The rise of news products
They look like journalism, but they're not
I grew up in the 1980s, the zenith of “food products,” a fancy term for processed food that resembled real food -- fruits, vegetables, etc -- but were invented in a lab somewhere specifically to appeal to our senses while being presented as just like actual food, never mind they weren’t.
We’re entering into an age of journalism products. These are newsletters and websites that certainly look a lot like the news we are accustomed to but they’re not real news. That includes many Substacks that are mostly opinion and analysis – that includes TRB, which I don’t consider a news product – corporate media like what Andreessen Horowitz is trying to do and media built as the front end for commerce businesses on the hunt for cheaper ways to acquire customers than dumping all their money into Google and Facebook.
Just like food products, few of these substitutes have the same nutritional value. Yet processed food has typically been cheaper to produce than actual food and is marketed in ways that enables people to forget they’re not consuming the real thing.
