5 questions for 2025
About media—whatever that is—of course
Good morning.
I’ve sent two newsletters so far this year and both feel like they’re a little more ponderous than I generally like to get here.
So today what I want to do is kind of take a step back. Maybe it’s not a step back but more of just a minute to pause and lay out five questions/media storylines I’m going to be asking myself and paying attention to this year.
This doesn’t include things like “what will happen to TikTok?”, which while major news, isn’t necessarily one of the major themes or questions I’m wondering about this year.
We’ll check back in on these in the summer and see where things are. I’m sure all of these will be irrelevant or have morphed wildly by then.
Will conservative media and entertainment continue to dominate?
I wrote about this a little back in November when I talked about how the future has already been here for some time.
At that time, I cited a Pew Research study that showed that a majority of news influencers are conservative and Taylor Lorenz’s further breakdown of the study.
In December month, a writer at the New York Times spent a week using Rumble as his primary source of news. And just as recently as this month, James Carville tipped his hat to the conservative media ecosystem.
I won’t pretend to be familiar with all of the conservative media outlets and influencers but it just seems like so much of what is talked about from what would be called liberal news influencers is reactions to messaging that begins on Fox News or from other conservative podcasts or information sources.
People like Aaron Rupar spend their days capturing video from Fox News and posting bits of pithy commentary around them. All of this gets liberal news information seekers riled up. And this is all kind of packaged up as “resistance” journalism.
It all kind of makes my head spin. Pointing out absurd statements from talking heads seems valuable I guess—but doesn’t that also spread that stuff further? Doesn’t that further the reach of Fox News and the voices they are bringing on?
I don’t think there needs to be a “liberal Joe Rogan” or whatever. But I’m interested to see if there is any kind of “liberal” media that comes together that can even match the consistency and and pervasiveness of conservative media today. Doesn’t seem likely.
Is reporting a valuable product?
And you could add: will people care about reporting vs. media as another part of this storyline. As I said last week, I think Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei at Axios summed this up best back in December when they were talking about the state of the information space after Elon Musk was able to kill the government spending bill in Congress through a tweet.
“This reality highlights the difference between media (what people consume) and reporting (a set of standards for pursuing fact-based information). In the new world order, media and reporting are tossed together with a mix of truth, opinion, and nonsense.”
There is so much information out there now. It comes from podcasts that we listen to or watch on YouTube on our SmartTVs. It comes from TV broadcasts that are structured like the news broadcasts of old but are really closer to podcasts with lots of ad breaks and a ton of guests. There are countless Substacks—with more starting each week—written by people who are experts in one thing or another or who claim to be experts in one thing or another that send out information every day.
So much of that is not reporting. And I wonder if, as the People vs. Algorithms guys did back in November, consumers will find reporting to be a valuable product in the future.
It certainly becomes valuable in moments of crisis like we’re seeing with the Los Angeles fires. But even that reporting gets mixed in with all of the media around who’s to blame for the fire or how the fires are going to impact local, state, and national politics.
And maybe that’s where we continue to head: toward a world where opinion and entertainment based on something pulled from a diminishing set of reporters is more valuable than the people actually gathering the information and delivering it.
I’d like to say there is some kind of opening there to create a good product that is all about reporting and reporting alone. But I don’t know if anyone wants that.
The editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News seems to think so and I guess the AP had a good election night.
What is the new dominant surface of the internet going to be?
I covered this last week, but feeds are really the dominant surface of the internet today.
However, as Troy Young laid out, that’s only because AI chat agents don’t have an ability to feed you content yet.
Over the course of this year, feeds will most likely stay dominant. But will there be a product that emerges that marks the beginning of a shift toward the new dominant surface of the internet?
Will independent publishers continue to cause legacy publishers to decline in competition over subscriber and affiliate dollars?
This is something I think about pretty much all the time now.
I’ve said this before but I work for a brand where pretty much everyone who was once associated with the brand and very popular with audiences has now left the brand and started their own individual brand and subscription service.
Now, perhaps you need the exposure that an established media brand can give you in order to create a foundation for that personal brand and business.
But maybe that was truer 5 or 6 years ago than it is today.
People are generating serious revenue from affiliate links in their newsletters. And there were almost too many gift guides to count on Substack this past holiday season.
And smart places, like Puck, are acquiring individual newsletters to bolster their offering to subscribers.
In the food space, there are seemingly endless, high-quality subscription-based newsletters that are in direct competition with a legacy brand, like the one I work for, and ones like the New York Times.
There’s only so many subscriptions you can pay for. Do you want to pay for the brand-name expertise and catalog breadth and depth of a legacy media organization or do you want the more direct connection of an individual providing their specific curation and recommendations?
Can anyone actually define what “the media” is today?
I noticed something on Substack Notes back in December. Taylor Lorenz was defending the characterization of her comments on the murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson. As she was defending herself, she referred to “the media.”
I found this interesting because as someone who has worked in media I’ve always thought of a reporter like Taylor Lorenz as someone in the media. I have been following her career from The Atlantic to the New York Times to the Washington Post and now to her own User Mag on Substack.
She has been one of the more prominent journalists to authentically cover the creator economy, for lack of a better term, for several years now. And she is now, since she has created an outlet of her own, a creator in her own right.
But if someone from her background is referring to other outlets as “the media” then what is the media?
This brings us back to the quote I referenced earlier from Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei that defines media as what people consume and reporting as a set of standards for fact-based information.
Or does “the media” in certain cases become a derogatory term for information that you simply do not like or agree with?
If chat is perhaps the emerging dominant surface of the internet, is a conversation with ChatGPT a media experience? Is it that much different from being in a subscriber-only chat on Substack?
There’s obviously a lot to explore within that and it’s something I want to try to do a bit more this year. I realize that I use the term “media” or “media industry” too loosely and that its become one of the biggest blur words out there,