Who will be your internet sherpa?
Plus: A notebook dump!
Good morning.
I hope you all had a great end to the year and start to 2025. I’m back from Long Island and a few days in New York City.
Quick dining summary: Dhamaka remains undefeated, Winner really is something, should’ve gone to East Harbor Seafood Palace years ago, Lola is a great new dining refuge in the Flatiron, and eating at a shockingly quiet Rucola late on New Year’s Day was a wonderful experience.
There’s a freeze warning here in Austin. We escaped unscathed last year. Let’s hope the same holds this year.
Alright, enough small talk. Let’s get to it. We’ve got a focus on one story I really liked from the past few weeks and then an end of 2024/early 2025 notebook dump of links.
Probably the most clarifying thing I’ve read in the last two weeks was a piece by Chris Cillizza called “2025 will be the year media changes.”
I found Cillizza’s piece clarifying because he was able to sum up and give a brief history to what has brought us to the current moment we are experiencing on the internet and in media.
Cillizza bases his piece around a quote from Matt Rhoades back in 2008. Rhoades was communications director for Mitt Romney’s presidential bid. And the quote Rhoades gave that Cillizza focuses on is this: “A link is a link.”
Why is this so important? Cillizza explains.
“What did he mean? Basically, this: That the obsession with getting a story in the New York Times or on CNN’s website was a relic. That the only thing that really mattered — in the context of a campaign at least — was getting a link from somewhere.
In Rhoades’ world, that link could come from a local paper. A conservative website. Almost anywhere. The origin of the link mattered less than his ability to send that link around to news aggregators — the Drudge Report was the king of that world back then — which, in turn, would pressure “mainstream” media, even then under pressure for clicks, to write something too.
The origin of the original link? It wouldn’t really matter in the end.
And, perhaps more importantly, even if the original link didn’t drive the bigger media outlets to write something, Rhoades could still send it around to national and local reporters as well as — and this is critical — major donors to Romney’s campaign.
Because, ultimately, a link was just a link. Did a major donor care whether it was a link to a story in the Louisville Courier Journal or the Washington Post? Not really.
What Rhoades understood was that the media world was flattening. Sure, he’d rather have a favorable story in the New York Times about Romney because everyone would immediately see it. But he could take a favorable story about Romney — or, more likely, an unfavorable story about one of Romney’s rivals — in, say, the Santa Fe New Mexican and make it work almost as effectively as that Times story.”
I dropped all of that here because, like I said, I find that example to be an incredibly clarifying way to think about the current circumstances of navigating information each day.
As I wrote about last year, the future has been here for some time. And, as Cillizza goes on to say in his piece, “the simple fact is that the slow decline of mainstream media is no longer slow. It is rapidly accelerating as the existing business model, which was already problematic, is further eroded by the rise of news influencers on alternative media platforms…The issue, of course, is not just that there are LOTS more platforms—and a LOT less gatekeepers—for news now.”
What I like about Cillizza’s piece also is that he doesn’t claim to have any answers for how a major media outlet solves this problem. He is simply pointing out the situation and noting that it’s going to take a lot of work and thinking to figure out how to evolve and survive.
He goes on to give an example of how a short video he made in 10 minutes about “not pushing hard enough to get answers on President Joe Biden’s mental and physical health in the run-up to his 2024 reelection bid” led to a national conservative media news story.
Cillizza finishes his piece by saying one of the ways to navigate the current landscape is, “to find people you trust to help guide you through this information and content avalanche.”
But, of course, the issue is—there are lots of sources of information for people to trust. And everyone has a different motive.
It makes me think that there’s probably going to be a growing need—maybe at schools, maybe at nonprofits, maybe at businesses—for people focused on teaching media literacy. That’s probably not news or an original thought at all, but each day I see and hear more people feeling overwhelmed with the amount of information they receive.
I know last year there were times I’d be reading a random Substack post I was served on Substack Notes and nodding my head at a point someone was making and being like, “Wait, a second—who the hell is this person?”
If there’s a chance for avalanches everywhere and everyone is trying to sell you something—then who’s supposed to be your sherpa?
One quote on what media is
“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.”
This is from an Axios piece on Elon Musk’s impact on the government spending bill back in December. But I want to come back to this idea of what media even means in 2025 later on this month or in February.
More links to clean out the notebook
Google and Wirecutter partnered on a last minute local shopping initiative. Wonder if there are more partnerships like this to come in the affiliate space in 2025.
The Wrap did a nice summary of all the success YouTube has seen on SmartTVs in 2024 and why it is poised to become the major streaming service of the future.
Digiday covered how Reddit is trying to corner the online sport community market. There are three places that I spend the most time consuming sports coverage: Spotify, Reddit, and The Athletic. Reddit is BY FAR the place I spend the most time following my favorite teams.
The People vs. Algorithms praised Timothy Chalomet’s digital media savvy in promoting A Complete Unknown (2024).
At Feed Me, Emily Sundberg had the CEO of beehiiv, Tyler Denk, conduct one of her guest lecture series entries.
The New York Times covered how media outlets are targeting newsletters at C-suite subscribers.
Search Engine Journal ran a piece looking at the state of SEO and AI search as a new year begins.