I’ll be at the DCN Next Summit today to conduct separate interviews with People Inc chief innovation officer Jon Roberts and Dow Jones chief growth officer Scott Havens. Hope to see some of you there.
I spoke to a media studies class at New York University last night. I sensed a lot of apprehension in the room from students who are about to enter an economy where leading tech CEOs continue to claim 50% of entry-level jobs will be erased. Few said they were interested in jobs in journalism.
The journalism profession is in a tough spot. Media and information services are more valuable than ever – Silicon Valley is busy building an alternative media ecosystem for a reason – only the original reporting journalism produces is severely undervalued in the marketplace. In my trip to the International Journalism Festival last week, I had a debate over whether journalism should embrace the market forces that have leeched power from the profession or retreat from the market to find subsidies.
Journalism, like many craft professions, can be too insular. This is not unique: See the tech industry. Its embrace of media runs the risk of falling victim to its own insularity, as a gulf widens between the young people who are scared of what AI is doing to their prospects and the tech elite who stand to accrue more power and wealth from the AI economy they are pushing.
Couple notes on upcoming events from The Rebooting because “new media” means doing many things at once:
Next week, The Rebooting is running a video series at Possible in Miami Beach in collaboration with EX.CO. We will have a shooting location at Nobu, part of the sprawling Fontainebleau complex, and are opening it up to guests during the day who need a place to grab a coffee or snack and assure the team back at the office you’re working hard even if the beach is right out front. Send a note to Marci Chocky if you’d like to be added to the guest list: [email protected].
On May 13, we are holding TRB Morning Salon: AI Strategies in New York City. We had a successful first edition of the Morning Salon. The format is 30 executives gathered for candid conversations about what’s working in applying AI to their businesses. Participants include top executives from The Wall Street Journal, People Inc, Time, The Atlantic, Morning Brew and more. We have a few slots left for publishing executives. Please fill out this form if you’re interested in invitations to our activations there and elsewhere during the year.
Cannes is coming. We have live podcast recordings we are doing at the Civic Science yacht, Bloomberg House and People Inc villa. We will be hosting a media leaders dinner as well and maybe a mixer. Fill out the event interest form to be updated on our events schedule. Get in touch to discuss sponsorship options: [email protected].
Subscriber churn doesn’t start with cancellation. It starts with disengagement, broken habits, and missed signals.
This playbook helps media audience teams identify churn risk early and act while subscribers still engage. What you'll get:
How media teams move from churn reporting to early, repeatable action.
The Churn Activation Checklist
A one-page readiness check for ownership, timing, and scale.
A 30/60/90 Day Churn Mitigation Plan
A focused roadmap for building a churn mitigation system with existing data.
Get the Subscriber Churn Mitigation Playbook and learn how to spot churn risk before cancellation.
Journalism vs capitalism
Journalism businesses are notoriously difficult to operate. Newsrooms sit at the heart of the business, only their true loyalty is to the profession. The entire orientation is split between delivering a civic good and making money. The church and state tradition means the people making the product were walled off from the people charged with making money from it. And that’s before we get to the competitive pressures in the market that penalize the kind of original reporting that underpin the civic mission. At the NYU class, Gideon Lewis-Kraus went through the more than six months of work he put in reporting out his story on Anthropic for The New Yorker. This kind of reportorial rigor is almost an uneconomic activity in the marketplace.
It’s no surprise that many in the profession question whether market forces can be trusted to deliver quality journalism. There are the exceptions everyone cites and then there are the rest. In the U.S., we tend to worship the logic of the market. It’s been good to many Americans. I was struck that Rome sometimes seemed like an American retirement community because older Americans, with flush 401ks, were everywhere I went.
Europe tends to trust market intervention more. At the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, I held a debate on the role of state support of journalism. I played the role of the American, since debates need participants to play their roles. My view is that state funding of journalism creates too many conflicts, distorts markets, creates a dependency culture, and ultimately will lead to worse outcomes because ignoring market signals is the same as ignoring the audience.
Taking the other side was Peter Erdelyi, director of the Center for Sustainable Media in Budapest. Peter has worked on these issues from the inside, and has a nuanced view of when it makes sense for state support, particularly in fragmented European markets that are without the U.S.’s deep philanthropy pools and the large advertising and capital markets.
Thanks to the International Journalism Festival for hosting this recording and to Milo Tesselaar of New Strategy & Concepts in Vienna for enabling it.
The Center Square is a nonprofit newsroom publishing original reporting across state and national markets. Before beehiiv, newsletters were managed externally, meaning slower turnaround, no direct access to subscriber data, and limited visibility into performance.
After migrating in-house on beehiiv, average open rates climbed from 52% to 72%, click-through rates increased 42.4%, and RSS automation saved more than 15 hours a week. A small internal team now manages 12 state and national newsletters without outside help, and the beehiiv Ad Network added a revenue stream that previously didn't exist.
Clipping is having a moment. The exit of TBPN for at least $100 million put a spotlight on the rise of streaming shows. It also put a spotlight on the seemingly very small audiences for their actual shows. Instead, it’s the derivative of the Main Thing that powers these businesses. That’s the clips.
Clipping has become an in-demand service for growing large audiences on platforms. The idea is simple: Shoot a livestream show, chop it up in to hundreds or more clips, and flood platforms like Instagram and X with them. It’s a new media growth hack.
It’s fitting for this time when so much is not real – the wagyu is also fake – that these shows are in some ways unreal. They’re more like a chef’s counter view of a content factory. As Alex put it on PvA: "Everybody knows about Clavicular, but nobody knows anybody who actually watches Clavicular."
Silicon Valley VC giant Andreessen Horowitz is backing a new entrant to this world with a live streaming show clone of TBPN, which grew out of A16z rival Founders Fund, called MTS. I’m distressed to inform you this stands for Monitoring the Situation, which is Silicon Valley for the male version of astrology, like gaming out ways to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Like TBPN, MTS is programming for X. an unfiltered but important niche of the Information Space.
MTS is broadening its purview to politics and beyond, just as Silicon Valley VCs have infiltrated more areas of the political economy. Like TBPN, MTS is optimized for the clips.
MTS adopts the trappings of cable TV. It is self-consciously adopting the aesthetics of CNN, only it features guys reading tweets and doing screenshares with crypto evangelist and institutional media hater Balaji Srinivasan. Give Andreessen credit for not giving up with Clubhouse.
I’m unsure who MTS is for exactly. The VC audience is now very well served with media that flatters its worldviews and provides a soapbox for Palmer Luckey, Marc Andreessen and the Sequoia guy who pops up now and again to say offensive things to prove he’s a free thinker. All industries tend to get insular – journalism is very insular – and tech is no different. The industry has spent many years talking to itself and blaming the media for its “problems” as tech has become a colossus.
The public’s backlash against AI – Sam Altman’s house has been attacked twice – can’t be dismissed as the fault of mainstream media. After all, Dario Amodei has a weekly calendar reminder to threaten/promise AI will eliminate 50% of jobs in some sector or another. Real shocker you have a brand issue.
MTS has an embedded flaw in that it is engineered. I believe the most lasting media brands come about organically. There are artists and engineers. Artists create things they want to exist in the world that express their point of view. Engineers build things based on leverage and taking apart models and optimizing them. MTS feels too engineered, beyond the obvious ludicrousness of calling a VC front operation “independent media.”
We’ll see a deluge of streaming shows. Most will fail because they’re not needed and are knockoffs. TBPN succeeded for many reasons, including hosts who are natural on-camera talent. MTS has the right backers to will it into existence and give it the appearance of popularity. The impact of the deluge of clips is another story. In VC terms, I don’t see this having a very big or deep total addressable market.
Thanks for reading. Send me a note with your feedback by hitting reply.