Het begin van het einde van de oude media kwam twintig jaar geleden met het internet. Want dat zou toch nooit groot gaan worden. Het bleek wel groot te worden dus was er paniek en alle haast om het internet-wiel alsnog een keer uit te vinden. Dat ging een tijd lang goed, even leek het einde van de oude media toch nog niet zo nabij.
Toen kwamen de social media. Toen kwamen podcasts zoals die van Joe Rogan.
Toen kwamen de millennials. Toen kwam woke en de SJW’s. Toen kwam Trump.
Daarna was er alsnog het einde van de oude media.
“To finally leave old media required me to confront some realities. Among them: The Washington Post is not the same place that broke Watergate, and The New York Times isn’t the same place that got the Pentagon Papers.
It’s not that the excellent, old-school reporters aren’t there. They are. They just don’t—or can’t—control the culture.
Partly that’s because of weakness and cowardice at the top of the masthead.
As we’ve been building this new company, we’ve seen the decay of the old institutions accelerate. I look at CNN+, which shut down after just 21 days. The streamer, hyped nonstop by CNN, spent $300 million—or $14,285,714.29 per day. In the end, 150,000 Americans signed up, with an average of 10,000 people watching any content each day. (By comparison, we have more than 180,000 people that receive this newsletter. We did not spend $300 million to achieve this.) Or I look at Spotify, and remember they paid the Obamas $25 million in 2019 to make some podcasts, little of which has had any impact. Or Buzzfeed, which is now basically a penny stock, trading at $2.23 a share.
When I started my career at the Wall Street Journal, the question every op-ed editor would ask before we published a piece was: Is this worth printing several hundred thousand times (literally)? Is it worth it?
I’m not sure that question is asked so much anymore.
In fact, they are incentivized to publish as much as they can. To push. The endless river of push notifications—which originally began about breaking news and is now used for items about tertiary British royals—is invasive and profit-seeking.
What there’s too little of is trust. A huge and growing audience of Americans no longer believes the stories the establishment media tells.
Reporting on the world as it actually is—and not as The Narrative would like it to be—was once a journalistic ideal. Now it’s a liability.”
