Context Collapse: 💰 How Journalists, Public Relations Folks & Marketers Can Thrive In A Janky Economy
Economy's weird, industry's weird, let's party: CC #246
In this issue: Helping your career move forward when everything’s held together with duct tape.
Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
I’m writing this in Fall 2023. The economy is janky right now. You don’t need me to tell you that.
For starters, the US economy has its highest inflation rate in 40 years while unemployment is at one of the lowest rates in years. Some sectors of the economy like the trades are thriving right now, while 2023 has been an absolutely terrible year for tech, journalism, and advertising layoffs.
All of this means things are deeply, deeply weird.
But, if you’re lucky (or unlucky!) enough to work in journalism, PR, advertising, or marketing, you can thrive.
I’m lucky that I can speak more freely than most. I run my own creative consulting agency (hire us!) and have a skill set that means I have opportunities in lots of other fields if things go seriously tits up. They won’t, of course, unless we get a black swan event or three. But in the meantime… shit in the industry’s weird.
More after the jump…
1. We’re All in the Same Weird Bucket Together.
There’s a reason why I’m talking about journalists, public relations professionals, marketers, and advertisers as one collective group.
This is because we’re all in the same weird bucket together—even if it doesn’t feel like it. Journalists are supposed to produce media for the public good (lolhahahalol). Public relations folks interact with journalists on behalf of their clients. Marketers and advertisers produce media on behalf of their clients. And all four cross over all the time in expected and unexpected ways.
We’re all exposed to the same industry tradewinds. It turns out that the general public was trained to expect content for free and don’t like paying for it. It turns out that, as a collective, the journalism industry and the advertising industry made some staggeringly stupid monetization decisions over the past two decades (pivot to video! programmatic everything! infinite ad inventory leading to infinitely declining revenue and infinite fraud! etc. etc.) that everyone’s exposed to. And then the general contagion of layoff logic, where one company makes layoffs and then all their competitors do it because CEOs love groupthink.
This means adaptability is key.
2. Journalism is Screwed. But It Won’t Be Screwed Forever.
Journalism is in a bad place right now. Local newspapers are struggling and local Facebook groups/WhatsApp chats/Instagram accounts are a shite substitute. Big publications are increasingly playing to the same audience of professional managerial class left-leaning urbanites and suburbanites who pay for digital subscriptions and offering fuck all to the rest. Even the mighty New York Times makes their main money from recipe subscriptions, a shopping tips site (Wirecutter) and games (Wordle, crosswords, etc) rather than from news consumption. Vice went belly up this year in a true shifting-of-the-vibes moment.
My advice for journalists is this: Learn lots of shit, flex your entrepreneurial muscles, produce work in lots of different mediums.
If you’re lucky enough to have a job at one of the big media brands, you could lose your job anyday. If you’re lucky enough to have a job at a well-managed publication, you could wake up one day to a new owner who will stripmine your publication for parts. It’s the nature of the beast.
If you’re a writer, learn how to create for YouTube and make podcasts. If you’re a YouTuber, build basecamps on Patreon and TikTok so you have a plan B or a plan C. If you have a beat, relentlessly create your own media outside of your day job so you:
a) Get to do the stuff you want to do
b) Build your skills in real time
Journalism will get better because there are clear, quantifiable benefits to an educated public with an understanding of the world. But it’s not there yet, shit’s still fucked up. Your job as a journalist is to navigate the waters until things clear up.
3. Public Relations is at a Turning Point
Once upon a time, public relations strategy was pretty clear. You emailed or called journalists on behalf of your clients. You’d organize events for your clients. You’d put together pretty reports with terms like earned media and owned media and paid media that noone outside your industry understood.
Then the collapse of print and that whole pandemic thing fucked everything up.
There was that weird period when everything became Zoom webinars and then everyone got vaxxed and never wanted to go to another Zoom webinar again.
There was that big adjustment when you started putting together Tuesday night journalist happy hours for your clients in the city, but the journalists were all working from home in Bushwick and East Hollywood and noone wanted to travel 45 minutes in rush hour.
Or the whole thing when your client really, really wanted that placement in the Wall Street Journal or Fortune and didn’t understand that half the journalists were gone and the other half had their editors shouting at them that their stories weren’t showing up on social media enough.
Everyone’s cutting spending, everyone’s trying to scale back retainers, everyone’s showing up with unrealistic expectations and unrealistic timelines and unrealistic budgets. Forget forecasting for the next year; forecasting for the next quarter is tough enough.
My suggestion: Live the chaos. Work with marketers and hire former journalists to build custom media pipelines for clients. Your clients, 95% of the time, will be better off with a weekly newsletter with original articles sent to a targeted industry list and a cadence of weekly YouTube videos and a monthly podcast than with an article in Business Insider. Build up that recipe site instead of betting everything on that Today show appearance. Steer your clients away from cliches, do cool shit that gets results instead.
4. Marketing & Advertising: The Web is Dead. Long Live the Web.
Have you heard about that whole generative AI thing? That latest tech gold rush now that we’re onto instead of the blockchain or cryptocurrency or the metaverse or big data or the internet of things? That generative AI thing.
It turns out, however, that there is something to that generative AI thing.
Look at that picture I posted at the top of this article:
I generated this using Substack’s built-in AI generator (which I believe is DALL-E based?) in about one minute. While it’s not quite commercial quality, it does the job for a newsletter quite nicely. I would never hire a graphic designer for a one-off image in a blog post; this AI generated image was a substitute for what would almost certainly be a free stock image instead.
AI is also transforming the web. Right now the web is a sloppy mix of SEO-optimized junk churn pages and abandoned content that deprecates within a year.
If you’re trying to learn about what kind of plants you saw on a hike or how to build a cabinet or about the 2023 Chicago Bears (God help you!) you’re almost 100% better off going on YouTube or TikTok or Reddit than doing a Google search.
GenAI is very good at many of these things. It’s not quite a destroyer of jobs in 2023—tools like ChatGPT, Bing Chat and Midjourney are like enthusiastic, well-rounded interns with surface knowledge of everything but no deep knowledge—but it is very good at replacing searches of the Web.
I can ask ChatGPT 4 about soccer rules, parenting advice or car repair and it will give advice that will be mostly (though not completely, which you should really keep in mind!) correct. This means web traffic for these ordinary, everyday searches is going to plummet.
This is the best fucking news marketers and advertisers can ever get.
Now’s the time to build webpages that actually serve clients and their target audiences and create digital campaigns that are customized to audiences instead of endless SEO-chasing and trying to outsmart the Meta/Google ad algorithms.
The new web is going to be a mixture of genAI chats and regular queries and of fewer visitors to sites who spend much more time there. GenAI won’t replace writers and graphic designers or editors or creative directors unless you really want some gnarly bottom of the barrel campaigns (And there are plenty of clients who want that! But they are the ones who paid shit and were difficult to work with even before genAI)…
But, but, but: GenAI will make the jobs of marketers and advertisers much easier. Just like how making a presentation in Google Slides is way easier than the old days of, err, slide projectors and physical slides. And how running is way easier in a good pair of sneakers. Embrace the superpowers.
5. What’s Next? LOL.
If I could predict the future, I would definitely be doing something more lucrative than PR/marketing consulting. I’d probably be running up an obscene DraftKings or casino bill, but that’s neither here nor there.
What I do know is that complacency in the weird, lopsided 2023/2024 economy is the worst fucking thing you can do and that there are lots of unknown X-factors that will keep on complicating things in the near future.
My advice for anyone working in comms, whether journalist or PR or advertiser or anyone else, comes down to this:
Acquire as many new skills as you can.
Don’t get complacent about your company/organization.
Always have a plan B and a plan C and a plan D.
Be creative. Please, please, please be creative.
And let’s see from there. Click like & subscribe etc. etc. and see you lovely people soon.
