Everything is kinda media now
And it all like depends on your definition, man.
Good morning.
I hope everyone had a good weekend.
Thanks to everyone who’s written to me about the 40 for 40 posts I’m doing. It’s not the most original thing in the world, but it gives me joy, it's fun to do, and what the hell else am I going to use this Substack for?
OK, let’s get to today’s newsletter.
This week, Brian Morrissey of The Rebooting, Ben Smith of Semafor, and Peter Kafka of Business Insider and the Channels podcast, collaborated on a multi-part podcast discussion.
The approach they took was to run each part on each of their podcast feeds to help with awareness and discoverability.
As Morrissey explains on the intro to his part, marketing a podcast is hard. I know first hand. People aren’t going to discover or listen to your podcast by just posting about it on social platforms or sending it out in an email. They need to find it in their own travels on listening apps on YouTube or via social video. And so the more you can work with other people to drive awareness through crossover episodes, the better.
That’s not the point of today’s newsletter. The point is the title of Morrissey’s portion of this three-headed podcast episode: the blurring of institutional and independent media.
None of the conversation Morrissey leads with Smith and Kafka is new. It touches on a lot of what I wrote about earlier this month when looking at Kyle Chayka’s thoughtful piece on what it means to be an independent journalist now.
But Morrissey lays it out pretty clearly: independent journalists or media personalities have tools to be more and more professional and institutional media is trying to be more authentic and direct with their audience. Independent media doesn’t have all the infrastructure to handle the business and scaled production side of things and institutional media moves to slow or is too restricted by “brand” to be truly innovative.
So both sides kind of need each other and the best path forward will be when independents and institutions realize this and find meaningful, equitable partnerships.
Morrissey even offers the best description I’ve seen of what a “creator” is.
“‘Creator’ is a catchall term that came into use to separate YouTube performers from Instagram selfie people, aka influencers. Outside of the YouTube world, creator is an awkward label for a journalist who sets up shop on Substack. While I’m sure Subtack likes the use of Substacker, I don’t think that fits either.”
But the challenge, at this moment, for institutional media is summed up pretty well by Morrissey. “Media is media. Institutional media will continue to market how their brands confer trust. Sometimes. The market ultimately determines that. And surveys I see do not back up that institutional media has much of a moat there, particularly in news. Independent media will professionalize on a presentation layer. And the reality is when word of Elon Musk and Donald Trump going to war broke, FBI director Kash Patel was speaking to Joe Rogan and JD Vance was with Theo Vonn.”
Brands are both powerful and restricting. And being too precious about brand can limit innovation and slow down progress.
But sometimes brand is all you have. Though, I’m not sure how much that matters if you move too slowly to keep your brand relevant and top of mind for people who are getting their information and entertainment from a wider and wider variety of sources and surfaces.
For many brands, as Google Zero approaches, it's time to get moving.
One creator tipping point quote
“[M]y prediction is creator-produced media will become increasingly indistinguishable from traditional media as creators are able to invest larger budgets into their content production. At some point the term ‘Creator Economy’ will start feeling anachronistic since it will all just seem like one big blended media.”
This one is from Simon Owens’s newsletter where he assesses a piece in the The Guardian that reports that “[i]n 2025, for the first time, more than half of content-driven advertising revenue will come from user-generated platforms and content rather than professionally produced content.” This all just builds on the conversation between Morrissey, Smith, and Kafka. Right now, and perhaps for the next few years, the source of content isn’t going to matter much as long as it is relevant, entertaining, or otherwise compelling to someone. What will matter more is if it's human-made or AI-made. And, even that might be debatable. I mean, people are watching whatever this is.
More media links
As part of their three-part podcast, Brian Morrissey, Ben Smith, and Peter Kafka talked about bundles on the Mixed Signals podcast.
And on the Channels podcast, they talked about the bright spots in media.
The Washington Post has talked with Substack about “hosting” their writers in their opinion section. This is the right idea generally but somehow I think this with either go nowhere or get botched somehow.
Like I wrote about last week, Yahoo keeps doing lots of stuff.
Jarrod Dicker, formerly of the Washington Post and now a crypto/innovation guru thinker guy, wrote about the changing paradigm on the internet.
On the Grill Room podcast, Dylan Byers and Julia Alexander talked to Lauren Sherman about Vanity Fair and the company I am employed by.