We Have A Serious News Media Problem. Here's A Look Inside How Journalism Works (Or Doesn't).
Wondering why so much of our media is utter trash? There are a few reasons for that.
By now it’s common knowledge that our news media is in considerable trouble. We don’t need to revisit here the reasons for that. But it’s mostly because of the internet. That’s causing some serious problems for media and democracy alike.
I’m coming at this issue as a freelancer who has worked with mainstream, sidestream, backstream, semi-stream, and no-stream outlets for over a decade. To the best of my knowledge, I just made up most of those streams, but you get the idea. I’ve written, podcasted, appeared on radio and TV, etc., etc. all over the place. I’ve studied this closely and written about it. I’m deeply worried about the state of journalism — and increasingly so.
On Sunday, I wrote a thread on Twitter, and that’s the basis of this longer piece. What is bothering me in particular is that smart, well-researched, carefully-argued content is rare, costly, and hard to produce. It’s better for us and for holding government to account, but we get less of it because we don’t have the resources (time, money, energy, access) to produce it.
Meanwhile, trash is cheap and easy, and despite what people say, they read and share it. That’s an old problem that existed pre-internet, but it’s gotten much worse. While folks may say they want smart, long-form content, their revealed preferences tell us otherwise. When push comes to shove, people love a scandal, they love an attack, they love a hit piece that confirms their priors and they aren’t super fussy about nailing the details in the process. People might say they want smarter stuff, but their clicks and shares don’t lie.
You can write partisan hack bombastic nonsense based on vibes and various allegiances and people will love it, boost it, and pay for it. It’s easy. It resonates emotionally. It hits. It goes viral. And because it’s easy — and cheap — you can produce it at scale.
Smart doesn’t pay. Stupid pays. So, in a world of scarce resources, you go with stupid. If you want to survive in this business and you can’t focus on a niche market that will pay top dollar without needing to scale to a mass audience, you have little choice if you want to write, podcast, create video, etc. and pay the bills.
As I wrote on Twitter, you can sum up the problem for many journalists as follows, particularly freelancers like me who don’t work for any single outlet on a full-time basis:
The economics of being a freelancer who wants to live is such that you either half-ass your work and get to scale or you full-ass it and starve. If you can try to full-ass and scale, but you’ll grind yourself to dust in no time.
This conundrum is also often true for journalists who are employed with outlets. They have a job, but it may not be stable, it probably doesn’t pay super well, and their resources are strained and increasingly diminished, which means you’re constantly asked to do more with less, strung out, and worried about it all falling apart any day.
That dynamic is a recipe for disaster that will get you cynical coverage instead of the careful work we want, which takes time and includes going to meetings, reading reports, poring over transcripts, building trust with sources, and carefully writing, editing, and fact checking your work.
The attention economy today doesn’t help. Beyond the resource constraint is the problem of personal, emotional incentives. Bombastic hackery not only sells, it gets attention, which in and of itself can be a valuable currency. Your personal stock grows as people pay attention, follow your accounts, and give you a sense of protection (‘my stuff hits, so I guess I’ll get to keep my job — hopefully’). This economy of work is based on perverse incentives that make journalists the centre of their work, not the work itself. This isn’t a new problem in the business, but the internet, and particularly social media, has turbocharged it.
Occasionally I consider leaving journalism because I worry I can’t do my best work any longer. I think if you have any integrity at all, at some point you have to ask yourself what you’re doing here and why; and if you can’t produce smart, true work that challenges authority and uplifts the conversation, then you’re just typing to pay the bills and biding time until you die. What kind of career is that? What kind of life is that?
Newspapers and magazines rarely raise the rates they pay their writers, so each year I take a pay cut through inflation. To address that, I can take on more work to make up the loss. With my limited time and energy that leads to producing worse material as I have to half-ass some of it. I could just eat the income loss and struggle to pay the bills, but eventually that catches up with you. I could try to full-ass more and inevitably burn out (been there more than once), but then I’d end up producing garbage anyway. None of these answers is good.
Stable and well-paying contracts with outlets — like I had with the Washington Post and TVO — help a lot. But as I learned, those arrangements can disappear overnight through no fault of your own. Losing those deals cost me tens of thousands of dollars a year and each disappeared out of nowhere, with no warning, for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of my work.
Substack, YouTube, and other subscription platforms offer some hope and some challenges. The hope is you can publish here and in the long run raise your per-article rate by growing paid subscriptions. If you do it right, you can keep up with rising costs or even beat them by adding more and more subscribers each year and in doing so give yourself a raise. You can make a real living doing this if you’re smart, persistent, lucky, and courageous.
But platforms like this also risk audience capture. As you get more money, you may want — wait for it — more money! You want to give people what they want and lots of it, because when you do, they give you that money. So maybe you stop hitting at the people and things they like and hit harder at the things they don’t like. Maybe you start telling people what they want to hear, whatever else you might think is right or true or good, because that’s what’s best for business. That too is hackery. It’s not smart or honest work.
To do this job right, you’ve got to be able to tell your audience things they might not like, which is something I am committed to doing because I refuse to betray myself and I’d rather quit than surrender my brain and my autonomy at the door.
Platforms like Substack and YouTube also risk lower quality work because going solo often means going without editorial checks and balances, including editing, fact checking, idea sharing and critique, and having someone who’ll say to you “No, you really shouldn’t do that.”
In Canada, there’s also the added risk of scale. It’s hard to write for a general audience and scale to a decent return since we’re a small-ish country and the media space, including freelance, is competitive. But we need people writing and talking about Canada.
Add to all of this the fact that running a small business (as I do with my freelance work) is itself time consuming and costly, with loads of administration work, invoice chasing, emails, bills, payroll taxes, etc. You know the drill. But it does take away from the focus of writing true and smart things to hold power to account.
I write all of this because I’m thinking about my career, the future of media, and state of our democracy. The media ecosystem is unhealthy and things are getting harder all the time. I’m considering doubling down on Substack and entering video by way of YouTube so that I can scale my work on my own terms, build an audience I can connect with directly, and make a sufficient money year-over-year instead of losing a little more each time the calendar flips a page.
Going all-in or mostly-in on Substack and YouTube is a risky move, since it involves walking away from the stable money and audiences that come with traditional outlets. But as someone pointed out to me, perhaps the risk is in not making this move. I think that’s probably true and reflects a changing mediascape that carries with it plenty of promise and just as much risk.
The problems we face are as great as they’ve ever been, and we need journalists who are prepared to confront them. We haven’t figured out how to create, balance, and maintain a healthy media ecosystem in which we can do this. But despite my doubts and worries, my plan is to do my best to help us try to sort it out. I hope you’ll join me.
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.
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.