I don't see how investing will save the industry from decline. If there was more revenue to be had, the legacy players wouldn't be struggling so badly. Investors chasing profits are just going to build a better Buzzfeed, not a better NY Times. Unless someone can crack the nut of profiting off of serious journalism and making the average TikTok scroller or Joe Rogan listener exercise a little more skepticism and under…
The state of journalism is where Joe Rogan or whatever podcast is a step forward and refreshing.
There's a reason people prefer listening to the guest to speak instead of being taught to think and live by white journo women.
Technology will advance such that basic "truths" will be verifiable, leaving journalists as nothing more than storytellers. We should be investing in companies that empower people with the verifiable information they need to arrive at their own conclusions.
>Technology will advance such that basic "truths" will be verifiable
With the way the world is rushing headfirst into lying LLMs and holding them up as gospel. I don't quite see the world going your way.
You’re misunderstanding the idea. Venture capitalists don’t invest their own money, they raise funds from other people and institutions, and make funding decisions on their behalf. The idea here is that journalists have skills and domain knowledge that would help them make better than average decisions when it comes to media startups. So: Raising and directing capital, not necessarily originating it.
Journalists are already heavily involved in capital raising through applying for grants and scholarships. Our time is already thin, so this article is effectively asking us to switch careers or become part-time investors.
I can’t help but laugh a bit at the absurdity of this thread. It’s like the “learn to code” meme but way more stupid. Or “why don’t poor people just take money out of their trust fund?”.
I think ambition often gets the better of most startups and that is especially true with journalism startups. People found companies with the hopes of it being worth billions and rarely try to make a company worth millions. One great journalism startup that I think is a huge success is Defector. A bunch of journalists, mostly coworkers from a previous media outlet, joined together to create a new company as a worker…
Isn't this creating a correlated risk for yourself? In the case of some giant negative disruption to the journalism industry, you now might both lose your job _and_ have your investment disappear. I thought that generally speaking, the advice was not to directly invest in the industry you work in for exactly this reason.
I don't see how investing will save the industry from decline. If there was more revenue to be had, the legacy players wouldn't be struggling so badly. Investors chasing profits are just going to build a better Buzzfeed, not a better NY Times. Unless someone can crack the nut of profiting off of serious journalism and making the average TikTok scroller or Joe Rogan listener exercise a little more skepticism and under…
Plenty of people would probably argue that Rogan has been leading the way to higher quality. It's why we now have countless of 3-5 hour podcasts where people are allowed to go through all nuances, finish their thoughts and we don't have to rely on the 30 seconds soundbites that TV and traditional media filters give us.
I mean, he's opened up the market for listening in general, but I'd still count his show as being low quality. Just letting cranks speak without interruption isn't journalism. The long-form podcasts I listen to are from professional journalists who do weeks of prep, gather sources, check facts, challenger assertions and try to present an accurate picture. Rogan just lets people lie and theorize and push agendas and he goes along with whatever so long as it's funny or engaging.
I don't see how investing will save the industry from decline. If there was more revenue to be had, the legacy players wouldn't be struggling so badly. Investors chasing profits are just going to build a better Buzzfeed, not a better NY Times. Unless someone can crack the nut of profiting off of serious journalism and making the average TikTok scroller or Joe Rogan listener exercise a little more skepticism and under…
There are definitely people on Substack who have been able to see success doing the whole "independent non biased news" schtick, but I'm not sure if it's possible to build a NYT level of business doing that. At the same time, maybe smaller independent news outfits that are run by at most a handful of people, that cover more local news might be able to make it work if they keep their expenses low.
What toot said. Substack is not really giving you news. It has some very good writers, but they're not out there developing sources, breaking stories, conducting investigations, or doing primary research of any kind mostly (except in the instances where a research scientist is also a writer). It's largely people with some expertise and writing skill reading the news and giving you their take. Someone still needs to actually produce the news for the writers on Substack to even have anything to write about.
Technology will advance such that basic "truths" will be verifiable, leaving journalists as nothing more than storytellers. We should be investing in companies that empower people with the verifiable information they need to arrive at their own conclusions.
>Technology will advance such that basic "truths" will be verifiable With the way the world is rushing headfirst into lying LLMs and holding them up as gospel. I don't quite see the world going your way.
There are companies working on authentication and fraud detection as we speak. There is an emerging cold war between them and AI.
There are definitely people on Substack who have been able to see success doing the whole "independent non biased news" schtick, but I'm not sure if it's possible to build a NYT level of business doing that. At the same time, maybe smaller independent news outfits that are run by at most a handful of people, that cover more local news might be able to make it work if they keep their expenses low.
I wonder are they truly selling "non-biased" news. Or is substack just platform that allows them to sell those who want to buy their specific bias. Not that it isn't the valid model in current online enviroment.
> unbiased news
Even sophisticated people like paulg make comments like "why doesn't someone just make factual news".
It suggests to me that thinking about epistemology and marketing is a learned skill.