David, a suggestion for all the writers on Substack. I can’t afford to support each writer I follow, so I’ve been strategic. Perhaps a Substack subscription like Spotify for musicians, would ensure all journalists are paid.
Medium was actually supposed to do this. You pay them per month and a portion of that money is divided to the writers you click on each month. Like Spotify though I think it mostly just lined the corporate owner's pockets.
But the $5 to everyone I like adds up fast problem is very real.
The price points on consumption of media also remains an important issue. As a consumer, there was a time when I could get a newspaper or magazine delivered to my home for (say) $100 per year. As things evolved I might also gain access to additional online content or choose a digital only version. And that content was extremely varied. Now, I likely pay much more than that to gain access to content from a limited number of providers through Substack or other platform. The benefit is that the content is more tailored to my interests. Getting a daily newspaper or monthly magazine usually meant paying for some content that didn’t interest me. But there is limit to how many such subscriptions I can afford even as it is apparent that this almost inevitably leads to a much reduced number of media professionals working in the industry.
The ad supported media of old seems to be gone forever but is still a model worth pursuing. Unfortunately, a few major players have stacked the deck (and unregulative regulations) to ensure they vacuum up all the ad revenue and seem unwilling to share fairly with content creators. Seems to me that the a seed of solution lies buried in that artificially created morass.
I agree, I sit here surrounded by newspapers and magazines and remember fondly the days of buying high quality news with thick heavy papers, broadsheets that weren’t shrunk.
For 25 or 50 cents, maybe a dollar for one issue….and yet, although micropayments have existed for decades, no one in news ever invented a way for me to buy a pdf of one issue for 50 cents.
With lots of ads, a year’s subscription was still only $100….often less.
Now, It’s either read one free story….or pay to buy access for a year. Pay $750/year…one was 1200/year. And no I can’t afford to pay that much for multiple papers
Meanwhile I still love the beautiful quality of shiny coated paper for magazines, pages and pages of beautiful colour ads shot by some of the finest photographers in the world.
Those were worth looking at.
And same…I used to buy one issue and learn about wonderful things, long expensive smart articles, all month for only $3
And now online, I can only see one free article, or I have to buy a years worth. All exponentially higher without ads.
I believe David touched on this conundrum in the article. Many of us share in your angst whereby we want to read all we can on those things that are of interest to us, yet are limited by a litany of firewalls in pursuit of these interests. The conundrum is that these self-imposed restrictions can create an unintentional filter of writers whose opinions we enjoy reading at the expense of those writers who we might not otherwise or always agree with. The result is a myopic point of view on issues, which is, or at least ought to be antithetical to what a journalist’s mission is
I am very happy that you have not gone the way of click-baiting potential readers to gain views/income. When I see articles from the likes of CTV with headlines something like “Major company declare bankruptcy”, which then forces reading the article to find out if you are interested. This drives false metrics.
I echo the above concern that there are only so many subscriptions one can do to support the industry. As a “professional”, employed by a large multinational, performance increments have not kept up with inflation for more than 20 years, and of course, no inflation adjustments either, so I understand your pain.
I am reviewing subscriptions and have decided to drop one other so that I can support you directly.
I have been following you on sub-stack and feel badly about the state of journalism these days. Some of the criticism I've read/seen about mainline press is so disheartening. I shared your article on FB and suggested people find it on sub-stack. This platform has led me to great writers and thinkers with well informed info. Thanks for sharing your dilemma.
As a chemical engineer, if my employer insisted I design and operate equipment in a way that ensured public harm and catastrophic failure, I’d have quit the profession and found something else to do for a living. Not saying leaving a job or profession is an easy thing to do, but it’s a morally obvious choice. I’d have made that decision in order to live with myself.
I have moral red lines but no one goes through life without making trade offs. My goal is to serve the public good and I work hard to do that. But if I thought I was, for instance, putting at risk of harm, I wouldn't do this job. But I do it to secure the opposite.
Something to remember is that we finally dropped the “monopolies are good” idea and economists have been exposed as a profession that is just as easily bent by money as the rest of us and totally wrong to boot
The DOJ is taking apart Google using antitrust and they’ll go after Meta and a lot of media companies next. And the ad market stranglehold will be broken…because it’s not just media and news that have suffered, it’s our tax base. All the ad distribution companies used to pay a lot of taxes, companies couldn’t write off ads as expenses. (They should only have been allowed to write off ads placed with small companies, start ups, never big ones)
The IRS and CRA and the EU etc will no longer allow the big digital monopolies to offshore corporate taxes when they should be paying for public services they use, and not using price fixing to destroy everything.
Go read Jonathan Kanter who exposed all of it. It’s cheery!
David, this is a harsh comment. You know I subscribe to your work and thinking because it is so different than mine. Your thinking helps me balance mine. But....
Stop focusing on yourself, the prostituting of your standards for the great unwashed who apparently won't pay for the "full meal deal" and the absence of a WaPo-style contracts from incorrigibly money losing outfits. This piece is a work of self-abuse and wasteful handwringing.
Define an audience you like. If their expectations and standards cannot rise to yours, time to quit.
In the meantime, I continue to be a well-satisfied reader.
I actually think this comment is more or less fair and on the mark. I'm explaining what the ecosystem is in this piece, and I'm absolutely correct about it. But it's not about the "great unwashed," it's about the pressures of the market. That's the problem with journalism, being both an ostensible public good but also a commercial market. But I think "define an audience you like" is very good advice, thank you.
"The market" is being generous to journalistic innovators...think Matt Gurney, Jen Gerson, Matt Taibi, Rudyard Griffiths, Sean Speeer and Tara Henley. Alongside you, I pay them all. I don't do freebies for more than 30 days then...either I pay up or I move on. I believe unlimited "freebies" diminishes the value.
I'd love to subscribe to someone who can figure out a way to deliver local news. Ditto, critical comment on universities (not the normal fawning, syrupy tripe usually read). I believe academics have "ruled the roost" to the detriment of students. Time for some serious assessments. UBC, McGill, McMaster, UofT are particularly poor institutions from one perspective or another. Time to DO SOMETHING.
Oh, dear. Here is somebody with this romanticized idea of journalism. He is in angst that real life does not work that way. He cannot make it doing what he thinks is real journalism.
Journalism, free press, freedom of the press, are more of these liberal ideas which do not really work. Nonetheless, they are so embedded in western culture that you are made out as crazy if you question them.
People should not expect to make a living writing about public affairs. I do not. I can therefore write what I want for whoever wants to read it.
I am under no illusion that in so doing I am performing any public service or anything important to society. If people want true information about what is going on, the only way they can get it is from some sort of public information service; a public voice.
The public cannot be rightly informed by private or independent media. All you get is institutional propaganda or just noise. This can only lead to societal breakdown.
So, here is my response to your concern about maintaining a “healthy media ecosystem”. It cannot be done in this type political and economic system, this kind of culture. I do not think it has ever occurred as you imagine it.
Ask what the real point is to a “media ecosystem”. What are the assumptions behind it? Are these assumptions valid?
If you want people to have correct information on which to make right decisions, that will not happen with forty different people all creating their own reality. It does not matter how high quality their research is.
To have social stability, there must be a public voice, a decider of truth. This idea sets liberal mindsets into canniptions. It is “totalitarian” and so on.
But the unwillingness to accept that there cannot be forty different ideas about everything is at the core of the current malaise in society. It is not a result of the internet. The net just makes it more obvious.
At this point, I think I have said enough. Think about what I said here.
Pair of ragged claws? Am I going to be clawed to death?
Reading over my ramble, I could have made the point more concisely. If we are going to ever have a real democracy, we will have to have a public information system. One voice, one reality, run as a public utility. Tis does not mean a ministry of truth. To be functional, it must be accurate and credible.
Meanwhile, most journalism is garbage, disinformation. Much of it is high quality, well researched disinformation.
Let me get this straight Tim: you think the public is going to be better informed by a public information system that is the "decider of truth"? Have you spent any time on this planet?
Let's say that this utopian ideal is agreed to by all, and everyone gets on board with taking this one institution as trustworthy and only produces the "truth". If it is going to be staffed by humans, even if they are well intentioned, it is still going to produce a lot of incorrect information. Many people are lazy. Many people are incompetent. In a huge organization such as you are proposing, those facts alone would doom it. Never mind that there are always going to be others that manipulate, bully or otherwise interfere with the "truth" getting out there. Information is power, that means it will always be contested.
I suggest you talk with your friends in a variety of companies. Ask them what percentage of the people they work with are competent? Lazy? Incompetent? That is going to be the same in you magical ministry of only true information.
Also, taking the time to write what you did, you must also be aware that pretty much any corruption, whether in business or government, is revealed by the private press. If a media organization is dedicated to it, and not its shareholders, news organizations can absolutely serve the public.
I got some reaction out of this, didn’t I? It is all form some people whose heads are locked into the liberal mindset. Or even libertarian.
Usually, after the third go round of such a thread, people start accusing me of trolling, so this will be my last response. I will block more comments.
So somebody looked at my site and decided he was not being informed. He thinks I have a “private media” site.
No. It is a personal site. Private means I am charging money for it. Or trying to.
As for not being informed, that would be because he is too backward to recognize salience. Like most people. I have no remedy for that.
Someone else thought I do not live on this planet. Apparently, this is because on his, government information cannot get anything right. But private media always expose corruption.
On my planet private media expose corruption when it is the wrong kind of corruption. Exposing corruption is nonsense anyway. On this planet in this century.
The dark forces could not care less if you expose them. You cannot do anything about it. You expose yourself as a nuisance to be monitored or maybe eliminated.
If you want to change anything, forget all the journalism crap. Work to mobilize the sentinel intelligences of the planet to remove capitalist oligarchy and socialize the political economy.
David, a suggestion for all the writers on Substack. I can’t afford to support each writer I follow, so I’ve been strategic. Perhaps a Substack subscription like Spotify for musicians, would ensure all journalists are paid.
Love this idea.
Medium was actually supposed to do this. You pay them per month and a portion of that money is divided to the writers you click on each month. Like Spotify though I think it mostly just lined the corporate owner's pockets.
But the $5 to everyone I like adds up fast problem is very real.
Then DO SOMETHING TO MAKE IT HAPPEN.
The amount Spotify pays to musicians is literally pennies, or fractions of pennies, per listen.
The price points on consumption of media also remains an important issue. As a consumer, there was a time when I could get a newspaper or magazine delivered to my home for (say) $100 per year. As things evolved I might also gain access to additional online content or choose a digital only version. And that content was extremely varied. Now, I likely pay much more than that to gain access to content from a limited number of providers through Substack or other platform. The benefit is that the content is more tailored to my interests. Getting a daily newspaper or monthly magazine usually meant paying for some content that didn’t interest me. But there is limit to how many such subscriptions I can afford even as it is apparent that this almost inevitably leads to a much reduced number of media professionals working in the industry.
The ad supported media of old seems to be gone forever but is still a model worth pursuing. Unfortunately, a few major players have stacked the deck (and unregulative regulations) to ensure they vacuum up all the ad revenue and seem unwilling to share fairly with content creators. Seems to me that the a seed of solution lies buried in that artificially created morass.
Absolutely. We've destroyed magazines and newspapers and now we have individuals floating around.
I agree, I sit here surrounded by newspapers and magazines and remember fondly the days of buying high quality news with thick heavy papers, broadsheets that weren’t shrunk.
For 25 or 50 cents, maybe a dollar for one issue….and yet, although micropayments have existed for decades, no one in news ever invented a way for me to buy a pdf of one issue for 50 cents.
With lots of ads, a year’s subscription was still only $100….often less.
Now, It’s either read one free story….or pay to buy access for a year. Pay $750/year…one was 1200/year. And no I can’t afford to pay that much for multiple papers
Meanwhile I still love the beautiful quality of shiny coated paper for magazines, pages and pages of beautiful colour ads shot by some of the finest photographers in the world.
Those were worth looking at.
And same…I used to buy one issue and learn about wonderful things, long expensive smart articles, all month for only $3
And now online, I can only see one free article, or I have to buy a years worth. All exponentially higher without ads.
I believe David touched on this conundrum in the article. Many of us share in your angst whereby we want to read all we can on those things that are of interest to us, yet are limited by a litany of firewalls in pursuit of these interests. The conundrum is that these self-imposed restrictions can create an unintentional filter of writers whose opinions we enjoy reading at the expense of those writers who we might not otherwise or always agree with. The result is a myopic point of view on issues, which is, or at least ought to be antithetical to what a journalist’s mission is
I am very happy that you have not gone the way of click-baiting potential readers to gain views/income. When I see articles from the likes of CTV with headlines something like “Major company declare bankruptcy”, which then forces reading the article to find out if you are interested. This drives false metrics.
I echo the above concern that there are only so many subscriptions one can do to support the industry. As a “professional”, employed by a large multinational, performance increments have not kept up with inflation for more than 20 years, and of course, no inflation adjustments either, so I understand your pain.
I am reviewing subscriptions and have decided to drop one other so that I can support you directly.
You're right on the mark. And I really appreciate support and kind words. Thank you.
I have been following you on sub-stack and feel badly about the state of journalism these days. Some of the criticism I've read/seen about mainline press is so disheartening. I shared your article on FB and suggested people find it on sub-stack. This platform has led me to great writers and thinkers with well informed info. Thanks for sharing your dilemma.
Thank you!
Time to combine forces with Paul Wells and Dan Gardner?
Why do you hate me so much.
All of you, plus Matt and Jen from the Line? Sharing a content creator house, like reality tv for policy wonks
I hope you never go away.
Thank you, I appreciate it.
Really thoughtful read. Great timing too as I contemplate my own "next moves".
Thank you!
A very interesting and substantive article.
Many thanks!
As a chemical engineer, if my employer insisted I design and operate equipment in a way that ensured public harm and catastrophic failure, I’d have quit the profession and found something else to do for a living. Not saying leaving a job or profession is an easy thing to do, but it’s a morally obvious choice. I’d have made that decision in order to live with myself.
I have moral red lines but no one goes through life without making trade offs. My goal is to serve the public good and I work hard to do that. But if I thought I was, for instance, putting at risk of harm, I wouldn't do this job. But I do it to secure the opposite.
Something to remember is that we finally dropped the “monopolies are good” idea and economists have been exposed as a profession that is just as easily bent by money as the rest of us and totally wrong to boot
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/25/epistemological-chaos/#incentives-matter
The DOJ is taking apart Google using antitrust and they’ll go after Meta and a lot of media companies next. And the ad market stranglehold will be broken…because it’s not just media and news that have suffered, it’s our tax base. All the ad distribution companies used to pay a lot of taxes, companies couldn’t write off ads as expenses. (They should only have been allowed to write off ads placed with small companies, start ups, never big ones)
The IRS and CRA and the EU etc will no longer allow the big digital monopolies to offshore corporate taxes when they should be paying for public services they use, and not using price fixing to destroy everything.
Go read Jonathan Kanter who exposed all of it. It’s cheery!
https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-general-jonathan-kanter-delivers-remarks-fordham-competition-law-0
David, this is a harsh comment. You know I subscribe to your work and thinking because it is so different than mine. Your thinking helps me balance mine. But....
Stop focusing on yourself, the prostituting of your standards for the great unwashed who apparently won't pay for the "full meal deal" and the absence of a WaPo-style contracts from incorrigibly money losing outfits. This piece is a work of self-abuse and wasteful handwringing.
Define an audience you like. If their expectations and standards cannot rise to yours, time to quit.
In the meantime, I continue to be a well-satisfied reader.
I actually think this comment is more or less fair and on the mark. I'm explaining what the ecosystem is in this piece, and I'm absolutely correct about it. But it's not about the "great unwashed," it's about the pressures of the market. That's the problem with journalism, being both an ostensible public good but also a commercial market. But I think "define an audience you like" is very good advice, thank you.
"The market" is being generous to journalistic innovators...think Matt Gurney, Jen Gerson, Matt Taibi, Rudyard Griffiths, Sean Speeer and Tara Henley. Alongside you, I pay them all. I don't do freebies for more than 30 days then...either I pay up or I move on. I believe unlimited "freebies" diminishes the value.
I'd love to subscribe to someone who can figure out a way to deliver local news. Ditto, critical comment on universities (not the normal fawning, syrupy tripe usually read). I believe academics have "ruled the roost" to the detriment of students. Time for some serious assessments. UBC, McGill, McMaster, UofT are particularly poor institutions from one perspective or another. Time to DO SOMETHING.
Sounds like a good argument for a universal basic income (which becomes less problematic than all the government funding journalism schemes).
This is a great, frank piece of meta writing (writing about writing, or the business of writing). Thank you.
Like your pops would likely advise, I'd say don't quit your day job. The jury's still out on Substack. Do you really want to be chasing ❤️s?
Oh, dear. Here is somebody with this romanticized idea of journalism. He is in angst that real life does not work that way. He cannot make it doing what he thinks is real journalism.
Journalism, free press, freedom of the press, are more of these liberal ideas which do not really work. Nonetheless, they are so embedded in western culture that you are made out as crazy if you question them.
People should not expect to make a living writing about public affairs. I do not. I can therefore write what I want for whoever wants to read it.
I am under no illusion that in so doing I am performing any public service or anything important to society. If people want true information about what is going on, the only way they can get it is from some sort of public information service; a public voice.
The public cannot be rightly informed by private or independent media. All you get is institutional propaganda or just noise. This can only lead to societal breakdown.
So, here is my response to your concern about maintaining a “healthy media ecosystem”. It cannot be done in this type political and economic system, this kind of culture. I do not think it has ever occurred as you imagine it.
Ask what the real point is to a “media ecosystem”. What are the assumptions behind it? Are these assumptions valid?
If you want people to have correct information on which to make right decisions, that will not happen with forty different people all creating their own reality. It does not matter how high quality their research is.
To have social stability, there must be a public voice, a decider of truth. This idea sets liberal mindsets into canniptions. It is “totalitarian” and so on.
But the unwillingness to accept that there cannot be forty different ideas about everything is at the core of the current malaise in society. It is not a result of the internet. The net just makes it more obvious.
At this point, I think I have said enough. Think about what I said here.
https://www.competentsincharge.ca/
I suppose I could and should have been a pair of ragged claws...
"The public cannot be rightly informed by private or independent media." he writes, as he offers the link to his own private media content.
Well, I had a look around at compentsincharge; after a few minutes I was not feeling rightly informed. So, point taken.
Pair of ragged claws? Am I going to be clawed to death?
Reading over my ramble, I could have made the point more concisely. If we are going to ever have a real democracy, we will have to have a public information system. One voice, one reality, run as a public utility. Tis does not mean a ministry of truth. To be functional, it must be accurate and credible.
Meanwhile, most journalism is garbage, disinformation. Much of it is high quality, well researched disinformation.
Let me get this straight Tim: you think the public is going to be better informed by a public information system that is the "decider of truth"? Have you spent any time on this planet?
Let's say that this utopian ideal is agreed to by all, and everyone gets on board with taking this one institution as trustworthy and only produces the "truth". If it is going to be staffed by humans, even if they are well intentioned, it is still going to produce a lot of incorrect information. Many people are lazy. Many people are incompetent. In a huge organization such as you are proposing, those facts alone would doom it. Never mind that there are always going to be others that manipulate, bully or otherwise interfere with the "truth" getting out there. Information is power, that means it will always be contested.
I suggest you talk with your friends in a variety of companies. Ask them what percentage of the people they work with are competent? Lazy? Incompetent? That is going to be the same in you magical ministry of only true information.
Also, taking the time to write what you did, you must also be aware that pretty much any corruption, whether in business or government, is revealed by the private press. If a media organization is dedicated to it, and not its shareholders, news organizations can absolutely serve the public.
I got some reaction out of this, didn’t I? It is all form some people whose heads are locked into the liberal mindset. Or even libertarian.
Usually, after the third go round of such a thread, people start accusing me of trolling, so this will be my last response. I will block more comments.
So somebody looked at my site and decided he was not being informed. He thinks I have a “private media” site.
No. It is a personal site. Private means I am charging money for it. Or trying to.
As for not being informed, that would be because he is too backward to recognize salience. Like most people. I have no remedy for that.
Someone else thought I do not live on this planet. Apparently, this is because on his, government information cannot get anything right. But private media always expose corruption.
On my planet private media expose corruption when it is the wrong kind of corruption. Exposing corruption is nonsense anyway. On this planet in this century.
The dark forces could not care less if you expose them. You cannot do anything about it. You expose yourself as a nuisance to be monitored or maybe eliminated.
If you want to change anything, forget all the journalism crap. Work to mobilize the sentinel intelligences of the planet to remove capitalist oligarchy and socialize the political economy.
As to what sentinel intelligence means, here is a good place to start. https://www.the-sentinel-intelligence.com/
She charges money for it. No, I get no kickbacks from her.