Rich Idiots Are Killing The Media To Please The Tech Industry

26:38But that's the thing. Look, if you're no longer concerned with loyalty and you really only care about people who accidentally find a page by being tricked by social, they see a headline they like, or perhaps they search for something, you don't really care about alienating readers. You can do whatever you want. You can experiment willy-nilly. You can undermine editorial standards. You can lay off people. You can promote your friends. You can force people to do stupid shit that nobody likes. Because all you care about are analytics. All you care about is that ephemeral, random, spontaneous traffic that you can show to your idiot rich friends and say, wow, my outlet's popping off.

27:19And when all you give a shit about is visits and impressions, all you're really going to focus on is what's going to please the big tech firms like Meta, Twitter, and Google. And these social networks have been very clear in how little they care about news unless it helps them get traffic. And indeed, the early days of these social networks were heavily dependent on media outlets creating content for them so that people stayed on them. And then they choke that traffic the moment they didn't need it anymore. The network effects that these executives are chasing, the social virality, the Google search positioning, they make the number go up.

27:55And if that's all that matters, well, you don't really care about having a lasting web presence. You don't really care about a sustainable media outlet. You're just an online marketing company that publishes words or videos. and frankly i can't think of a more damaging part of the media than the chase of these metrics and specifically search engine optimization the allure of search traffic especially with the drop of traffic from social media websites has just poisoned so much of the media and now publishers create content that's not really there to serve an audience per se or build a relationship but to kind of get this spurious traffic, the when does the Super Bowl start?

28:40What time does this go live? Where can I buy something? You've probably seen these and wondered why so many outlets publish the same thing. I'll get to that.

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30:44So, if you see all of these websites that have, like, when does the Super Bowl start and top 10 televisions, all these things, and you see them, you're like, this doesn't make sense. I'm used to reading long-form things on here. it's because those have embedded links, sometimes to Amazon or Walmart or Best Buy. Those outlets get a sliver of money every time you click, and they get a little more as you browse around the site if you buy something. Now, there are very trustworthy outlets engaging in this, and it's a way to make money for the media outlet. There are some like the Wirecutter who actually do a phenomenal job.

31:17They do very deep product testing. Later on in this podcast, I'm actually going to get into some of the scumbags in the industry, but there are trustworthy folks that make money on this. The problem is you can also make money by not making any effort at all. And I will get to that. And the result of this chase of metrics is a media industry in crisis. Executives and editors that don't really read or write and don't remember the last time they published anything, they're twisting reporters' coverage to make Google happy. And all they want to do is improve traffic and get advertising. That's all there is to it.

31:52And yes, I understand that there's money that needs to be made to pay people's salaries, but so much of the internet is becoming content that looks and sounds the same. And like I said, those affiliate marketing deals, they make money even when you just do a half-assed effort of saying, I like this TV. And what happens when everyone chases the same dragon is nobody's really happy. People aren't really coming to your website for the top 10 best apps. They're not coming to be told, hey, these are the best deals. They might enjoy those, they might use them, but that's not what's keeping them there.

32:30And you're seeing so much of that because those in power are not actually looking at the outlets. They're not reading these websites. They're not even really consuming the media. They're not on social media. They're not on anything other than maybe the New York Times and CNN. The people running the media don't participate. Not as customers, and frankly not as workers. And these people, they only really understand the media as a series of symbols, shadows on the cave. They don't really see it beyond the numbers, and they think that at some point money comes out due to words and writing, and video maybe?

33:10They don't really care how that forms as long as the money keeps coming, even if the money stops one day. This poor decision-making almost always leads to overstaffing and, frankly, general mismanagement. Any form of creative media, anything you see, any great outlet you have seen, requires a very basic understanding of audience. And an audience takes time, and it takes energy, and it takes working on this. I am sure in 15 episodes, I will be a lot better than this. I'm sure 15 after that, I'll be better than that. And thankfully, I hope I'm good enough now for you to listen to, and you'll stick around and hear me get better.

33:49But because of the way that Coolzone Media works, I will have that chance. I'm not being told I have to hit a quota. I'm being told to get in this studio and talk and produce great things, hopefully. But that's the problem. That's the problem when you don't create anything, when you're a parasite, when you're someone that steals from others. The Messenger's a great example here, by the way. So they hired about 300 reporters, and a lot of them were very well-established, well-respected reporters from major outlets. And then they took these great, skilled, wonderful people, and they said, please repurpose other people's work.

34:27I mentioned already the Daily Mail, New York Post, as examples of places they took from. This doesn't really make sense to even a regular person, but when you're a kind of soft-brained media executive and all you care about is short-term growth and you want to see number go up immediately, all you care about is scale, so all you're going to do is put out masses of chum. And it sucks. It sucks because they're so wrong. And what's insane is these executives, they're blind to the actual success stories of the media. I'm thinking of worker-owned outlets like Defecta, 404 Media, Aftermath, and, I don't know, many of the successful, profitable newsletters like newcomer and platformer that have done incredibly well with incredibly small staffs because guess what?

35:14People don't want the same shit in a different flavor. They want informed opinion. They want it from fallible, imperfect people. They want to know they're hearing from a person. They want something that has emotion in it. That's why people pay for journalism. That's why people read. While there is a degree of service journalism to tell you what happened, And a lot of great writing is emotional. Defecta, they're actually a really interesting one as well. They're successful. They're profitable. And they cover more than just sports, despite being a sports website. They're sports and culture. And their staff came from a website called Deadspin.

35:51Now, Deadspin is hilarious. I used to write that. I love Deadspin. Deadspin was a sports and culture site. They wrote about sports and then other things. Drew McGarry did a famous thing about one time when he collapsed and something was wrong. with his brain, for example. There were some wonderful things on there that were completely unrelated to sport. When the private equity shuffles as a result of Peter Thiel's lawsuit against Gawker happened, a company called Geo Media took over, and their complete moron of an executive, Jim Spanfella, he fired Barry Pochetsky because he refused to make Deadspin's staff stick to sports.

36:30Now, Jim Spanfella is a complete moron. And I know you shouldn't just insult people in the podcast, but he's a dingus. He's a complete numpty. And you may ask, huh, well, based on looking at Defecta, and indeed based on being able to look at the economics of Deadspin when he owned it, wouldn't you, Spanfella, just want to let them keep writing and doing stuff in the exceedingly popular way that everyone loved? And the answer is that Jim Spanfella is a fucking idiot that doesn't understand journalism or business. And indeed, many times you will see stories like this and you'll be like, I don't get it.

37:04How did it fall apart? And the answer is usually that. Jim Spanfella, he wanted Deadspin to be like any other sports out there. Yet the whole reason people read Deadspin and indeed read and pay for Defecta was because it approached sports without the kind of very strong boundaries that restrict the outlets like ESPN or NBC Sports, which they have their place. Now, Jim Spanfella and his type of people, they'll never understand that the world doesn't need another content mill. We don't need more aggregations of aggregations of aggregations of another outlet's aggregation. And though this content, when engineered in the precise way that Google likes, may indeed get traffic from search, and it may be quote-unquote popular, it doesn't mean that anyone's coming back.

37:51You're not building loyalty. And earlier in March, Deadspin was sold again, this time to a startup called Lineup Publishing. A little bit painful when you think about the right economy there. And they're based in Malta, which is a business retreat for tax dodgers, but also known for cryptocurrency startups and, more worrying in this case, European gambling firms. An investigation by Sean Keely over at TDM found numerous connections between Deadspin's new owner and various online casinos, which heavily suggests that it's going to become not a sports website, but a website for affiliate marketing for gambling sites.

38:26And what sucks about that is kind of the way that sports in general is going. You're going to be able to bet on NBA games from their app, for example. It's a terrible precedent, but also a terrible thing to happen to one of the greatest sports websites to ever run ever. But don't worry, Jim Spanfeller still has several other websites to fuck up. and in this case he's currently working on destroying Kotaku. Now Kotaku was previously one of the most well-respected gaming publications in the world and they were sold to GeoMedia as part of the Gawker lawsuit. Last week as reported by Aftermath's Geeta Jackson and Riley McLeod, Kotaku editor-in-chief Jen Glennon resigned after GeoMedia executives decided to change Kotaku's remit from publishing news and opinions about video games, the whole thing that made them famous to creating, and this is the real number by the way, 50 game guides a week on a staff of seven people.

39:24Kotaku is, or I guess was, an institution in the gaming industry, and it was built off the back of publishing thoughtful, timely coverage about games, and very personal, personal pieces about video games. An industry well-known, and pretty much the only other one other than sports that can really have a genuine feeling of nostalgia in the writing, they're turning away from that. And they're turning it into what will just become another SEO chop shop. And it's all thanks to Jim Spanfeller, a man who cannot run businesses. He's going to turn Kotaku into just another SEO slop dump, another place where you can answer questions about where to go in a game when you're stuck.

40:05Oh, how do I make Cloud Strife go nude? Oh, how do I beat Sephiroth at some point in FF7? Jim Spanfeller's never played a video game at any point, so I don't think he knows that there is no way to make Cloud Nude, but indeed doesn't know anything about gaming. He doesn't know anything about games. He doesn't know anything about writing, because like all of these people I've been talking about, Jim Spanfeller does not actually know anything about the company he runs. And it's disgraceful. Gaming is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Gaming is something that's so important to culture. You have the weirdest, most reclusive people and incredibly popular sports stars who all played the same games.

40:49This is one of the most dominant forces in culture. And this idiot is taking Kotaku, which has had a crazed history. It has had a lot of controversy, but it's popular. It's meaningful. Writers from Kotaku have gone on to found things like Polygon, another influential, and in this case, Vox Media-owned property. Aftermath was founded by several people who have written a Kotaku. This outlet created, in some level, modern games journalism. And now it's going to have the same value as game FAQs, except worse, because people on game FAQs actually play games. Much like Sports Illustrated, Kotaku and Deadspin, they're going to become something I call a shit of Theseus situation.

41:35When an illustrious brand has its guts ripped out, replaced with the thoughts and the feelings and the ideas of a huge moron. And it's so stupid. It's so frustrating. And until something changes, it's only going to get worse. And I know I'm angry and you should be angry too. I'm furious. These people, those of them who are not my friends are just people I've enjoyed reading. People have lost their jobs because the media industry is being run into the ground by people that do not know how to read, write, or even run a business. Every outlet that you read today that kind of feels like a shadow of its former self, there's a reason.

42:16It's got there because the people in charge don't read, don't write, they don't contribute, they're not media creators. They are parasites, as I've discussed, and their remit is not to create a lasting legacy, to make something that people read for years. They are trying to turn that outlet into a shitty startup that they can flog to someone. Except these things never sell. Ever. And that's because, on top of being idiots, they do not understand any kind of business at all. And the reason that a lot of these executives just can't understand it, and they can't understand why things succeed and their properties fail, is because they don't really want to accept that you can't grow a media business like a startup.

42:59or like any kind of regular business. You still need a profit and a loss, but it takes time and you have to invest that time as much as you have to invest that money. Media outlets grow, and I'm paraphrasing Coolzone Media's Robert Evans. They grow by hosting the work of journalists that people love and giving them the time to develop a following and make it, make that great stuff, to refine their craft, to be great even if they're not quite there. through mentorship and through just doing the work. Our sister show, Better Offline Sister Show, it could happen here. It took years to develop it into what it is today, which by the way, it's a profitable podcast and it gets millions of downloads a month.

43:43And it got there because Robert and Sophie put in the time and the money, and so did iHeartRadio of course, to give these voices the chance to grow and to help them grow comfortable, especially with media that involves you being exposed to the world by talking or by being on video, so much of that is growing comfortable with the format and finding what works specifically for you. And then once you've done that, you have to build a rapport with the audience, as I hope I'm doing today. And none of this can be forced. You can't accelerate this process. Perhaps, as Roberts also said, you can get these big, unique scoops that get people through the door, but you have to keep making stuff and you have to keep refining it too.

44:25And none of these executives like that because you can't tell that to a private equity firm. You can't tell a private equity firm to wait and be patient. They're not in the business of patience. Venture Capital doesn't want to hear that it's going to take a while and a non-specific while at that to get their money out. They want money now. Money me, money now. And what's really sick and ironic about this is they're not making money from this. Buzzfeed went public. It was a horrible mess. Vice has been running to the ground. And sure, these people have made a bunch of money off of the back of others, but they've also destroyed something meaningful.

45:03And this will colour their legacies for the rest of their lives. Maybe they don't care. I don't know. I hope they do. I hope they don't sleep at night. I hope Jimmy Finkelstein gets visited by the ghosts from A Muppet Christmas Carol specifically. Marley and Marley. I think that'd be kind of funny. Putting that joke aside though, these people shouldn't be allowed to walk down the street without getting yelled at in a perfectly legal way that I'm not encouraging anything illegal, of course. But I find within myself a great deal of poison for them. I find them disgraceful because I want to make it like they had a good thing.

45:37Had Vice been run sustainably, had they really focused on making it a profitable outlet, they could have what 404 Media is doing today and then some. 404 Media is a worker-owned business made by people like Jessen Kobler and Emmanuel Mybug, who left Vice, who left Motherboard. Vice used to own 404 Media. These people used to work for Vice. And now 404 Media has had major scoops that are changing the entire tech industry. They are the ones that published the Google search is getting worse story. They are continually getting these scoops, doing great journalism, and they're going to probably become a very successful and profitable business.

46:15Vice could have had that. Vice literally had that. Jim Spanfeller had Deadspin. None of these people realize what they've got, even after it's gone. And maybe they just want that short-term bang. Maybe they just want a little tittle of money so they can feel rich and nasty and hang around with their other arsehole friends. And I find them despicable. If I meet any of them, I want to make some very creative noises in their faces. And it sucks. It sucks because the real human consequences fall upon the actual people making them rich. The people creating stuff, the people talking, taking photos, and drawing things, writing things.

46:50They are the victims of this. The people who should be the victims, the people who shouldn't make a dollar, are the ones making the money. They are the ones who stay rich, stay powerful, and will probably fail upwards into another media job. And that's the thing. Thanks to these people, the media industry has spent over a decade fucking around, and now they're finding out. And the journalists are paying. These executives, they've spent this time and they built this foundation, this massive search and social-based foundation, and it's made on top of sand. And they're desperate, so they change strategy, and they change strategy again, and they do so to please algorithms, not people.

47:33They've completely forgotten, or maybe they did not know that every success, every previous success in the media has pretty much come from a small group of opinionated people with good ideas who create cool shit. And really, that's the only salvation for journalism. Modern journalism can be rebuilt, but rebuilding it will take reinforcing the relationship between writers and their audiences. And media properties need to help foster that and empower that relationship instead of trying to get rid of that instead of turning everything into a brand to be sold to private equity. We can work back. We can get back what has been lost.

48:14By supporting unions in newsrooms, by supporting and paying for worker-owned journalism, you can bring back great journalism. You can turn this tide. The private equitas will eventually lose because at some point, right now they're exceedingly dependent on Google search. Everyone chasing search engine optimization is dead in the water eventually. Google and Facebook, they turned on the news before. You don't think they'll do it again? You don't think that Google will eventually tweak the algorithm in some obscene way to turn away from this generic slop. When that happens, sadly, once again, journalists will be the ones that suffer, which is why right now journalists should unionize.

49:02It's tough, but if it's possible, they should join worker-owned co-ops like Flaming Hydra. They should join these great organizations and look up to things like Defecta and see the wonderful journalism they're doing day in, day out, people like Ray Rato. He's a fantastic journalist, an esteemed Bay Area reporter, and he's done some of the best work of his career at Defecta, and he's done so because it's owned by him and the rest of the writers. The people building are the people that should own stuff. Now, I feel a bit crazy whenever I talk about this subject, and I think it's because great journalism and great writing is foundational to culture.

49:41Hearing an informed opinion, doesn't matter where they're at, if they're at a blog, if they're at a newspaper, if they're on TV, hearing someone who actually knows what they're talking about, speaking from the heart, who's developed a relationship with you as a reader is transformational. It changes people's lives. And great opinion journalism does on top of that. And everything that I am doing, my PR firm, my newsletter, my podcast, is a result of having great mentors in journalism, like Will Porter over at PC Zone, and Log, and Steve Hogarty. People that were there to help me as an early writer to help me, encourage me to develop my voice, the voice you are hearing today.

50:22None of this crazed confidence comes from myself. It comes from having great mentors like Sophie and Rob over at Coolzone Media, like David Roth at Defecta. These people are the reason that people read websites. It's the reason they listen to podcasts. It isn't because of virality or search engine optimization or any other little bits of bullshit that people like Jim Spanfeller and Corey Haidt claim is the case. The answer to fixing journalism is simple. It's just annoying to growth-at-all-cost capitalists. Profitable, sustainable journalism, or any content really, is built off the back of letting people with defined voices build and sustain an audience.

51:07Every single success story, every single great newspaper and website was a result of letting great creators create great things and giving them the space and platform and time and funding to do so. If you want the next great media outlet, it isn't going to come through tricking Google or Twitter or Facebook or Instagram into reading your stories. It's about making great shit and getting people to see it and making sure that the people making it feel supported and mentored and helped to make more of it. I believe there is an absolute mountain of money right now in journalism for investors capable of thinking more than six seconds ahead of course give writers the space and the time and that time may be measured in years to build audiences and develop relationships with their readers embrace their individuality and pay them well for the privilege of having them speak on your behalf build for readers not investors and you will make way more money than you ever would licensing a brand like a goddamn Denny's franchise.

52:14Things can get better for journalism. I promise you they will, if only the money and the power is put in the hands of actual writers and actual creators rather than career failures and private equity dipshits. But until there is a significant realignment, that something meaningfully changes in media, one that puts the power back in the hands of the people actually creating stuff and focuses on the things that they create, We're going to see this cycle repeat again and again and again. And I'm going to get angry and you should be angry too. I hate to tell people to be angry. I hate anger in general.

52:49But in this case, it's justifiable. This is a singular force damaging culture and enriching arseholes. Do not believe them. Do not trust them that any of this was caused by market forces or anything other than the mass incompetence of arseholes running media into the ground. Thank you for listening.

53:21Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or check out betteroffline.com to find my newsletter and more links to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

54:15Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, save up to 50%, and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter, park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. This is Jason Timp from Hoops Tonight. Toyota is moving forward to a more sustainable future by giving you the freedom to choose from an incredible lineup of trucks now available in both gas and hybrid models, including the legendary Tacoma, the powerful Tundra, both available with the iForce Max hybrid powertrain and backed by Toyota's legendary reputation for reliability.

54:54More choices, less compromise. Visit buyatoyota.com for a great deal on an efficient Toyota today. Toyota, let's go places. Thursday night football is on, and it's only on Prime Video. Going deep. This week, it's a California showdown. Division rivals lock horns when the 49ers meet the Rams. What a great job. Coverage begins Thursday at 7 p.m. Eastern with football's best party, TNF Tonight, presented by Verizon. Not a Prime member, not a problem. Simply sign up for a 30-day free trial. 49ers, Rams, Thursday at 7 p.m. Eastern. Only on Prime Video. Restrictions apply. See amazon.com slash amazon prime for details.

55:34This is an iHeart Podcast.