We’ve been talking a lot this year about the changing internet, and what it’s doing to the media ecosystem — particularly journalism, which has taken a backseat to creators and influencers. But the tech platforms themselves have a lot of influence over what those creators and influencers make, too. If you’re a Decoder listener, you’ll recognize this as one of my common themes — the idea that the way we distribute media directly influences the media we make. To break this all down, I invited media critic and labor union president Matt Pearce on the show to discuss a great blog he wrote titled “Lessons on media policy at the slaughter-bench of history.” We get into what mechanisms can be used to fund journalism, and how building a direct audience and exercising control over distribution is more pivotal than ever. Links: Lessons on media policy at the slaughter-bench of history | Matt Pearce Journalism's fight for survival in a postliterate democracy | Matt Pearce A deep dive into Google's shady (and shoddy) California journalism deal | Matt Pearce Google Zero is here — now what? | Decoder Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next | Decoder Illusory Truth Effect | The Decision Lab The people who ruined the internet | The Verge Another independent site says Google killed its business | The Verge Google ‘can’t guarantee’ that independent sites will recover | The Verge Owner of Los Angeles Times Plans ‘Bias Meter’ Next to Coverage | NYT Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hello and welcome to Decoder. If you're a Decoder listener, you'll recognize this as a theme that we come back to a lot. The idea that the way we distribute media directly influences the media we make. The influential media scholar Marshall McLuhan famously summed this up as the medium is the message. It's a big idea that shapes the entire world around us.
Without question, our medium and our messages are now dominated by these big platforms, which distribute the vast majority of information to the public. And over the past decade, publishers of journalism have mostly ceded all of their distribution to Facebook and Google search, and now short-form video platforms like TikTok.
That means a lot of our media ecosystem is driven by algorithmic recommendation systems, which tend to favor quantity over quality. And that's created a news ecosystem that allows a lot of influencers and aggregators to take the value created by original journalism and maximize it for an algorithmic audience that doesn't really know where the information first came from and probably doesn't care.
Last month, in the aftermath of Donald Trump winning the presidential election, media critic and union president Matt Pierce, who represents the Media Guild of the West, wrote a particularly good blog post laying this all out. It's called Lessons on Media Policy at the Slaughter Bench of History.
And in it, Matt laid out pretty succinctly why, quote, America's information economy is rotten from top to bottom, starting with the digital infrastructure that stands between quality journalism and the public. Yeah, that's the quote. I read it and I thought, all right, we got to get Matt on the show.
We talked about that piece, the evolution of journalism in the digital age and what, if anything, can be done in the future to ensure reliable news outlets can still inform the public and importantly, survive financially.
We also got into what mechanisms can and should be used to fund independent journalism and how building a direct audience and exercising control over distribution is more important today than it's ever been.
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