Making journalism-shaped widgets at the discrimination factory

Creator-based journalism has a market problem: The market is bad.

I’m on this week’s episode of MSNBC host Chris Hayes’ podcast “Why Is This Happening?”, where we had a long conversation about the deterioration of the information economy. You can find the episode at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

In the show, I argued that creator-based journalism is far more exposed to ugly market forces than the legacy commercial newsrooms they’d replace, which I’ll elaborate more on here.

The problem of producing ethical journalism in a competitive attention economy is that to reach people’s brains, you have to get past their nervous systems first. Like I said on the show: People have the consciences of saints and the consumption habits of monsters. Often, the only way your ideas break through is by making people mad, getting them to laugh, or delivering the news with a moralistic or political bent that reaffirms your audience’s worldview. You know — red meat. Social media and audience analytics tools make this a two-way street for creators. Producing bangers gives you an endorphin rush! A lot of people can’t stop chasing that high of ballooning follower counts, pageviews, read times and subscription pledges after their first time tasting it. Never underestimate the power of number go up. Bluesky is hotter among longtime power posters relative to Threads and X exactly because the scrappy social media startup puts creators, not a platform algorithm, back in charge of what goes viral. Bluesky is the doing-numbers app for doing-numbers junkies.

Open protocols won’t necessarily lead to a better, healthier, more democratic, or more ethical media. Anil Dash has written about how “'Wherever you get your podcasts’ is a radical statement”: “What it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.” Amen. We gotta break up a couple trillion-dollar corporate squatters if we want the internet to be a more interesting public space again.

But here’s where I read down Apple’s 2024 list of the top shows thriving in podcasting’s open protocol ecosystem:

1. The Daily (legacy media)

2. Crime Junkie (true crime)

3. The Joe Rogan Experience (huckster central, Texas chapter)

4. Dateline NBC (legacy media true crime)

5. SmartLess (already famous Hollywood celebs)

6. Huberman Lab (huckster central, Stanford chapter)

7. This American Life (legacy media)

8. New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce (already famous sports celebs)

9. Up First from NPR (legacy media)

10. Morbid (true crime)

Open protocols deliver digital audiences what they want, which is the same stuff they wanted from legacy media: a mix of digestible journalism, celebrity yapping, prurient crime stories, and wellness woo-woo. Different protocols can and do structure consumer demand. They certainly structure production and distribution. But open protocols are not going to fundamentally change the desires of everyone on the other side of the 5G signal. Open protocols don’t even seem to undermine our cultural incumbents, let alone our tech incumbents: Consumers’ favorite podcast delivery mechanism is Google’s YouTube. Email is open protocol too. I read mine on a Google Gmail account. Interoperability is like democracy: a tool for freedom, but it’s not necessarily going to deliver all the good things in life.

Whether it feels like digital media is “democratizing” depends on who you are. Most prominent news-based content creators are men, and consumers are biased against women creators to the point of effectively silencing some of them. I think of this as the AirBnb problem. AirBnb brought a bunch of extra hotel rooms into the marketplace by turning homeowners into mini-Marriotts. So what happened when you cut out the corporate middleman and created a more open-ended marketplace? Black guests had a harder time booking rooms than white guests. Sometimes reducing frictions in supply comes by reintroducing frictions of discrimination, which can be incredibly burdensome for the market participants being discriminated against. So with media. You’ve probably already heard about the new Pew report about male creators making up two-thirds of news influencers. Another new creator labor study by Marita Freimane found that, when YouTube had metrics allowing users to show their dislike of videos, “female content creators received significantly more negative feedback on comparable content than male content creators.” When the dislike metric was removed, “relative to men, women produce 8.4 percent more videos after the platform design change. The increase in productivity coincides with an even larger increase of 15.5 percent in demand for content produced by women.” Women were literally making fewer videos, that fewer users saw, because users were discriminating against them so much. The internet is a workplace like any other, except this one doesn’t have unions.

If you ran a newspaper in the old South and the audience wanted to hear nice things about Jim Crow, it’s not a journalist’s job to say nice things about Jim Crow to help meet market demand. Consumers are often wrong, and the ability to reach consumers more effectively via platforms and parasocial content creation does not change consumers’ latent capacity for wrongness. Otherwise you’re just doing shiftwork making journalism-shaped widgets faster and cheaper at the discrimination factory. As an economic phenomenon, a journalist’s job is to accommodate but sometimes repudiate what consumers would normally want. Big media companies, like most companies, are paradoxes: hugely efficient in some ways, weirdly inefficient in others. You get all the powerful gains from divisions of labor and economies of scale that small newsrooms or solo creators could never match. (For those reasons, small businesses tend to be pretty bad at job creation by comparison.) But efficiency in one place creates inefficiencies elsewhere that are harder to explain; some of them are just luxuries. On Chris’ show, we talked a bit about how weird it is that economically irrational practice of investigative reporting spread widely across American corporate newsrooms in the second half of the 20th century. We’re at least a decade into Alden Global Capital destroying American newsrooms, and their Southern California News Group alone still sent more journalists to the Investigative Journalists and Editors conference this year than my state’s flagship nonprofit newsroom, CalMatters. Sometimes journalists have an overwhelming need to tell people what they don’t want to hear, even if it means aiming a boot at the center of their shins for maximum effect. If that’s what it takes for something real to get through, so be it.