Matt Pearce
Appearances
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
I'm advocating for the interest of journalists more broadly. And how do we make more journalism and get more good stuff out there in the ecosystem? Because you're totally right. So we've got this imbalance where you've still got this
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
tiny rock hard core of journalists who are doing a lot of the work of actually finding sources, getting people on the phone or hounding them at their offices or their houses or getting public records or doing original analysis. They're doing the original stuff and it's the original stuff that gets picked up by a million other sort of aggregators and distributors on the internet. So
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
If you don't think that journalism serves any kind of special or important function like that kind of journalism, then no, it's not going to make sense to you that successful businesses like Google and Meta, who are filling a market need and serving their own users, should give money to businesses that haven't figured out how to survive as well as they have.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
But I'm somebody who comes at this from the labor perspective and says, If you lay off 20 newspaper reporters, you're not going to see that labor replaced somewhere in the ecosystem. You're not going to see as many phone calls to the mayor or people digging through court records to bring original stuff to the public. So there's this
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
funding problem where that work not only is not getting paid for under the current economic structure that we have it's not getting replaced when it disappears like in a sort of market competition sense and but still benefits lots of people even when nobody's really reading it which is also true because i think even in the news industry we haven't come to grips to
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
The extent our stuff is not being directly encountered by people, but it's just being distributed through all these very, very diluted channels of TikTok and Instagram and people screenshotting or group texting. A lot of the way that people encounter our work, they don't even realize that they're encountering our work. I support those sort of mechanisms to try to fix that kind of mix match.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And also, there's just not an alternative. I mean, we don't have five or 10 search engines that are viable, that are competing with each other, and some of which who want to get a leg up, want to strike deals with news companies to prominently feature news content. We're just stuck with this one giant search engine.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
You're totally right about what's going on with this. And I think it's a real conflict between our sort of non-commercial journalistic mission and with the actual business reality of paying people and making sure that the direct deposit lands every two weeks. Because I too am also like a media pluralist. I spend a lot of my time on social media and on the internet.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And I am also like, I just want my stuff to be out there. And If I'm an investigative journalist and I write a story about a corrupt defense contractor, I want people to know about that. And I would love to get credit, of course, or whatever. But actually, if I'm doing a civic mission, I just want people to know the information, you know, like facts are not copyrightable. That's a fact.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
get it out there. People will talk about it. They'll do their own stuff with it. This is the fiber of democracy. The problem is, and the real breakdown is that I, as a journalist and as a consumer, am totally fine with that. But I, as a worker who needs to continue to get paid to produce that stuff, have a real material concern about the fact that this is not really a two-way relationship anymore.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
Maybe it was an earlier part of the internet. I just think back to this period 20 years ago, like 2005, where we did have the World Wide Web, Google was bumping around, but we also had a ton of news organizations that were very luxuriously staffed and a lot of them increasingly publishing stuff on the Internet.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And you have this combination of an open Internet along with a bunch of like really well-resourced news organizations doing a bunch of high quality journalism. And in my head, you can just never go backwards. It's never going to happen and it's never going to look like that again. But that is the equilibrium, the temporary equilibrium that I think about sometimes where it was a sort of less
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
less extractive relationship at the time, and it was this relationship that was less mediated by third-party platforms and was less mediated by non-chronological algorithms. That's the other thing that's crazy, too, is that, for example, if you're a news organization, one of the ways that you can build an audience and punch through this incredible noise of modern life
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
is to just be all over breaking news be all over this healthcare executive who was assassinated in the middle of new york in broad daylight be all over rebels finally advancing in syria after years of stasis in that war the problem is that a lot of the platforms that we're now distributing our stuff on no longer distribute the information that's up to the minute it's selected it's sometimes time delayed and like even that
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
alienation of news from the present moment is like a break from the direction of the development of media technology for the last century, where everything was like just getting faster all the time. That has changed. So we have this situation where we can't even get paid for producing the stuff, can't even find the people to consume it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
So the original example that Baumol used in The Economist was about a string quartet. So imagine a string quartet playing a piece of Beethoven. The act of doing that 150 years ago does not look all that different from now. You know, there's not really a lot of ways to technologically or through other innovation
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
make it more efficient to get four musicians in a concert hall to perform a piece that's 45 minutes long in the way that modern economics works if the technology or the business model is not making stuff cheaper it's only getting more expensive over time
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
So that's why your concert hall locally might be struggling, your local symphony orchestra, they're trying to perform an act of labor that hasn't effectively changed or gotten cheaper over the last 150 years. They have to rely a lot on philanthropy. They're not really for-profit enterprises, etc., etc.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
I argue that journalism, and specifically the parts of journalism that are like investigative reporting or original reporting, which I think is the real value that journalists bring to the ecosystem. It's a thing that we do well that other people don't do well or don't do at all. That stuff also hasn't really gotten all that much more efficient.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
So if you think back to the days of Woodward and Bernstein and what they were doing to crack open a really big story about Richard Nixon... like a true investigation that's stretching out over many months.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
They're going, they're knocking on people's doors, because one of the things that I don't know if people appreciate who are not journalists is that when you are interviewing somebody as a journalist, they behave differently based on whether you are texting them, emailing them, or talking to them on the phone, or talking to them in person.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And when you are talking to people in person, that's when you get the best interviews. The next best interview is when you're talking to them on the phone. The worst stuff is like texting and sliding through DMs, and you can't do that kind of reporting.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And in fact, it's influenced a lot of the journalism that you see on the Internet because we now have fewer classical what you would call shoe leather journalists who are actually physically traveling and going to places again because it's expensive and not efficient. So I say that journalism has a cost disease problem, and that stuff is the most replaceable stuff that we do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
It's the place where we'll get our asses kicked. It's also the place where we're least likely to produce something that the TikTokers are going to point to and green screen and plagiarize and send all over the internet. I don't want to overstate the case and say that there's been no technological improvements that can make journalism better.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
But AI is not going to come in and make it more efficient to knock on the mayor's door. The biggest disruptions of the tech have been how we distribute our stuff, and also it's kind of lowered the bar for what we can produce out there that people will kind of accept.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
I mean, this is one reason why I had been advocating for subsidies or market interventions in the form of the stuff.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
Well, I think it would come from the advertising dollars that we lost because, I mean... I would love for nothing on the internet to have a paywall. Like if we are in the sort of post-scarcity paradise where we don't have to worry about paying stuff, we can only just be like happy consumers and like, I want a paywall.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And honestly, I would be kind of fine with like Pop Crave, like distributing an important investigation, because that means that more people are learning about something happening in their community. It's as a commercial problem, it's unfixable. I mean, because I don't really want to be in the business of hassling other people who are talking about the thing that I did. I want that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
I want TV stations to talk about the investigation that we did. I want radio stations to talk about the investigation we did. That version of that ecosystem has been around since the founding. You know, like there have been various newspapers. They've written about the stuff that other newspapers have done.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
The single most cooperative enterprise in media is the Associated Press, which, you know, just makes sure that all the newspapers do one story instead of 20.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
But I think the reality is, is if you're somebody who has made the personal choice to consume information on social media, then the reality is that at some point you will be getting news from Pop Crave because Pop Crave has figured out how to be better at distribution than you are.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
So this is my argue on that. And I will say one thing where my alignment as a trade union president on top of being a journalist is that I tend not to pick on my fellow market participants as much as I want to go pick on the person holding the money back. So which in this case, is the platforms and the people who create the ecosystems that allow the pop craves to thrive.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
The way that we argued for this in the legislation that we've been looking at is essentially to subsidize the labor specifically of journalists rather than you know, publishers more broadly.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And I mean, some of this is a little bit wonky, but for me, the concept is that the only thing that distinguishes publishers from other types of businesses or content creators on the internet is that they employ journalists. And specifically, they employ journalists that perform functions that are
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
historically or traditionally recognizable as the type of stuff that newspaper reporters and TV producers have long done in the history of this country. And those are classifications of work that exist in the BLS data. It's their ways of crafting or at least drafting legislation that says this is a shape of labor that we think is important and should be supported.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And so the way that we argued the case when we were in front of the California legislature
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And, you know, what we would argue in front of Congress as well, if this came up, is that if you're going to have transfers of money between platforms and publishers for the sake of rebalancing this marketplace, then it should appear in the form of a journalism labor subsidy that's based on how many journalists that you employ, because that is about the closest thing that you are going to get.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
for a one-to-one match for news production. You can't produce news or original news without journalists. The more journalists that you have, the more news that you can potentially create. Obviously, this is messy. It's not perfect. It ends up funding some players that people don't like. That is the nature of something like that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
But that's the way that I would essentially address that problem because the LA Times, when I was there, Like the problem, the version of this that I lived through was I was one of like many people on a team that won a Pulitzer for covering the racist city council tapes that came out a couple of years ago.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And so basically a few city council people here in LA, along with the president of the local labor federation, ironically.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
got in a back room and were discussing gerrymandering in the los angeles city council districts someone had secretly recorded this conversation they were saying some kind of trashy and sometimes racist stuff and it was an la times reporter who spotted it that someone had anonymously posted on reddit and then saw that this was going to be a huge story and then we reported it all the way through now in that case
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
The public should know about that. That's their city council. Their ability to participate in democracy is influenced by how these people behave. For me, again, as not the person who has to keep the lights on, I just want the information out there because that affects the democracy.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And honestly, if there's a subsidy from a couple of tech monopolies that shouldn't exist that help pay for it, then that allows me to justify that a bit more easily. But the reality is that without it, we're at the mercy of this kind of crazy billionaire who now owns the place, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who's been running it at a massive loss essentially since he bought it from 2018.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And so the subsidy is coming from one kind of kooky guy who has a lot of bad ideas, but who nonetheless is employing a large number of very qualified and excellent journalists producing this kind of stuff. And like, that doesn't seem very desirable to me because I don't think we should be reliant on an individual person to keep the lights on for that kind of work.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
I think we do need like market solutions. And so that's why I've also become somebody who's really interested in antitrust.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
I think it is multiple factors happening at the same time. And because they're happening at the same time, it's easy to mix them up. So part of it is generational. These are older men and they come from a period where successful news media was the kind of nonpartisan, professional,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
not very in-your-face form of newspaper and TV coverage that they grew up on and which the institutions that they own are the final standard bearers of. The LA Times is probably among the most progressive of the big city newspapers is nonetheless, when you work there as a journalist as I did,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
very tightly constrained in terms of the temperament of coverage that you do and the ethics guidelines that you follow. And honestly, I'm somebody who's up two worlds on this because I do live in this world of, you know, the Internet, where I know that, like, actually what the Internet does not want is not objectivity. It wants a point of view. It wants independence. It wants interesting.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
It wants combative. It wants adversarial. It wants passionate. And every single one of those things, for the most part, is not something that gets expressed very well in straight-ahead traditional news reporting that is designed to work against the passions that play well. on the Internet. So part of it is that I think they're of a generation.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
Part of it is that I think they're already bought in on institutions that embrace those ideals. And I think their theory of the case is that like, oh, my God, we've got a bunch of labor lefty employees who have perverted this semblance of objectivity. And for Jeff Bezos, it starts with him looking at Pew data, saying that the public doesn't trust us for Patrick Soon-Shiong.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
Who is actually currently talking about introducing a bias meter powered by AI to roll out for L.A. Times in January. That's going to tell you whether the story is biased or not, which I'm sorry. Like the New York Times wrote about this and I'm like, this is just fundamentally not serious.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
I would say that one of the reasons I took a buyout from the LA Times and don't work there anymore is that I did not feel as though he was equipped to cope with the problems of media of 2024 and 2025. So I'm not surprised to hear him missing the point again. No, it's not going to solve the problem.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And I think especially for people maybe in like the center center right and to the right, there is ironically, I think still this belief in a kind of universalist form of journalism like we have in the 20th century, this aspiration of objectivity. I think there are a lot of people genuinely who are like, we've gotten away from that. The news coverage has gotten too liberal.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
There's too much analysis in it. And we can bring trust back to the media by making everything as odorless as possible and not having a point of view and specifically not a liberal one. And I think that's so funny. I mean, but consumer behavior tells all.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
The most successful outlet on cable is Fox News, which is about the least professional, independent, or objective news outlets that you could possibly put on a screen. And it's a great business, or sometimes it's a great business. And I don't think there's a lot of internal rationalization of that because
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
I don't know, like people want the aspiration of a universalist objective media, but consumer behavior is telling me or any of us who look at the data that like that's not the stuff that really plays. This little stuff that is going to do well, the green shoots that are going to survive in this kind of horrific platform environment is the stuff that's really sharply opinionated.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
So I actually, as in my capacity as a Guild president and as a between jobs journalist right now, actually spent the last couple of years in a legislative fight in California with Google and Meta and actually Amazon, too, because we were advancing some legislation along with some of the publishers to make Google and Meta give back some of their advertising dollars to newsrooms, because obviously journalism industry in all its guises has been in a
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
I don't think it's ultimately solvable. I also don't think we can even comprehend what the solution to it is going to be. Because I think the one thing that is constant through all of this is that human nature hasn't changed. I mean, human nature has previously given us more benevolent forms of knowledge transfer and learning and social building and solidarity. That part hasn't changed.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
Our environment has changed. The thing that concerns me is that All of these institutions have lost credibility, and it's across the board. Not only is it a thing that's in the United States, this is worldwide. I went to a journalism conference at Columbia University a few weeks ago with a bunch of journalism leaders from across Africa and Europe and North America.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And the political context for people's problems and their journalism are very different. But the basic problems being presented by tech and the way that our access to knowledge has changed are basically the same, which is that technology...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
I think we tell the story about it, about how it's democratizing, it gives more power to more people, and we use it to hold these kind of rickety, corrupt, unresponsive institutions more accountable. And I think what we're also seeing is that it's become a vehicle for what democracy scholars call personalism, and that's the Donald Trumps, it's the RFKs, it's the
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
Instead of new institutions emerging to replace the rickety, corrupt old ones, we're seeing individuals rise and replace those institutions. Nominally with the support of the public, but really who have less accountability than the other. I mean, the rise of television was one of the first things that really weakened television.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
the power of political parties and political parties are actually very important for checking the rise of authoritarians i think you see somebody like elon musk who has wielded media and social media to adopt an almost caesar-like personality in the business community where he's merging all of his separate business interests in a way that makes a laughing stock of the law and now he's becoming the law he's got his guy in the white house he's
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
forming a fake government agency to say how budgeting is going to happen. And through all this, he does it. partially because he makes a lot of money and people want to be around whoever makes a lot of money, but also because he bought important infrastructure, communications infrastructure, an ability to reach people and to mobilize mobs. And that is a feature that it's a democracy problem.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
It's a media problem. It's a problem for every institution, which is that this tech that gives us much more freedom to see the flaws in the institutions that we have instead of giving us new and better institutions is giving us new and better tyrants.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
Individual solutions. If you're somebody who cares about accountability journalism, just find something that you like that produces investigative journalism and give money to that. I mean, like I mentioned earlier in this conversation, investigative journalism is the thing that cannot pay for itself. And so your individual listener dollars
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
going to ProPublica or something like it, or Grist or places that do independent accountability work, serious investigative journalism. Give your individual consumer dollars to that. On a sort of collective social basis, I mean, I think we do have a couple gigantic monopolies that we need to break apart through antitrust action.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
The part that's going to be really weird about this administration is that It's going to do illiberal antitrust. So it's going to keep trying to break up Google. It's going to try to place some checks on media companies doing mergers. There was a report in the FT that said that Donald Trump wants to put a stop to all that stuff, but he's OK if oil and gas companies continue to merge.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
So we're going to have this horrible like Viktor Orban version of antitrust where the competition authority says, It harasses the enemies of the state and allows its allies to consolidate and gain more control of the economy. That's bad. And I think there's a strong argument that some antitrust in that form would be worse than no antitrust whatsoever.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And I think we should just have full antitrust and just break up a lot of these companies. I mean... We had a lot of people who got sent home during 2020 and handed giant stimulus checks who created startups that became actually surprisingly durable companies that continue to grow and defy some academic analysis.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
mostly a free fall, growth has been very sporadic. And so I, through helping advocate for this legislation, also spent a lot of time reflecting on my career as a journalist at the LA Times, where I started out in 2012 as a glorified blogger chasing hits on the Google News tab.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And I think that's a sign that we've got an economy and especially a tech sector where we do have some incumbents who are squatting on a lot of really talented people and squatting on competition and preventing more interesting things from emerging. We need more blue skies.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
We need more ambitious projects that are going to try to shake up what we've got, because I don't think we've realized exactly how stultifying the internet has become. And we won't realize how stultifying it is until maybe Donald Trump breaks it up a little bit. It just may be happening alongside some bad stuff as well. So it's going to be weird.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
We're going to be entering a new period of almost digital nationalism combined with mercantilism. I don't know what's going to happen with the USMCA. You have countries like Canada that are trying to place checks on big tech and competition authorities in Europe are trying to hold big tech in check.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
But I don't know if the United States under Donald Trump is going to try to rig these international agreements in such a way that...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
other countries can't regulate the american companies that are dominating the information flows inside of their borders or not i don't know but like it does feel like we're going to have an administration that is going to end or at least continue ending this universal idea of an open internet continue to have this fractured internet that is divided by national borders.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
That just seems like where we're heading. And there's going to be some really bad stuff in there. But ironically, I think there could be some good stuff in there too, just because of how decadent and rotten the current situation of consolidation has gotten.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
So you're going to have to pay attention to some incredibly boring antitrust and trade agreement news for the next few years, be really plugged into the big changes that could happen with the I don't know if we're going to try to get rid of Section 230, like really, or what that would do or what that might look like. I don't know.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
But a lot of that stuff would have very significant impacts over like how a normal person encounters Pop Crave.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
became more of a regular national correspondent seeking distribution through, you know, not just our website, but Google search. I was one of the early proponents in our newsroom of being really aggressively present and active on Twitter. I became a really big Twitter guy through the 2010s.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
You know, it all kind of brought me to this moment, and especially after Donald Trump was elected and a lot of people out there in the world are like, what kind of information are people are getting? I have
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
live the life of somebody who went through journalism through what was supposed to be a period of transformation, of this great transition from dead tree print newspapers to the exciting future of the internet. First, that looked like social media, and then it looked like nothing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
We've gotten to this point where we have these giant platforms that are totally unaccountable, that are the thing that control distribution and control our audience. And you can have the greatest journalists in the world. I've worked with a lot of them. You can do the best work you can possibly do. And a lot of my coworkers did. And you have to fight the
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
through these unaccountable systems and forms of delivery and extraction mechanisms just to reach the people that you're trying to get to, let alone even try to make any money from it. And those are really interlocking problems because it used to be that you could just put your stuff out there and try to get eyeballs on it, and maybe you can get the hope of some digital advertising dollars.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And then it turned into this thing where it's like, well,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
chasing digital advertising sucks we're gonna paywall some stuff and try to go after premium subscribers but to get premium subscribers they need to see the stuff and want to buy it and even that throttles distribution i really mean when i say it the information ecosystem is rotten from top to bottom because there's almost everything that you could possibly think of is wrong with the ecosystem right now from the platforms that we have and their size the people running them
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
from the people who run a lot of our news companies right now to our inability to reach a public, that is kind of okay with a lot of really low quality information.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
I think I would describe it as an awakening for people who once had control over distribution and remember what that was. The LA Times essentially became a regional monopoly in Los Angeles way back in the day with the Chandler family by starting to control newspaper distribution and getting access to the readers that they could put the paper on their doorsteps every day.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
That's the relationship that's gotten totally severed. And the thing is, is that it's those old companies that because they still have those legacy industrial physical distribution bases, whether it's the newspapers that still have delivery people and still have print editions that still make money, oddly enough.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
They, in many ways, are currently more durable or at least predictable businesses than a lot of the digital outlets that sprung up over the past decade that kind of thought about replacing them. You know, from BuzzFeed News, Vice, Messenger was the most recent failed version of this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And those businesses in large part were premised on, well, if we don't have control over distribution anymore, if we don't have that, you know, the newspaper trucks that we own coming from the
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
delivering the newspaper at a predictable time, we will try to have these partnerships with Facebook, try to have these partnerships with Google, and then realizing somewhat tragically that when you lose control over distribution, you lose control not only over when and how your stuff even appears in front of readers, if it appears in front of readers or viewers,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
But you've also lost independence and control over the shape and the content of your work because we now have this like incredibly oddly homogenized Internet, for example, that is geared around trying to appear on Google search because that's one of the few remaining kind of reliable sources of traffic for places online.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And so that has led to this entire industry and this entire kind of internal infrastructure for companies to try to create this like folk magic to make your content appear in front of this vast public out there that you don't have a thick relationship with the same way that you would have had in the same kind of media 50 years ago.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
It's only effectively doable for national publications or for people with particular business beats or the political press. Essentially, content for nerds. They start small and then they find a niche and then they mine that niche. So that is successful. But you look at something like 404 Media, it's like four journalists.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
You look at something like Casey's team, he's got one or two or three journalists. Where I come at this is very much at the level of BLS statistics and coming out of the newspaper industry, which once employed hundreds of thousands of news workers across the entire U.S. just a few decades ago.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
And my own battles that I waged over this stuff and that the sort of macroeconomic lens that I bring to these issues is often informed not by how the tech press is doing or how national political news is doing, but specifically how the news is doing in the town that you live in, covering the town that you live in, because that once was the primary way that people got their news. And it
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
not really is any longer. And that's the thing that I'm looking at. It's the giant gaping hole that nobody's coming even close to figuring out how to fill because the things that we can point to that are positive examples are things that cumulatively employ like, you know, 20 or 30 people.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
My own line on this is that if we are going to be trapped in an information economy with advertising monopolies, then there should effectively be forms of either collective bargaining or redistribution from those monopolies back to the people who are actually producing the original stuff. that they're distributing. I'm never advocating for a specific business.