Offline with Jon Favreau - What's Really Behind the Media Apocalypse?

Episode Date: February 4, 2024

Peter Hamby, host of Snapchat’s Good Luck America and a founding partner at Puck News, returns to Offline to discuss whether journalism is headed towards extinction. With the latest round of media layoffs hollowing out the industry more than ever before, how will people stay informed—and do they even want to? Has the news lost its primacy in the American mind? But first! Max and Jon break down Zuckerberg & co.‘s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, why children’s online safety is the social media moguls’ achilles heel, and whether Universal Music pulling their catalogue from TikTok is actually a big deal. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

I hate to say this because I care about journalism. I went to journalism school. My parents were journalists. But I also work at Snapchat, and I understand this. News can feel like homework to a lot of people. In addition to being sad and worrisome and giving you anxiety, it can feel tedious to sit down, if you are an everyday American, and read a 10,000 word magazine article or read, you know, 800 words of black and white text on a page. It's not just CNN competing against MSNBC and Fox. It is CNN competing against Roblox and competing against TikTok, et etc. Call it dopamine, call it a short attention span or whatever.

But it's not something that people feel like is essential to their everyday lives. Welcome to Offline. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. And you all just heard this week's guest, Peter Hamby, host of Good Luck America on Snapchat and a founding partner at puck news uh you've probably noticed that the media industry has had a terrifying last few weeks the la times laid off 20 of their newsroom awful max yeah uh insider laid off eight percent of theirs and the messenger a digital media

startup launched less than a year ago announced that they were shutting down completely, leaving its staff of 300 out of work. This is on top of 2023's media contraction, which saw layoffs at Vice, NPR, Vox, The Washington Post, and the shuttering of newsrooms at Jezebel and BuzzFeed News. This is a wild stat. Since the beginning of 2023, more than 20,000 journalism jobs have been eliminated. I know. I didn't realize it was that high. Holy shit. The media industry seems to be in crisis.

There's a headline in The Atlantic asking if journalism is headed towards an, quote, extinction-level event. So I had Peter on the show a few years ago to talk about the future of journalism. Figured it'd be a great time to bring him back. We talked about the business decisions that led to this moment, places where journalism is alive and thriving, and what the future might hold for the industry. So tune in. That interview is a little bit later. But before we get to that, Max. What a week. We had a big week. Big week in Congress. Mark Zuckerberg, Linda Iaccarino. All your faves.

All the CEOs of TikTok, Snap, and Discord all testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing focused on online child safety. Senators from both parties accused the CEOs of creating a crisis in America by ignoring the harmful impact of their content on children. At one moment, Senator Lindsey Graham told Mark Zuckerberg that he had blood on his hands and Josh Hawley got Zuck to turn around and apologize to families in attendance who say their children had been harmed by social media. Okay. Leave it to the Republicans in the Senate to make me roll my eyes at accountability for social media companies.

I'm glad you said that. Because when I heard this was happening, I'll just be very honest. I was like, oh, they're going to testify. So that means we're going to get some dumb questions. And we're going to get some non-answers. And then nothing's going to happen. And what we got was some dumb questions. Some smart questions.

Some dumb questions. Some, a lot of non-answers. Some answers. And then, of course, we got Zuck's big apology, a lot of non-answers. Some answers. And then, of course, we got Zuck's big apology, which was, like, the irony and I guess the bitter irony of this hearing about social media. And all of it was, like, what we got from it were, like, these made-for-social-media moments. Yeah. Right. And apparently, like, Meta afterwards, like, put like put out like posted about zuck's

apology so they were into it and then of course the senators did you know like holly was very excited because he like grilled the the uh ceo of tiktok that has nothing to do with online child safety but was like his nationality from singapore and he was like but have you ever been a member of the ccp so i was like, this is so fucking stupid. But what did you think? Well, I think... Now that I've put my thumb on the scale. I'd say you've summed it up.

So will anything from this latest congressional circus matter? I think that if what we're hoping for is some sort of legislation from congress out of this which is clearly what they're gearing up for right they're they're trying to get momentum for their child safety act it seems like the answer among all congress knowers is like absolutely not it'll never happen um which is the answer about almost everything in congress right in this issue especially it seems like it's something that just like they just haven't been able to move legislation on this uh for years like nothing comes out and there's different explanations why it's like tech spends a lot on lobbying it's very hard to write a bill on social media that

will um survive court challenges or they're just like maybe they're just inept i do think there is still a silver lining though that even if nothing out of this media circus or this congressional circus leads to legislation, which seems unlikely, there is a lot, a lot of movement and pressure against the social media companies on the issue of child safety and the well-being of child users coming from state legislatures, coming from lawsuits, coming from federal regulations. And I think that this is going to be helpful in focusing pressure for that just by sending the message that, hey, there's bipartisan support for this and there's a lot of energy in Congress, at least around the idea of acting on it. Have you seen good examples of states doing stuff about this, taking action? Take an action. So there was the big movement that started with Utah to prove parental consent for a kid to be on social media. And I do understand the criticism of this that, you know, what if kids need it as a kind of like haven and release valve from adult-dominated spaces like their home or like their school? I totally take that point. However, I think when you look at the tradeoffs of kids on social media

and the extent of the harms to children from having the fact that like all of them are on social media and all of them are by their own account addicted to it, like kids will be the first ones to tell you, I'm addicted to my phone and it's really harmful to me. I think making it tougher for kids to be on social platforms, which they're not supposed to be in the first place. Ostensibly, the platforms say we don't allow kids to have accounts. But, of course, all kids are on social media. I think that that is a positive step.

And a bunch of states followed Utah. Arkansas, Ohio, Louisiana, and Texas passed similar laws. And I think making it – putting the legal onus on the social media platforms to not have kids on there, I think is a really important step. Can we talk about the, so the one bill that has a lot of bipartisan support in the Senate is the Kids Online Safety Act. And there's a post story about this in the context of the hearing this week. And the Kids Online Safety Act, the post says, would require digital platforms to take reasonable measures to prevent harms to children,

specifically enumerating sexual exploitation, mental health, substance abuse, and suicide. It would also require companies to enable their strongest privacy and safety settings for kids by default, provide parents with greater control over their children's account settings, and force companies to regularly audit their products for potential risks. So this is the bill that has the bipartisan support. Obviously, it's not going anywhere in the House because Republicans are crazy and they barely can keep a speaker for more than a couple days. But it's interesting that even that bill,

there's a lot of groups that are worried about it. And so Evan Greer, who's the director of Fight for the Future, he's a human rights advocacy group. He said it's not a privacy bill, it's a censorship bill. It would make kids less safe by cutting them off from access to life-saving information and resources on controversial but important topics like abortion, gender-affirming care, substance abuse, and even current events. And the idea here is like, you know, Marsha Blackburn in the Senate.

Right. Hardcore Republican. She's a co-sponsor. But she's basically like, she's hoping that this will help prevent kids from finding stuff about being trans or the trans community, right? And so there's a concern that this becomes censorship. And I guess my question here is your point about sort of how to implement age verification and how to take the point that often these online spaces are havens for kids who are marginalized and they find communities, but then they also cause real harm to kids. And plenty of studies have shown that. I sort of wonder if the problem is just bigger. And if you don't solve the big problem, which is that we've talked about a million times,

so many of these social media platforms are designed in a way that's harmful. Yeah. And it's the amplification and it's the fee and it's all the stuff that goes into design. Because if kids were merely online, finding people like themselves in a chat room and all talking to each other, then they would get that benefit of that online community without some of the harms that happen in social media. But the platforms themselves are designed in a way

that is always going to cause kids harm if they get on the platform. I think that's a great point. And I think that's why I think that the best role this bill can play is a way to create national momentum behind measures like these ones from Ohio and other states to eliminate. Because this bill is, it's basically a content moderation bill. I mean, there's other measures in it, but it's mainly about kinds of content to get the social media platforms to say, be stricter about this, don't allow this kind of content. And we've talked before about how content moderation as a way to solve social media is kind of a red herring.

Because as you're saying – It's whack-a-mole too. Right. It's whack-a-mole. Even if you design the perfect rules, something else is going to pop up. It's an easy start point because who could possibly object to saying, hey, let's not have content on social media that encourages anorexia, which is like, they're absolutely right. But that alone will not fix the underlying harm from social media, as you're saying. So I think that I'm not so sad about this bill being DOA. I think on that it would be a good thing, but it kind of doesn't

matter because it's not going to pass. But something that limits kids' access to it, I think, is something that it doesn't fix social media, but just putting up a wall between kids and something that is very harmful for kids. Because something you and I have talked about a lot is that the harms inherent to social media, which will exist regardless of content moderation rules, even if you get rid of the anorexia content, even if you get rid of the content that encourages suicide, things like that, that will still be baked in there. Those harms are so much more pronounced for kids

because kids have a higher socialization drive. So they are much more susceptible to the harms from social media. And this brings me back to just like, I think we to the harms from social media. And I, this like brings me back to just like, I think we need to look at social media like cigarettes and just say, it's just a harmful product. It's especially harmful for children and we should make it much tougher for kids to access it. And I will say just reading that, the post story, you know, it has a lot of human rights advocates on there and LGBT activists, and then it has a lot of kids, like young kids who are on TikTok talking about why it's so important to them. And I think the

challenge here is like, if even adults don't fully understand how addictive social media is and the harms it's doing to them, of course, kids are going to say, yeah, this is important to me. I love TikTok or I love Instagram or I love going, right? Like, they're of course going to say that. And I'm sure there are benefits, socialization benefits. Absolutely. And again, you can find people, like-minded people, you can find your own community, especially if you don't find that community in offline. But that's the whole point of things that are addictive is you don't necessarily know that they're bad for you. And that's why we have regulations. Right. And I think your point too is a really important one that it is theoretically possible for there to be a kind of social media

that provides all these benefits where it's a place for you to go without all of these harms. And these social media companies want us to believe that those two things are inextricable. That's always been their argument, but it's not true because we used to have a social media that was much more neutral before the onset of algorithms, the like button, things like this, that drive all of the harm. So I kind of liked the idea of just saying like, look, if you're going to make social platforms that are this harmful to kids, we're not going to let kids use it. And if you want kids to have access to it, then design a version with that algorithms. Design a version that is not going to be this innately harmful that takes us back to like, you know, the AOL chat room

version of this. Well, you can have a trust and safety team that's as big as you want, and you can content moderate as much as you want. But the reason that they don't fix the real problem is because what's making them the money, as you pointed out and reported and wrote a book on, what's making the money is the algorithms. Can I tell you something else that actually I really like about the approach of regulating social platforms around their harms to kids is that I think that these social media companies, that they believe that this is by far the most effective route or could be the most effective route to regulating them. I think that they know that they're really vulnerable on this issue.

And the reason that I think that is you see how hard they fight anytime something comes up that is related to harm to kids or regulation around kids. I mean, you see it in the incredible amount of lobbying they're doing against these state laws, a couple of which they've gotten overturned in or like put on pause by federal courts around kids. But you also see it like reporting. The social media companies were never fought me more viciously and were never more defensive than when I was reporting a story about child exploitation because I think they know that they're really vulnerable in this in a public perception sense.

And I think they know their vulnerability in a legal sense because it's not just state laws. There are also I think it's 200 school districts now are suing the social media companies for harm to kids. Yeah. No, it's a, I don't know. It is a tough problem to solve, like undoubtedly. And there's a lot of different equities. And it's not just on the social media companies, but it's a lot on them. It's also on Congress, which is dysfunctional, which is why they can't really do anything.

But I think hearings like this, you know, it puts it in the headlines, which is good. But the behavior at the hearings, I don't know if it's necessarily moving the ball forward. I knew that the bill was DOA when the senators who were co-sponsoring the legislation on the committee started haranguing the social media platforms to support the bill. I was like, okay, if you're asking Facebook to support the bill, regulating Facebook, you really don't have it in the house. You really don't got it. It's bad.

In news of other tech platforms that are harming our nation's youth, TikTok lost a standoff with Universal Music Group this week. As the music publisher, one of the world's largest, announced they were pulling their catalog from the app, Universal alleges that TikTok, quote, is trying to build a music-based business without paying fair value for the music. Universal artists pulled from TikTok include Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, Drake, Harry Styles, and of course, Taylor Swift. Oh, it's our girl. So, Ryan Broderick tweeted that, who writes Garbage Day, that this decision could, quote, snowball into something that fundamentally alters the way the internet and culture currently works.

What do you think? Well, so I think that music could not be more integral to TikTok. Like TikTok as we know it basically started with the merger of kind of like proto TikTok and this app, this Chinese app called Musical.ly that was a like lip syncing app. So it's always been built around the idea that you select a song from a music library and then you record a video that syncs with it. Something like 60% of videos on TikTok have music in it. It's hugely integral to it. But I think at this point, I think that the music industry needs TikTok more than TikTok needs the music industry.

And I think you can kind of see that between the lines of the Universal Music Group statement like railing against TikTok. The platform is less and less reliant on music because they are moving much more towards other kinds of content. They're doing a lot more promoting people who sell stuff through their videos. It's like e-commerce is a much bigger source of revenue for TikTok. TikTok is also starting to use AI-generated music, which is incredibly scary.

A real Pandora's box. Right, Yeah. But for like the music industry, they're saying like, hey, this is literally robots replacing human. And they're right, replacing human artists, because if you're a TikTok creator, you go and create an AI generated song instead of picking a universal music group song. And then TikTok doesn't have to pay royalties to the universal music group. So I think that they're kind of like what we saw with the WGA strike. There's a recognition that the industry is shifting, in this case TikTok, in ways that are less beneficial towards the music industry. So they're kind of trying to hold on to this while they can because they really need TikTok. I was going to say, so you think Universal

eventually gives in? So something similar with this happened with um i think it was warner music group sued youtube or not sued youtube but they discussions broke down over royalties and they warner pulled all of their music from youtube for nine months but eventually they came together and struck a deal and i think that they just need each other and i think it's just a matter of just finding a number and the reason that the music industry needs t, we should say, is because a lot of artists who aren't the big name artists that I mentioned, they're discovered through TikTok. Right. And so it's basically a marketing opportunity. So there is an argument that, so yes, they're not getting paid as much as they should. But, and even some artists were quoted as saying this, who aren't quite as popular as the ones we mentioned.

They're saying like, yeah, I only see it as a marketing tool anyway. And so I'd rather, like, I know that we're not getting paid for everything, but it's cool because then I get, then people find my song and then they buy, then they, you know, go on Spotify and listen or whatever else. Right. So it does seem like that the music industry needs them more yeah and discovery is tiktok is really important for music discovery because like something that we have talked about and you talked about kyle talk to kyle jaco about is that we are losing our kind of traditional avenues for discovering new music new movies new art um and so tikt TikTok drives so much of it now because you don't have like the pitchforks that you used to have. You don't have the kind of traditional places you

would go to to recommend you new music. So if they lose that, yeah, I think there's a lot of new artists who would be, you'd have a much harder time finding an audience in addition to the loss of royalties. So did you read that piece in the times by John Karamanica, the pop music critic for the Times about the infinite skull? I did. And reading that, so I am an in-recovery TikTok addict where I used to spend hours a day on it and I deleted it and I'm not on it anymore. Reading that story where he talks a lot about different videos and falling down the rabbit hole made me feel like a former smoker who goes to a bar and smells cigarettes off in the distance where i was i was really like did you pick up your phone and like download takes off should i reinstall tick tock so people know basically the piece is that um the

tick tock is becoming it's the inshutification of tick tock basically and he cites three reasons uh diminishing utility as an organic music discovery vehicle, which we just talked about. The fact that it's become a shopping platform now. And people are basically using it to monetize their online lives.

And then you have these ads now. And he was saying like one or two of every five videos now is an ad, which having scrolled through TikTok, I can tell you is true. And then he said that TikTok that TikTok's personalization algorithm, which drives you further and deeper into your own taste. And I think that's a big one too, because I have not been as addicted to TikTok,

but every once in a while I'll scroll, but it's now like, I know the algorithm's telling me what I like, but it's just like so much of that. It becomes so same. Predictable. Yeah. And I'm not finding anything new. So I don't feel as addicted anymore either. Cause I'm just like, I don't want all this shit,

all that. It's just, it seems like it is a little bit more garbage than it used to be. I, I, I think that that is true. Um, I want to be careful not to like accidentally encourage TikTok to recreate

YouTube's reinforce algorithm, which was like the big engine of radicalization for so much of the world post-2018, where they instituted this algorithm that pushed you towards new things. And what they found over and over is, you know, what's really effective at getting people addicted to their feeds is alt-right rabbit holes. Okay, so we don't want that. And flat-eartherism. But yes, I think it has gotten so much bigger, it starts to feel homogenous to more individuals. Their numbers are up and up and up and up.

So I was reading that and I was saying, I'm sure this is so true for the Joe Caramonicas, but it seems like a lot of people continue to love it for good or for ill. Yeah, one line that stuck out at me in the piece is, for an app that claims a lot of attention, it doesn't demand much brainpower. Yeah, no, I know. That's the value proposition. And again, I talked about this with Kyle, and I'm sure the creators on TikTok are like,

well, it takes plenty of brainpower. You know, like I have to, yes, but the number of creators versus the number of users, the gap is growing and the users, not much brainpower there. Well, it reminds me of what you were saying last week when we were talking about Netflix trying to recreate cable. And you talk about how frustrating it is where you go on to a streaming service and there's this giant pool of content you can never find things you like. And of course, TikTok has, quote unquote, solved that problem where there's there's no choices to make. No choices to make. Yeah. Yeah. Just just all kinds of videos. Just down the rabbit hole. All right. Before we get to the break, Vote Save America is back with a brand new political action finder that curates volunteer opportunities specifically for you.

Just check a few boxes and Vote Save America will pinpoint the volunteer opportunities that will make the biggest impact from your state all the way to the White House. Head to votesaveamerica.com slash volunteer to get started now. And a new episode of our exclusive subscriber series, Polar Coaster, just dropped. This week, Dan Pfeiffer breaks down how exit polls work and whether or not a Trump-Biden general election is inevitable. It is. To listen to this episode, make sure you're a part of Crooked's Friends of the Pod community by heading to crooked.com slash friends now. After the break, my conversation with Peter Hamby about how back to Offline. It's great to be here, John. Great to be here at Crooked Media. That's right.

You were last here three years ago. You and I talked on this very podcast about how the internet transformed the media business and what a more sustainable model of journalism might look like. And I wanted to have you back on because last year, and especially the last several weeks, I've made it clear that no one's really cracked the code on what a sustainable model of journalism looks like. Some outlets have shut down, like BuzzFeed News,

just today, The Messenger, which was only around for, I think, less than a year. Outlets like Vice have declared bankruptcy. There have been massive layoffs in print, digital, local, broadcast, cable, LA Times, Washington Post, Vox, Condé Nast, NBC, NPR, Business Insider, everywhere. Why is this happening, and why is it happening now at a time when the overall economy is actually doing pretty well? Well, to borrow a phrase from you and Dan on Pod Save America, not great. Not great. Not great at all.

Not great, John. I was listening to Paul Fari, who is a longtime, was a longtime Washington Post media columnist, who just took buyouts at the Washington Post, not layoffs, but the Post did about 240 buyouts late last year. And he used a phrase that I like in a recent interview he did, where he said the news media has its own economy that's sort of independent of all of these current economic trends that we're seeing. For instance, dependent on Facebook and Google and big tech companies for revenue. But also, in my mind, the news media and the reason we're hearing about all these layoffs, they have been able to survive certain economic headwinds because the currency is attention.

So Donald Trump comes into office, 2015, 2016, 2016 2017 the so-called trump bump people are tuning in and the more eyeballs and attention the more money they can charge for advertising so that allows them to sort of create their own uh sort of independent economy but anyone with half a brain and anyone who could look at their own media behaviors and their own personal lives, even among their friends and family, 10 years ago could have seen a lot of this stuff coming. The business model was just not sustainable. And the economic pressure that did hurt a lot of media companies over the last couple of years was the economic downturn. It hurt advertising revenue for a lot of places.

But also that attention question is really important. And I know we're going to talk about this more in this conversation, but people have been tuning out the news. News avoidance has become a pretty important term that I'm glad we're talking about. I think the Reuters Institute measured in 2015, so again, around that time Trump was doing the escalator thing, 67% of Americans were reported that they were very interested or paying some attention to the news. That number now has dropped down to 49%. And right now,

40% of Americans also report actively tuning out the news. And that number is higher among women, it's higher among young people. And so, you know, the less attention that is being paid to your product, it's just like supply and demand and any other product in the marketplace. The less people want of it, the less valuable it becomes. A lot of the things we're seeing right now are because of that. And then also, again, we'll talk about this more, but a lot of these places are different, like management decisions, strategic decisions that people put in place years ago, but also, you know, ownership, leadership at different places, print, radio, television is having different impacts in different places. Some people years ago built their companies to last, sort of seeing around the future. Other places did not.

Let's start with the business model. Advertising, right? So long-term trend in advertising is that Facebook and Google, first Craigslist, then Facebook and Google started eating up a lot of the ad revenue for these places. So do you think that the internet and Facebook and Google and companies like that, when they started eating up ad revenue, that it was inevitable that we would get to today? Or were there other paths that a lot of media companies could have chosen that didn't quite depend so heavily on sort of the whims of these giant platforms eating up all the ad revenue? I think once media companies and publishers, news organizations started to see the power

of Facebook and Google and smaller platforms too, like Snapchat, Twitter, etc., they saw that and wanted to get on the train. The platforms didn't necessarily work with them. You know, I work at Snapchat. I can talk more about what we do. We pay publishers, actually, for their content. But a lot of this just goes back to the original sin of news on the internet, which is that someone back then, way back when, thought of it. It was an afterthought. Websites, et cetera, gave it away for free. And that just created a user behavior where people

weren't willing to pay for news. Going back to when Facebook and Google started to scale, news organizations, I'm thinking like BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, The Washington Post, they all tried to chase that scale and hired and made investments in places that they probably didn't need. I remember BuzzFeed did a round of layoffs, I want to say around 2017. And I was looking through some of the reporters that were laid off. And yeah, I felt bad for many of them. But they had hired a reporter to live in Hawaii to cover Hawaii news for BuzzFeed. Again, if you're the Honolulu star advertiser, great. Like we need reporters in Hawaii. You're covering your local community. But why was BuzzFeed hiring somebody there to cover something that probably most BuzzFeed users or people just seeing news on social media didn't

need? They were just trying to create more content for more inventory. And I do think you see this editorially as well in the news media. There's just a lot of groupthink. And I think journalists are good at being journalists, and they're not as good at being innovators. They're not as good seeing around the bend. And I said this on The Powers That Be with John Kelly recently. I'm starting to get tired for 10 years in a row of logging on to Twitter slash X and seeing a journalist say, my time has come. You know, it's been a good run at the LA Times. If you're looking for anyone to hire climate or immigration or metro issues, you know, contact me. And also, subscribe to your local paper. I've been seeing that for 10 years, like journalists saying, subscribe to your local paper

that's not going to help that era is not coming back but you know subscriptions is one model that does work uh but it works mostly for newer companies that are building strategically and methodically it doesn't necessarily work for those big brands that have been around for a long time. A lot of us, you know, look at our hometown papers probably. And a few years ago, you know, you went to the, you know, Tampa Bay Times and clicked and it was saying, asking you to pay. And I think a lot of people are like, nah, I'm not going to do that. Right. And people just go elsewhere for news. Well, I want to sort of separate out like management decisions, like a lack of creativity to see around corners

from sort of larger structural transformations. And I think one thing that the internet did was it wasn't just, okay, here's a bunch of news for free before they started asking people to pay for it, different outlets. It also nationalized news and then like globalized news, right?

And so now, like, how do you think we got to this point where more people care about reading national news and international news even than what's happening in their local community? Or do you think they'd want to read news that's happening in their local community? Or do you think they'd want to read news that's happening in their local community, but that there's just local news is like dying out? And so they'd rather, because it just doesn't seem that like, if you have, if you have five different news outlets, right, all writing the same story about what Trump did that day or what

Biden did that day or what anyone did that day. Why do you need five subscriptions for the same story in five different outlets? Yeah. I mean, think about if you're listening to this, if you woke up one day, six months ago, and you fired up your TV and you're like, why do I have a subscription to Peacock and Hulu and Max, you know, and I'm paying for cable, maybe probably not if you're listening to this, but you know, you make a but you just make a value proposition and be like, I don't need all of these things. I think the reason people continue to say in survey after survey that their number one source of news is local news, which is true, local television specifically, it's because it is distinctive and relevant compared to the rest of the news landscape, which is,

I think you're right, pretty homogenous. So you turn on the local news in Richmond, Virginia, where I'm from, you have a choice of like three or four stations. You probably have your favorite, you know, whatever you grew up with. But your local high school sports, weather, yes, a lot of crime, maybe some politics, less than it used to be. But again, that is different from what you're flipping through on CNN, Fox, all the broadcast networks, which is basically different versions of the same thing. I noticed this when I was in Iowa last year covering the caucuses. I went out and I was at the Iowa State Fair. We did some stuff away from the Iowa State Fair. But there was a moment when there were 10 TV cameras and like probably 10 reporters sticking microphones and cameras in the face of Asa Hutchinson.

I know your favorite candidate in the Republican race. No, I was a Doug Burgum guy. Oh, that's right. You're a Doug Burgum guy. And I just, you know, I asked a perfunctory question to Asa Hutchinson too, which I didn't end up using. But I was like, why are all these national news organizations here capturing the same exact thing? And that happens again like during the caucuses or on New Hampshire primary day. All of these news organizations fly all these people in and they're basically producing their own version of the same content.

And I think, again, some of that goes back to just habitual behaviors. If you're one of the big news networks, go back to the 70s, ABC, NBC, CBS. They had to get their own version of the story and go out there. And cable started doing the same behaviors. And I think other news organizations started to do the same thing that they've just been doing for years. But again, sometime around the late aughts, like early 2010s, a bunch of digital-focused, revenue-supported organizations, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Yahoo, you can pick them. Like, they all decided we need advertising revenue, so we're just going to keep chasing the same thing and also attendant to this the attention question they needed stuff to throw up on social media like

it was search engine optimization for a while that was the mother's milk of of revenue how can you tweak your headlines so that when people are googling stuff during the workday when they're sitting at their desk in the year 2005 how can we get people to come to our stuff? Then it became, how do we get people to look at our stuff in social media feeds, Twitter, Facebook, et cetera? And so news organizations are trying to both optimize for those social media feeds, but also create attention-grabbing content that would get their attention. And that attention-grab grabbing content is not a deep dive

into you know misbehavior at scott pruitt's epa right it is uh taylor swift and travis kelsey photos yeah and that uh you know again becomes homogenous because everyone kind of wants that even though they hate themselves for clicking on it uh and so that tends to mean newsrooms are going to invest more in that stuff, or at least they used to. I was interested to see during that round of buyouts that The Washington Post offered the parts of the paper that they targeted. Now, The Washington Post has very muscular political coverage,

very good political coverage investigations. The places that they were focusing on their layoffs were metro, transportation, sports like the local stuff that makes local stuff yeah like maryland uh virginia politics those sort of things scaling back and then doubling down on the national politics and the national investigations capitol hill etc because that's the washington post they're trying to compete with the new york times they're trying to be a national brand. But it removes some of the local flavor. The reason I subscribe to LA Times, which is in dire straits, but I subscribe to LA Times. I get it delivered at home, the paper, old school. It lands sometime in our water fountain, our front yard, and I have to

throw it in the trash because it's all wet. But do get uh some news about los angeles that i don't feel like i get elsewhere although i noticed that in the latest round of horrible layoffs at the la times they were cutting like the washington bureau and because and it actually it makes almost makes sense why the post would do what they did and the la times would do what they did because the post's competitive advantage is really good political reporting. But it sort of all goes back, I want to hit on the attention point that you made because I think that's central to all this,

which is my guess is that people's attention, there's not just news fatigue, right? It's not just, some of it's Trump fatigue, some of it's political news fatigue, but you're seeing it play out across the news industry, outside of even political news. Why do you think people are just not paying as much attention to news anymore? I mean, this is an uncomplicated answer. I think it's just that people have, feel like they have more fulfilling slash entertaining ways to spend their time and i hate

to say that as a journalist so if you go back to the 60s or 70s say you lived in cincinnati ohio you had a few pieces of media that you engaged with every day the reds radio station you know the cincinnati inquirer or maybe like this there was a saturday, you know, the Cincinnati Inquirer, or maybe like this, there was a Saturday paper, you know, your limited amount of TV channels. And that's kind of it. News as a commodity has lost its primacy in the American mind. Like it is not central to our days anymore. Whereas you used to sit down in the evening and watch the evening news you don't need to do that anymore to get a passing whiff of what's happening in the world there's also i've been talking about this for years too i hate to say this because i

care about journalism i went to journalism school my parents were journalists but i also work at snapchat and i understand this news can feel like homework to a lot of people. In addition to being sad and worrisome and giving you anxiety, it can feel tedious to sit down if you are an everyday American and read a 10,000 word magazine article or read 800 words of black and white text on a page.

And so if you're competing against TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Netflix, Roblox, that's what news is competing against now. It's not just NBC competing against ABC. It's not just CNN competing against MSNBC and Fox. It is CNN competing against Roblox and competing against TikTok, etc. And I just think they're, you know, call it dopamine, call it a short attention span or whatever. But it's not something that people feel like is essential to their everyday lives. And the challenge is as you try to make news more entertaining,

that becomes more of the clickbait stuff that you were talking about earlier where it's just like, okay, well, if we can throw some Taylor Swift, Travis Kelsey stuff in with the vegetables, then maybe more people will click on it and then people complain that, oh, it all seems frivolous now. So it's sort of a vicious cycle. I think there's like a couple other factors that I'd love to hear your take on, which is one, obviously, the polarization, the political polarization of the news. And so there's right wing news, there's progressive news like this. And then there's now been the whole couple. Now we've gone through this

since basically 2016 that everyone thinks there's all misinformation everywhere. No one trusts the media anymore, right? The trust, trust in media is at an all time low. And then, uh, you mentioned Paul Farhi wrote this piece in, in the Atlantic about, you know, is news headed for an extinction, extinction level event. Uh, he talked to Sewell Chan, who's editor in chief of the Texas Tribune. And Sewell said, if all we do is point out how bad politicians are, how our government is failing, and how our democracy is eroding, we're not exactly offering an appetizing menu. And I do wonder if that's part of this, right? Which is that the news has also become, look, there's a lot of bad news in the world. But there's also sort of a cynical take on the news that I don't know if it's all that fun or informative or desirable to tune into. Right. Why would I want to watch that when I can look at Instagram instead?

You know, I'm glad you brought up that Sewell quote. I like Sewell a lot. He's at the Texas Tribune. And they have had layoffs recently too, but they are a sort of hybrid revenue company where they rely on grants, they do events, et cetera. I think they have some subscription products. That quote is great because it reminded me also of when I did a fellowship at the Kennedy School at Harvard at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy back in 2013. After the 2012 campaign, I did a fellowship at the Kennedy School at Harvard at the Shorenstein Center, uh, for media, politics, and public policy back in 2013. After the 2012 campaign, I wrote this piece about how Twitter had changed the business of political journalism, but also just the fundamental behaviors and habits of political reporters.

Everyone go read it. Um. It's great. Uh, yeah, and interviewed, you know guys from the obama campaign and the romney campaign and interviewed big-name journalists etc people listening might not remember this name but joe klein i talked to remember him from time magazine i believe or was it newsweek one of the other magazine um primary colors that's right uh and he came of age in the boys on the bus era and i was talking to him about twitter which he didn't really use. If he used it, he quit.

And he said the default position for most everyday journalists has slipped from what it should be, which is skepticism, to what it is now, which is cynicism. And he said- Big difference. Yes, and he said the hardest thing

for a young journalist to do now is to write a positive story, especially about a politician. Because it is – even now, I mean this is 10 years ago when he gave me that quote, but it would be seen as sycophantic, uncool, lazy to write something that was kind of layered or nuanced or interesting if you did like a big profile about somebody. That was generally positive. And I think that's true and what sewell is saying like why like there is good stuff happening in the world not every actor in politics is evil most of them are self-interested and they're all flawed but it's just it's frustrating sometimes the self-interest leads you to do uh things that are good yeah Yeah, yeah, perhaps. It happens. And so I believe this also as a writer.

Like things to me are more interesting if they are complicated, if they illuminate things to me that I didn't know, if they challenge my assumptions. out there now, particularly among younger journalists in certain newsrooms, is kind of reactionary and finger-pointing and, you know, outrage-driven. And that doesn't necessarily make the reader better or smarter. And I think Sewell's right that it does turn people off. Well, and part of the challenge, I think, is it costs more money to do real reporting, especially investigative journalism. And we've talked about this. It costs a lot less money to just spit takes. Takes are free. Takes are easy. Takes are mostly what political journalism is now. So we're awash in takes from real journalists, from anyone on the internet who a lot of audiences would confuse for real journalists. And so now

you just have all these opinions. A lot of the opinions are negative, cynical, doomerish. And when you think about that, it doesn't really surprise you that people are like, why am I tuning into all this? Like, I want to know what's going on in my community. I want to know what's going on in the country, but I don't want to do it if i'm just watching this food fight or just everyone just being glum all day dan your colleague dan pfeiffer he either made a good point about this on one of your podcasts or in the sub stack and he was talking about cnn's rating challenges in the chris licht era which was sort of after jeff zucker left after the trump bump and i thought what he was saying was pretty astute, which is people aren't going to tune in

or seek out news that doesn't validate their priors in like everyday life. You know, you might tune in once a week to catch up on the news, but unless you're going to really activate people or make them angry or just like want to share something with their friends or text something to their friends like that's that is not what most normal people want to watch like they want entertainment they don't want on they don't want sort of

complicated nuanced dispassionate news uh i think that's just a fact of life. This is the other thing. People who are hardcore news consumers and political junkies, people like us, we spend our time reading Axios and looking at Twitter and all this stuff. That is a minority in this country. Only about a third of Americans have a college degree. The people who pay for news and the people who seek out news tend to be college-educated people with enough disposable income to pay for that product. But that is a plurality, if not a small minority, of this country, and I think journalists have to understand that.

Like, we can't reach people with homework. We have to reach people with homework you have to reach people with things that are both informational and compelling and look it's hard to make sense of who's who i remember after the october 7th attacks i took a detour onto tiktok and there were people on there who are very you know pro-palestine for example very activist but they were giving really accurate historical information and they weren't technically journalists right and then you'd swipe up and look at another tiktok and it was like fucking nuts totally nuts or totally moronic and and then you would swipe up and it'd be like abc news just like putting a clip out there on tiktok and like we have the sophistication to see the differences between those things but even very smart people

don't well and it's hard to find right like we max and i talked about that a couple episodes ago and we're talking about some of the tiktoks around gaza and some people were annoyed with us afterwards and they were like well there's a lot of really great reporting that's being done on tiktok about gaza and there was about ukraine and all and i totally right there is and we had said that but some of the way these platforms are now it's hard to find that you don't know where that is like i even to the point you made where like we are news junkies we are political junkies we read it all but when i'm like prepping for pod save america i read the times washington post i look at politico and as far as like figuring out what the news of the day is like i read playbook but i don't

read a lot more and that's not even because i'm not a junkie because I read it all, but it's because like how many more stories about the same topic do I need? And I wonder if, even if journalism figures out, even if journalists figure out how to make it a little more entertaining, uh, appealing to more people, you know, changes the, it's not just print, it's video too. I still don't know if you, if people need as many outlets reporting on the same thing. You do need a whole bunch of local outlets because there's different regions of the country and the world, and so you want to know a little bit about everything else. But how many outlets do you need reporting about the same national political story? You don't. And I wonder if that's partly

what the industry is going through right now. You're saying that because there are so many different versions of the same story, people can't tell who's legitimate and who's not. Well, let's use the, let's use, no, no. I would say let's use the messenger as an example, which just went out of business today. When the messenger started, I was like, why do I also need the messenger? Why am I also reading the messenger? Like, what is that? What is, what kind of coverage is that providing that is, does not exist already? And I could never answer that question. So yeah, I mean, this is why people need to think about the audience side of news and journalism

more. When I say people, I mean, people that work within the media business and the news industry, we often just keep doing things every day. We wake up and we're like, what story am I going to file today? What am I going to read today? are we covering today without stepping back and thinking about the consumer if you walk down a grocery aisle and you're used to buying one kind of granola amid 20 kinds of granola you're like that's i know what's here i see it and then one day messenger granola shows up and it's the same shit like what's the point but if on the other side of that the 22nd version of granola is a keto like low sugar it's a new flavor you've never seen like banana strawberry whatever you at least give it some attention um and so you know our theory of

the case at puck and not puck is not for, not everyone's going to pay for Puck, not everyone is interested in what we cover, you know, the sort of ivory tower corners of this country. But it suggests, or our theory of the case is that there's a market for niche. People are willing to pay for specialty media, specialty products. And when I was in journalism school, 2003, 2004, one of the classes I had to take at NYU was basically how to write like AP copy and write it fast. I remember we had this professor from Newsday, which is basically a tabloid in New York, and tabloid in a good way, like one of those broadsheet like subway papers.

And she was a killer. And she taught me and everyone else in my class how to write 200 words really fast about a murder or a trial or a Chuck Schumer press conference. Which was still happening back then on Sundays and still happening now. Some things don't change. And in journalism school in that era we were taught to be generalists. So you graduate from journalism school or college or whatever, go to Tampa, go to Anniston, Alabama, go to Albany, and you can plug in. They want you to cover sports. Cool. You can do that. They want you to cover murders. You can do that. Cover city hall. You can do that.

I'm proud that I know how to do that, but there's not a market for it anymore. I frequently talk to young journalists, speak to college classes, et cetera. Specialize is what I tell people. Because if you can be an expert in one niche thing, that's what the future of journalism is going to be. Building businesses around specialty slash niche coverage that provides an expertise that people are willing to pay for. Again, that might not reach mass America, but it'll give you a 401k and some income. Well, and this is why I think individuals have been able to succeed more, whether they're, people go to Substack or like, I subscribed to Puck because you went to Puck and I like reading your stuff.

Like when Semaphore started, there's a few journalists at Semaphore that I really like. So I was like, all right, I'm going to look at Semaphore because I like these journalists. In the Messenger, there was like a couple of journalists there that I knew that went there. I was like, okay, I'm going to read their stories. And Ezra Klein wrote this piece a couple of weeks ago about how we're seeing the death of the middle in media. And so, like I was saying, individual sub-stack writers can do well. Smaller outlets, partisan outlets can do well.

Niche can do well. And then big outlets like the New York Times are thriving. But that the middle, where you have to pay more to do real reporting, investigative journalism that covers different regions, that covers different topics,

that's what is not surviving. What's your take on that? I think he's right. I mean, we've been talking about this at Puck for a while now too, but look at some of the places that have done layoffs in the last few months, the stuff that's got a lot of attention. Time Magazine, Business Insider, CNN, NBC, elements of Condé Nast, the LA Times.

I mean, a lot of the places that are being targeted for layoffs are, do we need this? Like, is this essential? And so I would put all of those categories, Business Insider is, you know, a subscription-based business mostly, but I would put all of those brands I just mentioned in that fat middle. That's on top of the 3,000 newspapers that have just died since 2005 locally. And the tens of thousands of journalists that have been, you know, losing their jobs in midsize markets. I was actually really interested in something I saw recently. Northwestern, the Medill School, the journalism school, did a study sort of examining

the withering of local news. and it talked about some of the bright spots. And it's worth mentioning some of the bright spots. There are digital-focused businesses. Axios is a good example. Axios is doing like local markets all over the country. There's also, you know, grant-driven startups, et cetera, in different parts of the country. But again, most of these places are in places where you have high concentrations of college graduates with disposable income so the the the local digital only news sites that are springing up are still in places like portland and richmond and dallas and miami um it's the big red flyover country where Donald Trump is the god king,

where really the most local news is coming from public radio. And public radio is another good example of something that's surviving. I think there's like 3,000 public radio stations around the country. Not all of them do their original reporting, but a lot of them do. And so that continues to be a bright spot as public broadcasting. Speaking of bright spots, why do you think the New York Times was so successful and made it?

Do you remember, sometimes this feels like yesterday, but when you were in the Obama White House and I was working at CNN in 2008, 9, 10, the Washington Post and the New York Times were in deep doo-doo. Yeah, yeah. So, the New York Times is a good example of a place that combined an extremely strong brand that has a century-old connection with its readers with really smart strategic decisions. And so, Meredith Coppia Levin, also Mark Thompson, who's now running CNN, was there for a while. They were able to pivot to a subscription business. The New York Times currently, they still do advertising, but they have 10 million subscribers. And how much do you pay for a New York Times subscription? Like say it's 10 bucks a pop, a lot of money.

They also kind of went in on being a lifestyle brand because of that connection they have with their readers. You know, center left college educated people who proudly would carry around a New York Times tote bag in their hometown. Well, and Dan always says it's like, you know, it's recipes and Wordle. Well, that's the thing. So, like, they have a diversified business. And so, New York Times cooking, Wordle, Crossword, they bought The Athletic.

By the way, they killed their sports section. The New York Times sports section, which was a hallowed training ground for great sports journalists like David Halberstam, etc., gone because they have the Athletic. And it's partly because the New York Times aspires more to be a national newspaper and less of a New York City newspaper, which they really are. And so, yeah, they just made smart strategic decisions years ago that started to pay off. And now it's like they're lapping The Washington Post. I think The Washington Post peaked at 3 million subscribers during the Trump years, during the Trump bump. They've dropped down to two and a half. Because like, you know, if you, again, live in Dallas-Fort Worth, you read The New York Times, you get the Sunday paper delivered. It's sort of like a nice little routine. The Washington Post doesn't have that national report. I wonder why they lost

out because like, especially with Bezos, you know, owning the Post, you would think that they could have transitioned to this sort of essential national newspaper that goes just beyond political news where, you know know it's an essential subscription right and you subscribe and you get everything you need and that they could have competed with the new york times and it's weird to me that they just sort of fell off because like you said they were both they were both in dire straits in that time period but they were both really competing with each other and i feel like the competition between them now is not as right but like if you care about uh political news and and investigations and trump stuff, then The Washington Post is still

valuable. It's the people, again, who live in a different part of the country and want the habitual Sunday New York Times, and they want to read the style section, and they want to do Wordle. I mean, The New York Times offers different things outside of the scope of just hard news that I think allows them to be more valuable to consumers than The Washington Post right now. And by the way, The Washington Post, they have a new CEO. They continue to try to innovate. They have really interesting video products and a bunch of kick-ass reporters. They just haven't proven themselves to be as essential or beloved, I would say, as the New York Times is,

among a certain corner of our society. Well, it does feel like the New York Times is becoming the Netflix of the news media, right? Where it's like, there was the streaming wars, and then Netflix ended up winning. And I wonder how many, as there's a point, I wonder how many of these big media outlet success stories you can really have in this Internet age right now where news is nationalized and globalized. Yeah, I don't I don't I don't think you can have that man

No, no, I don't I think so. I'm very interested to see what cnn and the washington post do with their new ceos mark thompson and will lewis because They have told their employees in memos, et cetera, like, we need to change. Like, we need to evolve. And they don't have the answers yet, but at least they're saying it. So, Mark Thompson at CNN put out a big memo a few weeks ago saying it's time for a revolution, a quote-unquote digital revolution. Something, again, that should have been done 10 years ago over there, but the central lifeblood of their business are cable carriage fees and advertising. And that's what pays Anderson CNN is going to survive as a brand in the next 20 and 30 years, they have to get smarter about the small screen in your hand and less so about the big

screen in your living room. And I'm interested to see what they develop there. The ratings around the Iowa caucus night coverage were just abysmal, not just for CNN, but MSNBC, Fox, which is usually leads in cable, like all of them. The drop-off in cable is something that's been remarkable. It's something I don't want to toot my own horn. I've been talking about, you know this for a long time. I know you have. You and I have had this conversation dozens of times. There are moments in primetime cable, CNN, MSNBC, where 200,000 people are watching. Sometimes the amount of people that could fit in the Rose Bowl are watching some of these channels.

And they're paying big salaries and they're sending reporters to Afghanistan and Gaza. And sometimes it feels like a Ponzi scheme. Like where is this money going to come from? Because the more people cut the cord with cable, you know, Spectrum, Verizon, Cox, whatever, that's more money gone for CNN. And then they're even more dependent on advertising, which becomes even harder when fewer and fewer people are watching. And again, this gets back to what they're trying to do, which is how do we compete in streaming? How do we compete on the platforms?

How do we make ourselves entertaining and essential beyond just linear television? And it's just like a fascinating thing to watch, which is the same thing is true with ESPN. Like ESPN, all these cable channels, they peaked, I want to say, in like 2013, 2014. That was the height of their powers.

And then after that, people started cutting the cord, sports rights went to a bunch of different places. You know, ESPN isn't essential to people anymore. Yeah.

And that's sort of similar with the cable networks. I will say, it kind of gets overlooked in Washington. People don't talk about it. The broadcast news channels, specifically the evening news, those things are getting five, six million viewers a night. I mean that is still a huge number.

Yeah, that and then local news. Yes. Local television news. So local TV news and national broadcast news, people are still tuning in. Yes, and again, mostly over the age of 40 45 yeah young people yeah that'll absolutely not it'll change eventually but uh broadcast is still where you want to be the biden administration loves doing interviews with david muir on abc news it's not because david muir is the president of mensa yeah it's because 7 million people watch ABC every night. It's like they keep going

back there. Do you think local news can be saved? I mean, especially as younger generations aren't tuning into their local television broadcast and they're not watching national news. Where are people going to get information about what's happening in their community? Man, I, I don't know. I it's so, you know, it's also really funny. I love local TV news. My parents met working in local TV news, uh, at CNN. I worked out of, uh, uh, WIS TV in Columbia during the 2008 primaries. I was down there for like six or seven months and got to know a lot of those people. Those newsrooms are made up of young people. If you go to like Duluth, Minnesota, the anchors are like 23 and 24. They graduated from the Cronkite School. They sent their reel out and they're doing the news out there. So a lot of

the people making the news in local markets are actually pretty out and they're doing the news out there. So a lot of the people making the news in local markets are actually pretty young and they hustle too. Like they'll go out and cover the football game. They'll shoot it. They'll shoot their own standups. They'll edit it. Like they're doing everything. They're making $30,000 a year. I just want to give them a shout out. But I don't know what happens with local news and young people from a consumer side. I mean, they continue to do, local news continues to do pretty well, but it is one of the least, those newsrooms are some of the least innovative places digitally that I've seen. I will say this.

We've been talking about the LA Times and the layoffs. They laid off 115 people this year, and I think like 75, 76 last year, they're losing 20 or 30 million dollars a year. They started something kind of interesting that I follow them on Instagram. They hired like five Zoomers to do content for this product called the 404 by the LA Times. And they basically do explainers and news updates about anything, about the fire on the 405, about the mayor's race, about like efforts to clean up homelessness here, but also fun stuff, like stuff about like Dodger Stadium or whatever. And they do it using the formats that you would see on Snapchat and TikTok, and they distribute it across different platforms. And it's pretty good. and like the la times made that investment and made those hires and i hope they continue to use them because

i've seen them grow their social media accounts into the hundreds of thousands since they started a couple years ago again the question is i don't know how they're monetizing that yeah um but it is a good example for people listening of like what you can do at the local level to get people engaged i should also say it's snapchat which is a los angeles people listening of like what you can do at the local level to get people engaged. I should also say at Snapchat, which is a Los Angeles-based company. We live here. We're founded here. Like Evan Spiegel, our CEO, cares about LA.

We started – my show on Snapchat is called Good Luck America. We cover national politics. You've appeared on the show. I have. I have. I'm familiar. We also hired a journalist, Kat Hendrick, to do Good Luck Los Angeles. It's only here in LA, but we do local news here in LA for teenagers and 20-somethings on Snapchat just to learn more about what's going on in their community. So

there are examples of how you can create compelling video formats for young people. We at Snap have made financial investments in that. It's harder for other publishers to do so, obviously. It is interesting that the problem boils down to there needs to be innovation and creativity because obviously all these outlets need to be financially sustainable, but we've also had examples of billionaires, VCs, private equity coming in with lots of money,

and they have not been able to save some of these outlets. Yeah, no, I mean, Bezos is one example. Mark Benioff, I think, bought Time Magazine, which just did a bunch of layoffs. Patrick Soon-Shiong. Right. Not great at the LA Times right now. Not great.

Look, billionaires, they don't like losing money. Like, we thought Bezos would come in and be like, oh, I'll cut a blank check and you can lose a bunch of money over here. It turns out they don't like that. And we can say, like say that's shitty of them, but also we can't make them. We can't say, okay, billionaire, you ponied up the dough. Now you must pony up this dough forever.

You just can't do that. These are businesses. If we're just going to be at the whims of billionaires, then that's not really a sustainable model. Yes. Well, it is better than Gannett or Alden Global. I was going to say Alden Global. These conglomerates that are owned by private equity and hedge funds that are consolidating newspapers and doing layoffs. Gannett last year closed 20 daily and weekly community newspapers in the state of Ohio between Columbus and Akron. 20 in one year, which is crazy.

And that's happening all over the place. And so is that, I think having Jeff Bezos run my company is better than that. The billionaires are better than the private equity. Yeah. For sure. And, but still not, still not any guarantee of success um we could talk about this forever but last question i asked you three years ago like what does a sustainable model of journalism look like what's the future hold now we've had three years where uh a lot has gone down the shitter though you mentioned some bright spots um what do you think what's what's what's your best prediction on what happens man this is an impossible question to answer. I think, as I said, there's a move toward niche subscription media.

Like The Athletic is a good example for people who don't know. If you, I don't know how much it costs. I pay for it within my New York Times bundle, speaking of the New York Times. But say it costs $10 a month. Say you're a Milwaukee Bucks fan. Say you want the best like trade gossip. Say you want the most recent injury news about the Milwaukee Bucks. Like if you're a super fan, you're going to pay for the athletic and the athletic is breaking news that like other, you know, sports newsrooms in Wisconsin are not. You know, puck again, I love it.

Like, I love what we're doing. It's not going to be for everybody. I wish it was, but we cover a very specific corner of American society. Yeah. You know, I really think a lot of this is on the platforms. Snapchat, we pay publishers to create content that is, include news publishers for our platform um google and facebook don't do that but there's some legislation well so i was going to say australia

and canada have passed laws that either allow newsrooms to bargain with the platforms to get a cut of the revenue uh or compel them to just pay directly and i think your old pal buffy wicks from the obama administration yeah is now in the state directly and i think your old pal buffy wicks from the obama administration yeah is now in the state assembly and i think she has a similar bill in california to try to compel platforms to do that um we'll see where that goes i just think the the best case scenario that i can imagine is that these leaders in these newsrooms really pay attention to consumers and also listen to the younger employees in their newsroom about what they want to watch and what they want to listen to

they want audio and how they want to watch it how they want to listen how they want to read it right yeah you know like if you're listening to this this is a portable form of news media uh that's what people want i like one reason i always cared about quote unquote digital and the web and one reason i eventually left cnn to go to snapchat i always go back to this i came home in like 2005 from working at cnn all day you were you're working on the hill at that point i was with uh it was the senate in the senate office for obama yeah yeah uh and i remember i walked into my group house in adams morgan and my buddies are sitting there and i came home kind of late because like we got off at like 6 or 7 p.m and my three buddies are sitting around watching the daily show and this again 2005 and i was like oh guys did you see that we had this big interview

on wolf show today with uh nancy pelosi did you guys see that and they were like what the fuck are you talking about man that was 2005 and so i just held on to that like people my age were watching the daily show and getting their news from an unconventional entertaining format whereas i was you know slowly learning uh like how to like be a good newsman. And it turns out the incentives were misaligned. And the architecture of CNN at the time was misaligned with how people were actually getting information. And so I hope people listen to consumers a lot more. The revenue business question is really the hardest one, but the future is either subscriptions or grants. I mean,

the MacArthur Foundation just did like a $50 million grant to support a bunch of local newsrooms. So hopefully that's the kind of benevolence and philanthropy that can help sustain local news. I know I'd bring up the government, federal government, of course, like funding local news, but the federal government can't really do anything right now. So maybe if we had a functioning federal government, of course, like funding local news, but the federal government can't really do anything right now. So maybe, maybe if we had a functioning federal government, there would be legislation. Can you see Josh Hawley signing a bill to fund local news? No, no, I can't. No, I can't. There's some bipartisan bills that give like tax credits to local news organizations that like, hi, there's some of this that's like bipartisan going on, but it's all silly. No,

no one's doing this right now. Yeah. Sorry to not have a clean answer for you. No, I don't think there is a clean answer, but I think, I do think like walk, we try to do that here, which is trying to balance how to entertain the audience, but also give them good information, news that they can trust, et cetera, is the key, right? Because you want to entertain, you don't want to entertain so much that it's all fluff, but you also don't want to just be giving people vegetables all day long because, uh, would it be wonderful to live in a world where everyone wanted their vegetables all the time? Yes, of course. That's not the reality we live in. So if we want sustainable journalism, you've got to kind of figure out how to mix the entertainment with the information. I totally agree. Peter Hamby, thanks as always for stopping by Offline. Thank

you, John. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick

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