Better Offline - Rich Idiots Are Killing The Media To Please The Tech Industry

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

The media industry has laid off over 30,000 people in the last three years as a result of an executive sect that doesn't read, write, or meaningfully contribute to society. Ed Zitron walks you through how the startup mindset destroyed Sports Illustrated, VICE and The Messenger - and how journalism can turn the tide and survive.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you. you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so

wanting to be out of that phase out of my skin and I just really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone Media Hello and welcome to BetRuff Line.

I'm your host Ed Zittron. Now look, I'm just a simple country podcaster, but at my heart, I'm a writer. I've been writing since I was 16. I wrote about video games at a now defunct magazine called CVG and then another called PC Zone. And there's been one theme, one thing that has hung around my entire media career. And that thing is that the people really. running the media do not read or write.

I know I sound a little dramatic, but really, I'm not kidding, the majority of the media executives I've worked for, and the ones I've met just did not understand or create any media of any kind. There were publishers who ran games publications who didn't play games and didn't write and hadn't written, didn't contribute anything to the magazines, and they routinely made decisions that just made the publications worse. There are executive editors at newspapers I've read and read. worked for that hadn't written a word in decades, and they made calls about the tone and direction

of writers that they didn't even bother to read. And they were always looking for ways to increase readers without actually focusing on what made readers read things. When I went into PR in 2008, which, by the way, I did to move to America. I didn't really understand the job. Pretty good at it now, though. I was still able to keep a lot of my media connections, both at home and the ones I'd met on various press trips to America. And I saw this sudden and dramatic change that was happening to the industry. And it was all thanks to the advent of mass social media and digital publishing and of course digital advertising. And then over the years, I saw the same cycles repeat themselves again and again and again. These media executives, they'd see a trend, get very horny for it. They'd jump on

it. And nothing would happen. So they'd move on to the next one. And they'd move on to a next one. and they'd keep going, and they'd keep dragging media entities into these vast, unprofitable, unsustainable quagmires, all in pursuit of, you guessed it, growth. They were always chasing growth. But what they were actually chasing was the magic of the startup valuation. Startups were suddenly being valued at $50 million, $100 million, a billion dollars, and they wanted a little bit of that magic. They wanted to get even richer than they already were. Practically speaking, this meant that outlets were forced by their idiotic executives to chase the dragon of social media and search traffic,

and they'd optimise their content not for a person or a living being of any kind, but to please algorithms that they didn't control run by companies like Meta and Google who didn't give a shit about them. As a result, it's been a fairly apocalyptic decade in journalism. Multiple outlets have grown into these massive, unwieldy, unprofitable businesses and then collapsed under the weight of executive malpractice. In the last three years, over 30,000 people have lost their jobs in the media industry, all while executives received these massive paydays

for what appears to be accelerating the Titanic into the iceberg. As private equity and venture capital money has flown into the media industry, so of the rotten demands for eternal growth. Brands that you read as a kid, magazines and newspapers that inspired you, they become shells of the former selves, all because they've chased these growth metrics, which naturally ostracize and then eventually lay off the journalists that made these outlets famous, until, of course, the outlet has to shut down due to unforeseen market conditions, which is a euphemism for, we are too stupid to run a business.

Sadly, at this point, you'll probably realize that things are not going well in the media industry, and indeed, 2024 has been one of the darkest years in this industry I've ever seen. The first high-profile media casualty of 2024 was Sports Illustrated, formerly one of the most important brands in sports journalism, and it was slowly choked to death after being sold twice, first to Meredith, which acquired it as part of its $1.85 billion acquisition of Time magazine in 2017, and then it was sold again when the intellectual property was licensed to Authentic Brands Group, which is a holding company, which bought it for $110 million. Now, you did hear me right. They sold the intellectual property. the name Sports Illustrated and the logo, and their goal was the insane prospect of branding things like medical clinics and gambling businesses. This is actually kind of weird precursor to the amount of sports betting you'll see in modern sports today. Now, Meredith Corporation would continue to publish Sports Illustrated until about 2019 when Authentic Brands Group would license the editorial

operations to a company called the Maven as part of a 10-year licensing deal and then laid off 40 people and shifted the editorial strategy away from the deep, thoughtful analysis that people actually gave a shit about towards focusing on breaking news, the things that people could literally get anywhere. And while they were doing this, they flooded Sports Illustrated's website with this kind of noxious, empty, generic contributed content, all from affiliate sites run by these poorly vetted contributing bloggers. Now, no offense to the world of contributing bloggers, there are some good ones out there,

but in this case, this was chop shop work. This was done specifically to fill the site. It was not built to inform people. Thanks to this, Sports Illustrated had spent a few more years deteriorating until around December 2020, when they published a piece by a man called Drew Ortiz. Except Drew didn't exist. He was one of multiple non-existent pseudonyms

given to content generated by AI, while Sports Illustrated initially denied the claims of using AI, they'd fire their CEO, Ross Levinson, a few weeks later. Now, Levinson's a real piece of shit. He's a scumbag. He had multiple accusations of sexual harassment against him when he was at the LA Times as their CEO. And while he was there, he quite literally tried to do exactly the same thing. He tried to make the LA Times take external contributors. Thankfully, strong unions and the eventual acquisition of the Times managed to get rid of him. He still managed to get paid millions. In 2024, the Maven, now called the Arena Group, would lay off most of Sports Illustrated

staff after failing to pay the licensing fee to Authentic Brands Group, which is insane, by the way. You can't publish on the website because you didn't pay the Dairy Queen franchise thing you have to to be called Sports Illustrated. Anyway, the Arena Group claims they'll still keep publishing Sports Illustrated, but it's not really clear what that's actually going to look like, considering how unprofitable the arena group is. They had a net loss of $50 million in the first three quarters of 2023. And Sports Illustrated, well, they fired everyone. What's really pissing me off, though, and this whole subject fills me through my veins full of unearthly poison. Sports Illustrated used to be profitable. It was profitable for decades. And the reason it got profitable

in the 50s was because the managing editor was a sports writer. It was also, profitable when it was acquired in 2019, and it stayed that way through 2020, a year when pretty much every business suffered. Its value, just to be clear, over $100 million, didn't come from the fact that a private equity group sold it to another private equity group, though I realized the Eagorina group probably wouldn't like being called that. Its actual value came from writing, important, meaningful sports writing, from writers like George Plympton, Curry-Cook-Patrick, and Emma Bachelary. And it died.

It died at the hands of people that don't read, don't write, and don't understand business. Journalism is being killed by non-journalists that are desperate to turn it into another shitty startup ecosystem. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan

to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me.

Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group, the yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged.

Uh, one or a race. Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and Friends on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll be able.

hear your message. Plus only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. Agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30. You shouldn't have to share room with anybody. Mm-hmm. From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health.

These are real, honest conversations. We don't always get to have out loud. Totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them? Absolutely not. During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food. Because healing, empowerment, and resilient.

aren't just ideas, their practices. And this Mental Health Awareness Month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Less than a month after Sports Illustrated started to collapse, there was a new media entity that was actually already working on dying. The messenger was a news outlet that raised $50 million in VC money

and hired about 300 people. many of them were reporters. In many respects, it was not really a news outlet, though. It was focused on churn. It thought that volume, velocity, and just lots of stuff was the way that you make a big media out there, rather, of course, than building a rapport with readers and adding their trust and making them like the writing,

you know, writing good stuff that people like, no, no, no, no, you just need lots of things. And despite this hefty war chest, it shut down on February 1st, 2024. And this is the disgusting part. Workers were left unemployed and uninsured, and they didn't even get severance. And it's all because, guess what,

the executives running it didn't know what they were doing. The messenger was doomed from the beginning. The people behind it were just complete idiots. Their CEO, Jimmy Finkelstein, made $900,000 a year, and they spent $8 million on office space in New York, DC and Los Angeles. Which is just crazy, this is the year 2024. Why do you have office space?

For a thing you can do at any computer anywhere? Anyway, sorry, let me calm down. But what really drove it into the ground was that they had this very aggressive and extremely stupid editorial strategy. And it was all driven by people who didn't know what they were doing. All they thought was that traffic was good.

This goddamn thing didn't have a site map. The Messenger, a modern media property, was run by people who barely knew how to use a computer. Let me give you some insight into some of the rot inside this company. So after the company collapsed, Eli Walsh, who, love and more hate him, he was a writer at the messenger, and he built his career in California journalism, primarily local stuff. He described this constant pressure to produce more content, with a lot of it just actively ripped off from publications like The Daily Mail and the New York Post.

two outlets I would not describe as esteemed. After eight months of working at The Messenger, Eli Walsh claimed that he had no usable clips for his portfolio as a result of how crap the editorial strategy was. Now, listeners, if you're wondering why that's so bad, even at the worst place I've worked, even the crappiest freelance outlet, I still get a clip I can use.

Because usually good writing is still published, even if it's published and edited in a way that you don't. like. But what the messenger would publish was this very bland, mass appeal, mass-produced journalism that didn't really say much. And it's funny to steal from the Daily Mail, considering how much of their stuff is viral content stuff or very shittily written headlines. It's actually really weird that the messenger didn't die quicker. And honestly, the messenger's chop shop mentality was completely nonsensical, but seriously, the demise was avoidable. Had the people in charge actually known what they were doing or, say, I don't know,

talked to a journalist about how journalism works when developing the bloody business model, $50 million is actually quite a lot for a media organization. You could have done it a really great job. You can run an incredible newsroom with 10, 15, 20 people, $50 million, you'll be able to sustain that for a long, long time. But they didn't understand that. And the problem is that none of these media executives really understand how great journalism or great anything in media is built. They don't understand that trust, reputation, and loyalty are actually very hard to quantify. What is easy to quantify, though, is revenue growth and page views. You can look at page views if you're a colossal dingus

and say, wow, number go up. Ooh, money come in. Now, is it profitable? Is it actually stuff that people like? Are people returning after they click it? Or did you just convince them to do so through Google? Who knows? The messenger is dead now.

They deleted the whole website. But putting that aside, because these people have no active participation in the process of making journalism or creating media, they don't understand how media outlets are built. They may have been participants. They may have been the money.

But they were not the writers, the speakers, the photographers, the illustrators. They had no part of him. But just to be clear, the people involved have names. The messenger was founded and destroyed by a man called Jimmy Finkelstein. He's a media tycoon with close ties to Rudy Giuliani. And you know what he did at the Hill? Which he sold for $130 million, by the way. He used to lean over the shoulder of editors and tell them not to be so critical of Donald Trump.

It's fucking gross. It's disgusting that these people are allowed to get so rich. Finkelstein, and by the way, former staff when talking to The Daily Beast, referred to this guy as a sociopath that was deliberately cruel. He paid himself $900,000 a year while running a newsroom like a sweatshop and not giving people severance. Fuck you, Jimmy. you're a wrinkly scumbag.

I can't legally wish anything upon you, but I'll laugh if it happens. Sadly, Jimmy Finkelstein isn't the only con artist choking the life out of the media industry. There are some much worse freaks out there. I don't know if you've been looking in it. It's quite painful to watch, but for years I've been watching Vice die.

Vice used to be one of my favorite publications. Motherboard did some of the best tech journalism out there, and actually 404 Media is a lot of the four-mobile. motherbuck people, go pay them money. But on February 22nd, 2024, Vice announced it would no longer publish written content to any of its flagship publications,

which included Vice.com, their regional sites, or indeed motherboard. Hundreds of people lost their jobs as a result. It's a disgraceful end to this publication. It was once like this indie punk magazine built in Montreal. It was something cool. It was something weird. You could kind of mock it.

You kind of laugh at it. but Vice did cool share. And then over the course of years, it was infiltrated and rotted out by private equity adjacent freaks that don't write or read or create anything. And it turned into this giant, unprofitable, unsustainable, $7 billion behemoth.

And you'd think that growth for it would be good, that more people would be reading VICE's journalism. That would assume that journalism was the product that VICE actually wanted to sell. Though people do make fun of Vice's kind of faux-gonzo, I took drugs and walked down the street-style journalism, actually a lot of their stuff was incredible reporting. Simon Ostrovsky's coverage of the earliest days of the Russo-Ukrainian War culminated in him being arrested and held captive by separatists in Dombas.

It was really important work at a time when he really understood what was going on with that conflict. Ostrovsky's work ended up getting Vice 2 Emmy nominations, as well as a couple of Webby Awards. And it was seen, quite rightly, by the way, as a time when digital journalism was finally challenging broadcast's kind of monopoly over conflict and foreign policy reporting. It was a really impressive thing that Vice did. And it was at a time when people, I don't know, were kind of surprised by Vice's ability to do it.

And they shouldn't have been. They were home to some amazing journalists. Vice had an uncanny ability to get into some of the world's most isolated and, frankly, dangerous places and even make it out of life. A good example is they did a story on Siberian lumber camps where North Korean workers were being worked to death to make money for the country. They did another one on the Syrian city of Raqa,

which in 2015 was the capital of the Islamic State's self-proclaimed caliphate. Weiss did important work every single day, and then they did fun stuff, because not all journalists and needs to be world-changing. It just needs to be interesting and fun and full of love. And unlike many, so many outlets, VICE actually made money. And it could have been profitable, but it never seemed to get there. And while there's no single reason why, it mostly comes down to pursuing growth and executive greed.

Vice, as it grew into this $7 billion creature, it took on all of this debt, it wanted to be a global media empire and expanded in an aggressive, deeply unsustainable way, and it made these terrible, awful bets, branded content, shitty video, all while doing this ridiculous dance of paying their executives insane money and laying people off at the same time. And this was a big problem for this outlet. Executive compensation was always high, even when the company was not paying its utility bills or paying out severance. It would take these deals with investors where they guaranteed dividends, regardless of how

the company was doing. Just to be clear, on a business level that is insane, you don't make a deal you can't reliably pay. Very basic business. Unless, of course, you don't really care about the business succeeding or surviving. And then they would do these very annoying branded content deals. A good example of one is they did a 2014 deal with absolute vodka, which kind of made everyone feel a little greasy. And then they did a partnership with the Saudi government. It's not particularly punk rock and it's definitely not suggestive of any great editorial independence. To be clear, the people writing at Vice were victims of this. If you're looking for somebody to blame, you can start with Corey Haig, who is Vice's chief operating officer. Before joining Vice,

she co-led Mike, a publication she drove into the ground, and she did so by moving it away from this kind of hip, young, really actually beloved journalism. People loved Mike. And then she took it and said, huh, well, Facebook is saying that we're getting all of these views and all of this engagement on video on Facebook. So let's pivot the entire thing to video. Now, the pivot to video that Facebook pushed is enough for an entire episode. But the long story short was that Facebook incorrectly showed massive growth metrics that did not exist to publishers. This led publications like Mike and actually mashable to massively move their editorial strategies around to make video content.

Now, you may think, huh, couldn't you just avoid this by seeing if it made any money? And no, she didn't do that. She wrote an empty-headed Vox article about how the future of journalism was visual. And then she laid off most of the staff and sold the IP to a company called Bustle, is best known for buying IP and running crappy journalism on them. There are some good publications that run on the Basel Network. It certainly wasn't doing what Mike was doing at the time. Corey Haik is an example of the media world's failure to police itself.

She is a career failure. This is now the second publication she's driven into the ground because she does not understand what she is doing. And that op-ed I previously mentioned, the 2017 Vox one, she claimed that we were in the early stages of a visual revolution in journalism. To be clear, Corey Hike is not a journalist. She's not an editor. She's not a creator. She's not a creative.

She doesn't write things. She doesn't speak things. She doesn't take photos and she doesn't draw things. She is a parasite. And these walking stains on the earth, they got rich. They got rich as hundreds of people lost their jobs. Bankruptcy filing showed that vice executives paid themselves 11,000. million dollars between May 22 and May 23.

Corey Haik paid herself over $726,000, and former Chief People Officer Daisy Auger Dominguez made over $748,000. During this period, by the way, writer Joseph Cox said that he was unable to pay the 10 cent fee to pull a court record because Vice wasn't paying their bills. If you want to blame someone for the destruction of modern journalism, people like Corey Haich, and Miss Olga Dominguez, they're the people to blame. These are the people that are being allowed to make the cause on these vacuous pools of data that don't make sense. And they don't make sense because they have no connection to the newsroom. They're not writing anything. They're not reading anything. They're not part of the media other than the fact that they are in commanding positions in the

media. They are landlords by another name. And they're rich. They're unfathomably rich. All because they conned their way into different jobs that allow them to fail upwards again and again. Worse still, they don't have any ideas, which is why they so often do stupid things. It's why they're doing the same ridiculous cycle again and again, where they take a media out there and they try and run it like a tech startup, and they don't see the difference between running an app that sells a service and a media company that makes content that people consume, or creates a relationship with the audience. Trust, authenticity, these are the things at the heart of the media.

And readers are very sensitive to changes. They are not stupid, and I think that these executives believe they are. They believe that readers are little pigs that will come and click anything, that can be tricked and conned. Executives that believe readers are like that deserve to not have jobs, by the way. But what they don't realize is that media outlets are also delicate. If you mess with the formula of media outlets, you're going to alienate the people who actually read them, the people who pay your bills either by subscribing or by proxy by clicking and looking at ads.

And it sucks. It sucks because all of this is very obvious. I'm sure many of you listening are like, yeah, that makes sense. Surely you would not run an outlet by making worse stuff, but lots of it. surely you would make a good outlet that makes good things. But that's the thing. Look, if you're no longer concerned with loyalty and you really only care about people who accidentally find a page by being tricked by social, they see a headline they like,

or perhaps they search for something, you don't really care about alienating readers. You can do whatever you want. You can experiment willy-nilly. You can undermine editorial standards. You can lay off people. You can promote your friends. You can force people to do stupid shit that nobody

likes, because all you care about are analytics. All you care about is that ephemeral, random, spontaneous traffic that you can show to your idiot, rich friends and say, wow, my outlet's popping off. And when all you give a shit about is visits and impressions, all you're really going to focus on is what's going to please the big tech firms like meta, Twitter and Google. And these social networks have been very clear in how little they care about news unless it helps them get traffic. And indeed, the early days of these social networks were heavily dependent on media outlets creating content for them so that people stayed on them. And then they choked that traffic the moment they didn't need it anymore.

The network affects that these executives are chasing, the social virality, the Google search positioning, they make the number go up. And if that's all that matters, well, you don't really care about having a lasting web presence. You don't really care about a sustainable media outlet. You're just an online marketing company that publishes words or videos. And frankly, I can't think of a more damaging part of the media than the chase of these metrics, and specifically search engine optimization. The allure of search traffic, especially with the drop of traffic from social media websites,

has just poisoned so much of the media, and now publishers create content It's not really there to serve an audience per se or build a relationship, but to kind of get this spurious traffic, the when does the Super Bowl start? What time does this go live? Where can I buy something? You've probably seen these and wondered why so many outlets publish the same thing. I'll get to that. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite.

Unhumor me with Robert Smygle and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan, Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group?

The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open.

Do you have a name suggestion? open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster,

I heart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think Iheart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart.

Agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast, cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lulmex, create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30. You shouldn't have to share one with anybody. Mm-hmm. From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health.

These are real honest conversations. We don't always get to have out loud. Totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them? Absolutely not. During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food.

Because healing, empowerment, and resilience aren't just ideas. They're practices. And this Mental Health Awareness Month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So if you see all of these websites that have like, when's the Super Bowl star and top 10 televisions, all these things. see them, you're like, this doesn't make sense. I'm used to reading long-form things on here. It's because those have embedded links, sometimes to Amazon or Walmart or Best Buy. Those outlets get a slither of money every time you click, and they get a little more

as you browse around the site if you buy something. Now, there are very trustworthy outlets engaging in this, and it's a way to make money for the media outlet. There are some like the wirecutter who actually do a phenomenal job. They do very deep product testing. Later on in this podcast, I'm actually going to get into some of the scumbags in the industry, but there are trustworthy folks that make money on this. The problem is, you can also make money by not making any effort at all. And I will get to that.

And the result of this chase of metrics is a media industry and crisis. Executives and editors that don't really read or write and don't remember the last time they published anything, they're twisting reporters' coverage to make Google happy. And all they want to do is improve traffic and get. advertising. That's all there is to it. And yes, I understand that there's money that needs to be made to pay people's salaries, but so much of the internet is becoming content that looks and sounds the same. And like I said, those affiliate marketing deals, they make money even when you just do a half-fast effort saying, I like this TV. And what happens when everyone chases the same

dragon is nobody's really happy. People aren't really coming to your website for the the top 10 best apps. They're not coming to be told, hey, these are the best deals. They might enjoy those. They might use them. But that's not what's keeping them there. And you're seeing so much of that because those in power are not actually looking at the outlets. They're not reading these websites. They're not even really consuming the media. They're not on social media. They're not on anything other than maybe the New York Times and CNN. The people running the media don't participate. Not as customers, and frankly not as workers.

And these people, they only really understand the media as a series of symbols, shadows on the cave. They don't really see it beyond the numbers, and they think that at some point money comes out due to words and writing and video maybe. They don't really care how that forms as long as the money keeps coming, even if the money stops one day. This poor decision making almost always leads to overstaffing and, frankly, general mismanagement. Any form of creative media, anything you see, any great outlet you have seen requires a very

basic understanding of audience. And an audience takes time and it takes energy and it takes working on this. I am sure in 15 episodes I will be a lot better than this. I'm sure 15 after that, I'll be better than that. And thankfully, I'm hope I'm good enough now for you to listen to and you'll stick around and hear me get better. But because of the way that Cool Zone Media works, I will have that chance. I'm not being told I have to hit a quota. I'm being told to get in this studio and talk and produce great things, hopefully. But that's the problem.

That's the problem when you don't create anything, when you're a parasite, when you're someone that steals from others. The Messenger is a great example here, by the way. So they hired about 300 reporters and a lot of them, were very well-established, well-respected, reporters from, like, major outlets. And then they took these great, skilled, wonderful people, and they said, please repurpose other people's work. I mentioned already the Daily Mail New York Post as examples of places they took from.

This doesn't really make sense to even a regular person, but when you're a kind of soft-brain media executive and all you care about is short-term growth, you want to see number go up immediately, all you care about is scale, so all you're going to do is put out masses of chum. And it sucks. It sucks because they're so wrong. And what's insane is these executives, they're blind to the actual success stories of the media. I'm thinking of worker-owned outlets like Defector, 404 media, aftermath, and, I don't know,

many of the successful, profitable newsletters like newcomer and platformer that have done incredibly well with incredibly small staffs because guess what people don't want the same shit in a different flavor they want informed opinion they want it from fallible imperfect people they want to know they're hearing from a person they want something that has emotion in it that's why people pay for journalism that's why people read while there is a degree of service journalism to tell you what happened a lot of great writing is emotional defector they're actually a really interesting one as well. They're successful. They're profitable. And they cover more than just sports despite being a sports website. They're sports and culture. And their staff came from a website

called Deadspin. Now, Deadspin is hilarious. I used to write that I love Deadspin. Deadspin was a sports and culture site. They wrote about sports and then other things. Drew McGarry did a famous thing about a time when he collapsed and something was wrong with his brain, for example. There were some wonderful things on there that were completely unrelated to sport. When the private equity shuffles as a result of Peter Teal's lawsuit against Gorka happened, a company called Geo Media took over. And their complete moron of an executive Jim Spanfeller, he fired Barry Pichetsky because he refused to make Deadspin staff stick to sports.

Now, Jim Spanfeller is a complete moron. And I know you shouldn't just insult people in the podcast, but he's a dingus, he's a complete numpty. And you may ask, huh, well, based on looking at Defecta, and indeed based on being able to look at the economics of Deadspin when he owned it, wouldn't you, Spanfeller just want to let them keep writing and doing stuff in the exceedingly popular way that everyone loved? And the answer is that Jim Spanfeller is a fucking idiot that doesn't understand journalism or business. And indeed, many times you will see stories like this, you'd be like, I don't get it, how did it fall apart? And the answer is usually that.

Jim Spanfeller, he wanted Deadspin to be like any other sports out there. Yet, the whole reason people read Deadspin and indeed read and pay for Defector was because it approached sports without the kind of very strong boundaries that restrict the outlets like ESPN or NBC Sports, which they have their place. Now, Jim Spanfeller and his type of people, they'll never understand that the world doesn't need another content mill. We don't need more aggregations of aggregations of aggregations of aggregations another outlet's aggregation. And though this content, when engineered in the precise way that

Google likes, may indeed get traffic from search, and it may be quote-unquote popular, it doesn't mean that anyone's coming back. You're not building loyalty. And earlier in March, Deadspin was sold again, this time to a startup called Lineup of Publishing. Little bit painful when you think about the right economy there. And they're based in Malta, which is a business retreat for tax dodgers, but also known for cryptocurrency, and more worrying in this case, European gambling firms. An investigation by Sean Keely over at TDM found numerous connections between Deadspins' new owner and various online casinos, which heavily suggests that it's going to become not a sports

website, but a website for affiliate marketing for gambling sites. And what sucks about that is kind of the way that sports in general is going. You're going to be able to bet on NBA games from their app, for example. It's a terrible precedent, but also a terrible thing to happen to one of the greatest sports websites to ever run ever. But don't worry, Jim Spanfeller still has several other websites to fuck up. And in this case, he's currently working on destroying Kataku. Now, Kataku was previously one of the most well-respected gaming publications at the world, and they were sold to Geo Media as part of the Gorka lawsuit.

Last week, as reported by Aftermaths, Gita Jackson and Riley MacLeod, Katakou editor-in-chief Jen Glennon resigned after Geo Media executives decided to change Katakku's remit from publishing news and opinions about video games, the whole thing that made them famous, to creating, and this is the real number, by the way, 50 game guides a week on a staff of seven people. Kataku is, or I guess was an institution in the gaming industry, and it was built off the back of publishing thoughtful, timely coverage about games and very personal, personal pieces

about video games. An industry well-known and pretty much the only other one other than sports that can really have a genuine feeling of nostalgia in the writing, they're turning away from that and they're turning it into what will just become another SEO chop shop. And it's all thanks to Jim Spanfeller,

a man who cannot run businesses. He's going to turn Kataku into just another SEO slop dump. Another place where you can answer questions about where to go in a game when you're stuck. Oh, how do I make Cloud Strife go nude? Oh, how do I beat Seferoth at some point in FF7? Jim Spanfell has never played a video game in any point,

so I don't think he knows that there is no way to make Cloud Nude, but indeed doesn't know anything about gaming. He doesn't know anything about games. He doesn't know anything about writing, because, like all of these people I've been talking about, Jim Spanfeller does not actually know anything about the company he runs. And it's disgraceful. Gaming is a multi-trillion dollar industry.

Gaming is something that's so important to culture. You have the weirdest, most reclusive people and incredibly popular sports stars who all played the same games. This is one of the most dominant forces in culture, and this idiot is taking Katakaku, which has had a crazed history. It has had a lot of controversy, but it's popular, it's meaningful. Writers from Kataku have gone on to found things like Polygon, another influential, and in this case Vox Media owned property. Aftermath was founded by several people who have written at Kataku.

This outlet created in some level modern games journalism, and now it's going to have the same value as Game FAQs, except worse because people on Game FAQs, actually play games. Much like Sports Illustrated, Katakun and Deadspinner, they're going to become something I call a shit of Theseus situation,

when an illustrious brand has its guts ripped out, replaced with the thoughts and the feelings and the ideas of a huge moron. And it's so stupid. It's so frustrating. And until something changes, it's only going to get worse. And I know I'm angry and you should be angry too.

I'm furious. These people, those of them who are not my friends, are just people I've enjoyed reading. People have lost their jobs because the media industry is being run into the ground by people that do not know how to read, write, or even run a business. Every outlet that you read today that kind of feels like a shadow of its former self, there's a reason. It's got there because the people in charge don't read, don't write, they don't contribute, they're not media creators.

They are parasites, as I've discussed, and their remit is not to create a, lasting legacy to make something that people read for years. They are trying to turn that outlet into a shitty startup that they can flog to someone. Except these things never sell, ever. And that's because, on top of being idiots, they do not understand any kind of business at all. And the reason that a lot of these executives just can't understand it and they can't understand why things succeed and their properties fail is because they don't really want to accept that you can't grow a media business like a startup, or like any kind of regular business.

You still need a profit and a loss, but it takes time and you have to invest that time as much as you have to invest that money. Media outlets grow, and I'm paraphrasing, Cool Zone Media's Robert Evans. They grow by hosting the work of journalists that people love and giving them the time

to develop a following and make it, make that great stuff. To refine their craft, to be great even if they're not quite there through mentorship and through just doing the work. Our sister show, better offline sister show, it could happen here. It took years to develop it into what it is today, which by the way, it's a profitable podcast and it gets millions of downloads a month. And it got there because Robert and Sophie put in the time and the money, and so did IHartRadio,

of course, to give these voices the chance to grow and to help them grow comfortable, especially with media that involves you being exposed to the world by talking or by being on video, so much of that is growing comfortable with the format and finding what works specifically for you. And then once you've done that, you have to build a rapport with the audience as I hope I'm doing today. And none of this can be forced. You can't accelerate this process. Perhaps, as Roberts also said, you can get these big, unique scoops that get people through the door, but you have to keep making stuff and you have to keep refining it too.

And none of these executives like that because you can't tell that to a private equity firm. You can't tell a private equity firm to wait and be patient. They're not in the business of patience. Venture Capital doesn't want to hear that it's going to take a while and a non-specific while at that to get their money out. They want money now. Money, me, money now. And what's really sick and ironic about this is they're not making money from this. Bus feed went public.

It was a horrible mess. Vice has been run into the ground, and sure these people have made a bunch of money off of the back of others, but they've also destroyed something meaningful, and this will colour their legacies for the rest of their lives. Maybe they don't care, I don't know. I hope they do. I hope they don't sleep at night.

I hope Jimmy Finkelstein gets visited by the ghosts from a Muppet Christmas Carol specifically. Mali and Marley. I think that'd be kind of funny. Putting that joke aside, though, these people shouldn't be allowed to walk down the street without getting yelled at in a perfectly legal way that I'm not encouraging

anything illegal, of course. But I find within myself a great deal of poison for them. I find them disgraceful because I almost like they had a good thing. Had Weiss been run sustainably, had they really focused on making it a profitable outlet, they could have what 404 Media is doing today and then some. 404 Media is a worker-owned business made by people like Jason Cobra and Emmanuel Mybug who left Vice, who left motherboard. Weiss used to own 404 Media. These people used to work for Vice. And now 444 Media has had major scoops that are changing the entire tech industry.

They are the ones that published the Google Search is Getting Worst Story. They are continually getting these scoops, doing great journalism. And they're going to probably become a very successful and profitable business. Vice could have had that. Vice literally had that. Jim Spamfeller had Deadspin. None of these people realize what they've got, even after it's gone. and maybe they just want that short-term bang.

May they just want a little tittle of money so they can feel rich and nasty and hang around with their other asshole friends. And I find them despicable. If I meet any of them, I want to make some very creative noises in their faces. And it sucks. It sucks because the real human consequences

fall upon the actual people making them rich, the people creating stuff, the people talking, taking photos, and drawing things, writing things. They are the victims of this. The people who should be the victims, the people who shouldn't make a dollar, are the ones making the money. They are the ones who stay rich, stay powerful, and will probably fail upwards into another media job. And that's the thing.

Thanks to these people, the media industry has spent over a decade fucking around, and now they're finding out. And the journalists are paying. These executives, they spent this time and they built this foundation, this massive search and social, based foundation and it's made on top of sand. And they're desperate. So they change strategy and they change strategy again and they do so to please algorithms, not people. They've completely forgotten or maybe they did not know that every success, every previous success in the media has pretty much come from a small group of opinionated people with good ideas who create cool shit. And really, that's the only salvation for journalists.

Modern journalism can be rebuilt, but rebuilding it will take reinforcing the relationship between writers and their audiences. And media properties need to help foster that and empower that relationship, instead of trying to get rid of that, instead of turning everything into a brand to be sold to private equity. We can work back. We can get back what has been lost. By supporting unions in newsrooms. By supporting and paying for worker-owned journalism. You can bring back great journalism. You can turn this tide. The private equiters will eventually lose because at some point,

right now they're exceedingly dependent on Google search. Everyone chasing search engine optimization is dead in the water eventually. Google and Facebook, they turned on the news before. You don't think they'll do it again? You don't think that Google will eventually tweak the algorithm them in some obscene way to turn away from this generic slop. When that happens, sadly, once again, journalists will be the ones that suffer,

which is why right now journalists should unionize. It's tough, but if it's possible, they should join worker-owned co-ops, like Flaming Hydra. They should join these great organizations, look up to things like DeFecta, and see the wonderful journalist and they're doing day in, day out, people like Ray Rato. He's a fantastic journalist, an esteemed Bay Area reporter, and he's done some of the best work of his career at Defector, and he's done so because it's owned by him and the rest of the writers. The people building are the people that should own stuff. Now I feel a bit crazy whenever I talk about this subject, and I think it's because great journalism and great writing is foundational to culture. Hearing an informed opinion, doesn't matter where they're at if they're at a blog.

if there are a newspaper, if they're on TV, hearing someone who actually knows what they're talking about, speaking from the heart, who's developed a relationship with you as a reader, is transformational. It changes people's lives. And great opinion journalism does on top of that. And everything that I am doing,

my PR firm, my newsletter, my podcast, is a result of having great mentors in journalism, like Will Porter over at PC Zone, and Logge and Steve Hoggety, people that were there to help me as an early writer, to help me, encourage me to develop my voice, the voice you are hearing today. None of this crazed confidence comes from myself. It comes from having great mentors, like Sophie and Rob over at Cool Zone Media, like David Roth, a defector. These people are the reason that people read websites. It's the reason they listen to podcasts. It isn't because of virality or search engine optimization.

or any other little bits of bullshit that people like Jim Spanfeller and Corey Haight claim is the case. The answer to fixing journalism is simple. It's just annoying to growth at all cost-capitalists. Profitable, sustainable journalism, or any content really, is built off the back of letting people with defined voices build and sustain an audience. Every single success story, every single great newspaper and website, was a result of letting great creators create great things and giving them the space and platform and time and funding to do so. If you want the next great media outlet, it isn't going to come through tricking Google or Twitter or Facebook or Instagram into reading your stories.

It's about making great shit and getting people to see it and making sure that the people making it feel supported and mentored and helped to make more of it. I believe there is an absolute mountain of money right now in journalism. For investors capable of thinking more than six seconds ahead, of course. Give writers the space and the time, and that time may be measured in years to build audiences and develop relationships with their readers. Embrace their individuality and pay them well for the privilege of having them speak on your behalf. Build for readers, not investors, and you will make way more money than you ever would licensing a brand like a goddamn Denny's franchise.

Things can get better for journalism. I promise you they will, if only the money and the power is put in the hands of actual writers and actual creators rather than career failures and private equity dipshits. But until there is a significant realignment that something meaningfully changes in media, one that puts the power back in the hands

of the people actually creating stuff and focuses on the things that they create, we're going to see this cycle repeat again and again and again. and I'm going to get angry and you should be angry too. I hate to tell people to be angry. I hate anger in general. But in this case, it's justifiable. This is a singular force damaging culture and enriching assholes.

Do not believe them. Do not trust them that any of this was caused by market forces or anything other than the mass incompetence of assholes running media into the ground. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattersowski.com.

M-A-T-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at Easy at Better Offline.com or check out Better Offline.com to find my newsletter and more links to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Cool Zone. or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite.

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