Turns out the future was already here
"Oh, I once had a lot but the future's just not—not what it used to be"
Good morning.
The 2024 United States Presidential election is over and I know a lot of people feel a lot of different ways about it.
I’m not going to get into any of that because that’s not what I do here and frankly it’s not what I’m good at. (In all honesty, I’m not sure how good I am at whatever it is I’m doing here in the first place.)
What I do want to get into are what the election suddenly seems to reveal about the state of media.
What the 2024 election being in the rearview mirror seems to suddenly put into stark relief is that the future is here—and it’s seemingly been here for some time.
Just after midnight on November 6th, Elon Musk tweeted “You are the media now.”
This tweet has become Musk’s motto du jour apparently. And it's been referenced in a lot of coverage about what the future of the media will look like. Some of that coverage treats this declaration as novel.
But it's not novel, it's been true for a while except it was kind of hard to fully grasp that a change had occurred. And, like always, one specific event in history put the fine point on a large, gradual change.
Everyone is creating media. Everyone is covering things. Everyone is giving their takes. And they are doing it in all kinds of formats and forms. As I wrote about a few months ago, this is especially true in a place like Substack which has become a hyperactive content subscription marketplace.
But that’s been happening, more or less, for over a decade now. What’s more acute right now is that people don't need major media organizations as much as they used to. Writers don’t have to wait for their pitches to be accepted—they can publish a think piece and put it behind a paywall, pull the lever, and potentially makes as much as they would’ve crossing their fingers to get $300 for 1,000 words.
What Musk was saying with his tweet was that liberal media (whatever that means) is over. But what it actually means is that over the last 10 years we’ve shifted from what the People v. Algorithms guys called “packaged media” to “networked media.”
It’s been awhile since I read David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be (1979) but the biggest revelation when reading that book was that mainstream media, as I had come to know and understand it, had only really been around since the 1940s.
What we can, I think, see now is the end of the phase of media that defined the 20th century. We are now firmly rooted in the next phase of media.
In The Atlantic earlier this month, Charlie Warzel wrote a piece called “The Media’s Identity Crises” (on-page headline was “Bad News”).
In it, he goes over the fact that this election was deemed the “podcast election” and all of the factors (lack of trust due to various behind-the-scenes biases perceived or real, bad economics, etc) that have led to the slow decline of mainstream media.
Traffic to mainstream media brands is on the decline pretty much everywhere. And Warzel sums up the moment succinctly when he says, “An influencer economy has emerged on social-media platforms. It’s not an ecosystem that produces tons of original reporting, but it feels authentic to its audience. Traditional journalism operates with a different playbook, typically centered on strong ethical norms and a spirit of objectivity; the facts are meant to anchor the story, even where commentary is concerned.”
People don’t necessarily want fact-checked expertise anymore. What they seem to want is an authentic voice that speaks into their ear (podcast) or that conveys a message to them through a screen (YouTube, TikTok, IG) that feels true to what they are experiencing.
I listen to podcasts for multiple hours a day. If I can’t sleep, I listen to a podcast. Why? Because it is comforting on some level to have a familiar voice or voices in my ear.
And, as Warzel again explains, all of that content is very different from what mainstream media once was. “Independent online creators aren’t encumbered by any of this hand-wringing over objectivity or standards: they are concerned with publishing as much as they can, in order to cultivate audiences and build relationships with them. For them, posting is a volume game. It’s also about working ideas out in public. Creators post and figure it out later; if they make mistakes, they post through it. Eventually people forget.”
Yeah, we we forget a lot of things don’t we?
On Monday, Pew Research came out with a study that showed that the majority of news influencers are conservative. And, as The New Republic wrote, that might be way Donald Trump won the 2024 United States Presidential election. (Again, not getting into election speculation—just talking about media narratives.)
Taylor Lorenz broke down the Pew Research study in detail. She called out the fact that men comprised 63% of all news influencers and that 4 in 10 adults get their news from news content creators.
Axios called this the “game of telephone” election. As Neal Rothschild writes, “the scattering and flattening of media has created a labyrinth where information trickles from primary sources to news media to non-journalist media including YouTubers, podcasters, TikTokers and X accounts—and eventually to conversations between family and friends.”
He cites a stat from a survey conducted by The Civic Health Institutions Project that found that “friends and family” was the top source of election information among 25,000 adults sampled—above news media.
The New Yorker wrote about this when they discussed the “ambience of information” surrounding the 2024 election.
We live in a swirl of information from sources with varying degrees of credibility. And credibility in that environment ultimately comes down to each person: Who do you trust? Who do you read every day or every week? Who do you like to listen to? Who do you like to watch?
I’m guilty of this in my own mundane way: I’ll listen to random history, movie, or music podcasts on Spotify just based on searching for a topic I’m interested in. In some cases I don’t even care who they are, I just want to hear people talk about something I like.
Depending on who you like and what you like and what they say about what you like, that becomes truth—and in lots of cases that then becomes “news.”
The People v. Algorithms guys covered a lot of this in an episode last week.
We are now living in a present, in a future, where influencers, individuals, and creators can hold people’s attention better than mainstream media brands that have achieved a certain position in society since around World War II.
In this world, as the People v. Algorithms guys discussed, mainstream media organizations (like, say, CNN) have a chance if they get out of the entertainment business and firmly invest in the news gathering business.
AI can summarize. Influencers and creators can entertain. But not everyone can report. There is value in reporting on what is actually happening around the world vs. trying to add an entertainment layer on top of it. And that may become more valuable as AI content rises and more and more individuals are creating content around their personalities, professions, passions, hobbies, and beliefs, and trying to monetize it through service or entertainment.
The question is: how valuable?
At the end of the day, nobody knows anything and especially not me. I’m not sure where this is all going to end up.
It doesn’t make me happy to talk about things in this way. But this is where we are. And I realize, now, that we’ve been here for some time.
Think about it: What brands of media do you love? What media brands hold your attention?
Or are you, like me, jumping from source to source and surface to surface all while getting a range of opinions and thoughts and takes from people you have a tangential relationship to or even awareness of? And have you been doing it for years?
And do you, every so often, find one or two people who talk to you in a way that feels familiar and comforting in some way or who give you the exact service you are looking for? And have you, maybe, just maybe, been doing that for years?
Turns out the future’s already been here for some time.
One good quote about the here, the now, the point at which all future plunges into the past
“As large as The New York Times has become, it’s 11 million subscribers in a nation of 300 million people. Obviously its influence goes beyond its subscriber base, but the idea that even the biggest publications can only speak directly to a limited portion of the populace is just terribly old news…It’s become more fractured and more intensified by the way the media landscape has played out in recent years, for all the technological, political and economic reasons you know only too well. And anybody with any sense knows it’s true, right?”
That quote is from David Remnick, the editor in chief of The New Yorker, in Semafor’s excellent overview of the current state of the media.
More links from the here, the now, the point at which all future plunges into the past
The Wrap reported on how ESPN is using an AI avatar called FACTS to present stats and information breakdowns. It is already using AI for game summaries. No one tell Bob Ryan. ESPN used to be the place that built a brand around SportsCenter personalities and now they have an AI avatar called FACTS.
Speaking of AI, The Media Copilot wrote a comprehensive piece about how AI is already being used in newsrooms and recommendations for how it should be used.
On Puck’s The Grill Room podcast, Dylan Byers talked with Axios cofounder Jim VandeiHei about the current state of media. I highly recommend listening to this.
The Verge reports that Spotify is going to start paying creators based on how much engagement their videos receive from paid subscribers. “There’s uncertainty about how much Spotify plans to pay video creators, however. The company isn’t explaining exactly how it calculates video payouts.” There’s something to this strategy for brands—if they do it fairly and equitably which I am 100% sure Spotify will.
There is a new app called Particle that will be focused on using AI to summarize the news. Oh, what Axios hath wrought! In all honesty, and as much as I hate, this is a good idea that matches what consumers want.
At Axios, Sara Fischer reported that beehiiv, one of the main competitors to Substack, is starting a multi-million dollar fund to invest in journalists using their platform.
At her Substack, Leigh Stein reported on why literary agents are creating content now. Always thought agents should be doing more of this to improve the quality of the submissions they received: as a pitching writer it's hard to find information about agents and if you have a chance to learn more about them you’ll probably send them better pitches. But it is a sign of the times that everyone needs to be creating “shoulder” content on what they do.
I really enjoyed your take on authenticity vs. objectivity. Super interesting! Thanks, Matt.