I don't see how investing will save the industry from decline. If there was more revenue to be had, the legacy players wouldn't be struggling so badly. Investors chasing profits are just going to build a better Buzzfeed, not a better NY Times. Unless someone can crack the nut of profiting off of serious journalism and making the average TikTok scroller or Joe Rogan listener exercise a little more skepticism and understand the value of quality.
Agree in that “Startups” imply scale and that’s just race to the bottom clickbait with maybe a little real news on the side. However, one example here in Canada is “Canadaland”, which is profitable, funded partly by subscribers, and has investigated and broken real stories. The founder has made the point recently that journalism is not something that scales, but can be a successful business by serving an audience.
Canadaland may have been bootstrapped/helped along by its journalist founder getting some cut out of what they co-founded, “bitmoji” maker bitstrips, which was sold to Snapchat for a reported US$100m.
There are definitely people on Substack who have been able to see success doing the whole "independent non biased news" schtick, but I'm not sure if it's possible to build a NYT level of business doing that.
At the same time, maybe smaller independent news outfits that are run by at most a handful of people, that cover more local news might be able to make it work if they keep their expenses low.
I wonder are they truly selling "non-biased" news. Or is substack just platform that allows them to sell those who want to buy their specific bias. Not that it isn't the valid model in current online enviroment.
The substack realm is very iffy to me. I think there's a few really sharp thinkers, but they are almost exclusively doing analysis and opinion. It's extremely hard to get primary sources talking to a blogger. You might think you're getting a fresh perspective, but really they are just reading a load of MSM sources for you and giving you a filtered version.
What toot said. Substack is not really giving you news. It has some very good writers, but they're not out there developing sources, breaking stories, conducting investigations, or doing primary research of any kind mostly (except in the instances where a research scientist is also a writer). It's largely people with some expertise and writing skill reading the news and giving you their take. Someone still needs to actually produce the news for the writers on Substack to even have anything to write about.
Plenty of people would probably argue that Rogan has been leading the way to higher quality. It's why we now have countless of 3-5 hour podcasts where people are allowed to go through all nuances, finish their thoughts and we don't have to rely on the 30 seconds soundbites that TV and traditional media filters give us.
I mean, he's opened up the market for listening in general, but I'd still count his show as being low quality. Just letting cranks speak without interruption isn't journalism. The long-form podcasts I listen to are from professional journalists who do weeks of prep, gather sources, check facts, challenger assertions and try to present an accurate picture. Rogan just lets people lie and theorize and push agendas and he goes along with whatever so long as it's funny or engaging.
> Are from professional journalists who do weeks of prep
What you are referring to is called branding and this particular form appeals to your sensibilities.
All the top media outlets try to use a similar brand. Ultimately you are consuming a second hand synthesis woven into popular narratives, not anything more true.
What an odd take. Are you saying that professional journalism literally doesn't exist? That Joe Rogan is the same thing as James Risen? Admittedly plenty of people call themselves professional journalists that are frauds like all the folks at FOX or OAN who have been caught dead to rights lying to pander to their audiences. Or Rogan's guests like RFK and Alex Jones who only come on his show to promote their personal interests push their own utterly deceitful agendas.
But there are a great many serious people who take pride in speaking the truth and exposing reality that people don't want to hear. It's beyond cynical to think that every single one of them is fake.
> Are you saying that professional journalism literally doesn't exist
Seriousness and truthfulness are separate axis. Serious branding gives the appearance of authority.
> frauds like all the folks at FOX
You will find they have similar credentials as the outlets you enjoy. In fact, they probably used to work there.
> every single one of them is fake.
It's not they they are fake. It's that nobody has a monopoly on truth or methods of finding it.
Can journalists provide valuable information? Certainly. But they have their own systematic and personal biased. In particular, they are an extremely tight knit community performing for their peers.
Joe's podcast is obviously goofy as can be. But I actually prefer being explicit about your biases, instead of faux objectivity.
"It's not they they are fake. It's that nobody has a monopoly on truth or methods of finding it."
That's moving the goal posts into the parking lot. Joe Rogan and James Risen (as an example) are both fallible human beings capable of bias and errors, but one of them is 1000X better at eliciting and distributing truth than the other. And it's not by dint of their relative credentials, it's because one of them is smarter, more dedicated, more moral, has studied their craft, worked at it for decades, puts in hours of legwork, has the courage to risk their personal safety for the good of the reading public and the other is a drug-addled meathead who is interested in making money. Not that you're not allowed to enjoy his show, but it's purely entertainment and if you learn anything that happens to be true it's purely by coincidence.
> There's a reason people prefer listening to the guest to speak instead of being taught to think and live by white journo women.
Yes: it’s confirming their priors and not challenging any preconceived notions.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Rogan is fine but it’s largely an entertainment podcast. The idea that it’s a replacement for hard news doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Where precisely are the journalists who are paid sufficiently well for their skill that they have liquidity to invest in startups?
edit: alright turns out he's "former chief of staff at the Atlantic" but I still remain convinced he's decently out of touch with everyday journalists' financial situation.
Yeah. I'm a freelance journalist and this is one of the worst journalism takes I've seen in a while. Paying bills is already hard enough as it is and I, like many others in this industry, don't even have health insurance: why in the fuck would any of us invest in a startup?
> What can be done with new tech that makes publishing cheaper than ever?
Nothing. IMO that’s all been done: replacing the printing presses with the internet made it incredibly cheap to publish journalism. Producing journalism, however, remains a solidly human task that resists automation. And every time anyone tries the result is notably inferior.
this was a direct consequence of Google and Facebook's predatory pricing. How is a hack on the bread line supposed to take on the Goliaths of Silicon Valley?
Venture capitalists don’t invest their own money, they raise funds from other people and institutions, and make funding decisions on their behalf.
The idea here is that journalists have skills and domain knowledge that would help them make better than average decisions when it comes to media startups.
So: Raising and directing capital, not necessarily originating it.
Journalists are already heavily involved in capital raising through applying for grants and scholarships. Our time is already thin, so this article is effectively asking us to switch careers or become part-time investors.
I can’t help but laugh a bit at the absurdity of this thread. It’s like the “learn to code” meme but way more stupid. Or “why don’t poor people just take money out of their trust fund?”.
Sure, I guess so. I suppose I latched on too hard to the rather editorialized HN submission title.
I do believe generally-speaking that folks with editorial leadership are probably as good if not better as run-of-the-mill domain VCs at assessing founder quality in a journalism context, as the article suggests.
But really we're talking about asking journalists to consider a career in venture capital, which is...fine I guess?
> In recent years, many prominent journalists have left their posts to start their own publications. That’s certainly exciting when it happens. But looking ahead, I'd love to see more journalists on the other side of the table, with the resources to help fund the next generation of new publications
Are many of these profitable? What would make them investable? This industry doesn’t exactly print money.
Technology will advance such that basic "truths" will be verifiable, leaving journalists as nothing more than storytellers. We should be investing in companies that empower people with the verifiable information they need to arrive at their own conclusions.
I think ambition often gets the better of most startups and that is especially true with journalism startups. People found companies with the hopes of it being worth billions and rarely try to make a company worth millions.
One great journalism startup that I think is a huge success is Defector. A bunch of journalists, mostly coworkers from a previous media outlet, joined together to create a new company as a worker owned co-op. It's never going to be a unicorn, but it employees a couple dozen people sustainably as they have been profitable every year of their existence. Most importantly, the company is run how the journalists want to run it. They don't chase page views or cover a topic specifically because some businessperson in corporate leadership wants them to cover it. I think we need more of that.
Maybe I'll be forced to eat crow, but investing in a domain of expertise that can be faked by a batch of looped Python scripts seems like the stupidest idea ever.
edit: Journalism is one of those trades where people care about their craft. They're passionate and emotionally invested in it, and it's been threatened in recent decades, so anyone affected is primed to make misguided decisions in an attempt to preserve that which they care about.
No beak for me, this is going to bankrupt desperate journalists in a massive exit scam.
I run a B2B media company. There are tons of success in B2B media:
- Aging Media (sold yesterday to PE)
- Morning Brew (sold for $75M)
- Blockworks bootstrapped and just raised first round at $135M valuation with $25M revenue
- Skift is a profitable media venture
- Industry Dive (sold for $530M)
- Politico (sold for $1B)
Isn't this creating a correlated risk for yourself? In the case of some giant negative disruption to the journalism industry, you now might both lose your job _and_ have your investment disappear. I thought that generally speaking, the advice was not to directly invest in the industry you work in for exactly this reason.
There are tradeoffs. It certainly correlates, and there's risk to that. At the same time, your knowledge about the domain may let you make better investments, growing more companies may mean more demand for you as an individual contributor, and it's probably good networking.
I think if you've chosen to be a journalist, it's probably because you believe there's money to be made in journalism and/or because you believe that journalism is making the world better, and in either of those cases it seems a worthwhile use of your excess funds/effort. You should probably have a separate rainy day fund that's un- (or ideally anti-) correlated, and an uncorrelated retirement fund. Y'know, with all the extra money journalists tend to have.
Do journalists generally have a great track record of startup investment?
I didn’t think the writing was that much of being a journalist - isn’t finding stories (and having ideas) just going to be even more important while AIs regurgitate irrelevant press releases into articles and turn clinical trials into X-gives-you-cures-cancer (in mice) fodder?
it was cheap ads by Google and Facebook; untaxed across the world, that removed the traditional revenue from classified ads that historically paid for journalism. Now it's just rich people with vested interests paying for it, with the last frontier of actual journalism "open source intelligence", or telling people what's going on without injecting you're opinion or propaganda into it.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstrips
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Brown_(journalist)
Maybe the article title should be “Journalists that have successful exits in non-journalism startups should invest in journalism startups”
At the same time, maybe smaller independent news outfits that are run by at most a handful of people, that cover more local news might be able to make it work if they keep their expenses low.
Even sophisticated people like paulg make comments like "why doesn't someone just make factual news".
It suggests to me that thinking about epistemology and marketing is a learned skill.
What you are referring to is called branding and this particular form appeals to your sensibilities.
All the top media outlets try to use a similar brand. Ultimately you are consuming a second hand synthesis woven into popular narratives, not anything more true.
But there are a great many serious people who take pride in speaking the truth and exposing reality that people don't want to hear. It's beyond cynical to think that every single one of them is fake.
Seriousness and truthfulness are separate axis. Serious branding gives the appearance of authority.
> frauds like all the folks at FOX
You will find they have similar credentials as the outlets you enjoy. In fact, they probably used to work there.
> every single one of them is fake.
It's not they they are fake. It's that nobody has a monopoly on truth or methods of finding it.
Can journalists provide valuable information? Certainly. But they have their own systematic and personal biased. In particular, they are an extremely tight knit community performing for their peers.
Joe's podcast is obviously goofy as can be. But I actually prefer being explicit about your biases, instead of faux objectivity.
That's moving the goal posts into the parking lot. Joe Rogan and James Risen (as an example) are both fallible human beings capable of bias and errors, but one of them is 1000X better at eliciting and distributing truth than the other. And it's not by dint of their relative credentials, it's because one of them is smarter, more dedicated, more moral, has studied their craft, worked at it for decades, puts in hours of legwork, has the courage to risk their personal safety for the good of the reading public and the other is a drug-addled meathead who is interested in making money. Not that you're not allowed to enjoy his show, but it's purely entertainment and if you learn anything that happens to be true it's purely by coincidence.
I don't believe anyone sees Rogan as a journalist or anything along those lines.
There's a reason people prefer listening to the guest to speak instead of being taught to think and live by white journo women.
Yes: it’s confirming their priors and not challenging any preconceived notions.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Rogan is fine but it’s largely an entertainment podcast. The idea that it’s a replacement for hard news doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Where precisely are the journalists who are paid sufficiently well for their skill that they have liquidity to invest in startups?
edit: alright turns out he's "former chief of staff at the Atlantic" but I still remain convinced he's decently out of touch with everyday journalists' financial situation.
You (we?) are some of the minority of humans that value journalism. Unfortunately.
Wouldn't you like to be in control of it for your troubles?
What did it really cost to start The Intercept, though? Salaries aside - or not.
What can be done with new tech that makes publishing cheaper than ever?
https://pressthink.org/2013/10/why-pierre-omidyar-decided-to...
Nothing. IMO that’s all been done: replacing the printing presses with the internet made it incredibly cheap to publish journalism. Producing journalism, however, remains a solidly human task that resists automation. And every time anyone tries the result is notably inferior.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Stock_Ownership_Plan
Though I’d note The Economist has staff and former staff as minority shareholders.
While there are successes, the total size of the industry has been declining.
http://payloadspace.com/
If you do then there is a chance you might become rich.
Venture capitalists don’t invest their own money, they raise funds from other people and institutions, and make funding decisions on their behalf.
The idea here is that journalists have skills and domain knowledge that would help them make better than average decisions when it comes to media startups.
So: Raising and directing capital, not necessarily originating it.
I do believe generally-speaking that folks with editorial leadership are probably as good if not better as run-of-the-mill domain VCs at assessing founder quality in a journalism context, as the article suggests.
But really we're talking about asking journalists to consider a career in venture capital, which is...fine I guess?
Are many of these profitable? What would make them investable? This industry doesn’t exactly print money.
With the way the world is rushing headfirst into lying LLMs and holding them up as gospel. I don't quite see the world going your way.
One great journalism startup that I think is a huge success is Defector. A bunch of journalists, mostly coworkers from a previous media outlet, joined together to create a new company as a worker owned co-op. It's never going to be a unicorn, but it employees a couple dozen people sustainably as they have been profitable every year of their existence. Most importantly, the company is run how the journalists want to run it. They don't chase page views or cover a topic specifically because some businessperson in corporate leadership wants them to cover it. I think we need more of that.
Interesting that they have a rev share with their development vendor, and rely on that vendor for all engineering and product.
edit: Journalism is one of those trades where people care about their craft. They're passionate and emotionally invested in it, and it's been threatened in recent decades, so anyone affected is primed to make misguided decisions in an attempt to preserve that which they care about.
No beak for me, this is going to bankrupt desperate journalists in a massive exit scam.
- Contentville. Whatever happened to that?
- Brill's Content? Started by the heir to a streetcar manufacturing company.
- Vice Media is in bankruptcy and about to be sold.
- Gawker - crushed by Peter Thiel.
Any big successes?
Politico - Sold for $1 billion to Axel Springer.
Barstool Sports - Sold for $390 million to Penn National Gaming.
The Athletic - Acquired by the New York Times for $550 millio.
- Aging Media (sold yesterday to PE) - Morning Brew (sold for $75M) - Blockworks bootstrapped and just raised first round at $135M valuation with $25M revenue - Skift is a profitable media venture - Industry Dive (sold for $530M) - Politico (sold for $1B)
You also have established companies like Informa.
I think if you've chosen to be a journalist, it's probably because you believe there's money to be made in journalism and/or because you believe that journalism is making the world better, and in either of those cases it seems a worthwhile use of your excess funds/effort. You should probably have a separate rainy day fund that's un- (or ideally anti-) correlated, and an uncorrelated retirement fund. Y'know, with all the extra money journalists tend to have.
I didn’t think the writing was that much of being a journalist - isn’t finding stories (and having ideas) just going to be even more important while AIs regurgitate irrelevant press releases into articles and turn clinical trials into X-gives-you-cures-cancer (in mice) fodder?