The Trump reckoning

Welcome to a post-election edition of The Rebooting. Four years ago, I wrote about “news in the post-Trump era.” That headline didn’t age well, although the points in it stand. This week, I revisit the topic again, and many of the challenges are actually quite similar.

Before we get to that, I want to tell you about some things we have going on in a very busy November, aka Events Season:

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The return of Donald Trump to the presidency is a remarkable comeback that marks a return to the disruptive years of his first term. For the already hard-hit news business, Trump is the ultimate complexifer. And his return comes at a time when the overall publishing business is in the midst of structural change that’s put unprecedented pressure on business models.

The last time around, the news media responded to Trump with branding; this time around, it's time to focus on the product itself.

The news media will bifurcate in their approaches. In 2016, the election of Trump was a shock. In the the news industry, the default position to Trump, as it was in most liberal institutions, was resistance.

Trump played handy foil, driving up news show ratings and making stars of reporters who trafficked in a steady stream of mostly inconsequential leaks about who was fighting who in the administration, not to mention the patented New York Times story telling us Trump is “raging.” 

Trump sold subscriptions for this resistance product. He allowed news publications to position a paid subscription as not a mere economic transaction but an act of defiance. Any marketer will tell you, emotion beats rationality. That’s why The New York Times literally used “truth” as a marketing slogan, and The Washington Post gave us “democracy dies in darkness.” Opening The Atlantic was a reliably bracing experience that would send anyone reaching for the SRIs. 

We have seen signs of a return to this pose. The Guardian has used its opposition as a marketing hook. Slate is also joining the fray. The Atlantic Even the Financial Times sent me an email affirming its democratic credentials.

I suspect the resistance media will be the minority this time around. For one, the election results indicate that the messaging around democracy under threat fell flat. And overall there is an exhaustion that’s set in. Any marketer will also tell you that messaging inevitably wears out.

An alternative approach is to focus on government accountability. That means laying out the facts for people to make informed political decisions, not trying to advocate for political decisions that more often than not line up neatly with progressive priorities. 

And importantly, that means not just focusing on problems but also on progress. The bad-news bias means a conscious effort to focus on what is working. Americans are a practical people; always will be. 

The indieverse has truly arrived. Speaking of wearout, the surreal moments that swirl around Trump start to normalize. It didn’t fell that unusual at his victory speech that UFC CEO Dana White took the microphone to laud the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ With the Boys, and “last but not least the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.”

The podcast election will be debated. The shift to Trump was across the board – even Manhattan went shifted notably – so it’s hard to ascribe too much credit to targeting young males. Yet it is undeniable that Trump did very well with a demographic that historically has a low propensity to vote. 

Perhaps more important, the long-form interview is here to stay. It used to be that a politician needed to be a great orator to be a legitimate presidential candidate. Trump has obliterated that requirement, with “the weave,” a highly peculiar speaking style that involves jumping from topic to topic. The result can border on incoherence. It’s a far cry from Barack Obama speaking in perfectly formed paragraphs.

Podcasting taps into that. Sitting for long podcast interviews will become the norm for politicians and beyond. And that’s because you can’t hide. I know a terrible podcast before it begins if a guest, or more likely their handlers, ask for questions in advance. I usually tell them this isn’t a good fit for them. I’ve had people arrive at podcast studios with their talking points printed on paper for them. You can steer back to talking points for a half hour, but that runs out. 

Over the course of a long conversation, you get a better understanding of a person. Too much time has been wasted debating “platforming” people with views others disagree with. 

The news media has a product problem. One upside of the breadth of Trump’s win is that it allows little room for the blame games of 2016, when people would fervently tell me that Facebook ads unfairly decided the election. The mainstream news media comforted itself in these stories rather than take of the message the market was sending. 

This time around, it’s very clear that the issues the news media was obsessed with – the MSG rally jokes, the democracy on the ballot, etc – were roundly ignored by the electorate. Forget those trust surveys, this is a wakeup call. It calls to mind Will Lewis awkwardly telling the Washington Post newsroom “nobody is reading your stuff.”

Semafor CEO Justin Smith sent an “open letter” to Jeff Bezos that also happened to promote Semafor’s approach to rethinking news. The “Semaform” is an interesting, if limited attempt to build trust and impartiality into the product by separating out analysis that tends to creep into news stories. It’s a start. More news publishers are publishing full transcripts of interviews. 

One of the reasons podcasts have become a preferred medium for subjects is that they are, for the most part, unfiltered. Packaging up information for others is still valuable. It will increasingly be done by machines, however. 

The feature story format can be problematic. The choices made in it are easy to push in one direction or the other. And stories themselves need tension and narrative. That sometimes sands off the edges of the rough contours of humanity. An editor once told me we are in the business of “heroes and villains.” That kind of casting is part of the product problem.

The alternative approach is to abandon the pretext of objectivity to become more like the podcasters themselves. The elevation of “stars” at publications will accelerate, if only because the market continues to value individuals over institutions. 

That means competing in the chaos of the Information Space. The entire notion of the Fourth Estate is a fiction. As was mentioned to me yesterday, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan are more influential at this moment than most legacy news publications. The takeaway from that should be: We need to fix our products.

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