Big Technology Podcast - Digital Publishing’s Next Evolution — With Brian Morrissey

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

Brian Morrissey writes The Rebooting on Substack and hosts The Rebooting Show, a podcast. He is the former editor-in-chief of Digiday and digital editor of Adweek. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how digital publishing is evolving from an industry reliant on social media for distribution to one that prioritizes focus and dedicated audiences. Stay tuned for the third segment where we discuss Brian's views on Web3, crypto, and how these new technologies may help the industry.

Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation, of the tech world and beyond. Well, our guest today, Brian Morrissey writes the rebooting newsletter and hosts the rebooting podcasts. It's an excellent read and listen about the future of digital. publishing. And I am a pretty intense reader and listener of the stuff that Brian does, A, because I run my own digital publishing business, but B, because I think when the internet changes, you can always see this stuff happening first in the digital publishing world. I think it's kind of like the crimes and courts of the internet. You see the changes happen there first, and then you start talking about how the policies can fix the issues. So I'm thrilled to Brian here today.

have a long discussion about the evolution, the next evolution digital publishing, and we'll touch on some Web 3 and crypto stuff at the end. Brian, welcome to the show. Alex, thank you. I'm very excited to do this. Yeah, I'm thrilled that you're here. I kept trying to hire you so many times in the last decade. Well, look, we have worked together on publications, which was awesome. And I will say, like, you know, having been edited by you, I think that, like, you're an excellent editor and always made the stuff that I was writing better. So it's actually a thrill to see you writing more at the reboot.

I know. I like came out of retirement. You know, it's harder. It's harder at first. Like even though I was a reporter for probably like 15 years. And then, you know, you become an editor. And I feel like, you know, you become an editor. You're like, I'm going to do both.

I'm going to be like a player coach. And then next thing you know, you're in like meeting after meeting after meeting, and I used to write down what I was spending my time on, and the actual product, which is journalism, or we must call it content these days, was like a small sliver. And so it's been good to get back to actually doing the creation myself, but it's harder. It's harder than a useful. It's so much harder. When I send big technology out on Thursday and, like, Thursday morning I wake up.

And I'm like, oh, no, I don't know if this happens to you also. But it always happens. That's the thing. Yeah. My wife is always like stuck. You put it to the end and then it happens. Exactly. Yeah.

And then eventually it comes together. And I do remember that, you know, we've had lots of conversations over the years. But one of the things that you've said that stuck with me is you talked about like companies and sometimes, you know, you can tell. I think you said that you can look at the health of a company when it comes to the of people writing emails versus doing stuff. And it must be nice to be the person doing this stuff now, even though you're doing it in an email format, which is kind of a blend of maybe the two passions. Yeah.

No, I was the digital letter at Adweek for many years. I think it was seven. I forget what it was. It was definitely two years too long. And I used to go into medians and I would mentally sort of, you know, divide people into writes emails or writes stories. It was vastly outnumbered the number of people who are writing emails versus writing stories.

But then I became the guy writing emails rather than writing stories. So I started to value that group of people a lot higher. Interesting. And now? Now I'm back to like saying, oh, what are these people just writing? Although I am writing emails. But like, you know, actually, you know, creating the product. But I do think that there's something to be said that.

As publishing grew more complicated with its business models, the infrastructure needed to execute on those things just kept growing. And so the ratio of people who are actually making the product versus people are doing things around the product kind of grew because I think a lot of publishing business have not been direct business models, right? So they're advertising companies or events companies. And so it was a bit of a shell game, right? Like you're creating, you're doing journalism and you're creating content, but really the business was in some ways something else. Yeah. And we'll get to this, but that's when the business hiccups then, then it always ends up getting, the cost ends up getting borne out by the people creating the content. yeah and and that sucks and i think it also like it has created this era and i mean yeah it's created

this era where reporters um are like always on unstable footing they're underpaid and even though these media businesses could be healthy you know you end up getting just a small percentage actually going to the people writing the stories versus writing the emails and that's why you know we're going to get to it but that's why i'm sort of bullish on this new model of of independent publishing where I think one of the things that I've realized doing big technology is that when you cut out a lot of the inefficiency, you could actually have, you know, the output of a single reporter is actually worth something more than what you see inside media companies. Yeah, because I think a lot of times the people packaging together the content and selling the content were taking a larger slice of the pie, right? The pie is not necessarily growing, but I think how it's being sliced is different. And there's a lot of economic pressures on publishing, but at the same time, there's a lot of

inequality within publishing organizations. And I think that is part of this great resignation and the ex-person-to-substack meme is different economics, because once I think what Substack has done, and you're a great example of this, It's a media business in a box, right? You're doing it. You and I are both doing slightly different models than a lot of substack. But I think what substack has enabled is people to set up a media business in 10 minutes. You can hook up a Stripe account and you have a media business.

You have all the infrastructure there. It doesn't mean, like, you know, this podcast will probably be edited by someone different. But like you have very minimal costs. And when you can lower your costs, then you have a lot of, you know, a lot of it is upside to some degree. It's hard because you have to do everything. And I don't think it's for everyone. And I think, you know, a lot of people don't have the privilege to be able to go off on their own and make it work. But for those that do, that has some traction or reputation and particularly expertise in an area,

It's a very attractive model. Yeah, and I want to talk about how we got here, and then we'll circle back to the prospects of individual publishing and also the other trends that we're seeing in digital publishing right now, which is this sort of, I don't know, you could kind of call it facetiously a pivot to quality, right? But it does seem like maybe just five minutes ago, we were moving from the search engine optimized Huffington Post era of digital publishing to the social media era, where you had the buzz feeds of the world where I used to work, but also the mics and, you know, other places that all pivoted to video and then seemed to fall apart. You could maybe put Vox Media in that camp. And so, Brian, can you share a little bit about why we're evolving away, which I really think is the case from the social media-driven publishing model to something else. But let's talk about why social media-driven publishing is on the outs. Well, I think digital publishing, you know, if you think about when it really started, the idea was there was an artificial constraint on the ability. to publish. You needed a printing press in many cases. Now, the internet was going to change that

and it was going to lead to all kinds of new publications and anyone can create content. There would be no gatekeepers. And that in some ways happened in the early internet. But the problem was it was impossible to find. It was impossible to make money from. And so you ended up having algorithms. The original algorithm was the search algorithm. And so SEO popped up as a way to solve for discoverability. And what happened was, that was why everyone was writing, what time does the Super Bowl start? They were not writing for people. They were writing for algorithms.

Facebook was simply another algorithm. It had different mechanics than the Google algorithm that gave us how to boil water from demand media. Thank you very much, demand media. That was an actual article, how to boil water? Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Okay, continue. There's people who search for it.

Like, because when you follow the, I always say this, like, when you follow the data and your, your main thing is optimizing the data, you're going to optimize into some really weird places, okay? And search was, you know, that ended up leading search. And so when we had, you know, social come around with Facebook, what you saw is a lot of people continuing to write for algorithms, which is writing for a different algorithm. So instead of how to boil water, it was more sensationalist content. I mean, the tail was wagging the dog in many ways because publications were not writing for people. They were writing for algorithms, right? And there's a difference between the two.

So my hope is that we're going to return to actually writing for people, right algorithms. But it also seemed so promising at the time because these were big platforms that if you did it right, you could deliver. large um large amounts of views to your web pages or you could even like bus fee did try a distributed publishing model where you build big audiences on these platforms and then run ads to the audiences there or or use the expertise that you built up working on those platforms to um to basically create content for advertisers who needed that expertise in order to reach people there so but it's does seem like almost in the blink of an eye, that went away. So I'm curious, A, if you think

that that's true, that we, we, that the publishing, publishing business has, digital publishing business is moving away from that sort of model. And if so, why did it disappear so quickly? Well, I mean, ultimately, you know, this is a game of distribution, right? I mean, it's Distribution and monetization are sort of the two polls of publishing. And Facebook particularly was, in particular, was a very attractive means of distribution. I can remember, you know, little things going in 18 months. They amassed an audience of 50 million people off of what was originally a pet food website. They turned out they were better at content than pet food.

delivery. And so, you know, that growth was always sort of unnatural. Media doesn't work that way. It takes a long time to establish credibility. And, you know, we're in it like right now. It's like incremental growth is, it sounds nice, but it also means that it takes a really long time. And so algorithms were a shortcut, in my view, in many ways. It was a shortcut to scale. And And like many shortcuts, they're not, they end up being worth it in the long term. Like there's very few shortcuts in life. I mean, maybe when we get to the crypto part of the show, we'll get to shortcuts again. But, you know, publishers were not in control ultimately.

I know it's like control of your own destiny. It doesn't make sense. But, you know, they were basically enthrall to the vagaries of an algorithm. It wasn't like, couldn't predict this. Like, I used to cover search marketing in the early days. And, you know, the Google dance, that was the name they used for any time Google changed its algorithm. And there would be winners and losers. And it would wipe away various people who had gotten really good at the last algorithm change.

And this was just how it worked on the Internet. And so I don't think any of that was particularly new because when you don't have control, you know, you just have to hope for the good graces of whoever is in control. And Facebook was in control, and Facebook's interests were not the same as publishers' interests. And Facebook proved this time and again. And for whatever reason, publishers chose to bet on the fact that this is a juggernaut. It is rising at an incredible rate, and we're just going to ride it. Yeah, and I mean, like having been in the belly of the beast, like, it was like an

unbelievable high when something caught that Facebook algorithm, and next thing you know, you were delivering hundreds of thousands of views to your website. It was nuts. It almost seemed unbelievable, right? Yeah. Like, because I know, like, just, you know, look, we are business to business media, which is, is what we were in at Digidae has different dynamics than B2C media, business and consumer media, because ultimately with consumer media, you need to reach very large numbers, whereas in B2B

media, you need to reach very specific people. So large numbers are not as important. At the same time, like anyone, you know, we were running stories that were designed to like sort of catch the Facebook algorithm and some of the numbers on these stories. Like it would take like, 20 minutes or not 20 minutes maybe like two hours to like write up some posts and for some reason it would catch the the Google algorithm and you had hundreds of thousands of fuse and it was like how is this possible right yeah it did feel feel fake and then um I guess what happened well it's not really guess what did happen was well anyway this is a theory really yeah Facebook got a lot of blowback after the 2016 election.

And then I think what happened is it realized that, hey, we probably shouldn't be pushing all this news on our news feed. It doesn't really seem to benefit us. And then, bam, depreciated the value of news links in the feed. And then all of a sudden, the bottom dropped out for a lot of that. Does that sound right to you? Yeah, that sounds exactly what happened. And, you know, publishers got caught holding the bag, ultimately.

You know, they built up operations and they hired people specifically to do this thing, which is right to algorithms, right? And so it became really difficult for these publishers to change course because that's what they were geared to do. Now, now, like when people are starting new publications, nobody says we're going to, like, excel on Facebook, right? Like, I mean, everyone's like saying we're going to do, we're going to have, direct connections with, with our audience, mostly through email. And I think that's because

we're seeing this flight to focus, right? And the publications that are starting now are trying to serve specific audiences rather than everyone. Because I think one of the lessons learned from that era of algorithmic control is that when you try to, when you try to, when you try to to, when you try to cater to everyone, you become about nothing, right? You're just like doing the same old, same old because everyone has, pretty soon everyone had the same playbook, right? I remember getting pitched one of these dashboards that tells you what's trending on Facebook and stuff. And I was like, wow, that's like amazing. I'm like, but here's the thing, aren't you selling this to like every other publisher out there? And they're like, well, I mean, we work with

the major problem. I'm like, so won't I be doing the same stuff everyone else is doing? And how do you build a brand and how do you build a differentiation and long-term enterprise value? If you're the 500th outlet who's writing the same Kardashian story or the Game of Thrones recap, it's really difficult to do. It's better to do something that's different. Not only that, it shows up in the Facebook news feed in the same format. So NBC News can look the same as Offie and Posts can look the same as Digiday. Can look the same as like someone else's basement publisher. I think in many ways, you know, publishers really devalued their brands completely.

Because I always thought like the test of a strong publishing brand is if you take off all of the branding, the logos and everything like this and someone can say, yeah, that's a, that's an economist story. Like, you know the economists. You've got a point of view and stuff. And that's really hard to do when you're catering to algorithms. It's really difficult. You can't have everything and you sacrifice differentiation in the market. And that's why a lot of these publications imploded after Facebook, you know, pulled the football back like Charlie, like, who was it? Lucy?

Lucy did it. Yeah, Lucy. Yeah, she pulled the football back on Charlie. Although Charlie never learned the lesson. And that's why we always use that GIF for the algorithm. It's very fitting. Because I'm like, Charlie, it was always like, no, this time, I'm going to kick the football. But that's, yeah, I mean, that's why when these publications went away, people mourned for an afternoon on Twitter.

And look, I don't like losing a job sucks. So this is nothing to do with the people who are who unfortunately would have lost their jobs. to that. But a lot of these publications weren't truly missed. And that's because they had no uniqueness that made them essential to a group of people. Yeah. I mean, look, I was at one of those publications. Well, I won't say that BuzzFeed wasn't essential. I thought there was some good parts to it. But I do also think that like I went in eyes wide open saying like this is and BuzzFeed was very clear about it. We were experimental. We're going to experiment and try to figure out what works. And I do think they've built a somewhat sustainable business. And I think that maybe the

problems there were, you know, partially just due to the, which always happens, the investor expectations versus reality. Yeah. Well, that's the other thing. It's like venture capitalist bet. They made like both the right and the wrong bet. So I can remember, you know, everyone used to trot out the Mary Meeker slide. Do you know that one? Oh, yes. The amount of time spent versus the dollar spent, the dollar spent. And the time spent online. and on mobile far exceeded the dollars that were being spent. So the idea behind that slide was that eventually the dollars were going to catch up and the publishers that got ahead would get a windfall. And that's why the Andreessen Horowitz of the world invested in BuzzFeed because it was an

idea that if you were a digital publishing company that cracked this nut, you were going to beat the New York Times in the game and get that money. So that actually did happen. Those lines both met and actually got exceeded, okay? But the problem is all the money went to Google and Facebook and Amazon. Exactly. Yeah. Want, won't. Right. And so, like, you ended up having publications that filled these companies' feeds with great content, did exactly what they asked for, but ended up just making the platform's money. Yeah, basically. And so, and now we're moving away from that. You know, it's interesting because we've heard less, like, I feel like there's been less of a buzz about how Facebook's killing publishing recently because publishers, I think,

have gotten smart and said, we're not going to depend on that anymore. So I want, you've written a lot about this. So can you talk a little bit about where we're heading now? Because there does seem to be this move away from, you know, catch all, do everything published on social media to, I don't know, maybe you could call it pivot to quality, pivot to scarcity. I'm always afraid about, you know, immediate digital publications doing these pivots to X because we know what usually happens. But where are we going, Brian? Yeah, I think publishers sort of went through the Kubler-Ross stages of grieving. You know, it's like bargaining acceptance.

There was definitely anger. Anger was fair in a big way. They spent a long time on the anger phase. And look, everyone, you know, everyone's process is different for publishers. The anger phase was a long one. that's like the bargaining phase like live video didn't work but now you know

Facebook is doing the what was the TV like thing I don't even remember all these pivots remember they were they were doing anyway Ricky Van Bean they brought over Kyle Jume and said we're going to do produced video Facebook TV

I even forgot what the name was and I cover this stuff there's been so many of them there's been so many of them but like eventually I mean it's like Charlie Brown like eventually Charlie was like no. I'm out of here. In fact, I'm not even playing football anymore. Forget about this kicking stuff. Or maybe he just took up punting. I don't even know because he has full control. I guess that's what publishers. Publishers are being like, no, we're not

going to have you hold the, we're just going to punt it ourselves or drop kick it. Because I think that's, you know, publishers spend a lot of time pointing fingers at tech companies for the the travails that their business businesses are in. But at the same time, they went into these agreements. No one forced them to rely on that. As I said, many publishers, I'm not like, you know, like, I don't hate the player, hate the game, I understand that. But like, you know, many publishers went into this eyes wide open.

They were making a bet and the bet just didn't pan out, right? And I think now increasingly, you know, publishers want to be able to have. have a lot more control over how their businesses develop. That means that things are going to take a long time and the numbers are going to be smaller. So I think one of the interesting things that is starting to take place across the entire media ecosystem is a comfort with smaller numbers, right? Like we've been so used to these astronomical numbers.

I used to joke, like, in a podcast, like, I would have people on from, like, I would have, like, Ben Lairer on from, from group nine and stuff. And he'd be like, or like, you'd be like, now this did like 4.5 billion video views last month. And I would be like, is that good? I'm like, literally, Ben, you could tell me any number. You could have said $4 trillion. And I'd be like, hmm, $4 billion, $4 trillion. It doesn't really matter. We've gotten so used to massive numbers that, you know, the real numbers.

are going to be a lot smaller. And so everyone needs to get more comfortable with that. I would rather have 10,000 email subscribers with like a 60% open rate than a million people visiting from Facebook. Really? Yeah, for sure. I mean, it depends on like the category and stuff like this, but having like, having a close connection with an audience, particularly if it's in like a high value area,

you can build a sustainable media business around that. And I think it's no mistake that a lot of the new publications that we see springing up are really focused on defined audiences. Yeah, often high value audiences, but defined audiences. Yeah, flesh that out a bit and name some names. You know, if you look at just where some of the, like, funding is going, like, so take just the Washington, D.C. publishing industrial complex, if you will. This used to be a backwater, right? It used to be the hill and roll call where these, like, little thin newspapers that got dropped off at members' offices and hopefully catch the attention of some legislative directors and stuff, small businesses.

Politico just exploded that market, right? And it also went along with the growth of the government. The government has become far larger. So there's more money at stake. What they realized was there's an incredibly high value audience to be reached and the people making legislation and trying to shape legislation, which means all the lobbyists and interests and whatnot. And so, you know, they got bought for a billion dollars,

and that's why we've seen Axios. come out of Politico. We've seen Punchball. I just did a podcast with Jake Sherman. They did 10 million in their first year. And Grid is starting. And again, they're all focused on these influential decision makers, which I think is good and bad.

Like, that's just one area of it. And I think that there are a lot of opportunities, you know, both B2B but also B2C, when you have a focused audience. I mean, what you're doing is a perfect example of it, right? You know, it's a big audience because technology is a horizontal story, right? But it's a defined one. It's not general news. I don't think you see a lot of general news startups.

We'll see what Ben Smith and Justin Smith end up coming out with. But I think it's going to be more focused, I would bet, than like a general news. I think we've seen the end of like, you know, Refinery 29 telling us that they're going to cover the Ukraine conflict. That was so insane. I remember that. Sorry. Some of the stuff that's happened in this industry just makes you shake your head. I know. It's like parody. Like looking back, you're like, is this, was this real or was this a joke? It's crazy. Brian Morrissey is here with us. He writes the rebooting on SubSec. You should go subscribe if you haven't yet. He's also the host of the rebooting. It's a podcast. You can find it on your podcast. app of choice. We're talking about the next evolution of digital publishing. We'll be back right after this. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with

business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than two million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less, and explain why you should care about them. So search for the Hustled Daily Show and your favorite podcast app like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on the big technology podcast with Brian Morrissey. He writes the rebooting on Substack former editor-in-chief of Digidae. He also, that's right, right, Brian? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And he also was the digital editor, digital editor at adjunct.

Yeah, yeah. One of the essential reads on the digital publishing world, been reading Brian for a long as I've been paying attention to this stuff, so for more, well more than a decade now. All right, Brian, so we spoke a little bit about what the next era of publishing is going to look like. So we've zeroed into it a little bit, right? It's going to be publications that are focusing on a niche. What's the business model? You know, you mentioned, you gave us like a couple of data points.

They're focused on a niche. They're largely email-based. that doesn't seem like a business plan to me. So what is it? It's a distribution. Is it subscriptions? Is it high dollar advertising? And then of course, we're like seeing it in politics. We're seeing it in some ways in sports. Is it all substack? Is it a different version of this? Tell me a little bit more about how it works. I mean, I think one of the good things about what's happening right now is that there's a whole diverse menu of ways that you can make money in publishing, whereas before, I feel like it was mostly advertising

was the default, right? And I like advertising. I run advertising and the rebooting. Please get in touch if you want to sponsor. But, you know, it's not the only way to make money. And so I think a lot of times in publishing, people can be dogmatic, right? It's either like, remember like BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed was dogmatic about it. It was like just native advertising. We hate banner ads. We're not doing any of the banner ads and stuff like this. It made no sense, right?

No, it did make sense. I'll tell you why. Well, it's marketing, right? Yes, it's not that there was an aversion. Eventually, BuzzFeed did introduce banner ads. It was, yes, it was marketing. You're selling against the standard with a new form of advertising that you were better at than everyone else.

And that's why. Yeah, but people catch up, right? Like, you know, at the time BuzzFeed started, it's, you know, native advertising. and John Steinberg was saying, we'll never run banner ads. Never say never. You know, whatever. You got it like a lot of, you know, people like Digitator write about it. And, you know, ultimately the best way to make money is lots of different ways in media. So, you know, if there's a lot of people who say just subscriptions, just ads, you know, ultimately, in the history of media says, you're going to have like a number of different ways that you make money. And I think if you just look at BuzzFeed, you know, like the profile of their business now versus five years ago is quite a bit different.

They're making money in a bunch of different ways. I think the challenge ends up being how many different ways can you make money without just eating into your margins with higher infrastructure costs? Because then you end up in that situation where you have all of these infrastructure needs and teams needed in order to execute again. that, right? And I think nowadays people are able to choose a bunch of different ways in which they make money that fits their editorial mission in some ways, right? So you have new publications in which the business model is more consulting than it is advertising. Well, I mean, you have people that are doing like, I mean, I do consulting on the side, right? And the newsletter is a good way to have those kind of assignments because it's a way to say how you think and stuff like this.

There's people who are using this like to invest, right? I think what Pachy McCormick is doing and not boring is fascinating, right? And a lot of, you know, I understand it. A lot of Capital J journalists are uncomfortable with it, but there is no priesthood or accreditation process as far as I know. to be publishing content on the internet. So I think that's a good thing overall. I understand the ethical quagmires and the rest of that, and they're very important.

But ultimately, I think particularly when you see this shift from institutions to individuals, you're going to have a lot of different types of business models because people inherently trust other people more than they trust institutions, We're seeing that all across the economy. That's what is powering this creator economy stuff, right? People are more attached to other people. So tell me then what do you think is going to, do you think that this next evolution is going to be more of these like publications that are going after the opportunity? A few that we spoke about, Ben Smith and Justin Smith's publication.

It's going to go after 200 million people, but follow the pattern that we talked about. largely they'll probably do a lot of email they'll probably do you know quality over quantity and then you have the pucks also which you and i both we both work with puck um which is you know subscription based email driven quality news um or do you think that it's going to be more individual based like we're doing on substack or a combination of both yeah it's going to be all the above right i think the you know it's it's often set of media so this isn't necessarily super original but it goes through phases of bundling, unbundling, and then re-bundling. I think we're at the start of a re-bundling phase.

I mean, you see that in streaming. Obviously, the explosion of streaming services was going to be unsustainable. You just simply can't have this many subscriptions of this many streaming. What's the example you gave in your newsletter like Sundance Live? I don't know. Someone gave me shit about like I keep going after. after Sundance Now. And that's me.

Like someone was like, oh, you know, just wrote me this week. It's like, you know, why do you keep going after Sundance Now? It's an indie film buff. I'm like, okay, it just hit me, but, you know, fine. You know, the reality is people are, and we're seeing this, you know, growth slowing in the streaming world is people get subscription fatigue at the end of the day. There's only so many things they can pay for. And so there's a need to rebuttal, right?

And I think that that is the question about how the re-bundling will happen. I pay a lot of attention to what Puck is doing, companies like every, in some ways what Axios has done. And a lot of what they're doing is, like I consider them like collective media companies in which they're trying to have the best of both worlds. They're trying to have the institutional benefits, which is like, oh, you have an infrastructure that exists. You have, I don't know, health care, things like that, maybe a 401K, but you get upside, right? And the individuals are more front and center if you look at like how the Puck model is. And I think that's really smart. And so I think more publications are going to take the best of like the substack world and mix it with the best of the existing publishing model.

Right. And so do you think that, you think we've hit a peak, though, with this individual reporter as a business? I guess we're both doing it. Or do you, do you, well, not, yes, we are both. Yeah, we should warn other people from getting into this, right? So, like, just less competition, right? No, it's terrible. You should all not do it.

It's like the worst in the world. In all seriousness, it seems pretty promising. But sorry, yeah, I'd like to hear your thoughts on. No, I mean, it's promising for a simple reason. The economics are great, right? If, like, if you can have enough demand on the subscription side and or the sponsorship side, the economics are tremendous. Your costs are extremely low, so your margins are going to be, like, insane. And there's a lot of drawbacks to that.

You know, taking vacations is more difficult when it's just you. I was once told a very smart piece of advice that large organizations cover up for our inefficiencies. We can have bad days. Alex, you and I never have a bad day. Well, it doesn't apply to me. I've had some pretty tough ones, and it's definitely shown up. And that is, it is. Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, that's the downside of it. I mean, I think it has, I think it has legs, the individual publications, right? But I think it's going to be itself a niche phenomenon, right? I don't know if substack develops a true middle class. I haven't necessarily, and I don't even know what that middle class looks like depending on the sector. Right now, a lot of the success cases are in specific areas. There's what I consider the sort of grievance blogger world.

Outrage cycle stuff. Always sell. Doesn't matter the format. Social, email. Yeah. And like, you know, like substacks getting pulled into that over anti-vaxxers and all that stuff like this. That's always going to be, you know, outrage will always be good. And particularly, we just have a tribalist society in which people, you know, want to, I don't want to say virtue signal, but they want to signal that they're part of a tribe. And that is a way.

And just to be clear, this isn't unique to newsletters or substack. I would argue the New York Times does the exact same thing since it's become a subscription publication. If you look at the New York Times today versus before it went hardcore subscription, a lot has changed in our political front. But like, it's pretty clear. Like people criticize a lot ad models for distorting the incentives. But I think it's pretty clear that the incentives for the New York Times to preach

to the choir are there, right? It's very interesting who your customer is. If your customer is your advertiser, you have a certain set of expectations. If your customer is your subscriber, on one hand, it's good because you align your interest with your reader's interest. But on the other hand, the temptation to preach to the choir and to, I don't know, make the choir mad. Yes.

So they keep paying you. I mean, but you also want to align with them. Like you see it anytime the New York Times has published like a dissenting, conservative voice on its opinion page, all of a sudden this cancel New York Times comes up. That has an impact. That has an impact. So no model is perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But as I said, there's different areas. I'm sorry, there was like different areas that are, and they're more like lucrative. For instance, like there's more like around fintech, like success cases in the substack world because that's where money is. And I think one of the,

the one of the realities that I think is good to keep in mind. I try not to be Pollyanna-ish, but I'm trying to be a little bit more optimistic maybe than I was before. It is that a lot of the innovation happening right now in publishing is geared to the affluent and the powerful. And none of that is new. But I think it's just the, I think the focus is more these days in that direction. We have like gaping inequality in this country. I went to some like event at art Basel. Talk about being on the other side of the inequality divide. And even like some art dealer is telling me, she was like, we're all courtiers at the end of the day. And that's because we have so many mega rich people that there is, you know, the world is sort of, you know,

organized to catering around them. There's so many underserved areas that do not have the luxury of being able to have, you know, big subscription businesses. And I think that is obviously a concern. And so I think it's great that we're seeing innovation. And I don't believe it's like a zero-sum game or anything like this. But at the same time, we need to have sustainable media models for all demographics and not just for the affluent and powerful. You write, the biggest challenge is facing societies in the future climate change inequality migration all disproportionately affect the non-rich it's hard to see how trust and news can be reversed if much of it is directed towards and caters to the rich yeah it's a big big point and a worthy issue

that it does seem that like a lot of news coverage is geared or well yeah the business models will gear towards the rich and also like you it's there's there's a bubble aspect to it. And, you know, you tend, if you, if, well, we already know that media is as super coastal, as newspapers have been kind of falling apart in small towns across the country. How does this, can you reverse this? I mean, this seems like an extremely, this is a extremely serious issue. And one that you highlight, and I'm curious if you think there's hope for it. Yeah. I mean, like local is the hardest of the heart. problems to solve, right? Axios is not solving up by one person, like, in Atlanta,

aggregating content. I don't, I don't mean, like, that as a knock on what Axios is doing, I think it's, it's good. I just wouldn't, I wouldn't PR it as saving journalism because it's not, it's not saving local journalism. Right. For context, they have, like, they're starting to do these local versions where they, like, throw a reporter in a town, which, okay, we're glad to have a reporter, but out there but yeah it's not going to replace the Pittsburgh Post Gazette I mean I grew up I grew up in in Philadelphia and we had the Inquirer I guess for the first like six or seven years of my life we had the bulletin and we had the daily news to believe came out twice a day there was like an evening edition right it was like so much news even the inquire the Inquirer had a Jerusalem bureau it was nuts and you know now it's completely hollow out, right? I live in Miami right now, and the Miami Herald, which has an incredibly long and storied tradition, and again, they had, you know, bureaus throughout Latin America. You know, looking at the paper today, it's like, it's just a shell of its former self.

I don't know what the solution to that is. Benevolent billionaires are only benevolent until for so long. So I don't know if that's like necessarily a good approach. You go to other countries and you, you know, it's very normal to have publications aligned with political parties or oligarchs. And like I do have concern that we will become the same thing. Like I don't. Feels like it's not been already.

Well, it's funny to me. It's like if you're a billionaire in Ukraine, you're an oligarch. If you're a billionaire here, you're an entrepreneur. Like, I don't know. Like, okay. I don't know. Like I guess. like it's somewhat different, but like, you know, the reality is like people who are powerful

are not funding things out of pure altruism. I just don't believe that as a journalist and stuff. Right. So I think it's interesting that we're seeing some non-profit models. I think Capital B just launched this week. Lauren Williams, former editorial director at Vox, started this focused on on black issues on a local level. I think they're starting in Atlanta and then building from there. But when I look at local, it's going to be, it's going to be kind of like how we deal with like healthcare, right? There's no one system that we're going to have. We're just going to have a bunch of slices of Swiss cheese that we pile on top of one another completely inefficiently and solve part of the problem. But the problem doesn't go away.

Yeah. And we've danced in this conversation a little bit around the topic of trust, but, you know, there's such little trust in the U.S. media right now. And I wonder if part of that is because you used to know your local journalists, right? They would be in towns like Pittsburgh and Toledo. And now, you know, as the papers in those areas start to fall apart or be bought by private equity and then torn to shreds, you know, now a lot of journalists live in places like well i mean i'm here in brooklyn right um in brooklyn in california you're in miami well you're out of the bubble in brooklyn south in some ways yeah so but i do think that they you know i i wonder if there's there's this trust issue where they just um you know are not

are not going through what the rest with the rest of the country are and and if that's causing some serious disconnect between you know mainstream news and oh i don't know we're not mainstream news, but like between the news and the news consumer. And maybe that's responsible and part. I think that's like without a doubt that's true. And like I think in it's the best cases is that all this like, you know, shifting to from institutions to individuals is that it rebuild trust in some ways, right? I mean, we need to rebuild trust in our institutions.

I just think it's going to take a long time. I don't know of an institution that has fared well since the pandemic. has started, at least in the United States. Every institution has suffered in some ways. So I think, you know, the rise of individuals is similar to that because you just trust people that you see and you hear and you know. I mean, I think one of the reasons that newsletters and podcasts are interesting is that, I don't know if you've found this, is you have a different connection to the people who are reading you or listening. You hear from them more, at least I do hear from them more. I have a conversation with them. And I think one of the good things of this

sort of flight to focus is it forces people to do stuff that doesn't scale, right? You've got to be like in your community and embedded as part of your community, right? And that can be on a local level of going to the, going to the community boards and stuff like this. But it's also like in like a B-to-B community or like, for instance, I was talking with Jake Sherman. He and Anna Palmer and John Bresnahan, they've been on the hill, each of them for more than 15 years, right? Like literally on the hill. They are a part from, but a part of that community. They are at least like visible within that community and that engenders trust. And trust takes a long time to build up. You just don't automatically have it. And so I think as Jeff Bezos said, there's no compression algorithm

for experience. But a lot of the stuff obviously is a niche phenomenon just because it's really difficult. It takes a lot of time to build up trust. And I think that's going to be completely critical because it's important for democracy, ultimately. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And I do think that the individual journalist model, you know, it's amazing to be experiencing firsthand. It's awesome. And I do think that when people know where you're coming from, there's a chance to just have a much deeper, much more authentic connection with that. Yeah. Let me ask you this, though. I'm going to turn the tables on you. What's been the hardest part that you didn't expect to be the hardest part? Well, I think that there's definitely

Definitely way more time being spent on stuff that's not journalism. Yeah. And that does take away from the ability to focus completely on reporting. I would love to have, you know, another day in the week that I could use strictly for reporting. So to me, that's been, I mean, I do love doing the business side of it. It's super fun. And, you know, I went entrepreneurial because I enjoyed doing entrepreneurial things. Yeah.

But like, for me, there's definitely been a challenge in terms of like dedicating the amount of time for reporting. And, you know, I was thrilled to get out on my own and, like, have a dialogue with readers and listeners through the newsletter and the pod. But I miss newsrooms. Like, I think there's something to be said when you have the collective group together. And there's, there are moments where, like, it's easy to lose focus if you're on your own in terms of where your North Star should be. And so, like, for me, I think I've made it a practice. And I just did last night of spending time just writing writing about what I'm what I'm after how I differentiate myself what I'm covering like basically just rewriting the beat memo over and over and doing

it for my own good to keep myself focused it is it's so easy to get pulled off course I feel like solo because you don't have you don't have that structure of a newsroom you don't have people to tell you, that's a terrible idea. Correct. So I think that makes it, that makes it more difficult. And I think that's why a lot of this is not made for everyone, right? I spoke to like a journalism school class at Penn State earlier this week. And I asked them, it was probably like 20 students in the class.

And I ask, that's hard to do with over Zoom, first of all, like with show of hands. You know, those show of hands questions are always lame. But I pushed ahead. I did it anyway. And I asked them how many expect to work in, like, institutional newsrooms when they graduate. And two hands went up. Oh, my God. And I asked, like, why?

And one of them, you know, was strategic about it. And he said, oh, I want to, like, work in an institutional newsroom because I know I don't know enough. And then I want to go off and do my own thing. There was much more, and I know it's been like. sort of cliche to like link to it about how like you know uh gen z or whatever like want to be like uh influencers and stuff but they really want to be solo and i think what was interesting to me was when i asked why what i heard was they were smart they saw what happened to the millennials they saw that they got like used as cannon fodder and then cast aside and the gen z people were

paying attention they weren't just on tic-tok they had one eye on what was going on and these kids are savvy you're not going to fold them with the free beer and like sacks they're like cut the check c tc but i think it's a major issue um for newsrooms right and i think it's a major issue for the profession because you know like you couldn't have been able to do this 10 years ago right i mean like right because you didn't have the experience No. I mean, the reason what actually gave me confidence to do it was writing always day one. Like once I wrote the book, the book is a, you know, it's a solo endeavor. And it forced me to, you know, become a much better writer because I looked at this thing as like this was going to be my presentation of my work to the world. And I was going to, I spent an inordinate amount of time refining the writing and refining. And refining. the ideas. And I think that once I got there, I said, you know, I can write a newsletter on my own every week that without an editor because I've been to this process. And that's what I do worry about

when like, you know, this substack revolution sort of gets oversold in some ways because you lose a lot. There's tradeoffs to everything in life. And you lose a lot not being part of a newsroom, but you also lose a lot not having, like, and this is my bias since I was an editor, of having an editor, right? And, you know, I hope that, you know, because like, look, we always, I know when I was trying to hire you, like, the bet was always like, I was like, we'll let you do things you'll not, you, you wouldn't be able to do it, whatever other place that had a better name. And, you know, you will grow faster here than you will at those places that was always because like our benefits sucked and the salary was maybe competitive um

and like you would have to like you know people would mispronounce the name and it didn't sound good at cocktail parties you to get a lot working against you so you better have a better pitch than that but i worry that um that people will not grow in their craft because this is a craft at the end of the day 100% yeah i mean i even know that like when i showed up to buzzfeed like i couldn't right. Like, my writing was, was bad. And just having that for five years hammered out of me, you know, I could not have done it without that. So however much I hated, and my editors there will tell you, I'm sure that me and a Google doc could be kind of a terror. But however much I hated having my words like changed and stuff like that, being through that process repetitively over five

years definitely changed the way that I approach this stuff. Yeah. Were you like a prima don't about at Knox, where you're like, take my name off this. No, I wasn't ever. Donna, I mean, you've edited me so you know. You are chained. But thank you. I appreciate that. But yeah, I definitely would get attached to, like, certain facts or things in a story and find it difficult to let go.

Yeah, I get that. So I hope that there's, like, some sort of, like, I've been thinking about, like, apprenticeships, right? Like, I hate when people call things fellowships because it's just like, we're not going to give any benefits. They're going to pay you not that much money. Right. Most likely we'll just scoot you to the door unless you're really good, then we'll hire you. But I do think, like, the apprenticeship model would be an interesting one for publishing. Because, you know, I know the needs for people to perfect their craft are still there.

That doesn't change. Everyone needs to learn. But I just think that it needs to be in a different way than it's been structured before. all this, you know, the unionization that is sweeping through newsrooms, I don't even know of a major newsroom at this point that hasn't been unionized. I mean, that's a tell. Like, you know, there's a lot of dissatisfaction with how publishing companies have been organized. And I think that needs to change. I wonder if like an apprenticeship model would make more sense for the people who are more entrepreneurially minded. Yeah, I think that could work. And I also think that the stuff that's going

at places like Puck really makes a lot of sense where you put the journalists front and center, you give them a piece of the action, and you edit them still. But I would say this. I think the, I would say the downside of that is that these are people who have already established themselves, right? And I always thought the test of a great publication is being able to nurture, you know, great reporters. And that's the calling card, right? I mean, the thing that I sort of, you know, if there's anything I'm most proud of with Digidae, is that how many people who, you know,

I don't pretend that it was because of us, they did it. But how many people who came through ended up going on to doing really great things in other places? Like, I think that's the test, like of having a strong alumni network that you were able to, again, enable them to grow faster than they would otherwise. So I think it's like a little bit easier to like, it's a little bit of a shortcut itself to just collect a bunch of people who have already perfected, not perfected, but come close to perfecting their craft. Yeah.

No, I agree. You guys were great at that. I thought Ben Smith also just like a master at it. And that's why I'm bullish about what he's going to build. I have no idea what it is. But the way that I saw Ben, you know, pick people from, you know, from untraditional backgrounds often because he wasn't going to get the person

that the Times was recruiting. He was going to get someone else and then turn them into a star reporter was amazing. Yeah. So I'm very interested to see if new publications can do that because that's the test. Just amassing people who are already really good at what they do is

nice, but I don't see that as the same as being able to nurture, you know, talent. Agreed. Do you have 10 more minutes to talk about crypto? Of course. Okay, great.

Why don't we do that? We'll do 10 more minutes on crypto and then let Brian get back to his day here on Big Technology Podcasts. We'll be back right after this. And we're back for one final segment here on the Big Technology podcast with Brian Morrissey, the what do you call yourself, the CEO, founder, editor of the Reboating, the sole proprietor of the rebooting. It's great newsletter on Substack.

What would be great if instead of like people like calling? themselves like entrepreneurs. They're just small business owners and stuff like this. I don't know when like everyone became like sort of entrepreneur. Like I don't know. The people who open up a bakery aren't like, I'm an entrepreneur. They're like, no, I opened a bakery. Yeah. I was coming out of JFK last night and the guys, the police officer standing at the exit were like, all right, you know, before you could actually leave to society, they're like, well, what do you do for work? Who do you work for. I was like, I'm a business owner. And they're like, what type of business? What do you sell? And I was like, well, I was like, I sell information on the internet. The guy looked at me weird.

So you get pulled into like a room or something. Like, we need this guy in secondary. I mean, it was close. He was like, I hope it's good information. I was like, well, if you really need to know, and he's like, just go. You know, Alex, I hope a day very soon arise that you can come into JFK and be like, I read a newsletter and they're just like, boom, they stamp your passport and they're like, welcome back to America, sir. That's right. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure that will happen very soon. So let's talk about crypto because you are, from your writing, pretty optimistic about crypto. I'm crypto curious. I'm not crypto sold. Yeah. Is that a weasel position? I don't know. No, I think that that's a fair position. I mean, yeah, I think it's, it makes a lot of sense to be

curious about it but not sold. It seems like the right position to me. Yeah. And I think it's just like for me, like beyond the technical aspects of it, which I don't pretend to fully grasp, although I've tried as much as I could. I mean, I'm like, hey, you and I both like delved into programmatic advertising. So I'm like, I don't mean to be cocky, but like I know. I know enough to be dangerous of this stuff. But to me, like, it makes a lot of sense. And I like, you know, when you look at, there's so many smart people who are going into this field that there needs to be like a lot more fleshing out and a lot more meat on the bones. And I understand that we're in this trough of disillusionment. I believe that's like a key part of the Gartner hype cycle.

You go and then it normalizes. And we're in that right now because, you know, You would call it a trough of dissolutionment. That's interesting because it seems like it's almost like another polarized thing. There's a bunch of people dissolution and a bunch of people who are like, this is the next big biggest thing after Jesus. Oh, yeah. Well, the Ponzi, you know, people are selling Bitcoin pizza and whatnot. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, that's just all part of the scheme, right? But I think, you know, when you look, it's like every week comes out another about why Web3 is like a bunch of nonsense and stuff like. this. And it's important to, to me, it's like important to pay attention to, you know, both the knowledgeable naysayers, but also like the biggest proponents. But understanding that each has their own, they're arriving at with their own point of view with their own interests, right? Like, I mean, I think a lot of the, the crypto boosters, they obviously have an interest in pumping up the prices, and this thing has to keep going because it has momentum and you need to keep

bringing more people in, and that's why people call it a Ponzi scheme. But I think the underlying principles of it are very sound. I mean, obviously, there's not many people who are very pleased with how the technology industry is set up right now. I think there's very little bipartisan agreement on anything in Washington, one issue that everyone is unhappy with the power of big technology, if I could say. That's right. Yeah. And, you know, that's the same because a lot of the promises that the Internet made, you know,

have simply been disappointing to a large degree, right? Like, we were supposed to have this amazing democratization, and, you know, it ended up, it ended up not working out. It ended up just with a couple of gatekeepers. And so I think this is a reaction to a lot of that. Obviously, with Bitcoin, it was a reaction to the financial crisis. So I think it makes a lot of sense that there would be a reordering. And again, these things all come in cycles.

And so I would think that there's a good chance that this is the next cycle of innovation. on the internet. Yeah. And one of the things I always keep reminding myself is that the internet is really so young. I mean, high speed, high speed internet is only a few decades old. And if you think about it in the course of humanity, the internet's not going to go away. So we are going to have a lot more innovation from what we have. And I guess, it's cool to see these.

You know, having like sort of lived through a few of these cycles, like, you know, and been working during them. Like I'm part of the last generation that grew up analog, which is an interesting experience because, you know, for those of us who are in Gen X, our childhoods and, you know, even in college, you know, were internet free. We didn't have the internet. I didn't have email until I graduated from college. So it gives you a slightly different perspective to some degree.

And I think it reminds you of, or at least it reminds me, of how new and weird all this stuff is. But I also, having lived through this, I can remember the overpromises of the Internet 1.0 era and the silliness of Pets.com, pseudo and all these other fly-by-night entities that went away. And then the NASDAQ crash and everyone wrote off all the stuff that was happening. And they didn't pay attention. They looked at the NASDAQ number. They didn't pay attention to the number of homes getting broadband. And that ended up being a more important number.

I can remember Google's IPO being a mess, Facebook's IPO being a mess, Facebook not being able to make the transition to mobile and stuff like this. And so boom and bust is part of the internet cycle. I don't think that the development of the technology industry is going to stop all of a sudden, right? Like if you were to go back 20 years ago, it's all about sun microsystems, like, you know, and things change very quickly. And so, you know, it makes sense for this to be, you know, the next cycle of innovation. And do you see any applications for publishing there? yeah of course like i mean i think um you know one of the principles that i think is the is is most

compelling to me in the web three world is the concept of of ownership and so moving if you think about like you know early internet really treated publishing treated the audience they talked about audiences and there was a lot of targeting we want to target the audience a lot of military metaphors and whatnot. And then Web 2.0 kind of introduced the idea of community with a lot of nonsense around sharing economy that was really about like getting around local regulations and running unregulated taxi and hotel chains. Be that as it may.

I think the next, like, I think the idea of moving towards a better system of ownership in which incentives are better aligned would, would serve. of the internet well. I think, you know, overall, the internet for some reason has evolved into almost a predatory place, right? It's like a lot of the, you know, the Tereere Square, the Twitter, you know, Tahrir Square days are long past. And going on the internet as a, as a user is an almost adversarial experience. You're always worried about like, you know, what is going to be done to your computer or who's collecting data for what purposes and whatnot. And even the business models. I mean, you see a lot of, there's been a lot

of predatory behavior by technology companies. Don't be fooled by the fleece. There's some sharp elbows going on. So I think that is really, you know, interesting. Obviously, you know, with NFTs and having a new way of having like a community show their support is is interesting to the point of where they have ownership privileges, you know, because right now, like, subscriptions, I think the way subscriptions have been implemented by many publishers is in the same sort of predatory way, right? You see all these, you saw all these dollar a month intro offers that explode to like $300 a year and stuff like this. Now, a lot of that is based off of, you know, people not canceling and then you just whack

them and hope they don't notice. This is the same kind of stuff that has eroded trust to begin with. So if you can come, if Web 3.0, if it's Web 3, I don't care. If there can be a better alignment of incentives using these technologies between the people creating the content and the people who want that content to exist in the world, then I think that should lead to a healthier digital media ecosystem. An optimistic note to leave it off on, Brian Morrissey, thank you so much for joining. What a great conversation.

Appreciate you being here. Yeah, thanks, Alex. Appreciate it. Okay. And people can find the rebooting. Why don't you give the shout out? Yeah, it's the rebooting. It's the rebooting.

It's the rebooting.com. There's also the rebooting show, which is my podcast. that's on Apple and Spotify. I haven't left Spotify over the Joe Rogan thing just yet. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And I can't recommend both properties enough.

Some of my favorite stuff, always great to read. Brian, always great to listen to him and even better to speak with him. So thanks again. Thank you to Nate Gwattany for editing the audio. I know Nate, we're given to you last minute. So I appreciate the help.

Thanks to Red Circle for hosting and selling the ads. Thanks to all of you, the listeners. Appreciate you being here with us every week. week. I think we're going to be talking about CRISPR next week. So if you're into gene editing, why don't you stick around? I'm glad you didn't get the questions mixed up. It's like a nightmare. We'll get you back on talking about CRISPR, man. If it's your first time here, please subscribe if you're here for a while and you like the show. A five-star rating would be much appreciated on Apple. We only have a few of those. So if you're willing to rate us, that would be a big help.

Other than that, have a great week. Thanks again for stopping by Big Technology Podcast. We will see you next time.