Can’t journalism have an "abundance agenda"?

Or is that the right question?

“The Veteran in a New Field,” Winslow Homer, 1865. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In the grand scheme of things, I am a producerist. I like people who make stuff and do stuff. The world can’t survive a day without them.

“Abundance,” the new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is about how American life would be better if we made and invented more stuff. They’re especially interested in physical things (notably stuff mostly built by other men): More housing, more nuclear power plants, more high-speed trains. Science has given us amazing productive potential, the argument goes, and we waste that potential by misallocating our efforts or throwing up red tape.

“The story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities,” the authors write, teeing up primarily on the failures of my state of California. “Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen — that we could choose otherwise — is thrilling.”

This perks up my ears. My area of professional focus, journalism, has the same supply-side problem as affordable housing advocates, clean energy proponents and the world’s railway superfans. High-quality journalism is good for us, but we don’t have enough of it. Especially at the community level, and especially if you’re working-class or poor.

This scarcity of journalism is odd. Today’s journalist commands amazing productive potential at their fingertips, thanks to multiple productivity revolutions within my lifetime, which has manifested as a slow disappearance of many types of news jobs. Otter.ai can transcribe interviews instead of news assistants. Grammarly can zip past copy editors in catching typos. iPhones displace photojournalists and camera crews. Social media, search engines and newsletter recommendation networks have replaced the distribution work of pressmen, newsstand operators and (most interestingly) publishing executives.

At the end of this long process of industrial shrinkage is a solo journalist now capable, however well or poorly, of doing tasks previously performed by five to eight of their old coworkers.

Goodbye Gannett, hello Substack.

So here’s the mystery: When the productivity of journalists has grown by so many multiples in my lifetime — when abundance is within our grasp — where is all the goddamn local news?

I. Not enough funding! (Right?)

In the 2010s, lot of people looked at this paradox of the growing productivity and decreasing employability of journalists and saw a capitalization problem. I was one of them.

Too many Alden Global Capital hedge fund types were suctioning cash out of legacy newsrooms to divert toward more profitable lines of investment when they should have doubled down and scaled up on making higher quality journalism, we thought. How about giving consumers higher-quality news they’d actually want to consume?

And so the 2010s witnessed interesting new injections of venture capital, billionaire capital and philanthropic capital into different and higher-quality sorts of news production, especially over digital channels.

Legacy newsrooms piled up Pulitzers after Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong buoyed the drifting Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Digital journalists cut their teeth at innovating digital outlets like BuzzFeed News, VICE News, Mic, Vox.com, Quartz et al. A wave of new donor-backed, public-interest nonprofit newsrooms cropped everywhere to plug the gaps.

You can ask the out-of-work journalists who rode the 2010s capitalization wave how it went. There is not a lot of romance out there these days about big-moneyed saviors or particular business models.

Within the last couple of years, the new move for my peers from the reporting ranks is a last-ditch forced march toward independent work on platforms like Substack or YouTube. The upside is that the platforms capitalize the publishing and distribution infrastructure, albeit while skimping on things like compensation for labor (which is your responsibility now, dear subscriber).

Thus, a survivor generation of working journalists has undergone an economic transformation. They’ve become small businesspeople who have created their own platform jobs. The most successful of them are leveraging the skills and audiences they built from their previous careers in corporate media. Yearning for editorial freedom, and finally tasting it with their own newsletters and podcasts, this yeoman journalist entrepreneur class is speaking its mind and finding modest but growing audiences.

This survivor generation of journalists is also on a collision course with the same limitations that contain median net employment growth at small businesses to “about zero,” as the U.S. Census Bureau put it. The downside of sweat equity can be summed up like this: Your favorite creator’s YouTube channel is a single major health incident, algorithm pivot, or burnout episode from not existing anymore.

II. The end of localism, the rise of financialization

The lesson from the past decade was that dumping a lot of money at quality news production indeed leads to a greater abundance of quality journalism. Throw good money at good journalists, and they’ll do good work.

But the other lesson from the past decade is that an abundance of news production does not necessarily lead to an abundance of sustainable business models. That story I told above about the productivity growth and undercapitalization of news production is missing a critical piece.

In a word, profits.

You know: more money in than out, whether for a commercial or nonprofit enterprise. The thing that makes news entities create new jobs instead of eliminating existing ones, even at firms not looking to grow. (Inflation inexorably drives up operating costs even for businesses that don’t aspire to bigness.)

I’ll tell another story now about the decline of local news that’s also a story about the transformation of the American economy. This time we’ll follow the dollars instead of the productivity improvements.

Let’s start with your local dentist. When newspapers were family-owned regional advertising monopolies, the dentist probably had to pay the paper monopoly prices to advertise her practice to your community. The newspaper’s high ad prices were probably bad for the dentist’s client-acquisition costs. But it was good for the newspaper reporters, photographers and editors who harvested those monopoly advertising rents to do local news about the community. Some of the local ad monopoly dollars even cycled back to the dentist when the reporters got cavities for eating too much junk food out of the newsroom vending machine on deadline. This wasn’t the most efficient circulation of dollars possible, but it was one that privileged and sustained local journalism.

Today, your dentist’s ads are far more efficiently targeted at local cavity-havers through surveillance-based advertising on Google Search, Instagram and Facebook. Accordingly, those local toothache ad dollars instead now head straight to Menlo Park or Mountain View in California (maybe also at monopoly prices) and don’t come back home — except in the form of monopoly-inflated Meta and Alphabet stock that the dentist probably owns as part of her 401(k) retirement plan. A local newsroom, and the journalists and support staff who work for it, no longer hold an inefficient rent-collecting position within the chain of economic circulation.

I’m not trying to be abstract, here. What I am describing is the current organization of the American economy, which has built-in bias against less profitable forms of localized production, as Bloomberg columnist Joe Weisenthal pointed out in a gently damning critique of Klein and Thompson’s “Abundance”:

Just last year, the activist investor group Elliott Investment Management took a $2.5 billion stake in Texas Instruments, calling for it to reverse plans to bring more manufacturing back in-house. Elliott's letter said that by rebuilding its manufacturing capacity, the company had "deviated from its longstanding commitment to drive growth of free cash flow per share."

Some might see this as the work of one greedy hedge fund. But a stock market that continues to go up is part of the entire US economic model. Rising stocks are how we pay for retirement, education, consumption, and so forth. To some extent, if you’re an investor in, say, a diversified index fund, you’re benefitting from the Elliotts of this world. They’re like the cops on the beat, keeping companies in check, focused on the mission of making the line go up. So any impulse to abundantly build out less profitable lines of business undoubtedly strikes at the heart of how American capitalism works.

For example, the decline in local news corresponds with a broader decline in local business ownership. The local dental office in our example is now increasingly likely to be owned by out-of-town private equity rather than by the dentist herself.

If you squint your eyes, there are upsides for journalism in our de-localized, pro-financialized economic system, but only if you’re the kind of person who has access to assets or influences their allocation. Wealth extraction from consumers, businesses and workers via hedge funds and private equity — I am not exaggerating, here — is what helps make number go up on charitable foundations’ balance sheets and, accordingly, their grantmaking capacities to community-oriented nonprofit newsrooms. We don’t really know how much Mom and Dad money is quietly propping up entrants into the creator economy, but it’s probably not insignificant; nepo babies whose parents hold inflated assets can certainly have more economic cushion to freelance, take low-wage news jobs or start up risky indie endeavors.

In the localist days, job growth in news production was likelier to be debt-based (which is to say, profit-based): Maybe a local publisher would walk down to the corner bank for a small business loan to hire an extra reporter or advertising manager, calculating that the expanded productivity would pay off the loan. But we’re de-risking! In the financialization era, growth can be grant-based because the risk burden has quietly been shifted out of sight, onto other parts of the economic system. (Except when one of your funders suddenly pulls out.)

Wiesenthal’s macroeconomic criticism of the naïveté of “Abundance,” adapted for journalism, might go something like this: The local reporter who’s getting crushed working at low wages in a shrinking hedge fund-owned newsroom, and having too many holes drilled into their teeth by their private-equity-controlled dentist’s office, is the kind of person whose exploitation is necessary to sustain someone else’s new indie project or the creation of another journalist’s job in a nonprofit newsroom. It’s everyone’s fault and nobody’s fault. That’s the nature of the American system.

III. “Aut Zuck aut nihil”

Local news’ abundance problem is that there’s not enough of it, clearly. But now we get to our final paradox: The same time journalists’ information-producing powers multiplied, so did everyone else’s. In fact, the productivity of everybody else’s publishing powers grew faster than journalists’ productivity did.

As a result, there is now a superabundance of content coming from everyone, everywhere, all the time, more than humans could ever consume.

I don’t know if you’ve cracked open Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook lately and seen what’s actually on the feed, but this superabundance is killing us. The information economy has gained the density and behavior of a black hole. It grabs and grows. An AI crawler is the closest thing to a universal reader that could probe this singularity, try to comprehend the totality. But the project is doomed, gravitationally. The signals sent by the GPT can’t escape event horizon. AI only thickens the mass.

The biggest upside from the Googlization of advertising was that journalists got some great tools out of the deal to parse this informational superabundance: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, and all the other wonderful infrastructural tools that Google used its advertising monopoly profits to develop. We lost a lot of local reporting and got Google Search in return.

Except everybody else gets to use Google’s tools, too. Therein lies the dark side of journalism’s abundance paradox: The efficiencies that make content-parsing and content production easier are the very same things that keep putting journalists at a greater and greater economic disadvantage against other types of content creators. Growth in productivity for content creation is the very thing that dooms journalists to fall behind.

How? One of the arguments I make about journalistic labor is that, at its ethical core, journalism is cost-diseased: The most irreplaceable parts of reporting can’t be automated and, in Baumol’s formula, will only get more expensive with time. We’re talking about long, conversational interviews with important or hesitant sources. Fact-checking. Critical thinking to push back against official or received narratives. The whole, irreplaceable process of original inquiry to find truth. (I’ve been talking to a lot of leading journalists lately about AI, and they’re interested in its potential but skeptical of its limitations — more on that soon.)

High-quality journalists perform this kind of “inefficient” labor because they’re doing journalism. Journalists are participants in a loose, decentralized, unregulated but nonetheless cohesive social practice distinguishable by its ethical commitments to honesty, accuracy and relevance. Journalists can’t futz around on the edges of fact with impunity the way a comedian or entertainer can; if they did, by definition they’d stop being journalists.

Another way of putting this is that journalists are people who could publish anything and choose not to. They’re distinguished economically by imposing productive restraints on themselves that others don’t have to.

There are different economic metaphors with their own remedies that you could apply to the content productivity trap. You could compare it to predatory pricing and product dumping; Meta, TikTok and YouTube are flooding the market with cheap content that drives higher-cost producers, like news outlets and other premium creators, out of business. (Did you know MrBeast’s media business lost $80 million last year? He makes his money selling chocolate now.) Except the idea of placing tariffs on Facebook posts is a non-starter in every conceivable way.

Or you could compare the conundrum to energy production. Mass content creation is like the fossil fuel revolution: Burning all that coal is amazing for stimulating economic activity, but the pollutants that result can kill us — unless we divert resources toward mitigating the harms.

Given that a lot of people are currently ripping the copper wiring out of American democracy in part because they thought that directly mitigating “misinformation” on tech platforms was intolerable content censorship, that seems to leave us with 1. smashing the biggest information polluters and/or 2. making them pay for cleanup.

IV. My “abundance agenda” for local news

Unlike Klein and Thompson’s pitch in “Abundance,” journalism’s problem isn’t that it needs to build more news printing plants or physical newsrooms. Nor is the problem that reporters don’t have fast enough microprocessors in their laptops (unless the publisher won’t replace their eight-year-old Dell, anyway). We are, instead, staring at an even vaster informational wasteland than the one Newton N. Minow saw in television in 1961, which preceded the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — which is now under attack.

We need strong public media. But we also need a strong private sector. Governments should tap these tech platforms, via taxes or bargaining codes, to direct funding specifically back toward news production on a sector-wide basis to try to help close the widening content-productivity gap that Big Tech has consigned to all journalists. Those dollars the dentist sent away for advertising should be directed back toward newsrooms; governments themselves should also cut back on their agencies’ use of taxpayer dollars to advertise on tech platforms to advertise in community media instead.

This kind of stable public funding would help attract back some of the catalytic private investment that got scared off by the failures of the 2010s. And since the Constitution’s dormant Commerce Clause probably forbids targeting support only for local ownership, such subsidies should be tied to high-road employer standards, like minimum mandatory prevailing wages, to help break the cycle of exploitation in financialized newsrooms. Many of the journalists in those newsrooms have already taken the first step themselves by unionizing; they could use a hand.

We’re surrounded by mess. Let’s give journalists the shovels to help clean up.