You are the media

This week:

I’m excited to announce The Rebooting’s first live podcast and networking event. We are holding it at Gannett | USA Today Network headquarters in New York on Dec. 10. We’ll kickoff with cocktails and networking at 5pm with the podcast event starting at 5:30pm and networking afterwards. “The AI opportunity” is the theme of a conversation I’ll have with the key executives at Gannett, across editorial, product, advertising and subscriptions. We will go into how Gannett is approaching AI in order to do more with less – and create better content, not just more, and a better business model. Hope to see you there.

My early prediction for 2025 is a no-brainer: It will be a year dominated by the downstream impacts of AI adding to the pressures on the publishing business. Much of the focus will be on playing defense, with licensing deals and intercepting AI bots to charge them. Simultaneously, all publishers, like Gannett, are figuring out how to effectively embed AI into their workflow. Recently, The Rebooting held an online forum in collaboration with Nota, which provides tools to newsrooms, to take a deep dive into the opportunities to use AI to do more with less at a time when that is a reality. Nota CEO Josh Brandau and I discussed what AI is best at – summarization, optimization, versioning – and where its current limitations are (it can lie), as well as the practical steps newsrooms need to take to adopt AI both effectively and responsibly. Check out the replay.

Google faces a pair of antitrust threats that seek to rein in its undeniable dominance in digital media. The ad tech case, which is expected to get a ruling soon, is arguably less critical to Google, even if it has large implications for the digital ad ecosystem. It’s the search antitrust case that could fundamentally alter the Information Space. The Department of Justice is going for it: Proposing a structural remedy to Google’s dominance by forcing Google to spin off Chrome. The thinking is that Chrome is a moat Google has created to control distribution, along with a lucrative deal with Apple to be the default on its operating system.

On the latest episode of People vs Algorithms, we discuss the implications of a standalone Chrome and whether it will do much to alter the balance of power in the market – or whether a more sensible remedy would be giving rival search players access to Google’s index. I can’t help but wonder if this will all play out along the lines of Microsoft’s antitrust trial in the 1990s, when the government tried to break up Microsoft over its browser bundling strategy only for market dynamics to fundamentally change. The market tends to correct imbalances better than centralized forces like governments and regulatory bodies. 

You can watch PvA on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify or other podcast platforms.

The funny thing about journalism and media overall is there is no accreditation. That’s why “the media” has always been a misnomer. The professionalization of media was mostly an accident of technological limitations. Creation was constrained by the need for special tools and even then, distribution was limited. 

The dawn of the internet set in motion the end to this era of media. The internet shifted distribution from a controlled system in which publishers could be assured of quasi monopolies – think of local newspapers – to one where the choke point of distribution moved to the interface level. Controlling the interface is the closest you’ll get to commanding heights.

Elon Musk understood that in acquiring Twitter. The usual billionaire media playbook is to buy an individual publication in order to exert influence indirectly. As we have seen, owning a single publication has limited leverage in a chaotic Information Space. The real action is to control the interface to information, as Musk has done with the now rechristened X. 

Who needs to steer editorial boards when you can tweak an algorithm to the point where I cannot escape the noted VC public philosopher Sean Maguire? Some social media platforms have algorithms that are eerily in tune with your interests. X is not one of those. I have not quit X to decamp to Bluesky or Threads. I still find it a fascinating place, and the rightward tilt can be seen as a correction to the obvious leftward tilt of most mainstream news publications. 

Musk can have the best of both worlds, claiming to have a free speech platform while hiding behind algorithms to promote his views. I have asked to see fewer of his tweets to no avail. Using X means facing a barrage of Musk’s endless posts on all manner of issues, not to mention “doctor or engineer” anti-migrant posts. 

“You are the media now” has been a frequent message from Musk, cheerleading the demise of mainstream media to be replaced by the crowd. It plays to Trump’s most effective advertising message around transgender issues: “He’s for you, she’s for them.” Populism is always rooted in anti-elitism resentments, and we are living in a very populist time. Leave aside the absurd notion of a plutocrat as populist. 

Musk found an unlikely foil in this in Axios CEO Jim VandeHei, who gave a cri de coeur to the National Press Club criticizing the notion that the crowd could replace the meticulous work of journalism. It was a sensible speech that I read as a reassurance of the relevance of professional journalism.

As usual, I find zero-sum analyses somewhere between disingenuous talking points and brand positioning. Musk is happy to cite mainstream media reporting when it is useful to him. To many of his acolytes, mainstream media is full of liars who happen to tell the truth when the reporting is in their direction. I noticed that Joe Lonsdale, a VC who is part of the anti-media crowd on X, was trumpeting a positive 60 Minutes segment on his anti-woke education project, The University of Austin. Suddenly mainstream media has relevance. Go figure. 

The Information Space is vast, and traditional journalism will continue to exist, even if it is the fodder for AI-enabled algorithmic remixing and sees economic value leech downstream by podcasters, Substackers and “you.”

I often think of Musk as a product of the early internet, the time before Facebook and walled gardens of social media. This message of “you are the media” has a long history back to when it was tagged “user-generated content.” That never fully reached its potential, mostly because the quality of UGC was far below what could be produced professionally. That gap has narrowed, and with AI tools it should collapse entirely. 

Podcasters can easily compete on YouTube with cable talk shows. For a time, mainstream media could pretend popular YouTubers were not the same as concurrent viewers on a TV. That’s a tough argument to continue to make, particularly as cable news audiences shrink. The post-election declines at CNN and MSNBC are striking, enough that there is a running joke about Musk buying MSNBC.

That audience shrinkage is a fact of life across much of the media industry, as they deal with traffic declines from social platforms and from Google. The more-with-less theme is a constant in my conversations with publishers. At the WordPresss VIP Innovation Showcase last Thursday in London, I spoke to Metro’s traffic director, Sofia Delgado, about the steep declines Metro saw in recent years and how it has clawed its way back up. That’s the reality now, as many publishers look to fill leaky traffic buckets.

The framing of “you” vs the mainstream media is convenient but inaccurate. I think of news as a combination of play-by-play announcers and color commentators. The play-by-play role is what Jim was passionately defending. Reporting out stories fairly and impartially, with an infrastructure to support that, is still mainly done by mainstream media. It’s the color commentary that’s been overwhelmed in the Information Space. Interpreting the news has shifted decisively away from mainstream media and decentralized across the Information Space. 

Substack is an important part of the future of color commentary. It has already made a major impact here. Nate Silver couldn’t build a sustainable media business as part of mainstream media, but in the indieverse, he has a thriving business. What Substack has not produced is a ton of original reporting.

The issue I see is that the economic incentives lie in color commentary. The Information Space currently rewards a version of attention fracking. It involves pumping out provocative takes, stoking us-against-them emotional responses and playing to tribal loyalties and resentments. The surveys may indicate that people thirst for “unbiased news,” but the marketplace does not reward that. Slate and The Guardian are racking up subscriptions and memberships on the back of resistance positioning. Fox News is getting a bigger share of the shrinking cable news market. 

The reality is this will inexorably lead to mainstream news being something of a niche product in the Information Space. Paywalls will continue to proliferate, inevitably shrinking the overall reach of publications and making them more of a niche luxury product. After all, Axios itself is selling $1,000 subscriptions to have webinar access to Jim and Axios co-founder Mike Allen.