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.
We also talked about the internet and whether the giant platform companies that dominate the internet have any interest in prioritizing journalism and truth, especially in a world where the billionaires who own the newspapers also own the tech companies. There's a lot going on in this one. One really interesting dynamic in this conversation is that Matt is literally a union president.
He represents reporters in the Media Guild of the West. I am the head of the Verge's newsroom. By definition, I'm management. I'm not part of the Vox Media Union, which represents most of the folks on our team. But as you'll hear in the episode, Matt and I agree more than we disagree. And we're both interested in solving the problems that came up at the seams.
I think you're going to like this one. Okay, Matt Pierce on the future of media in the age of platforms. Here we go. Matt Pierce, you are the president of Media Guild of the West, which is a union on the west coast of the country for newspaper reporters. You're also a former Los Angeles Times reporter.
And you are very good at social media, which is really the reason I wanted to talk to you about the future of media. Thank you. So you recently wrote a blog post after the election. It has a great title, Lessons on Media Policy at the Slaughter Bench of History.
which is very dire, but there's one sentence in here that I read and I thought, oh, I should just talk to Matt for a while in Decoder and we should just talk about this one sentence. You wrote, America's information economy is rotten from top to bottom, starting with a digital infrastructure that stands between quality journalism and the public. What do you mean?
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
And then it turned into this thing where it's like, well,
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
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.
There's a lot of pieces there. I just want to stay focused on one word that you used, distribution, which feels like a very old kind of vocabulary word in the business of news, right?
You would say distribution, and maybe you think about physical print newspapers getting loaded on trucks or airport newsstands or the publisher of Condé Nast telling you how many magazines got mailed out every month or –
what we mean on the internet is we're going to put our stuff on platforms like tick tock or twitter or something and some algorithm will show it to some number of people in a way that we can't control unless we put money into it and it feels like only recently
everyone realized that that is the same exact kind of distribution as putting the newspapers on the trucks, only there's no control and there's no mechanism to influence it anyway, except for paying money into it, which is very problematic and really not very cost efficient. Do you think that's an awakening? Is that a change in how people are thinking about it?
Is that a change in how you're thinking about it? Or is that we all wanted to ignore it because we thought maybe naively that the best quality work would just win on these platforms?
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.
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.
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.
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
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,
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.
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.
What Matt's describing here is something we've talked about a lot on Decoder this year. Back in May, we put out an entire episode talking about what I call Google Zero, the moment when Google referral traffic to a website effectively disappears.
That happens because you're not aggressive enough at gaming SEO or Google just changed the algorithms, but it has already happened for a growing number of independent websites. And when their traffic dries up, they have to leave the web or shut down. Just last month, entertainment outlet Giant Freakin' Robot shifted exclusively to YouTube because its Google search traffic had cratered.
So what Matt's talking about here is a one-two punch. At the same time that traditional media is in decline, both new media startups and small independent websites are getting squeezed by platform incentives they can't control. and an information ecosystem that does not prioritize their work over whoever else wants a higher ranking on the results page.
And now with Google loading search up with AI results and saying to independent websites that it can't, quote, guarantee that traffic will ever recover, yeah, we've got a problem on our hands. So broadly, I agree with you. I mean, I work for a digital media startup, too.
Vox Media is one of those companies that raised a bunch of money to go make millennial media and get so viral on Facebook that Mark Zuckerberg would have no choice but to pay us money.
And is now doing paywalls.
And now The Verge has a paywall, right? A sequence of lucky events.
led us to say we cannot be too dependent on these platforms that let us stand up a paywall like the week that you and i are speaking i don't begrudge anyone who's made different business decisions because a lot of them seemed rational at the time we were just too stubborn to be like yes we will take google's money to cover google and we can sleep at night and that's just that's a quirk like i i don't think that that is a replicable series of events
But, you know, I look around now and I see a bunch of independents who are doing well, right? I do not think the politics of the free press align with my politics, but Barry Weiss is running a newsroom that is growing and taking in more money and hiring reporters and they look more and more like a full-fledged newspaper every day. They have events. They have a big audience.
My friend Casey Newton runs Platformer. He's growing, right? He's connected to the New York Times now in a very real way. You can see where the green shoots are. Ben Smith has been on the show. Semaphore is a new startup that he started. It is growing. They're still free.
How do you square the rise of sort of these independent new newsrooms that have looked directly at the problem of distribution and said, well, either we're going to email our stuff to you individually or we're going to find other ways to compete and stay free?
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.
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.
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
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.
It's interesting that you mention that, right? Because, I don't know, a bunch of people on Substack are distributed inside the Substack app, and there's a little bit of hand-wringing about whether that's becoming more algorithmic distribution or Substack is becoming more of a closed platform.
But those people right now get the benefit of Substack's designers and app developers and the icons on your phone, and it gets updates, and the local newspaper has none of those benefits, right? If they put out an app... we can all just close our eyes and imagine what the local newspaper app looks like. And then there's this secondary problem of, well, they're all just icons on your phone.
And you open the YouTube icon, and it's an infinite amount of well-produced content for free with some ads. Or you open your local newspaper's app, and it is that app. And it does not have infinite content, and it's mostly about, I don't know, city council meetings.
There's a problem there where you're trying to say, well, this app is going to cost money, and it's going to cost more money than the free apps from the platforms, which by and large are free.
And somehow there's an economic disparity between how much money Google and YouTube and TikTok make and how much money the local newspaper makes, even though the costs of the content and the value to you as a local consumer of news might be radically misaligned. Is that what you're trying to get at when you were fighting to make Google pay for publishers?
Like, hey, you took this whole business model. You should pump some of it back into the news. Because that seems, I think, to most people... like a redistribution that doesn't make a lot of sense on its face. Like our audience was always like, why would you do that? Like just go in, you know, like in the way that Americans are always like, just go in.
But it seems like part of what you're getting at is you need all of these other resources to even make the content feel as premium as it should.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
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We're back with Media Guild of the West president Matt Pierce talking about the state of media and why the information ecosystem of today is becoming more adversarial to independent journalism. Before the break, Matt and I were discussing the state of play for digital media.
We went from a world where a massive influx of venture capital funding created a diverse and promising playing field of websites to what now feels like something approaching the same graveyard of TV and print media all of that investment was supposed to replace.
Distribution is, of course, one major factor of what's happened here, and particularly the distribution power ceded to platforms like Facebook, Google Search, and now video feeds like YouTube and TikTok. But there's also an economic angle here that goes beyond just the raw numbers of website traffic.
It's about how journalists create value today and how that value moves through the information ecosystem because so many other people can just take that value for free. I came up as a blogger. I wrote a lot of blog posts about New York Times headlines. CNET had a really hot news division when I first started in a gadget in 2007. I rewrote a lot of CNET stories. This is a real thing that happened.
The reporters of those stories would sometimes get mad. You're just lifting our work. This was the case against Gawker for years. Nick Denton at Gawker and people who worked at Gawker would be like, well, you should have just written a better headline. Like, all we're doing is rewriting our headlines better, right? And we're just spicier.
And there's a lot of reasons you could or could not do that. But there is a real dynamic there, right? I would rewrite this scoop about whatever in The Times, and I would link back and be like, this was from The Times. We had via links and source links. There was a grassroots crediting etiquette that sprung up in the blogging community. And it's all gone, right?
Because the platforms are taking all that stuff away. But I look at it now and I'm like, well, that's just a huge value exchange, right? Like we make the work, we pay for the reporters, and then the people on TikTok read our stories. TikTok makes a bunch of ad revenue. The creators might get some creator fund revenue or whatever, and we get nothing.
And I don't know how to reconcile that because there's a part of me that says, well, I want our stories to spread. I want people to see that there's the Verge logo and that means it's real journalism and you can trust it and go ahead and talk about it as much as you want. And hopefully that will result in traffic or subscribers or whatever it will result in.
But over the past five years, maybe more, it just feels like more and more of a taking. There's more and more value being given specifically to the platforms and less and less to the people who make the work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
Let's talk about cost for just a few more seconds here. You describe the problem of costs in journalism as Baumol's cost disease, which is this great phrase that describes how some things get more expensive based on how efficient everything else around them is. Can you explain what you mean by that?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All right, so let me put this to you directly. I'm going to name names. I'm going to make this as spicy as I can. The L.A. Times has a bunch of reporters. They are out in the world talking to people, knocking on doors. They get a scoop. Two hours later, Pop Crave aggregates the scoop and puts it out on X or Blue Sky or whatever. Instagram screenshot, Pop Crave, breaking news.
And it's something that the LA Times reported. How do you reconcile that value, right? Because it's infinitely cheaper for the people who work at Pop Crave or any one of these other millions of news aggregators on social media to just sit and wait for the Bloomberg terminal to have some news or for the LA Times to have some news or wherever to have some news and blast it out to their audiences.
And that is a value transfer. Like, straightforwardly, they're paying for one Bloomberg terminal subscription. There are actually lots of news aggregators that pay for one Bloomberg terminal subscription and then blast it out to a bigger audience on social media that they can get whatever value they can.
I think Bloomberg is fine on that because Bloomberg is rich and a lot of people have those terminals. But your average local newspaper gets no value back from that. How do you solve that problem?
I mean, this is one reason why I had been advocating for subsidies or market interventions in the form of the stuff.
Would the subsidy come from Pop Crave?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Part of the dynamic of this conversation is that I am inherently just definitionally the management of my newsroom and you're the president of a union. And I'm saying I cannot distribute our content on these platforms because I will be doing it at a loss. I will be effectively subsidizing Twitter or threads or whatever by giving them more value than they will ever return to me. Right.
They will not link to our pages. We won't even show the ads. They won't pay me enough money. You can see all the major publications are basically like we're not going to participate in this. YouTube, I think, is the best example of this. I think it is a moral tragedy that there's not an ABC News of YouTube.
Like any other distributor of that scale in history has stood up something that looks like a broadcast news organization. That's just the way it goes. And YouTube doesn't have anything like that. The reason I bring up like the management labor dynamic is because I sympathize with every reporter that's like – just put it on platforms for free. Like, let's go get the audience. Like, here we go.
And I'm like, but I have to pay you. That's a real dynamic that I think is like, it's unspoken. The beneficiaries are the people whose cost structures align with the platforms.
So the pop craves of the world, and not to just keep picking on pop craves, but the breaking news lives of the world, whatever those channels are called, they get the benefit of all the reporting at a cost structure that works for the platforms that they are on. I truly, absent, okay, we're going to move money from here to there. We're going to pass a law like the ones you were advocating for.
We're going to take money from these platforms and say you have to give it to the original sources of information. Or we're going to do a bunch of copyright lawsuits, which is kind of what we're doing in the AI world. or something, some other redistribution of the income has to happen in order to support the original work. And I just haven't seen a mechanism that makes a lot of sense for 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.
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.
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
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.
And so the way that we argued the case when we were in front of the California legislature
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.
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.
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.
And so basically a few city council people here in LA, along with the president of the local labor federation, ironically.
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
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.
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.
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.
I think we do need like market solutions. And so that's why I've also become somebody who's really interested in antitrust.
We have to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
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We're back with Media Guild of the West president, Matt Pierce. Before the break, you heard Matt bring up another wrinkle in the entire system of media funding, which is, of course, billionaires. What it is they think they want, what they might be able to get, and whether or not those things are even compatible with the way people consume news today.
Let me ask you about the billionaires for just a second here. There's Patrick Soontrong at the LA Times. There's obviously Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post. They, I would say, have different temperaments. That is as fair of a characterization as I can give. But they have kind of the same ideas.
Bezos is like the Washington Post editorial board is not going to endorse a presidential candidate because consumers have lost trust in the news. And he loves to say that consumers now trust the news media less than Congress. Sure. You can buy that or not and you can ascribe reasons to that or not.
But his idea is we're going to get the trust back by being even more impartial than before and never having any opinions. Patrick Soon-Chung, different vibe around the same idea, which is I'm going to hire the guy from CNN who always says whatever the Trump administration is doing is correct.
And that will provide balance to my editorial board and then people will trust us and we'll sell more newspapers. there's something there that does not seem like it addresses the root cause of the problem. Right, no one is gonna open the YouTube app on their phone where they get most of their news from or the TikTok app on their phone and say, you know what? There's not enough objectivity here.
I'm gonna go read the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times. There's just a disconnect. I can't imagine some young adult being like, I gotta go read the print newspaper to find editorial balance here because I'm not getting enough of it from TikTok, right? That's the real competition. Why do you think they keep retreating to that position instead of facing head on their distribution problem?
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,
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's fundamentally not serious. And also, I just you got to even if you think that's going to work. Even if you grant the benefit of the doubt that what everybody wants is a bias meter on the stories that indicate the stories produced by your own newsroom might be biased and you should click a button to unbias them. How on earth are you going to get that in front of anyone?
Like what's the plan, right? Like it's like you're solving a problem two steps away from your real problem.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I want to pause and zoom out for a minute here. Matt's making a very good point, and it's worth stopping to explore it for a second. That version of, quote, the news that billionaire media moguls keep saying we need to bring back doesn't align at all with the reality of the distribution environment we're in. And there's a few parts to that.
A major piece is the way that influencers shape messages. You might think of influencers right now as YouTubers or people who make TikToks or sell products on Instagram. But we're decades deep into an experiment with high-profile influencers on traditional TV outlets like Fox News and audio platforms like AM radio and podcasts.
Partisan influencers use all of these platforms to convey their messages. That ties into a powerful undercurrent that's driving a lot of discussion about why readers think traditional media has no value. They're getting their information directly from people they trust who say traditional media has no value.
Even though without all that original reporting, the influencers would have nothing to push back on and criticize because they're not doing any reporting.
It's all tied into the widespread feeling right now that our institutions have failed us or are failing or are bad, not because they're failing at producing the truth or doing the reporting or even living up to an ideal of objectivity, but simply because they're institutions. And so that's what Matt and I ended up talking about. Let me ask you about that.
There's something very powerful in the notion that we should just tear everything in America down right now, right? The anti-institutional spirit is alive and well. We see it in this recent election. And Elon Musk is out there every day tweeting, you are the media now. The legacy media is lying to you. Everyone's lying to you. These institutions mean nothing. Tear them down.
We're going to rebuild them all wherever we're going to rebuild them, on X, on Substack, whatever. That's still – I hear what you're saying. People don't see how much value they're getting from the existence of these institutions and the work that those journalists are still doing.
But you also have said over and over again the consumer behavior tells you the whole story and the consumers by and large are saying we don't want these. Right? We might not see the value, but actually we definitely see the value in tweeting that it's all bullshit. We definitely see the value in saying everyone's lying to you all the time.
And we're going to gravitate towards the people who validate those beliefs. How do you solve that problem? Is that even solvable?
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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
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.
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.
What do you think happens next? Is there a way for people to support more of the kind of journalism you're describing, or are we just in the TikTok era until something else breaks?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
But a lot of that stuff would have very significant impacts over like how a normal person encounters Pop Crave.
Well, Matt, I'm going to count on you to pay attention to all that stuff. And we'll just have you back on the show every so often and talk about it. Thank you so much for coming on.
Keeping an eye on it.
I'd like to thank Matt Pierce for joining me on the show. And thank you for listening. This one was deep. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have thoughts about this episode or what you'd like to hear more of, you can email us at decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also email directly on threads or on blue sky. And we have a TikTok. Check it out. It's at decoder pod.
It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you really love the show, hit us with that five-star review. 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. We'll see you next time.
Support for Decoder comes from AT&T. What's it like to get the new iPhone 16 Pro with AT&T next up anytime? It's like when you first light up the grill and think of all of the mouthwatering possibilities. Learn how to get the new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence on AT&T and the latest iPhone every year. With AT&T, next up anytime. AT&T, connecting changes everything.
Apple intelligence coming fall 2024, with Siri and device language set to US English. Some features and languages will be coming over the next year. Zero dollar offer may not be available on future iPhones. Next up anytime feature may be discontinued at any time. Subject to change. Additional fees, terms, or restrictions apply. See AT&T.com slash iPhone for details.