📰5 things I learned as a journalist you wouldn't believe.
Mainstream media is dead, long live mainstream media: Context Collapse #200
Confession time: I’ve spent a huge chunk of my adult life working in journalism and digital media.
I started working as a freelance journalist in 2004. This was followed by three years of working as an “intern” (LOL) at Gawker Media working on projects for sites like Wonkette, Gridskipper and Deadspin. I worked full-time digital media jobs in-house at places like the 92nd Street Y and Menupages. From 2010-2017 I worked as a masthead reporter at Fast Company and also wrote op-eds for the Los Angeles Times alongside articles for publications like Wired, Esquire and Foreign Policy.
All of this is a fancy way of saying I know a lot about how modern journalism works. I’m 42, which means I had a front-row seat for the transition from print to digital journalism. Here are five things I learned as a journalist that I wanted to share:
1. People only read the headlines and look at the art.
Takeaway: Headlines and thumbnail art are everything.
Journalists who spend their days working on carefully crafted articles and videos persist under a flattering delusion that readers will actually open their article or click on their video.
That’s not the case the vast majority of time in real life.
Humans are busy, distracted creatures. They will see a social media link/header image/link description, a headline in a newsletter or a headline in an app and make a split-second decision on whether to explore further or not.
YouTube creators understand this well. This is why making YouTube thumbnails is a science. Advertisers understand this very well; entire books have been written about how brand slogans tap into our deepest primal needs and desires.
In modern journalism, headlines, images and social media descriptions are typically chosen by editors rather than the actual masthead writers. These editors will typically have faith in the content itself to attract readers (lol doesn’t work) or go the other way with clickbaity headlines that include emotional appeals.
Which is what I did with this article! 5 things (a clear number giving readers an expectation on article length) I learned as a journalist (interesting to our target audience) you wouldn’t believe (the all important emotional appeal!).
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2. Media outlets suck at making money.
Takeaway: Getting people to pay for news is hard.
Sorry, old bosses. I love you. But you know I’m right.
With isolated exceptions (the New York Times has a thriving subscription business, for instance), most media outlets struggle to attract paying subscribers. Even for the Times, the primary driver of their subscription business is access to Gaming/Wordle, the NYT’s enormously successful Cooking app/website and product reviews on The Wirecutter… and not the NYT’s news coverage itself.
This problem is less of an issue for business publications. I’ll give an example: Working in marketing consulting, my business is at a distinct disadvantage if we didn’t subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg for advertising/marketing coverage or to industry publications like Ad Age or Adweek. We’d lack access to important news that makes it easier for us to work with clients. Therefore, we subscribe.
For a while, there was a lot of talk of micropayments (aka paying a few dollars for every individual article a reader wanted to read), which would have been very good for audiences. But they aren’t good for publications! The technical costs of micropayment platforms are very expensive in exchange for a profit model with very few repeat customers and little way of forecasting customer spend.
Meanwhile, the public has a wide, wide range of free content sources to choose from instead. After all, this is the internet.
3. Legacy media has a class problem.
Takeaway: Good luck finding journalists and editors at legacy media who didn’t grow up upper-middle class.
I’m going to say something that you may already know: The vast bulk of journalists working at legacy publications come from upper-middle class or flat-out wealthy backgrounds. A wide range of intentional and unintentional filters exist that divert young talent from lower-middle class, working class or poor backgrounds from careers in legacy journalism. While mid-level (and some high-level) leadership at legacy publications are paying attention to racial disparities among media outlet staff, economic background is a huge and ongoing blind spot.
Unpaid internships, selective hiring that prioritizes applicants who attended private universities for liberal arts majors, low pay for entry-level journo jobs that require 60 hour weeks routinely and disproportionate concentration of national/international media outlets in NYC makes this problem even worse.
Smart, young storytellers with hustle from lower-middle class and below backgrounds would do themselves a favor by ignoring traditional media careers entirely and instead devoting their energies to using YouTube, TikTok and Substack to build audiences and share their passions. They will likely make more money, work fewer hours and reach their dream audiences much more easily than those poor souls working in the legacy media dream crusher industrial complex. Which brings us to…
4. Social media is the medium.
Takeaway: Social media is where audiences discover.
The social media wars are over. The platforms won though the new rise of AI-powered search engines (which I’m keeping a beady paranoid eye on for the future) may well change things.
Platforms like Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest are the way the bulk of audiences interact with the internet. In the United States, at least, certain demographics skew towards different social networks. The heart of working class America is on TikTok. Facebook users are a little older than Twitter users, on average. Policymakers, academics and journalists love Twitter a little too much.
These platforms shape the way we ingest news and information in a host of conscious and subconscious ways. Media outlets who want to bypass platform gatekeepers need to be intentional in cultivating audiences by email or closed platforms like Discord and Slack. Do not count on web traffic as the primary driver of acquiring new readers under any circumstances.
5. Social media is the new commons.
Takeaway: Social media is how readers communicate with you & one another.
This brings us to a central, final discovery: Social media is what passes for the commons of 21st century America in how we communicate with each other and share information. However, there is no one site or company that has a monopoly on these commons.
I’m extremely skeptical of some of the more conspiracy theorist worldviews of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et all as unstoppable monoliths. Their behavior instead seems to be a mix of some smart decisions, some not so smart decisions and a whole lot of being in the right place at the right time. I’m also skeptical of many claims of social media censorship while being suspicious of the lack of insight the public (and many employees at social media companies themselves) has into how the algorithms that sort and prioritize recommended content work.
The United States is an atomized, deeply divided society where the idea of a shared national pop culture is falling apart and even professional sports are becoming politicized and no-go zones for decently sized sections of the public. Social media in all its algorithmically prioritized mess is the closest functioning thing we have to shared national popular culture.