Alex Wright - Empire of Ink

28:51Reed was also the one who brought the linotype into the Tribune. So he was very much on a mission to cut costs and improve efficiencies and go for scale, very much like a kind of capitalist mindset. And he did that, but that became more the norm as we go into the 20th century, where the rise of the commercial media enterprise becomes the dominant story and the old way of newspapering that was more driven by these strong individual opinionated editors starts to fall by the wayside. Sure. Let's see. Sam Clemens becomes Mark Twain at the territorial enterprise in Virginia City. Full disclosure, we did another book about George Hearst by Matthew Bernstein, and that has Virginia City and obviously has Samuel Clemens in it.

29:40And so I've been to Virginia City, which is a very fun kind of tourist trap nowadays up in the hills above Reno. And so I've become kind of a Sam Clemens sucker for better or for worse. So reading your book was – you had all the trappings in the later part of the book of him. But he brings up this idea of like – he has a story of the petrified man hoax. And he said, quote, the public needed matters of thrilling interest for breakfast, end quote. You call it – you quantify it to be like the 1860s equivalent of clickbait. and I also think of like papers you know in the front of the headlines right you know the front page news you're not going to put your clickbait in the front page news it's like the back pages or kind of the comedy section or the gossip section do you think how these were laid out would change how we think about the news yeah I mean there's a lot to unpack there I think maybe I'll just pick your question apart a little bit first yes there were certainly you know, all kinds of fun examples of kind of hoaxes and, you know, tall tales that kind of circulated in these papers.

30:51I mean, there was a lot of like so-called straight news too, but you can go back to the 1840s and the New York Sun publishing the famous moon hoax story about the supposed discovery of people and creatures living on the moon, which they later, and that was one was actually kind of a prank where they were trying to test out other papers to see if they would fall for it, which they did. And then all these papers started republishing, and then they acknowledged that they were putting them on. But Clemens was, I mean, Clemens and eventually Mark Twain, you know, he had a lot of fun with it. You know, he had started out in the newspaper trade early on working, apprenticing.

31:30He was apprenticed at, I think, the age of 11 or 12 to a local newspaper in Hannibal, Missouri. And, you know, then eventually went to work for his brother who was publishing another newspaper. And he would submit sort of anonymous stories because he didn't think his older brother would publish his younger brother's work. So he would submit them anonymously. There was a whole culture of like pseudonymous, anonymous kind of submissions. And as Twain went on his journey working in different newspapers, he started to really experiment with the forum a lot. There was one example, I think it was in, I forget if it was in somewhere on the East Coast, maybe Philadelphia or Baltimore.

32:09He was doing a stint at a newspaper and he was, he was really decided to make fun of the obituaries. There were apparently a lot of very flowery poems being written about people who had passed away. And so he started to basically submit fake obituaries in this kind of purple poetry, like all these people. So he was like, he was, he was a prankster. He wasn't afraid to like make stuff up. And so when he got to the territorial enterprise, which is a really amazing collection of talent, not just Twain, but some really great newspaper. It was probably the best written newspaper west of the Mississippi for many years.

32:46He had kind of a partner in crime, a guy named Dan DeKeele, who has largely been forgotten, but also wrote a lot of these tall tale stories about like, there's one about the traveling stones, these kind of rocks that move across the desert by themselves. And then Twain with the petrified man. Yeah, they didn't shy away from having it on. I think they were having fun with that. I don't think they really fully expected people to believe all these stories, but they were testing the boundaries and seeing what they could get away with. Yeah, because I think – You wouldn't see that today. Yeah, to your point.

33:17And I think we do see these things on the internet. We do see them on social media. And I think that was one of the takeaways I had from your book is, is the media business taking itself too seriously? Like, for example, let's say we're chatting and we're talking about politics or we're talking about sports and you say to me, oh, well, did you hear the rumor is XYZ? Well, by the way, if the media doesn't want to talk about the rumors, that's kind of the scuttlebutt. And what's interesting about that is it's terribly human. It's gossip. It could be true. It could be false. I work in the investment business.

33:51So I always joke that like 90 percent of the rumors in our business are true because they usually are. But again, so who deals in the rumors of the investment business? We call that the New York Post, for example, obviously created by Alexander Hamilton. So they've made a really good business out of rumors in many ways. And yet you see all these other publications that are like prim and proper. And they're like, I am not going to traffic in that kind of indulgence. And the answer is if you don't, someone will. And what creates intimate content is the people that publish stuff that's unique. Yeah, and I think it's really interesting to think about when you look at this earlier era of newspapering and the kinds of value that people got out of these papers, it wasn't just what today we would maybe call news, which is a hard term to define, actually.

34:46But, you know, I think we tend to think of it as kind of like politics and, you know, maybe sports and, you know, the kinds of things you see and, you know, the main menu of the section names of newspapers. So politics, sports, business, weather, whatever. You know, if you look in the 19th century, people got all kinds of other value out of newspapers. They got gossip. They got tall tales. They got poetry. They got updates from their neighbors about their vacation. People would submit these little things about so-and-so came a-calling from two counties over last weekend. And here's the latest hog prices.

35:34All kinds of things. And it was a real mix of stuff. And I think if you look today, I think those people still want that whole range of stuff in their media diet, but they're not looking to news organizations for a lot of that stuff. They're looking to places like TikTok or Instagram or Facebook. And I think in a way, you know, the success of these social media companies stems from the fact that they're fulfilling a real human need that once upon a time newspapers used to fill. And they have not even tried to fill those needs in a very long time for complicated reasons. It reminds me of the Bonnie Raitt song.

36:15Let's give him something to talk about. Right. I mean, that's that's kind of what part of the the news fulfilled. Let's move over to kind of the print distribution side. Richard Ho's Rotary Press could print 60 page a minute, 10 times faster than anything before it. There's this other tension, this kind of big arc and theme of your book, which is like some look and say, here comes technology. Let's adapt it and adopt it quickly. And others say, uh-oh, it's the death of the news business. You know, some people tried to sabotage his technology as an example. Well, yeah. I mean, there's always been this kind of tension between doing things faster, better, cheaper, and trying to maintain some sense of quality and sort of human touch to the whole thing.

37:09In the case of the Ho press, I mean, that was another massively important innovation, whereas before the rotary press came along – and Ho wasn't the first one to invent a rotary press, but he kind of perfected it and commercialized it. Newspapers and any kind of printed material were printed sort of one sheet at a time, the way you would maybe feed things into a home printer. You have one sheet and you feed it in and you print it and then you get to the next sheet. The rotary press basically lets you print using a roll of paper in a continuous flow. So it just massively accelerates the whole process.

37:45Interestingly, though, the sheer kind of scale and velocity of rotary printing also exacerbated another problem I talk about in the book, which is the raw materials problem. Like for – up until – people, I think, don't recognize that the use of like wood pulp paper didn't become a normal practice until well into the 19th century. For most of that time, paper was made out of rags. And even as early as the mid-1700s, there was – printers were worried that they were going to run out of rags and raw material. And so people started experimenting with other things they could print with, like straw or grass or all kinds of vegetables.

38:31And there's also one particularly weird story I get into in the book where there was a guy who discovered a very strange source of raw material for printing in the form of Egyptian mummies, which were in plentiful supply in the mid-1800s. And he started importing them from Egypt and determined that they were actually – it was cheaper to print on recycled mummies than to find local rags. And so people – it was a thing for a while and people found out about it and were somewhat horrified. But anyway, necessity is the mother of invention, I guess. But people were trying all kinds of things. Anyway, but then eventually things did start to scale.

39:14But again, up until like the 1880s, there was still this kind of fundamental bottleneck around the last step in the production cycle, which was the typesetting. And so I think for a long time that did actually – and I think a lot of printers took pride in this notion that they were the last gatekeepers for like the quality of the printed word. And they were like the last kind of QA step in the process. And a lot of them held on to that. And it was a tough transition where a lot of them were suddenly thrown out of work by the linotype, although eventually things worked out because there was so much greater demand and market for papers that eventually most of them transitioned to become linotype operators.

39:55Yeah. To your point about the use of wood and pulp, my maternal grandfather worked at a Crown Zellerback Mill on the Columbia River, which obviously had five presses at one point. I think they're down to one. It's now owned by Georgia Pacific. and that would be a typical pulp plant. And that was the largest, I think, in the area at that time. But it's gone to be much more efficient for one press, but there's just not the same print needed. And I also think of the transition that the Wall Street Journal did. It used to have the wider format and it moved to a more standardized print format so it could be published across the United States by other printers.

40:37That was a big change. That happened in the last 20 years, by the way. That was a big deal. I remember when that happened. We hope you're enjoying the podcast. You know, we work hard putting together this show, but we work even harder for our investors at Smead Capital Management. At Smead, we believe in discipline investing, which is why the Smead funds have a proven track record of long-term outperformance. If you're an investor who plays the long game and want to invest in wonderful companies to build wealth, we invite you to visit SmeadCap.com. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

41:09Investing involves risks, including loss of principle. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead funds distributed by Smead Funds Distributors, LLC, not affiliated. The other change that came about, you talk about Kellogg. Kellogg built the first ready print syndication service. You know, this is like the predecessor in my mind of like the Associated Press or other syndication services like that. How did he come up with that idea and how much scale did he combine for that?

41:47Yeah, Kellogg is a really interesting character and another one of these folks who's maybe living a little bit on the margins of history. But he invented this what he called ready print service, which is sometimes also called boilerplate. And the – essentially what he – the solution that he came up with, he was trying to address the problem of newspapers not having enough news to print. And this was something that was really exacerbated during the Civil War. He was right at the end of the war. You know, the fact is a lot of the trained, skilled printers in the country had gone off to war and many of them were killed.

42:29And there was actually a printer shortage after the war. And so a lot of these papers – and at the same time, the demand for newspapers had actually boomed during the war because people were so like – were very engaged in following the news of the war. Yep. And so the problem was papers just – many small – especially smaller country papers just didn't have enough stuff or enough people to print a weekly edition, a weekly four-page edition. And so he hit on this idea of what if there was sort of a more of a kind of – a knowledge-sharing kind of mechanism where you could basically print out sheets in advance.

43:14and what he came up with was interesting idea. So typical paper at this country paper at the time would have been a four page paper. So basically two sheets folded over, right? And his idea was, what if you already, what if you printed one side of the sheet? So essentially what are the inside pages, like the pages two and three? So one and four, the local paper, page one still looks like your local paper. Stage four still looks like your local paper, but the inside half the paper, half the work comes to you pre-printed. And he invented this whole business model around this and he would sell ads on the inside pages.

43:49And so he would give you your paper for free. You could have a free stock of paper. He would collect the ad money for the inside pages and you could do what you wanted with the rest. It turned out to be wildly popular in the Midwest and that really expanded. Eventually, he started introducing all kinds of variations on that where you could get like pre-printed blocks or just buy certain stories or certain topics you were interested in. You could subscribe to kind of a particular political – you could have like Republican-flavored pages or Democratic-flavored pages. He eventually ran a whole newsroom in Chicago with people cranking out these stories with no – without bylines.

44:28It was sort of this anonymous – I think in the book I call them the ghost editors. Like they're these anonymous – this anonymous newsroom of people who were quietly like producing a huge volume of the news that was being consumed in the country. Nobody knew who they were for the most part. And that, as you say, that really paved the way for eventually the rise of new syndicates, these kind of syndication services that became kind of a dominant force in the 20th century, things like the AP and UPS – sorry, the United Press and UPI and things like that. Well, I think – I mean it's now called USA Today, but Gannett was the big publisher, and they had enough dailies that they could conglomerate that news together.

45:10We sit – Arizona Central News is what is now referred to as the Arizona Republic, is a USA Today on publication. So when you go into the paper, you'll see quite a few USA Today articles that are just repurposed into the daily paper, obviously coming out of that same idea. You mentioned ads. I'm going to list off a few of the oddities of prior, you know, the idea of ads early on. Patent medicine ads paid for the late 19th century press. As you point out, Coca-Cola started as a curative. A French tonic wine had six milligrams of cocaine per fluid ounce.

45:50Highly unregulated, a potion called Big G, reputedly cured syphilis. and you talk about like today's social feeds. I mean, like when I think of TikTok, my daughters will come to me. I have three daughters. They're 16 to 12 years old right now and they will come tell me about skin treatment ideas that just seem totally insane but actually are very historically accurate for crazy stupid ideas that proliferate on media platforms. I think you're exactly right. I think there is this really weird echo right now of the patent medicine boom in the 1880s and 90s. I have a teenage kid too who I'm constantly having to explain to him why maybe peptides are not a great idea.

46:39He's reading all about them. That's so funny. And it was, yeah, in that era, like – and it was very tied to the rise of ReadyPrint and Boilerplate. Some of – many of the ads that these people like Kellogg and later a guy named George Jocelyn were selling were patent medicine ads. And they were kind of nationally advertised. Lydia Pinkham's famous women's tonic was like probably the most popular one of the era that sort of cured all kinds of women's ailments supposedly. And there were all kinds of other ones that were all kinds of dubious concoctions out there. But it was a booming business and it really fueled the kind of growth of the modern advertising industry in many ways before eventually Congress came in and started regulating it in the early 1900s, which needed to happen.

47:27But up until then, it was kind of anything goes and a lot of money was changing hands. But they're fun to look at. Like there's all kinds of – you can go online and go down all kinds of rabbit holes. Look at your old patent medicine ads. They're really visually fun to look at too. Well, I was going to say the visuals you do provide in the book are fun because you look back at these old ads and whatnot. It's just kind of fun to put yourself in the moment and think of how human – again, back to the earlier point, this all is. So this is kind of like the more somber or sad part of the book. Twain meets James Page at the cult factory in Hartford and just is blown away by what this guy wants to do.

48:05You know, Page wants to create this column connected by strings to really speed forward the idea of print and the ability to do that. And Twain sinks a small fortune into Page. How could Twain be so enraptured with this person and be so disappointed in the end? Yeah, it really turns out to be kind of a tragic chapter in Twain's life, but it starts out with a lot of optimism. We talked at the beginning about the linotype and this problem of automating the process of setting type. James Page had thought he had the answer. He was a brilliant inventor who had thought about this problem and thought he had it solved with this quite elaborate machine that seemed on paper like it should work.

49:00And Twain was no dummy. He was – remember, he had spent much of his life in the printing trades. He grew up as a printer's devil, an apprentice, a writer. He knew the ins and outs of the business, and he himself had actually, in addition to writing newspaper articles, later novels and things, he was also a publisher. He had had huge success publishing Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs just prior to meeting Page. And so he was actually convinced that he kind of had a Midas touch at this point. I think it's an important thing to keep in mind. He had just – Huckleberry Finn had just come out to huge acclaim.

49:35He had just made a fortune on Grant's memoirs. He had started to see himself as someone who could kind of do no wrong. And he was always like – and Twain had grown up in poverty and there was always this kind of undercurrent of financial insecurity. And he was always kind of trying to figure out how to make more money, how he would eventually hit it rich or richer. And he had speculated on a bunch of different little inventions that people would bring to him. he was a real kind of technophile, I guess you would say today. He loved new inventions. He was fascinated with the typewriter. And he developed a tool, he funded a device for like image printing and all kinds of other things.

50:22But when he got wind of the page project, he just decided this was it. This was where he was going to really make his fortune. And he started out as kind of coming in with a small investment, and he got very close to the project. He became progressively more and more obsessed with figuring out how to solve this problem because he saw the opportunity, and he was right. It was a huge opportunity. Whoever, you know, solved this problem was going to make, you know, was going to make a fortune and he thought it was going to be him. The problem was that Page was a bit of a mercurial figure and a fast talker and kind of a charmer.

51:06And he was a brilliant engineer, but he was also had the fatal flaw of a lot of brilliant engineers. He was a perfectionist and he could never let it go. It was always like this close to being perfect, this one more feature, this one more tweak. And eventually he ended up designing this machine that was just so kind of over-engineered that it was impossible to maintain and it broke down all the time. And Twain was also kind of implicated in this because Twain for many years was right in there in the weeds of it with Page. I went to the Bancroft Library and the archives in UC Berkeley and saw some of Twain's papers.

51:48He was writing like a man possessed, like notebooks and notebooks full of his ideas and like specifications and figuring out the economics of the machine and how it was going to work. And while they were so busy trying to, you know, concocting this grand plan, Mergenthaler came along with the Linotype, a much simpler machine, a less elegant machine, machine that did not have quite – did not produce quite the beautiful, elegant specimens of type that the Page machine would produce, but was good enough, you know, for the purposes of the newspaper publishers who used it. And it was very reliable.

52:27And in fact, the Linotype was in service for 100 years. I mean, that machine was kind of like – I mean, not that it was also a complicated machine that requires some maintenance, but it clearly just won in the marketplace. And unfortunately, Twain kind of kept throwing good money after bad, convinced that they were going to get out front of this and ultimately prevail, and they didn't. And eventually he became disillusioned and withdrew his investment, but it was too late at that point. He had basically spent most of his fortune and his wife's inheritance on this project, had to actually pack up his family and leave their home in Hartford.

53:07And for several years they went over to Europe where he got on the lecture circuit to try to make some money back. And his writing, if you read his biographers, they kind of all agree that his writing was never the same after that. It took so much out of him that his writing took a turn for the kind of dystopian after that. If you look at Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court, which is kind of like it has a sour tone to it about the modern world. I think it really drained him spiritually and psychologically. He continued to write and produce some good stuff. But his kind of – I think he put some of the best creative years of his life into this project that ultimately went bust.

53:48And it is kind of a tragedy. Well, it reminds me, I think you mentioned in the book that if Page or the compositor was brought up, I mean it was like you just couldn't say anything around him to the tune of that. Sir Isaac Newton, it was said many years later after the South Seas bubble that no one would bring up the South Seas bubble around him because he had lost so much money personally on that as well, much like Twain with Page. Um, the, the Linotype disenfranchised hand compositors at first, but in kind of like a classical creative destruction way, it then powers the newspaper to be, you know, more cost effective, cheaper to produce, and it causes an explosion of the newspaper, um, you know, because of this technology.

54:34As you think about the rebound, you know, for the hand compositors or the industry following this technological change, looking back as a historian, who paid the price? Who lost? Who won? And was it actually a massive positive for all? Or was there something to really be said that was a big loser in that? Yeah, I mean, it's a complicated story. I think it's hard to say who won, who lost. I think it's a great example of sort of creative destruction, where this new, very disruptive technology comes along, throws a lot of people out of work at first. It's kind of a John Henry story. All these skilled.

55:13And one of the chapters of the book, I talk about this phenomenon of typesetter races in the 1870s and 80s where the typesetting became – people, I think, sort of knew that something like this was coming. And the fastest typesetter started to compete for prize money and prove who could be the fastest, best. And then eventually, they just all lose out to the linotype. But in the years that followed, the Linotype did trigger this massive expansion of newspaper publishing that ultimately created a lot of jobs for Linotype operators, many of whom had formerly been hand compositors. There's a book coming out later this year by Jeff Jarvis, which actually talks also about the Linotype and the page compositor that actually really more follows the trajectory of what happened afterwards, which I think that book will actually be a nice kind of counterpoint to my book, which is more focused on what came before.

56:08But in terms of what was lost and what was gained, I mean, I think one of the big gains that came out of this was sort of the professionalization of journalism. Like it was for most of the 18th century or the 19th century, it was kind of a anything goes kind of environment. Like a lot of very passionate, voicey kind of idiosyncratic people like, you know, made themselves heard, but it was very noisy and very chaotic and occasionally violent. And there weren't really, there wasn't really the sense of journalistic standards or ethics or, you know, guiding principles behind it. And I think that's really started to change, you know, after a period of, you know, a rocky adjustment period, you go through the era of Hearst and Pulitzer and all that, but the formation of the first journalism schools, the fact that suddenly reporting became like a kind of normal middle class job you could have living in a city and you could go to grad school for and learn some, you know, some guidelines for how to do this.

57:14It did give birth to this kind of more dispassionate kind of just the facts kind of ideal of reporting that became, you know, more of a,

57:26more of the model going into the 20th century. Not that there weren't still people voicing opinions and speaking their minds, but there was what historian James Carey calls this iron core of journalism sort of coalesced of like, you know, this kind of pyramid style, just the facts, like baseline reporting that then enabled a lot of things to flourish around it. So I think, I don't want to over-romanticize 19th century reporting. It was like people did play fast and loose with the facts, and it was pretty messy. And there was what passed for news was a lot of stuff that probably today would not pass muster in any news organization.

58:05So there's tradeoffs both ways. Hey, I want to give a big shout out to everyone who's been working so hard on this show. You know, we recently hit the top 10 in investing podcasts on Apple Podcasts and even number one in the business category in several countries. As you may know, this show is brought to you by Smead Capital Management. Smead Capital Management understands how frustrating and illogical the stock market can be. If you're searching for funds with a proven track record, give the Smead funds a look. Or better yet, reach out at SmeadCap.com. And don't forget to mention, you're a fan of the podcast.

58:40Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risks, including loss of principle. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead funds distributed by Smead Funds Distributors, LLC, not affiliated. One of your core arguments is that this 19th century press was this like self-organizing, decentralized, participatory ecosystem. In other words, like anything goes. that is more common with today's social media platforms or kind of direct to the masses in a way.

59:20Do you think this is like a pendulum? It's swinging back and forth constantly. So the 19th century was really chaotic, whatever goes. We swung in the 20th century to call it the late 20th century of being really a organized and rote kind of ideal system. And we're swinging back towards where the 19th century is, or at least are kind of hanging in that area more often. These paradigm shifts happen more than once in an industry. They go back and forth between kind of highly concentrated to an explosion of creativity and revolution. Do you think that's just the transition that we're in the media business to?

1:00:00Yeah. So first, I'm always hesitant to try to predict the future. I'm much more comfortable talking about the past. But I will say that I think the parallels are – seem almost self-evident. Like when we look at the media landscape today and just how chaotic and noisy and self-organizing it is, it does start to look a lot like the kinds of sort of self-expression and opinion mongering that was happening in the 19th century. And we see that everywhere online. And the sort of mass media monoculture that evolved in the 20th century seems like to be fracturing in a lot of ways, like the so-called mainstream or legacy media.

1:00:47I mean, it's still there, but it doesn't have the same cultural authority that it did. I was reading somewhere recently in 1980, like one in four American households watched the evening news, watched one of the evening newscasts on network TV, and now it's closer to one in 15 or one in 20. So it just doesn't have the same weight or ability to hold a kind of cultural consensus as it used to. But I think what's interesting to ponder as we go into this yet another kind of wave of disruption to the media business with generative AI, I think a lot of people are sort of fixated on the problems like AI slop or AI-generated content.

1:01:32But I actually feel like that's kind of just a very surface level kind of phenomenon. I think what could be really interesting, and we'll see how it plays out, but whether the ability of newsrooms to leverage some of these tools to sort of support what they're doing might actually enable them to just sort of reconstitute that iron core of journalism that has been so threatened in the last couple of decades by the internet. And to give you a better idea of what I mean there, if you think about the economics of covering your local town council or your school board meeting or your kids' Little League sports game or whatever, there's no economic model where sending a dedicated reporter to cover those things is probably going to make sense.

1:02:21But I think there are models where machines can do some of that data gathering and then create some kind of a substrate of information and data that then human reporters and editors and journalists can work with to recreate some of that scaffolding. I actually think that looking ahead, I'm actually kind of bullish on the possibilities of local news. I think my hypothesis is that people are maybe getting burned out on these kind of big global platforms that are so kind of catering to their interests and increasingly are just awash in AI slop. And I wonder if people won't start to gravitate back towards like their local communities in the sense of like real, you know, real things happening to real people around you and wanting to find ways to connect and sort of make sense of the world that's right around them, you know, as we look ahead to what the – how the media ecosystem might evolve.

1:03:17But who knows? Much remains to be seen. Well, I agree. And let me follow on that because if you look at the news business in general, the news business has stayed the strongest where there's the most money. So, for example, financial news is highly profitable and therefore, because people will pay a lot for financial news, that's been kind of like the central core of some of the news. So you think of like a Bloomberg, a New York Times, a Wall Street Journal, et cetera. Since they're so financial related in some respects, that's where a lot of money is kind of kept. Now, it doesn't change. None of that changes what you might want to know.

1:03:55For example, I think gossip is terribly interesting. I just do. Call it human. Okay? Now, that being said, what I think when someone writes or wants to put prose out there or an interesting idea, et cetera, that's what AI can't do well, right? It cannot create an original idea. Now, if you say, hey, we don't need to have a full-time editor because we can do a lot of editing through AI and taking an original idea and synthesizing it down to what we want to get to in the word format we need for XYZ column, that actually makes a lot of sense. I see a lot of editorial needs that can be reduced. Or to your point, what happened to Little League games?

1:04:33Well, let's synthesize what it was down to and then let's go out on the internet and see what people were talking about. And let's use that as the way to say what was the most important part of that. I think there's elements of that that I, it's a filtering process. It is not the original idea though. I think that's right. I think it's also interesting to think about as these big AI platforms kind of coalesce, we're already at a point where they have kind of vacuumed up almost the entirety of published human knowledge about things. And so what's next? I believe that one of the types of information that's going to hold value over time is actually going to be local news because the one thing that they don't have access to are things that haven't happened yet.

1:05:26Correct. And especially in smaller communities or areas where there's maybe only one or two people actually covering what actually happened at the town council meeting. That information, I think, becomes pretty valuable, and I think people will recognize that over time. But, you know, who knows? I think there's also, like, an open question of how, you know, to what extent people value, like, kind of civic information, like news about the local politics versus the more of the kind of, like, lifestyle or interest or information or kind of, you know, entertainment type of information. I think that's a little bit of what has been lost with the fragmenting of the newspaper bundle.

1:06:11It used to be that it was really the shopping market circular and the movie listings and the entertainment section that sort of subsidized the town hall reporter. And now how do we put – how can you put Humpty Dumpty back together again is kind of an open question. Yeah. No, I totally agree. And also I think about, for example, being here in Arizona, we have the state capital here in our town. The local paper, Arizona Republic, historically is kind of like a left-leaning, not terribly left, but just left-leaning relative to a town that's historically red or pink as a state. And there's nothing right-leaning.

1:06:49So I always think about like what if we get back to more competition of ideas in things like politics? Because I do agree with you that like local politics, there's still a vast trove. I also think about other incentives like, you know, if you're a U.S. senator, you make no money. Do I think you have a lot of power? Yeah. If we paid you$2 million a year, would we care a lot more about what's going on in local politics? Probably. So maybe also solving for some of the incentives in politics from a financial perspective would cause the news to be more valuable to the people involved with it, right?

1:07:25That's interesting. Right, because the grift is going on and sometimes graft is going on, but those go on because they don't pay very well directly in the job, which if you got paid$2 million, do I think the local publication is going to want to hold you more accountable? A hundred percent. So I agree. I think of it as a spectrum and a pendulum that we have to swing back and what causes that, to your point, is very unknown. Um, let me, let me, um, you know, outside of gossip or, or financial news or politics, are there other content categories that you think sit out there that are kind of unexplored, if you will?

1:08:04Well, I think there are, I mean, I think it's interesting. You brought up the example of the continued demand for like business information. I think there are these kind of like very vertical, uh, information products that I think will continue to have legs. Like if you look at the, you know, the success of, you know, some writers on Substack or, you know, people with these kind of specialized, you know, there's media newsletters or people doing like political newsletters that are dedicated to politics or other topics. Like, I think there are those kinds of like niche businesses, I think will, will continue to, to find audience because if people, you know, find value in an individual writers like expertise or access to information, feeling like they have sort of an inside track on things.

1:08:49I think that will be a thing. I think what will also be interesting is, are there more kind of data-driven products that might emerge? And this is a little bit speculative, but in a world where AI tools can hoover up and analyze and synthesize a lot of data from a lot of different sources, you know, what kinds of like value might you be able to create out of those kinds of, those kinds of environments? I mean, I think a lot of that will probably be more in the business and finance world, but I can imagine other sorts of like, again, very, probably more vertical kind of opportunities like that.

1:09:24But then where does that leave sort of communities and local news? I think it's going to be interesting to think about. I think the other thing that I, that I think about when I look back to the 19th century news landscape was just how participatory it was. And in many cases, especially in the first half of the century, these printers weren't making a lot of money necessarily from the newspaper itself, but they had a lot of influence in their communities. The newspaper might be one of several little side hustles they had going. They might also be running a printing business. they might be you know doing some advertising doing some posters they have some of them were also running the post office or later the the telegraph shop so i think it's another way of thinking about and i think it's interesting to look today in the world of like content creators influencers like we kind of see that now like for many people like they might have a podcast as kind of a you know a project that they run that's part of their part of their livelihood but it's one of one of many parts of their livelihood i think it'll be interesting to see if those kinds of uh Those kinds of models continue to evolve where the idea of the big city newsroom being the only way of doing journalism, I think we have to keep an open mind about other kinds of ways that value exchange can happen.

1:10:42Yeah. Well, to your point, a side hustle, as they call it, and even the newspaper businesses, their side hustle in many cases ended up being radio or TV as well. Where can people follow you going forward? Where can our listeners keep track of what you're writing and what you're thinking? Yeah, well, I have a personal website, alexwright.com. I also do a Substack newsletter. I'm on Instagram. Those are kind of my main channels at the moment. I'm also on LinkedIn. Those are the main places to find me. and yeah, I'm mostly heads down trying to, you know, think about what another book might look like and moving on to the next thing.

1:11:23But we'd love to hear from anyone who takes interest in this stuff. I'm always happy to chat. But I enjoyed this conversation. This was great. Yeah, this is a great read, Alex. Yeah, thank you. Your book, Empire of Ink, reminds me that great industries are built, made, and unmade in long arcs and the people who shape them are rarely the ones we remember. Many had never heard of until your research comes to this book. Legacy is everything in the building of long-lasting tribes and our families, our communities, to our discussion just a second ago, and our companies as well. Our listeners should go out and buy a copy of Empire of Ink today.

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1:13:10Thank you.