New Media Models and A Good Summer Movie
The new action.
POD 144: Institutional Collapse
Old structures are in retreat. Newsrooms are splintering, late-night shows are being sent upstate, and legacy formats are entering media's Uncanny Valley. As the old order gives way, the contours of the new media world are coming into view: video and audio are eating text, performance and participation are mandatory, individuals matter more than formats, and being a brand is better than being a publisher.
We get into the Washington Post’s third-newsroom experiment, the rise of Pablo Torre's performance investigative journalism, and why Colbert was AOL-dead long before the cancellation. Also: TikTok talent flight, the return of conspiracy as entertainment, and why most magazine brands are now running some version of the Forbes playbook.. Out Friday AM. Listen.
PVA CONVERSATION
Troy: So, how should we think about digital media now?
How quickly the old ways feel so naive, so outdated. The platform dependency, the product perversions that come with optimizing, not for an audience, but for someone else’s rules and the whimsy of an algorithm. An ad model that puts floating video ad players between you and the thing you came for.
We can start to see the shape of the next. At the risk of boiling the ocean, here are a few models that seem sustainable now.
Reported Media: You are valuable because of people. People gathering information, people with views, sorting between truth and lies, sense making, distilling gossip to fact. Your true north is ultimately your values and a satisfied subscriber who appreciates how they are expressed.
You have found a way to get enough scale to make the appropriate investment in this media creation flywheel. If you are not a Substacker, you need a newsroom that matters in sensibility, breadth, expertise, pace and ambition.
The Reported Media people stubbornly genuflect to the institutional credibility of “the media brand.”
Here a successful new guard appreciates the power of an “augmented media org,” one that sees AI as friend in the necessary pursuit of hyper-efficient, multi-modal media expression where polar opposites on the old media spectrum collide. Newsletters with a side of cable news.
You make things AI cannot. Scale players like NYT and WSJ sit solidly in this camp. The Atlantic has developed a flywheel inside its progressive niche. Admittedly helped along by a patient benefactor in Lauren Powell Jobs. Wired is doing a nice job of shifting from tech cheerleader to its watchful eye. Vanity Fair sits on the precipice. Puck, Semafor, The Free Press… all becoming. Others in the category like Forbes, Fortune, Time deliver a veneer of news but not enough to garner real subscription support. Instead they trade their brand equity for ad dollars. This has a place but it is tenuous.
Impresario Media: Impresario’s leverage the power of personality and point of view to carve out mindshare in a noisy information space. They win on platforms. They entertain and inform. Audio and video drives the business. Ads matter more than subs.
The best find ways to spread the goodness of the human to the media brand. Examples include Dave and Barstool, Bari and the Free Press, Mr Beast and Beast Media. I would put most of the newsletter people here. This market is wildly fragmented but always overflowing with explosive promise, the breakout algebra of a Hollywood phenom.
This week we take a look at a new entry in the ad trade pub category that is deploying the Impresario playbook - Breaking and Entering. These guys are great and have succeeded in developing a quick hit ad news format that will give them permission to build a next-gen B2B media brand.
All of the Reported People aspire to play here. Which naturally creates talent headaches as it did at the Washington Post when Dave Jorgenson departed this week to go solo: Can The Washington Post’s TikTok Guy Make It Without The Post?
Mr. Jorgenson, 34, is leaving The Post next month to start an online video company based on his personal YouTube channel, Local News International, which blends the topical wit of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” with the surreal antics of Ron Burgundy, the fictional star of “Anchorman.” Joining him are two former colleagues: Micah Gelman, who until recently was The Post’s director of video, and Lauren Saks, Mr. Gelman’s former deputy.
Agentic media: This is largely nascent but we can see the outlines. Much of what used to function as ad-carrying media will be aggregated and delivered in infinitely personalized bundles via AI interfaces. Here, UCG finds new life as the AI sweeps up the human generated bits and makes it useful at scale. It’s early to tell if content creators can actually create a business feeding the beast. Data owners, like ones that have really valuable up to the minute stuff, may find blood in the vein. Most of the other media stuff will be compressed and commoditized inside of the handy chat interface.
Of course nothing is pure in media. A fun bonus category this week would be State-Adjacent Media which is what All-In has become. It is truly remarkable how this podcast has grown in influence to become the media appendage of the Trump Administration. Jcal and Freidberg have navigated the dissonance shamelessly. See as example this week’s All-In / Hill and Valley AI Summit in Washington. Note how effectively the Silicon Valley agenda has seeped into Washington. IP is becoming inconvenient in the race for global AI dominance.
Lastly, in entertainment news, Ari Aster’s Eddington is a useful summer rumination on covid insanity, our fractious nation and the insidiousness of social media that divides us. Worth a trip to the cinema.
Good episode this week. What would you add?
Brian: What about harvest media?
One path you skip is harvest media. There’s still value in the AOL dialup business. Yes, it’s not sexy, but a broad swathe of legacy media has entering its harvesting phase. These are brands. They will struggle to get to the rarefied level of reported media to command a big subscriptions base. Impressario media is attractive yet hard for them to make work.
These brands will all run some version of the Forbes playbook by prioritizing lists (OK, franchises), events and mining value from the brand asset. Fortune embraced this path this week, and it’s one Time, Newsweek are on.
I would augment your state-run media to broaden it to any media as a front operation. Media is undervalued in the marketplace because the economic models are broken, not because it’s not valuable. Trump parlayed a preternatural feel for the attention economy into the presidency. Media always finds a way, and companies will create or fund their own media for their own purposes. All-In’s success is remarkable. They’ve wrung far more value from that asset than they would if they were doing sock ad reads or trying to make programmatic work.