to see more of. My email is brian@therebooting.com.
And now onto the episode. Okay. Jay, let's get into it. So let's start with the demise of BuzzFeed News. I've read, you know, many of these postmortems on it. I don't know if you have, but, um- Yes, I have.
But Ben Smith called his own autopsy The End of the BuzzFeed Era of News. You know, he pins a lot of the blame on, on really the pivot to, to social media and social platforms. Mm-hmm.
You know, that was of that era, and we saw a lot of, uh, publications that really started in different areas all of a sudden gravitate to news.
I don't know if you remember, all of a sudden Refinery29 was covering the first Ukraine war, and, and then Mashable, uh, was bringing in, like, uh- Mm-hmm... Jim Roberts to build out a news operation.
W-what is your a-assessment? What's your autopsy when it comes to what felled BuzzFeed News? Well, it's really hard to know
what shape a news site is in if it's venture funded, uh, and if it's playing with money that hasn't been generated by the operation. That's why sustainable media, which you're exploring- Mm-hmm...
in these podcasts, is such an important idea. But I think BuzzFeed News, which is different than BuzzFeed, uh, which came later than BuzzFeed,
uh, was an important try, and it in-influenced a lot of what was going on then.
And I think the most important thing that BuzzFeed News established was just the whole idea of very tech-aware journalists who are serious about reporting, but also unafraid of new technology and new ways of doing things, and w-eager to incorporate them into their journalism.
That was an important sort of attitude to proceed with. Now, why it ended up failing is just a-as Ben suggested, it's, it's a story of where the internet is, you know?
It's a story of w-what else sort of took the place of these early attempts at bringing news to, to the net. And one way of recognizing how influential BuzzFeed was, was to go back to The Times Innovation Report. Right.
Yeah. You know, in, in which- I was gonna, I was gonna go there next. You c-- you beat me to it. Yeah. Well, I've taught that moment in my classes.
I did a whole class actually once on the future of The New York Times in which that report was a very important moment.
But it was a rare moment when The New York Times didn't really know where to go with some of these things, and BuzzFeed was constantly referred to as- Yeah...
a s-site that kind of had figured some of this out, and that's a pretty heady experience. And so it was exciting to
see that newsroom evolve because it was very serious about journalism and very serious about the internet at the same time. Yeah. We used to call it BuzzFeed envy, right?
I think the entire industry sort of had BuzzFeed envy at the time. The, the innovation report- Mm-hmm... was in two thousand and fourteen, I believe, and- Right...
it, it really reflected a feeling across a lot of quarters of the industry that these upstarts were, were stealing a march on them, right? Yes. And, you know,
all of the legacy publications were struggling to, to keep up with the changes at the time. Now, BuzzFeed News was never a, a real business- Right... and I think that was a mistake.
A-and I think Jonah alludes to it, uh, in, you know, his, like, mea culpa, which are now becoming sort of cliché, these mea culpas. Like, I... It's like- Mm-hmm... you damn do or you do, or you damn do, you don't.
Like, but whatever. But I do think, you know, at the very least he acknowledged the fact that they never... You know, it was basically being subsidized by the, the, the stereotypical, you know, cat GIFs and whatnot.
And I think
to me it was like the, that era was really defined in many ways by social media in that inAnd just in the merging of these types of content, what BuzzFeed was, was known for and what people came to BuzzFeed for was not news, right?
And- Right... and it is the same way, like Facebook fell for this too, right? People went to Facebook to look at photos of babies and stuff like this, and then they said, "Well, we can introduce news into this feed."
And then it was just a whole mix of random stuff, and then next thing you know, you, you know, the racist uncles like showed up at the party.
[laughs] Yeah, I don't think Facebook had any idea what it was doing when it went into news. It's, it wasn't prepared for what was to come. [chuckles] Yeah.
And I think it had no clue what being an editorial company was, zero. Yeah. And so when some of the problems of being an editorial company came up, they just had like the- Yeah...
very lame responses to-- I think BuzzFeed was a little different. I thought that when BuzzFeed News came, when everybody says, "Well, what's the business model for this?"
I thought I detected at least a, a hope of, of one, which was news was there because it was serious, and it gave, uh, the brand of BuzzFeed, uh, a weightier reason for being. Right.
Uh, and it was a, in a sense, a prestige move, and if BuzzFeed could generate prestige in addition to generating audiences, that maybe that could serve itself, serve as a business model. Yeah.
But it never worked out that way, but I thought there was a, a logic to it that remains important because when you talk about sustainable media sources, subsidy is not a dirty word.
I mean, all, almost all good content is subsidized by something. Yeah. Ad-advertising is subsidy, right? It's the advertisers who are subsidizing the journalists. And so subsidy is not the, uh, the problem.
In fact, we need more discoveries of subsidy systems that can work because what happens is they go out of favor, and they get broken at a faster pace now. Yeah.
I, I think that's a great point because it's easy to blithely say, "Well, it's just about getting direct connections and having the audience pay for, you know, support."
That opens up a whole can of worms, y- and not the least of which is credible information shouldn't be a luxury good. It just should not be in a democracy. Totally. So there's no silver bullet.
I think at this point we've, um, we just talked about cliches, and I'm just gonna lapse into them. [laughs] I'll just start to mix them. There's a holy grail of a silver bullet, and
because n- there needs to be new models that, that subsidize news. A-and- Yes... journalism and media in general has always been a great way to get attention, prestige, the rest of this soft stuff.
It's not a great business. No, it's not. On its own, it is not a great business, and it is time to accept that.
There are exceptions to every rule, but the reality is, most of the time, news is being subsidized by other things.
Now, I think BuzzFeed was going to subsidize this with, what was in essence, like a content agency business at the time. I mean, I can remember Virgin Mobile, their mobile thing.
You know, they were building some kind of like, you know, branded newsroom at the time. You know, it was a crazy time. Yeah. I, I remember- And BuzzFeed-... different experiments like that...
BuzzFeed was basically, like helping them do that. I mean, they were acting like an agency.
I can remember one of, an event at that time, a, uh, advertiser, I think it was Mondelez, and they showed their campaign, and they put up their agency list, and it was, you know, regular Havas and all these, you know, VP, and then Vice,
right? Mm-hmm. And I went up to them afterwards, I was like, "Vice?" I was like, "But they're..." And they're like, "Oh, yeah, we use a little bit of distribution, but they're key for a production partner." You know?
Mm-hmm. And so like, you know, media has always been this shell game in some ways in like you're being subsidized by something else. I mean, look at like Bloomberg, right? Yeah. Bloomberg's great. Totally. Great.
Great example. Yeah. It's four percent of the, of the revenue of Bloomberg LP. Yeah. You know, so we have to- Well-... we have to find new ways.
Yeah, but I, I think the, the way we have to think about this is every way of supporting serious journalism is a subsidy system. Mm-hmm. Every subsidy has weaknesses and strengths.
They're all dangerous to high-quality journalism. [chuckles] They come and go, and they work for a while, and then they stop working, which is what BuzzFeed discovered.
And we actually need new subsidy systems, and we need to try subsidies that maybe didn't even make sense decades ago.
And there's no perfect subsidy system, and it's something that we have to continue to tinker with.
[gentle music] So talk to me more about like how you think about like a subsidy system, right?
So, you know, there's advertising, like as you said, it's the original subsidy system. There are trade-offs in life, and there is no perfect model. Like- Mm-hmm...
anyone who tells me a benevolent billionaire is the answer, I'm like, "Well, generally billionaires don't become billionaires by their benevolence."
And pinning your hopes on that has proven time and again to not last, right? So- Mm-hmm... and it creates its own set of conflicts too, like, and managing conflicts is a reality. Advertising creates conflicts.
Subscription businesses, again, like if your mission, and you have to align it with your mission, if your mission is to make impact and have like, let's say, a healthy democracy, well, your paywall's working against your mission.
Totally. That's a big problem with paywalls, yeah. Yeah. Well, well, I-- The way I think of it is all of these systems have their weaknesses.
We should go into them with eyes open.Each one of them can work if you introduce the right controls and you have the right culture.
Even the billionaire system can work, but you have to be prepared for problems to arise.
And instead of trying to find the perfect subsidy system or look for the answer that's gonna deliver us to sound budget principles, we should assume that we're never going to find that, and we have to continually develop new subsidies.
Okay, so I have an idea, Jay And be aware of them. Yeah. I've sol- I've solved the problem. Okay.
We're just gonna tax the tech platforms, and we're gonna pool it into a giant fund, and that's gonna be the subsidy for news. That is a subsidy system for sure, and I would love that.
A tax on internet advertising that creates a kind of fund that funds public service journalism would be something that I think is worth a try, yeah. Yeah. So you are in favor of this?
The political prospects for it are zero. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So here's my- I'd love you to- Here, here's the sort of counter to it. Like, it would become, like, everything. It would become political.
Like, deciding who gets funded and who does not is where it's- Totally... like we see in Australia- And Canada... yeah, these things become political very quickly.
Uh, Rupert Murdoch somehow ends up at the front of the line. I don't know how this happens. [chuckles] Absolutely. Absolutely. Those are the dangers, those are the likely results.
We still have to conclude that as a possible solution. Look, this is an all hands on deck situation we're in with- Yeah...
public service journalism, and so I don't think we have the luxury of tossing one or another subsidy system out.
I, I think we have to actually work through the problems in all of them, whether it's government taxes, BBC style, billionaire style, a membership subscription, all of them.
We have to get accustomed to all of them and be savvy interpreters of their strengths and weaknesses. Yeah. And particularly on the local front- Yes... right?
I think there is more attempts right now at local than there have been. Like- There's a lot going on, yeah... and, you know, some green shoots, and I'll be like, "This is, like... This is great.
These are amazing models." I mean, a lot of them are hollowed out. They're extremely lightweight. Like, I mean- Mm-hmm...
I love newsletters and stuff like this, but, like, sorry, you're not gonna have three people that are replacing, like, big metro newspapers. That's just- No.
And at the same time, while I try to think of myself as somewhat optimistic, and it's a Friday afternoon, so I wanna be op-optimistic heading into the weekend, I'm not sort of holding my breath for, like, Alden or any other private equity firm to [chuckles]
I don't mean- Definitely not... I don't mean to speak ill of our private equity friends, but I'm not holding my breath. Now, there are some interesting things going on, though, in local news. For example,
uh, I think a lot-- several of the ch- the chains are occasionally reaching the point
where they've milked so much of the last profits from the property that they're willing to sell them to local people, which then restores local ownership, and that becomes a different game because the way they treat those properties is very different than the way the financial firms do.
Also, uh, there's a small number of metro dailies turned into news sites from the previous era of news production in certain cities where they are owned by people who live there and are sort of big wheels in, in that city.
And when you have that structure, the quality and the, the sort of resiliency of the news property is just totally different.
So if you look at cities like Seattle with Seattle Times, Minneapolis with the Star Tribune, Boston with The Boston Globe, to some degree Philadelphia, which has a sort of a nonprofit ownership.
Charleston, South Carolina is, is another one. These newsrooms are owned by people who are dedicated to those places
and wanna live there and want them to be better and wanna be big deals in those cities. And they end up supporting journalism in a much stronger way than the chains do. Yeah.
And they're learning through trial and error how to finance what they wanna do. So for example, The Seattle Times, if you look at it,
it's actually supporting a lot of its most valuable journalism, its investigative journalism to non-profit status. It has a, a The Seattle Times Investigative Fund- Hmm...
which you can contribute to like a nonprofit, and it, it funds, supports the highest value journalism that Seattle Times does, even though Seattle Times is a private company at the same time.
And so these institutions are moving into kinda like different relationships with their community because they're owned by people who care about that place.
Uh, and I just think it's an interesting dynamic, and it's so different than what the, uh, private equity firms are doing. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know if, like, more scale is gonna solve the issue.
Um- Scale is not gonna solve the local news problem. [chuckles] So- I don't see that happening. Yeah. No, no doubt.
So the other thing I wanted to get at is, beyond local is, you know, we have a few, some, you know, new models coming out, and I wanna get your take on a few- Mm-hmm... of them.
One is, and I know it's hard to, it's hard to judge publications, like, particularly before their launch, but even in their first year. What's your assessment of Semafor?
Does it have a reason for existence?Well, I noticed with Semafor that you don't hear much anymore about the original explanation of what it was, which was global in English and serving this target audience that nobody was addressing.
That was the original idea that Semafor sort of came forward with. People who speak English? Is that the... And, and went to college? Yeah, people speak English, went to college, and live all over the globe. That's us.
And yeah. And no, nobody is addressing this. [chuckles] No, I have no media. I decide to- [chuckles] It was just a strange claim to, to start with. But you don't, you don't see that going anymore.
And it's hard to know how it's doing, again, for the same reason. It has these investors, and right now it's, you know, it's burning through, I assume- Yeah...
the money that its investors gave them because they believe there's a future to this thing. But I mean, as a news product, as like a news product. As a news product, it's very professional.
I think the design of it is very attractive. And there's one thing about what they're doing that I think is super interesting, and that's the form they have, where you start with the news, and then you
switch to Ben's take on it. Yeah. And then you switch after that to what they call room for disagreement, which is other, you know, perspectives from around the subject.
And I think that's a really interesting idea, not, you know, one hundred percent original, but just good in its execution. And it makes clear something that we don't often talk about, which is that
journalists who have done the reporting for a subject also have the most interesting takes on it. Yeah. You know?
And it kind of fiddles with the news versus opinion, uh, distinction, which is the basis for so much journalism, by saying that actually the collector of news, their opinions actually make a big difference, too.
And it kinda suggests that whether it's Ben Smith himself or one of his reporters like Dave Weigel, they have a view of things. Right. And we are giving you that as well as the facts that they've collected.
And I think they, they sort of designed that in a, in an attractive way.
Uh, and I, and I do find a lot of it is very high quality, but that still leaves open the question, okay, so how does this business become sustainable? Right. We don't know the answer to that.
Yeah, but let's stick with the Semaform. I be- that's the, uh, the cringey sort of name they gave it. But, and because I do think it's an interesting trying to deconstruct the news article.
I think a lot of people have, have tried these- Yes... these versions. But I think that it's in service of this trust problem that, you know, been hearing about- Yes... for a long time and is real.
The-- it's, it's real that, you know, the numbers, I think Gallup had numbers, I think it's down the lowest it's been. It's down to like nineteen percent of like adults trust newspaper news. Mm-hmm.
So trying to separate out the sort of analysis and opinion, and I don't know, it could be getting older, but I do feel like there has been a lot more insertion of opinion in news pieces.
Now, we're all human beings, and we all have, like, viewpoints and stuff. So I think the quest for objectivity, quote unquote- Mm... has mostly been fruitless, and I don't know what replaces that.
I know you've, you've written and talked a lot about the problems with objectivity as a North Star. Yes. Mm-hmm. North Star is another cliche.
[gentle music] Well, I do have a notion of what could replace it.
I think if instead of the view from nowhere, we put together a number of different principles that kind of go together well, starting with a clear point of view, this is where I'm coming from, uh, is, is the way I call it.
Mm. Plus high standards of verification, plus open transparency about where we're coming from, as I, as I suggested earlier, plus openness to criticism
and, and response, willingness to discuss error, but also fighting back against people who are trying to destroy a free press.
If you put all of those things together, I think it's the start of a different system than what academics call neutral professionalism and others just call objectivity. But it's gonna take a while to get there.
But I, I do think if you put those things together, it's a little stronger and more resilient than the view from nowhere. One of the... A- and, and one w- just one more point on this. Yeah.
One of the weaknesses of the view from nowhere, or objectivity as it's sometimes called, is that because it says, "We don't have an investment in this. We don't have a take. We don't have a bias.
We don't have a point of view. We're just telling you the way it is," everything that disproves that becomes kind of like a way to break or, or discredit the news, uh, site.
Uh, and that's why I think here's where we're coming from, combined with high standards and verification, transparency, correction, being openness to criticism, is a better system, and eventually that will be seen.
Mm-hmm. But we're still a long way from that.
And there's still gonna be situations in whichFor this particular reporting beat, you have to stay on good terms with both sides, and so you have to kind of claim that you don't have any investment in either side, and, and that's- Yeah...
how you get your stories, and that situation is never gonna go away. No. Beet sweeteners are gonna be around forever. Beet sweeteners. Exactly. So [laughs] that's a, it's a coin of the realm, if you will. Right.
Like, sometimes if you're in the business, uh, you, you sort of see, like, I don't know, a Maggie Haberman story, and it's pretty clear that she's doing a beet sweetener because, uh, Jared and Ivanka are, like, some of her main sources.
But I don't know that for sure. I'm just observing what I see. I'm gonna pass in commenting on Maggie Haberman.
I think the counter to this is that a lot of the sort of criticism of the quote unquote bias in the media is bad faith, and it's, it's being done a lot of times in the political realm. Yes. I agree.
But at the same time, I do think that there is valid criticism of a lack of self-awareness and thin-skinnedness- Mm-hmm...
in the media, I mean, Maggie Haberman on Twitter is actually a great example, that really has injured the reputation, honestly, of a lot of these media organizations and has played into the bad faith critics, right?
Mm-hmm. So I was r- doing some reading before this podcast.
Brett Stevens had criticized the criticism against objectivity when he said, "We are not in the truth business," this is journalists, "at least not the sort with a capital T.
Our job is to collect and present relevant facts and good evidence.
Beyond that, truth quickly becomes a matter of personal interpretation, quote unquote, lived experiences, moral judgments, and other subjective considerations that affect all journalists but should not frame their coverage."
Is that possible? Is it possible to separate your lived experiences from your coverage?
Because, I mean, I think the counter to this is, okay, well, that's why we get a lot of news that comes from a particular set of lived experiences which oftentimes are, are elite and, and, and white and male, et cetera.
Mm-hmm. I think lived experience is important. I think making room for it in newsrooms is important.
I also think that a commitment to, to truth more-- and even more than that, what I call verification, is super important. And something interesting in that area is, is underway now where,
as you know, there's a lot of people being hired now, especially in metro news organizations, who are members of previously rare [chuckles]
species within newsrooms, like people who are Hispanic, Black- Mm-hmm...
part of communities that are rarely heard from within the news, and they are, of course, recruited into the newsroom because their perspective is needed in the product.
And then when they get there, they find that they're supposed to check that at the door. That's been a contradiction that minority journalists have had to face for a long time.
But now I think it's sort of coming to a head, and there's a, a young generation of journalists who are, for lack of a better term, you know, multicultural themselves in their outlook, many different colors, backgrounds, uh, tribes, ethnicities.
Mm-hmm. And they don't wanna just check their perspective at the door. They're not gonna really stand for that anymore. And the newsrooms need those people.
Uh, and I think a lot of that is coming to a head, and you see it occasionally in these controversies at newspapers- Yeah... uh, and newsrooms.
And, and that is a, a new dynamic because the f- young generation of journalists
used to want for themselves the same thing that the older generations, the editors wanted, and now I think there's more of a sort of parting of the road there. Yeah. And it's gonna be a factor in- Yeah...
journalism in the next few decades. Yeah. Well, as a couple middle-aged guys talking about younger people. Well, but- I mean, so, so something I j- Part of my business is to know the next generation- Yeah, I know...
as a teacher of them. Yeah. No, I know. Well, you spend more time with them. But I do wonder about the line between, like, the quote unquote activist journalist, right?
Because there, there's bringing your lived experiences, but this has come up in, in many newsrooms, and I do think there's something of a generational divide to this where, you know, you hear it like, "We're not advocates."
Mm-hmm. And I think, you know, The Times is going through this right now with a lot of internal criticism over- Mm-hmm... its trans coverage- Mm-hmm...
and trying to walk that line of, of being a newspaper, uh, and, and covering these issues and all of their complexity. How do you advise sort of getting that right?
Because as I get older, I keep in mind that I don't wanna be like Grandpa Simpson shaking my fist at the cloud. Right. [laughs] And yet at the same time- Well-...
some of the stuff lands a little differently with what I consider, frankly, activism. Like it's, it's- Yeah... advocacy. I try to start with a simple rule, which is doing journalism is not the same as doing politics.
Yeah. And anyone who makes light of that or doesn't realize that, it can create a lot of trouble, uh, for a newsroom. At the same time, things like
framing, uh, having a, a standard narrative, both sides-ism,
these are real problems that, uh, need to be addressed, and modern newsrooms have to have a language in which they can talk about such things without, uh, having to have this crude discussion about activism and advocacy where things are just sort of denounced or, uh, with that tag on them, and then they're supposed to disappear.
Uh, but I don't think that, uh, if you're a journalist, you can simplyequate what you're doing with what political advocates and activists do, I think that's a bad practice, uh, but at the same time, claiming to have, uh, no perspective is a bad practice too.
Mm-hmm. So that's, that's where the, you know, the need for intelligent leadership comes in.
[upbeat music] So one of the other new entrants that I want to get your take on because you had emailed me about them is the Messenger.
Now, Jimmy Finkelstein, who very briefly was, I guess, my boss's boss's boss at Adweek, uh, although we didn't have a lot of interactions. I mostly stayed in my cubicle.
But Jimmy had said basically an organizing principle was this idea that there is too much bias embedded in news.
Now, Jimmy, he goes to CNN's coverage of the border and then Fox News downplaying the Capitol riot, and he said, "I find that bias in the news is not so much what the people report but what they don't report."
So it's a question- Mm. -not of commission, but omission. Mm-hmm. Fair diagnosis? I think everything that's been said so far about the Messenger is inane- [chuckles]
-uh, useless for judging the final project and immature. And this idea [chuckles] that we're gonna be nonpartisan unlike everyone else is fatuous, and it's not unique to the Messenger. The- Yeah.
At different times, that same notion that what makes us different is that we're nonpartisan was said to be the key notion in News Nation, which is Nexstar.
CNN itself has said this is how we're gonna correct for our misdirection during the Trump years. Recently, Axel Springer made the same claim that w-what makes- Mm. -us different is that we are nonpartisan.
And actually each- I hear center right. I hear center right when I hear nonpartisan, [chuckles] which is fine.
I'm expecting from, uh, the Messenger clickbait journalism, you know, on steroids, uh, and- Well, let's, let's, let's unpack that.
So I mean, couldn't you make the case -- [clears throat] like, let's just say, 'cause I mean, they brought in, like, a, an editor from, like, People and stuff, and, like, I think a lot of, a lot of publishers should really look at the Daily Mail a-as, like, the Daily Mail has been successful, okay?
Sure. And, and the Daily Mail has been, has been successful. It is very different than the UK paper. It has nailed a format, okay? And it gets a ton of traffic to its homepage.
When we talk about having a direct audience connection, they have a direct audience connection, and th-they do what- Mm-hmm. -they do well. Why couldn't that stuff subsidize, like, quote-unquote, "serious news"?
If he feels he has a new subsidy system and that he can do clickbait better than Daily Mail is and that's what's gonna fund the newsroom, then more power to him. Then let's, let, let's describe it that way.
Like, you know, come out with it. Don't play, try and hide- Well- -what you're doing- Well- -behind these- Yeah, I know, but anytime I get- You know, these witless phrases like nonpartisan. I mean, it's marketing, right?
Okay. One man's- Well, I don't like that marketing then. One man's wit-- One man's witless... What did you call it? Witless... Witless nonpartisanship. Yeah, witless nonpartisanship is another man's marketing.
I mean, everyone who comes out with a new publication from Axios to Semafor to The Messenger to now Axel Springer coming to the US and stuff, they're always gonna be, "News is broken. We're gonna fix it," right?
I mean, that's just- Okay, but they're not all equally brain dead. [chuckles] This one is brain dead. Okay, so I...
It sounds, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but it sounds like at least, uh, you've got some, some skepticism of the Messenger system. [laughing] I, I, I don't th- Uh, well, let's just wait and see- Yeah.
-'cause you're right. They- Okay. Until they have a product that we can, you know, actually interact with, we don't really know what it's gonna be. Yeah. I too am skeptical- Yeah. -just to be fully transparent here.
We gotta talk Trump. I mean, we got to, right? So I hesitate to talk about the former guy, uh, but you, you've been pretty, uh, open and candid with your feeling that as a whole, the news industry did not handle
Trump because Trump is, is non-traditional in every s-sort of way possible. Mm-hmm. Um, and he was a, a, a... You know, to be fair, I think it was a real challenge to figure out how to cover Donald Trump.
I mean, let's just rewind to- Well, definitely. -two thousand and fifteen. I mean, remember when Huffington Post, I think it was still Huffington Post then, was relegating coverage- Yes.
-of him to the entertainment pages. Now, if you wanna- I wrote about it.
If you wanna talk about denting your credibility, [clears throat] okay, this man was elected president of the United States, whether you agree or not, and you as a news publication was saying, "We're gonna cover him in the entertainment section."
I have a different view of that. Nobody agrees with me on this, and I actually wrote about this at the time in twenty fifteen when Huffington Post made that decision.
But I, I looked at it a little bit differently, which is- Mm-hmm. Trump was different enough from
other candidates that you had to try and find a different principle or starting place for covering the guy, and maybe entertainment wasn't the right one or comedy, you know, did- wasn't the right one, but it was a lot better than proceeding with a system that he was clearly breaking in half.
And as a matter of fact, recently, like two weeks ago, the executive editor of NPR, which is a extremely conservative newsroom in t-its view of journalism, right? It's conservative about- Small c. Small c conservative.
Yeah, conservative about its journalism- Okay...
said that one of the things that he realized is that Trump broke the system in a lot of ways and, and that he himself saidThat NPR was slow to realize just how different a problem this was.
And that was a significant, uh- Mm-hmm... admission, and that happened a few weeks ago. But to, to get even more into the weeds on this,
in November twenty twenty-one, Jon Karl, who used to be head of the White House Correspondents' Association, he's the chief White House correspondent of ABC News.
In his book tour for his second book on Trump, was asked about what happens if Trump runs in, uh, twenty twenty-four, and he gave a very interesting, uh, answer. I have a, a few notes about it.
He said it's gonna be an incredible challenge because you're covering something-- someone who's essentially an anti-democratic candidate. Small D. And he... Yes, small D. Okay.
And he said, "You're, you're covering somebody who's running in a system that he's also trying to undermine." And Jon Karl said he, uh, Trump's gonna be perpetually lying during the campaign.
You have to figure out what to do about that. He asked, like, "What is a debate like with this version of Trump in it?" Which I think is, is a very live, uh, question.
And he went through all of these, like, really difficult things to adjust to, and Brian Stelter asked him, "Okay, so then what do we do?" And he said, "I don't know."
[chuckles] And I'm not aware of any of the big national newsrooms that have tried to solve some of these things and come forward with an approach that would address- Hmm...
the very things that Jonathan Karl was talking about. But clearly they see the problem because he gave a very good description- Yeah... of it. But what are we gonna do about this?
I don't sense that national newsrooms really have a good grasp on that yet, and here we are, the campaign is upon us. Yeah.
But I mean, if we go back to the last four years, like, calling him a liar and saying that, like, this, these are lies didn't seem to have much impact.
In fact, it probably actually made these utterances have more credence with his, his followers because, um- Yes... uh, he, he could- He, he incorporated it into his system, yes. You know? I agree with that.
And so it's like a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of thing, and I don't know what the answer is.
Like, I think it was well-meaning, but I don't know if, like, for instance, fact-checks are a good idea. Why are they a bad idea?
Well, because inevitably it gets overused, and it's used to undermine even further the credibility of the press when, you know, there's fact-checks about, say, the Wuhan lab leak theory. Mm-hmm. Right? Fact check.
No, it's not. You know, and it just inevitably, again, there's a lot of bad faith actors, I believe, out there that are trying to undermine the credibility of journalists.
I mean, I know they are just because it just doesn't make sense. And [clears throat] I mean, I think this is playing into, to that game to some degree. Yeah. Well, the problem of
how do you deal with bad faith actors who also represent a side is a very difficult challenge- Yeah...
in journalism because if you ignore them, then you are ignoring one of the sides that are in contest with other sides.
But if you fact-check them thoroughly and keep at it, then you can be accused of bias against that side. Yeah. Right? So this is a very tricky problem.
I don't think the press has solved it yet, uh, but we're heading into a period where it's going to be magnified a hundred X.
[gentle music] Okay, so Fox was just ordered to pay Dominion, uh, seven hundred and eighty-seven point five million dollars, um, not gonna have to apologize.
Do you consider Fox News a journalistic organization? I don't.
Explain to my mom and to others why Fox News is not a journalistic organization outside of obviously the evening programming, which is opinion, and it's a different beast. What's your mom's name? Nancy.
Nancy, the reason Fox is not a news organization is it doesn't care if what it says is true. That's why. And if you don't care whether what you say is true, you can't be in the news business.
You can be in business, you can have an audience, you can make money, you can be on scene and be part of the White House, but you're not a news organization if you don't care if what you're saying is true.
And the run-up to the trial produced a lot of evidence for, uh, what I'm saying. Their concern was not, is there anything to these wild charges- Mm-hmm... about voting machines and Dominion?
Uh, their, uh, problem with it was, uh, our audience is angry at us. And Fox News has not developed a mature enough relationship with its audience where it can say, "You won't like this, but this is the fact.
This is the truth." Mm-hmm. And sometimes in the news business, you have to do that, and you have to have a bond strong enough with your audience that you can do that, and it won't be a crisis.
But at Fox News, it was a crisis. And as for this distinction between the news side of Fox and the opinion side, I don't buy that as an analytical tool.
That is not a good description of what's going on here because in this case, in this story of the twenty-twenty election, we learned through the Dominion trial that the so-called opinion hosts were actually withholding their opinion about the evidence in this case.Because they knew it would upset their audience.
So that's not opinion journalism when you refuse to even share your opinions [chuckles]. And so that distinction doesn't work either. Mm-hmm. S-so no, I don't consider Fox a news organization.
I consider it a very powerful company that is heart of the MAGA movement and the commercial arm of it. Yeah. And you don't think this applies to, say, an MSNBC?
I mean- Well, anyone who believes that should compare how verification is treated by MSNBC and how verification is treated by Fox. Okay.
But did M-MSNBC like, I don't know, retract any of this stuff, like with Rachel Maddow and, and, and all the Russia dossier stuff? I don't recall any retractions. Okay. Uh, no, I don't recall any retractions. Okay.
Yeah, it's a tough one. I don't know if you're gonna sway, uh, my mom, but we'll see. Uh- [chuckles] I tried. [laughs] Yeah. No, she's, she's an independent and, and she just likes Brett Baier. Let's talk about- Okay...
Twitter's impact on, on news over the years. I think it's kind of been disastrous, but [laughs] I'd like to hear your, your take before I give you my take.
To me, this is a very complex question, as like a lot of different things- Yeah... uh, went on.
One of the things that happened with the, the Twitter era in news was that journalists had to draw much closer to their audience and to the people who read them and rely on them and interact with it in a way that they, they really didn't before.
Well, a part of their audience. Okay. A part of their audience. Um- I mean, Twitter is a very strange place. Uh, I'm not a Twitter equals America person- [laughs] Okay, good...
so you, you don't have to convince me of that. Uh, but uuuuh, that was part of it. Uh, it also, as people have said, in-increased kind of the journalist to journalist professional coterie, uh, problem in journalism.
That was- Yeah... another effect of it.
It also, for me, as a press critic, Twitter has been great, not only because people, uh, who will listen to me can be found there, but the tools you had were effective for press criticism.
For example, the quote tweet, which a lot of people say was part of the problem at, at Twitter, is great for me because I can take an example of journalism being done and then comment on it in the same frame, and that was really useful to me.
I think also that Twitter empowered people with a lot of knowledge, especially academics, specialists, to have a voice in the news without going through the journalists, and that was a significant thing as well.
And then, you know, it also introduced like the traffic game and the evils of virality to a lot of people who weren't ready for that at all. And finally, it's a very demanding form in my opinion.
Writing on Twitter in originally one hundred and forty characters and two hundred and eighty characters and, and having to anticipate responses is a very demanding set of constraints for, uh, writers, and that was one of the things that really sucked me into Twitter, was just how hard it was to do it well.
Mm-hmm. And now, of course, it's all being dismantled piece by piece, and pretty soon it'll be dead. Yeah. It feels like we're at the end of a few different eras. They're overlapping. I would agree with that. Yeah.
But the Twitter era, I personally am like good riddance. And like I, I credit- Are you? Oh, I credit Twitter a lot like with, you know, you know, it helped me personally in my career and, and- Mm...
and just to sort of de-commoditize myself, to be honest with you, because I think this profession commoditizes people. Mm-hmm. At the same time, it, it became a drag.
It became a lot of dunking and a lot of like a-adversarial bad faith stuff that... I compare it to menthol cigarettes and like nobody wakes up the next day and is like, "You know, I wish I had another menthol cigarette."
[laughs] I gotta sometimes feel that way, but that's my own Twitter problem. I understand all of those things. They're all true. It's, it's very conflicted.
All right, so final thing and then I'll let you go is- Mm-hmm... is about membership and subscription, right? There's no like one thing that is going to solve.
I think that one of the biggest challenges when you talk about business models and news and just publishing in general is a lack of alignment and getting alignment between the different stakeholders and in particular aligning with your audience's interests is, to me, critical to making any good product, and the same goes for news.
And I think- Mm-hmm... I think that membership can do that. But explain to me like sort of how you sort of divide membership versus subscription.
I, uh, ran for four years a membership puzzle project, which is a grant funded attempt to articulate what membership was and why it was different. And the way I explained it is subscription is a product relationship.
You pay your money, you get a product. When you're not satisfied with it, you stop paying. We-I think we know a lot about how product relationships work, and it's a very important way to fund journalism.
Membership is different in that you join the cause 'cause you believe in the importance of the work.
And the reason that distinction matters is that membership does not necessarily imply a paywall, and that's important for democracy.
And so with membership, you find a portion of the audience that is willing to subsidize it for the rest. And we do know about this system because it's the system that has sustained public radio for a very long time.
People contribute to their local NPR station. Yeah.
They are quite aware that others are listening to it who are not contributors, but it's fine because they believe in the importance of public radio, and they want it to existAnd I think that that is a different system from the subscription system.
And the reason that I spent four years studying membership is that I think it's a viable subsidy system, but I also think it's distinct from subscription.
And if we mix those two things up, we will lose a possible source of subsidy that is really important. I'm also very interested...
I was never able to get enough people to try it to see if it really could work, but I'm, I'm really interested in
people who believe in the importance of the journalism contributing to a membership site with something other than dollars,
meaning contributing your time, contributing your expertise, contributing the fact that you know a lot about something. And I would love to see a new site emerge which, uh, has members in that sense. Yeah.
It's funny that you say the blurred lines between the two. I always go back to, like, the, The Wall Street Journal, which describes their subscriptions as, like, memberships. And I'm like, "Come on." But it's not.
You got... Like, it's- It's not. It's, it's straight subscription. I mean, it's going on corporate credit cards. Like, it's fine. Totally, yeah.
But journalism is very capable of mixing those two things up and using the same words for two different things- Yeah... which I think is a mistake. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons- Wow...
that I said, "We should talk about this." Yeah. That's when marketing gets involved, basically. [laughs] Mm-hmm. Yeah. Marketing will, will do it, for sure. Yeah.
And I think, you know, it's, it's a great point with, with membership because I think you just see this even in, like, Substack, right? Is, is, you know- Yeah... a lot of what works is not really subscription.
It's somewhere between- It's not... Patreon and a subscription. And you look at, like, Letters From An American, right? It's, I think it's one of the most popular- Mm-hmm... political- Paywall there. Yeah.
And, you know, she, she's got, like, the most po- and she has no paywall. And, and people- Yeah... just want this to exist.
And I do believe, I'm interested to see how that can translate with more institutional brands because I would always say, you know, my previous place, like, we could say we put up some kind of paywall and do nothing, and a certain number of people would convert.
Mm-hmm. That number percentage-wise is far lower than it is for an individual, I believe. Mm-hmm. I can't prove this out with any data, but- Interesting idea.
Well, we have a kind of test of this, which is the, uh, The Guardian. The Guardian- Yeah... isn't really a paywall site, and the people who support it support it 'cause they think The Guardian should exist.
And so I think that there's something there that you can combine the fact that I believe people trust other people more than they trust faceless institutions. It just- Yeah... it just makes sense.
It's the same way on every survey, they hate all politicians, but they like theirs. Right. [laughs] You know? And there's a- There's an element of that in journalism, too.
If you ask them about their local news product, like their local television news, they like that, but they hate the medium. Yeah. All right, I could do this all day, but I, it, we're getting up against an hour, Jay.
Uh, you gotta come back on, and we'll, and we'll talk about all sorts of other issues, and maybe we'll convince my mom [laughs] of Fox News. I don't know. We'll see.
With a direct address to her, I think that that's gonna be persuasive. All right. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it, Jay. Okay. Take care. Thank you so much for listening. Again, please do send me your feedback.
My email is bmorrissey@therebooting.com. Thanks a lot to Jay Sparks, who is producing this podcast.
If you're thinking about doing your own podcast, and again, they're hard to grow, but the depth of engagement is amazing, so don't let that scare you off, get in touch. Jay can help you out. He is at podhelpus.
That is podhelp.us.
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