Search Engine - How do we survive the media apocalypse?

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

Something strange, new, and unsettling is happening in media right now. Huge institutions, both newspapers and online outlets, are being severely transformed by layoffs. As a person just trying to find good information on the internet, what are you supposed to do? We’re joined this week again by Ezra Klein, who has an explanation for why this is happening, a prediction about where it’s going, and a prescription for what we all can do about it. If you'd like to support Search Engine, you can do so over at searchengine.show To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vote. Every week on the show, we answer a question we have about the world. No question too big, no question too small. This week, should we be concerned that the news websites all seem to be disappearing? That's after some ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Square. Square, the easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place.

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The Square gets started today. Okay, I'm going to read you an intro. I realize that I haven't even totally settled on the question here, which is fine. Right now my... History media fucked. Should we be concerned that the news website seem to be disappearing? Is media fucked this better, honestly?

I don't know if I'm allowed to curse. Okay, here's the intro. In mid-January, much of the staff of the music review website pitchfork was laid off. It was an increasingly familiar moment on my corner of the internet. A lot of news and newsy websites that felt like institutions are dying, either being shut down or losing most of their staff and then continuing in an under new management,

but it's mostly freelancers or artificial intelligence sort of way. There's a long list of destroyed and decimated websites that people have been reciting. Buyouts at the Washington Posts, layoffs at the LA Times, BuzzFeed News is gone, Sports Illustrated has been gutted, Gawker has been raised from the dead and killed again three times since I started recording this intro. There's been a lot written about this, a lot of anguish by journalists who are understandably upset that their industry is being seemingly destroyed. In the New Yorker, writer Claire Malone asked if media is prepared for, quote, an extinction level event. The illustration was a picture of a comet hitting the earth.

The dinosaurs were all named after publications I used to like to read. As a journalist, obviously it bothers me. But I get that non-journalists might not immediately care. I wanted to have a conversation about what all this means, though, for people who depend on journalism to understand the world, which is everybody, whether they directly consume journalism or not. When pitchfork was decimated, there were a string of lovely eulogies from journalists,

about what the sight had meant to them. At the New York Times, writer Ezra Klein wrote this piece that was not just about pitchfork exactly, but also about this strange moment we're experiencing. It seemed to capture what might be shifting under our feet right now. Ezra is the host of the Ezra Klein Show, a repeat search engine guest returning to the Octagon. I wanted to ask him about what he thinks might be happening

and whether he has a plan for how we're supposed to get reliable information in a world where they're firing the journalists and deleting the websites they wrote for. Ezra, welcome back to the show. Devastated to be here, thank you. You don't seem totally concerned. I don't seem to... I don't seem concerned.

You just seem smiley this morning. I guess you can have both feelings at the same time. I think, I mean, my whole job is covering things that are bad in the world. You have to maintain a separation interpersonal affect. Right, you can't walk around just like... I can be happy to see you and not happy about the destruction of my industry. You don't have to be a media goth 24-7.

So we've talked about this a little bit offline. I emailed you with some of my concerns. You sent me some amazing voice notes where you disagreed with part of my premise. Before you into that, I just want to set up kind of like the backstory to this. So I actually want to start this like ludicrously early. If the argument is that we're in a moment

where the internet is changing media, I actually want to ask you about the first time that happened. There was a time before either of us worked in media where the news business was a very good business. It was like a series of relatively profitable local monopolies. Can you just draw me a picture of what that looked like? Yeah, I think it's helpful actually to come at this from the perspective of competition.

Okay. And competition and one of the media's main villains, Peter Thiel, wrote a whole book about this. Competition, which economists like, is bad. What do you mean? Not everywhere. It creates a lot of innovation, creates a lot of efficiency. but in a perfectly competitive market,

the marginal profit goes down to functionally zero, right? The more profit you have in a market, the more inefficiency you have in a market. Monoplies create a lot of profit. Patents create a lot of profit. What was the reigning fact of media for a very long time was that space had created inefficiency. Meaning what?

So different newspapers dominated different places. The New York Times dominated along with the Post and the Daily News, New York. the LA Times, you know, Southern California. I also had the O.C. Register where I grew up. Newspapers practically had local monopolies, and that gave them a business model. If you were an advertiser who wanted to tell people about shoes,

you advertised in the LA Times. And the LA Times took your money that was about trying to get people to buy shoes and use that to fund, like, a dozen foreign bureaus. It was a very strange business, but it worked very well. So you had a period in the news, like most of the period in the news, but definitely what people think of as the heyday of profits,

where what the news business was selling was a local advertising monopoly. And that was very profitable. And crucially, that sustained a lot of different players who were not really in competition with each other. When I grew up in Southern California, the New York Times is probably net net, a better paper than the L.A. Times.

I never, ever read a New York Times. Right. I barely ever saw one. Occasionally you'd go to, like the bookstore, and sometimes they would have a Sunday New York Times for weirdos who would spend money on that. But it just had, the New York Times had no relevance in my life. Yes. Now, the New York Times is, I think, the biggest paper in California. The key thing happening

right now is all of the general interest players are in competition with each other. And that's going to have a kind of natural effect of if you're only going to subscribe to one large news bundle, you're going to subscribe to the largest news bundle. You went from a situation where the Baltimore Sun and the LA Times and the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News were not competing with each other. Yeah. To a situation where they were. Something you don't often hear people say in American society is looking at the news business, competition was kind of in some ways a bad thing, and Monopoly was kind of, in some ways, a good thing historically. Yes. Surprising thing to say. Yeah, it shouldn't be that surprising.

Why? I'm not saying Monopoly is. great. And there were a lot of problems with those kind of local monopoly papers and who were the gatekeepers and who made the decisions about what was in the news. But inefficiency is often good. Right. I sometimes describe this as benevolent inefficiency or benign inefficiency. You don't want everything optimized within an inch of its life because you need things that maybe don't immediately net out in terms of how much money they make but have other kinds of social good. So one of the just the fundamental facts about journalism that is very unnerving, is that the most profitable kinds of journalism are oftentimes the least important kinds of journalism, and the most important

kinds of journalism are often the least profitable kinds of journalism. So to give a just canonical example here, war reporting. Two things about war reporting. It is incredibly, incredibly fucking expensive. You are sending people into combat zones. You need to equip them, train them, protect them, also just pay for their lodging, their food, their travel back and forth, their therapy, their trauma therapy. Yeah. You can imagine 100 reasons war reporting is costly. But also, no advertiser wants to be on a war story. Right. It's not like... Coca-Cola isn't like excited to be on this story about war crimes. Yeah, the Lexus, December to remember everyone died in a bomb event does not happen.

Exactly. So you have here, I think, just fundamentally the most important work we do, the most costly work we do, it almost drives the advertisers away. Right. So what you need is a business that can cross-subsidize. Right. So you have the war reporting, which is expensive and loses money, but you believe is socially important.

And then you have, say, like, in the olden days, a big movies section. And, like, you have a lot of movie reviews, partly because people want to know which movies are good, but also because the movie distributors will pay for a lot of ads. I used to find out what movies were playing by turning to the listing section of the New York Times where the local theaters had paid money to put the listings in, but now I do that on Fandango. Right. Right. And so the problem is, as things become unbundled and more competitive, your ability to have an inefficient editorial product where the important and costly things are

paid for by the frivolous and profitable things like starts to go away. Yeah, and I don't want to call all the profitable things frivolous. Many of them are great or important or useful, but investigative journalism slow, difficult. Like, you need really skilled journalists to do that. It takes a long time. You don't make money off of investigative journalism. It's why ProPublica is a philanthropically funded publication. They are amazing, but that is not a thing capitalism will create. And this is why, as much as there's good things happening on Substack, I'm not fundamentally optimistic about Substant. and other newsletter companies as any kind of savior here because what they're actually doing is unbundling the stuff that makes money from the stuff that doesn't.

You can make a lot of money, not that many people really do make a lot of money doing this, but you can make money if you're in an excellent takes writer on substack. But every substacker who makes any money

will tell you it is a volume game. Yeah. So to then have people who are doing slow, not profitable work, it just doesn't work, right? It also, as a distraker, distribution mechanism, newsletters do not allow you to have high volume, right? It's fine to get one

email from some newsletter a day. You don't want 15 from that newsletter. So you have this problem where, like, all of that cross-subsidy is gone. It's been taken by others. It's been unbundled. The different revenue streams are getting chewed up, classifieds, you know, went to Craigslist, like all these different things. And all of this was contributing to a situation where the media was in this bizarre business of selling shoe ads to fund war reporting. Right. Of telling you which movies were playing

to fund investigations into corruption at City Hall. Then one other thing happened, which you really should not underestimate, and like I will talk about this as long as you want to because I lived through this. The platforms came in and took all the money. The whole period,

the sort of explosion of optimism that I was part of in Building Box, that we could build a whole new set of digital first news behemmists, right? That we could create not just sites that people would read and like, but we could create things that would ultimately be on the level of something like the L.A. Times or, you know, the Washington Post, that would be able to sustain that many writers, that much reporting. This was based on a theory that you could turn the huge scale of digital media, right? All of a sudden, more people were reading you than, you know, had ever read any news organization ever before.

You could turn them into money. but the scale was mediated by Google, right? People would find you by searching something on Google, what time is a Super Bowl famously. People would find you on Facebook. They would find you on Twitter. Yeah. And the idea was that in getting all these new readers,

you would eventually turn all these new readers into new advertising dollars. Because the platforms had the audience. If you put your stuff on the platforms, they would send the audience over, and there will be an ad for something, and to Vox will make a few pennies, and that's what the plan was.

Well, and ideally, I mean, probably per any one person, not a few pennies of that, but the idea was all this, you know, premium advertising would migrate, right? You know, the magazines and newspapers were going to go away or at least become diminished to what they once were, and you'd have, like, nice ads for Lexus cars and, right, like the stuff that really makes money, which is not this sort of direct consumer, you know,

one trick to get rid of your belly fat. It's, how do you feel just in a background way about Coca-Cola? Right. It's called brand advertising. And the platforms just took that. The thing that broke in the media, this was a big point of this piece I wrote about pitchfork.

One of the things that frustrates me every time I see a organization getting gutted is there's a tendency to focus very tightly on their individual editorial decisions, and then, as they're laying people off or getting folded into GQ or whatever, begin to look like mistakes, right? If only they had done X.

The fact that's happening to so many different groups at the same time suggested it's structure, right? And the key thing there is that the big platforms kept the advertising revenue. And this whole explosion of faith that we could do this was built on the idea that you could build these new audiences and turn them into money. And you couldn't because you didn't control the audience. And the platform could host all that advertising on itself. It could target that advertising at the consumer better than you could. And so just like the business model never netted out. People keep wanting to look at the editorial side because that's the part they feel

like they experience and that they have expertise in, right? If you're a journalist or you're a reader, you probably have a lot of views on the editorial of the things that you consume. But what is actually happening is that the business model didn't come together. So it's like because all these beloved mid-sized websites are either like dying or doing something that looks like dying. And you're saying, in the case of something like Pitchfork, our bias is to say like, oh, well, if Pitchfork had covered more of this type of music, or if they'd covered this music differently or whatever, we look at that, and it's like our eyes off the ball, because if the real question is about the business model and it's structural, those decisions, even though they're easier for us to

understand and argue about, they're not the decisions that decided whether or not this thing continued to exist. And also the fact that it's happening across so many different kinds of publications suggests that it's, you know, they can't all be making huge editorial mistakes. Right. Or they can be, because we always are on some level. But We were before, too. We were in the days when we were making money also. Yes. And the editorial decisions are visible and legible to the audience,

and the P&L statement is not, right? There's so much happening on the business side. Yeah. And it's very, very hard for people to see it. So the two things that happened are everybody ended up in competition with each other, which wasn't how it used to be, right? Like every single content provider of any kind is in competition with each other. other simultaneously. Yeah. That's going to drive profit down, right? That's just like core

economics, Econ 101. And then at the same time, the platforms came into the middle and just took the audience and took the money. Like, it didn't make any sense, but we had basically created this Rube Goldberg machine that worked as a business. Then the business became efficient and it wrecked the business. Then there was a hope that we could build it again online because Well, look, we had lost a bunch of the revenue streams, but now we had so much more audience, more audience than we had ever imagined having ever before. Because, like, when we were selling subscriptions

and, like, in a little local market, right? That was nothing like what could happen when an article went viral and all of a seven million people read it. Yeah. But it turned out Facebook got the money from the seven million people reading it. That's where we are.

So there's, like, era one, the beautiful, inefficient, non-competitive monopoly that we all benefited from. There's era two, which is, was we all thought we could make money on the internet, but it turns out we were sort of wrong. Why, in your opinion, did Era 2 work for as long as it did? Venture Capital.

It was all venture capital. I don't want to say it was all venture capital, but it was all venture capital. Is venture capital and low interest rates. We were not making money. Right. BuzzFeed was not making money. Right.

Like, I know more than I can say about the balance sheets of a bunch of these places in the boom years. Yeah. They're sometimes making a bit of money, more often losing a lot of money. or oftentimes just losing some money. Yeah. But they were being pumped up by venture capital in a low interest rate environment. It is not a coincidence that the tide went out

on this era of media when the Fed began hiking interest rates because when money had to pay off more, it stopped going into media. And now, to be fair, this also coincided within the end of the view that these media companies were going to become big-scale players.

If you ever want to see an interesting document on this, Andresen Horowitz, the venture firm, had a, I believe it was a $50 million investment in BuzzFeed. Yeah. And this is years back. And they wrote a thing explaining their investment on their site. You can probably still find it somewhere. And what they're basically saying is that they think you can create this, like, crazy kind of scale play. And what was it supposed to look like?

Like, what was the profitable, this all makes sense, Andrews and Horwood's view of BuzzFeed? So BuzzFeed was always interesting from a couple of perspectives. But one of the perspectives was BuzzFeed didn't do advertising the way the other players did advertising, at least for a long time. They didn't just sell ads to whomever. They made their ads. So everything kind of felt like BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed had a very big creative agency. The ad team was in-house.

Yeah. And so what they were doing was BuzzFeed was demonstrating its extraordinary competence at creating viral hits. Right? You can understand the entire BuzzFeed operation from a business perspective as a did. of what they could do for advertisers. So what they were saying is like, look, we're going to do, the same way we set the internet on fire with like this top 10 list

of whatever, we can do that for you, Unilever, and we can have a listicle that is like dove soap. And they actually pulled that off a lot of times. That was the idea. So the theory was that BuzzFeed was going to master the social media era of the news. They were going to be

better at distributing their content through social, better at then distributing and creating advertising content through social. and that you would create this flywheel that would be like more audience, more money, more journalism, more audience, more money, more journalism and entertainment, right? There's a lot of entertainment at BuzzFeed, obviously. And, like, that was why they put money in.

It always then drives me crazy later on when all these people at Andresen Horowitz complained about the clickbait era in news. I'm like, you funded it. Like, Andresen was both on the board of Facebook, still is, in fact, meta, I guess we call it now, and was funding BuzzFeed. He's like, where did all this clickbait come from? It's like, I can fucking tell you. you all the clickbait came from, man.

Like, I was here. I was watching. Like, I was part of, I was in the industry. You were reshaping while you were reshaping it. Like, sorry you were a surprise, but I could have explained. It actually drives me nuts. But that was the theory. You could turn scale into money that you could then turn into more capacity,

which you could then turn into more scale, which you could then turn into more money. We had our own versions of this at Vox. And it's just not what happened. We just couldn't do it. The platforms kept too much of the money. So basically what you're saying is like this era, and I don't even know how long it lasted, but like the era of web first, exciting, interesting stuff that felt like it could replace or even like add to what came before it.

It was basically investors making a bet about what might work on the internet, a lot of stuff getting made with the money from that bet, but that bet never hit. It never paid off. It was a rough draft, and now the rough draft is kind of getting thrown away. Yeah, and that doesn't mean you can't make any money at it. I mean, a bunch of these players are still around doing great work. Like, Vox Media, which is where I used to work, is still, I think, like, doing great. I mean, I think some of the dreams of 10 years ago or 8 years ago have been trimmed.

I mean, they probably wouldn't agree with that. But if you go look at the work Vox is doing, that The Verge is doing, that Eater is doing, that New York Magazine is doing, I mean, it's great work. The problem is, like, this dream of, like, the rocket ship is gone. And when that dream, the rocket ship left, so did the money that was coming. with that dream of the rocket ship. Right. And so then you're just kind of in this much more normal media business.

I mean, this is what I always say, and I say it with like a lot of grief. The fundamental fact of what we've learned in the media is that the business is the same as it was 15 years ago, just shittier. That you're still just dealing with a mix of advertising revenue, subscriptions, and maybe events,

but the platforms have taken more of the advertising money. Subscriptions, you're in competition with everybody else simultaneously. And, I mean, events, for events, but also a lot of events, businesses got destroyed by COVID. Do I still feel too cheery to you? No. Does this still feel a little too bright of a conversation?

No, it is now... Thanks for this on a Monday, man. It's Monday morning at 948, and everything feels totally bogged. So, okay, so last time we spoke, I was like, what do you like to look at on the internet, Ezra? And you're like, you know, when I'm just looking at something, just like, have a good time and not feel too stressed out. I've got a little icon on my phone for pitchfork.

I look at pitchfork reviews. If I'd asked you in December, pitchfork.com, how many years do you think this institution will exist in essentially its current form where it publishes five music reviews a day? In December, what would you have said? I don't know enough about the internals of Pitchfork.

I would not have thought and still don't think Pitchfork is probably that expensive to run. Yeah. And things can survive. It's about whether or not they can thrive. I mean, a lot of things are able to survive at some level.

But I think something you can probably still fund online is something that is providing a service to the audience. A real problem to me about pitchfork is why could I never give them money for what was clearly a service to me? I want somebody out there hunting down great music and finding it for me. And I subscribe to different substacks that do this. I mean, I love Philip Sherbourne substack. Futurism Restated.

There's another one called Data Strain. It just finds great music in Brooklyn. I pay for that one so happily, right? It's fantastic if you want to learn about just like what cool shows. and what's happening in the Brooklyn music community, I think at a kind of modest level, there is still a lot of space to do great things with subscription. And I think it was a mistake of pitchfork

to not be subscription-oriented earlier because for people like me, they were doing something very specific. And I think one lesson, if you look at things that do make money, different kinds of newsletters, like they tend to be quite specific. My worry is about the ability of things

to move out of the specific and into the general. And we should, I am not completely doomed. in gloom. I expect there to be a kind of renewal of certain forms of media within the next five years. And I can talk about what I think that is and what I would expect and what I would be starting today if I were starting media organizations. Because in a kind of paradoxic way, I think there's actually a great time to start things. But for what has been there, I think the most dangerous position to be in right now is to be a mid-sized, ambitious place that was hooked on the business model that failed in the 2010s and early 2020s, right? The things like Pitchfork that believed you

would do the scale play into digital advertising online, and then like the kick, the struts of that got kicked out from under you. Right. One of the things that you said about Pitchfork that I found really interesting is that you said that you saw this. It's not a story that should be understood as just about a bunch of individual editorial choices at one specific website. It's about sectoral change. And that the trend you see happening, which feels right, to me, both across media and weirdly, like, across many forms of things that try to get attention, is that, like, the small things are surviving. You know, you can have a substack, and the huge battleships, like the New York Times are surviving, and then everything in the

middle is getting crushed. Like, why, what is it about all these factors that kills the middle? I don't totally understand that. Everything in the middle competes with everything at the top. Right. You got to look at it from both the business side and the audience side. So from the business side, first, it's just really hard to make money advertising as a media organization. You're not, like, there the issue is not that you're competing with the New York Times, it's you're competing with Facebook. You're competing with Google.

You're competing with TikTok, right? You're competing with Netflix. Yeah. So that's really tough, right? So what is your differentiated proposal to the advertiser? So in the past, it might be, I am how you reach the people of Indianapolis. and you want to reach a people of Indianapolis. But you know who knows when people are in Indianapolis?

Meta. Google. They know when people are in Indianapolis and they know how to follow them all around the internet. So that's one thing. Then the next thing is that you are, you know, if you're doing anything kind of general interest, you're competing with everybody, right?

You're competing with the New York Times, with the Washington Post, with everyone. You're competing with everybody on YouTube. And this is one of the, the paradoxes of this era, the audience probably has more access to high-quality journalism they have ever had in human history, ever, right? Compared to what I grew up with, it's like I had the LA Times op-ed page if I wanted to read political opinion.

That was it. Like, that was all the political opinion I had access to. And it wasn't much. Now, if I own political opinion, I drown in it. Right. I mean, I obviously created myself, too, but I drown in it, right? you know, I would be growing up now in Southern California and like listening to, you know, whatever, Pod Save America

and reading political substacks and, you know, magazines and the New York Times opinion page, you know, and like a million other things. Like, it's just endless, right, how much people can have. So you're having to fight against all of that to get somebody's fundamentally their subscriber dollars. And how much money do people want to spend out of their pocket a month on media?

Well, they're already probably like subscribing out at Netflix or Max. or Amazon Prime or some Hulu, Disney Plus, whatever, some combo of those. Like, that's in their kind of media budget. Maybe they're going to subscribe to, like, one real news thing. Maybe, right? That's probably going to be the New York Times, right? Unless they have a real reason to be subscribing to the journal or the financial times.

Most of what people want is not local news. Yeah. Most of what they want is this kind of mix of just being an informed citizen and also having just stuff they enjoy reading. So they're going to go for one of the big players. you're competing for what's left after all that, right? So on Substack, like, maybe they really like you. Like, I really like PJ.

That's the reason people subscribe, right? They're not actually subscribing because it is on a cost-benefit level, like the most content for their buck. They're subscribing because they actually want to support the person, right? That kind of individual personalized relationship is really important. But if you're trying to be something that is growing, and so it can't be quite that personalized, right? You want to have 100 or 200 journalists.

that's like this really hard space, because at that level, you really are competing with Time Magazine and The Washington Post, a couple very, very big players. So once you put that kind of mid-sized publication in competition with all of the very big players, who also, if it begins doing something interesting, will begin immediately seeing that,

possibly hiring the way it's a talent and copying it. Right. It's very hard to thrive. It's not that nobody can, and some people do, but it is just an incredibly hard business to sustain in. And so then, okay, if I'm just like a media nihilist and I say, fine, we're just going to have, like, the New York Times is going to be the one newspaper in America. They'll have a great Philadelphia Bureau and a great Cleveland Bureau. And then people can subscribe to some smart substacks for analysis and takes and some very specialized reporting.

Why is that bad? Why do we not want a journalism that has no middle? I think a couple things. One is that as much as I love The New York Times and work there myself, obviously, the New York Times is not capable for placing your local paper. It just isn't.

It doesn't have, even if it has a Philly Bureau, it doesn't cover Philadelphia the way the Philadelphia Inquirer does. And nobody at the New York Times would say it does. That's like not part of our offering. Maybe one day it should be, right? I mean, I don't make that decision.

But you can imagine actually trying to nationalize local news, right? You can imagine trying to have some kind of player that has almost like a franchise model for local news. but we don't really have that right now. Local news is important.

It just is, and not just local news. I think one mistake, particularly on the philanthropic side, has been trying to make local news too much of eat your vegetables kind of thing. But that was never the thing people primarily wanted in local news. They kept coming back for sports, for restaurants, for just a connection to their community and what might be happening in it and what they might like in it. And the fact that they were coming back

then meant when you reported on corruption at City Hall, they also saw that. and that gave the corruption reporting power. But you can't just be trying to report on corruption in City Hall. That doesn't really have a huge audience. What has the audience is like the connection to the place. So one, in this world where there's no middle, you've just lost too much local news, right?

And it never got replaced. It turned out that that was one of the things being subsidized. Then I think there's this other issue, which is the middle is where a lot of interesting experimentation happens, where a lot of great journalists are trained up. where things happen that you wouldn't expect, it's not going to be a healthy industry long-term content-wise.

If you don't have a lot of different kinds of things happening in it, I mean, we were talking about pitchfork, which is very specific. It's like you want things that can be simultaneously tuned to a certain audience, but with the scale, like the modest but real scale of journalists and money and capital and time,

to do ambitious work. Yeah. And if you don't have that, then a lot of the best work of journalism does not happen. And so you're losing local news. You're losing interesting kinds of experiments. You just lose a lot. We're going to take a short break for some ads. When we come back, Ezra Klein believes we have to fundamentally change how we think about consuming information online.

He also believes that one of the words I just said in the previous sentence is basically a bad word. his radical argument and the dirty word after the break. This episode of search engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors out there whose job is to help your clients

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All of a sudden had to be much better information consumers. Like, to use an analogy, instead of basically one grocery store you would go to and get your apples, now it's like you have to identify what a good apple is. And if you eat the wrong kind of apple, it can make you not trust vaccines, or it can make you kind of racist, or can make you think like the election didn't happen or whatever.

And I think if you look at how we as news consumers navigated that new media environment, I don't think we did a great job. Like, I don't think people's literacy when it came to finding good information, really met the task at hand very well. My fear is now, as more websites disappear, that job is getting harder and our ability to do the job is. not getting better. And that's sort of what I feel afraid of right now.

One of the things I think I object to in the analogy, and that I think has been poisonous across media now for a long time, is the idea that what you are online or as a person is a consumer, that it's this kind of passive consumption. You know, you've got to figure out which apple is going to, you know,

infect you with anti-vaccine sentiment or whatever. Yeah. I think that over time, one of the things that we are going to have to discover is an identity of ourselves as generators of the Internet, not consumers of the Internet. Meaning what?

Meaning, on a small level, every time you read one thing over another or watch or listen to or spend time on, you are creating more of that thing and less of other things, right? There is still some money that comes from just like your attention. Then a level above that, when you pay for it, anything. When you come on a member, a subscriber, then you're really sending a signal to generate more of that thing and not of the other thing. Like what we pay attention to online, we're willing

into existence, what we ignore online, we are asking to die. Yes. I think that we have come to see what we do online as sort of morally neutral with the only moral decisions being made by the providers of the content. So it matters, like, what decisions, the Washington Post or meta or whoever. It matters what decisions those companies make, right?

They're giving us stuff we like or we don't like and we can be mad at them or not mad at them. But what we are clicking on, reading, where we are spending our time, where we are spending our money, like,

but we can't be blamed for that. It's clickbait. Right. If you want local news to exist, you have to subscribe to local news. Right. And read it.

Right. And spend time there. Like, you have to make that vibrant by your presence and your decisions. nobody else, I mean, maybe philanthropists will do it for you, but you definitely can't trust them to do it for you.

If you want, like, pitchfork to exist, you need to read it. If you decide that the way you are going to access the entirety of the internet is by spending time on social media sites and occasionally clicking a link, then what you will get is an internet composed of social media sites, which is more or less what we have now. I wish I had, like, a better answer.

It would be better if the venture capital had just found a bunch of like fantastic business models. Yeah. But at some point, if we don't want this, if people don't want this, then they have to do something else. Like, choosing to listen to search engine means there is more search engine. Right. Choosing to listen to the Ezra Klein show means there is more Ezra Klein show.

Choosing not to listen on some level, like means there is less of it. And the point is not that you should be listening to everything or everything should be pure virtue. But it is worth asking. Like, if you find what I am saying here bad, but you do not subscribe to any local news, you are not neutral in this, you are the problem in it. And I just don't think people absorb that. I actually think the left has become allergic to any sense

that there's like individual responsibility and collective problems, that like the decisions you make individually relating to climate or animals or news or anything. It's like there's some view that everything should be solved by a policy. Yeah. But particularly in things that are driven by capitalism, it's like what the people do is what decides,

what there is more and less of. Now, you can do different things. Like, you can do policies, and I have policies that I would like to see done. But it is not actually neutral what we do. Like, we are generators of the Internet. We are generators of the media. What we give our time, attention, and money to is what thrives.

And what doesn't get it is what dies. So if you look around, you're like, I kind of like this mix of what is currently thriving and dying on the Internet. Terrific. Like, you're doing a great job. If you don't, then, like, I don't have another answer. I mean, collectively at some point, it has to be worth it to create and fund the kind of journalism people want to see in the world.

So what you're saying is like one of the things you'll see people say online is, like, well, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. And you're like, actually, there is an ethical consumption under capitalism. There's more ethical consumption. There's less ethical consumption. And your attention is a kind of consumption. So for you, the most frustrating person in this paradigm is like the person who's on Twitter complaining about Twitter, you're like, dude, it's like you're sending money to Elon Mao. and complaining about Elon Musk as you like take your $20 and put it in the... You know my fury.

People complain about Twitter and are still on Twitter, right? Yes. If you don't want there to be more Twitter, more Elon Musk's X, but you are sitting there all day reading and then adding value to Elon Musk's X, then actually what you want is there to be more of Elon Musk's X? Right. You're voting for it with your attention. You are voting for it with your attention.

And yet, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism people. that's a kind of personal absolution so you don't have to think about anything. I can tell you that there is more and less ethical consumption under capitalism if you are buying a lot of factory farmed meat super cheap chicken where those chickens live unbelievably

horrible monstrous lives because the only thing that you see at the market is how cheap the chicken breast is, I can tell you it's an unethical decision, right? And you're creating more horrifying treatment for chickens, whereas if you try to buy better things, but you create more market for better things, and that ultimately might also help lead to policy change and whatever.

I often say, like, within these questions of consumption, people should think of themselves as individual nodes for collective change. Meaning what? Meaning that your decisions don't matter so much because they're your decision. Any one of us is a small part of this very, very large hole. But the decisions you make influence of people around you, human beings are social. What we do is contagious.

You know, like, you should understand that there is a relationship between like individual decisions and collective outcomes. Again, I want to be very clear that I'm not saying at all that what happened in media is that like individual people made a bunch of bad decisions and this is the fault of the consumer. Like the business models got wrecked by platforms, by bad venture capital decisions, by a lot of forces that were out of our control, right?

And we were like, we were not prepared for it. We had no immune system. Like, we were being given, you know, curiosity bait headlines and serve things virally, and, like, we didn't see it all. But at some point, you have to stop if you think this is going badly and say, okay, now what? So you're saying it's not our fault, but solving it might still be our responsibility. Yeah, this is a position of retreat here, right? Like, this is like a last gasp you were saying in your intro about, you know, is the media ready for an extinction level event? This isn't where I was 10 years ago.

I mean, like, I will say, like, I started a number of media organizations. I started Wonk Blog. I was a co-founder of Vox. I was the first editor-in-chief of Vox. And Vox is still there and, like, doing great work. But I am looking around me and I am seeing things die. I am seeing great things and great journalists get gutted. Yeah.

And something, like, recoils in me from just seeing people complain about it on social media. You know, I was on this show last to talk about how I'd use the Internet sanely. Yeah. And, like, one thing is. you're hearing from me here is I think a harder question is how to use the internet ethically. Right. But I don't know what it means to use the internet ethically. Like, I don't have a great answer to this. I'll give you an example. One of the things I've been trying to think about over the past, you know, year, year and a half is like, how do I use kind of smaller products?

They're just kind of interesting, doing something different. One of the things I tried to use in this period was a really interesting browser experiment called arc, the arc browser. And they had a bunch of cool ideas inside of it. You know, it was like a small group. And then recently they got a bunch of coverage for creating a kind of search product that was built on AI. And what was going to, what the search project does is when you search for something, the AI basically reads a bunch of relevant web pages and then assembles an entirely new web page for you, like pastiche out of the stuff it is read, giving you the answer to the thing you've searched on. This was, okay, so this was, there's a similar product called perplexity.

Yes. It does the same thing. And I had a real moment of, like, as a person who, honestly, I'm not very doom and gloom about anything. I tend to think, like, I am perhaps too lazy citizen where a lot of big problems, I'm like, smart people who care are going to figure this out. It's going to be fine. Like, I can, like, kind of stay on the sidelines. And I used perplexity for the first time,

and I asked it some question. And I watched in front of me as an AI wrote essentially a Wikipedia article specifically for me, and it cited its sources. And it was like, you know, citation one, the New York Times, citation two, NPR. And it was giving me all this information that journalists had worked to provide,

but it was not sending me to the underlying websites. And I thought, oh, my God, Google Search has really, for me, sucked for the past few years. Perplexity is doing a great job. And if no one visits those websites and no one looks at that advertising and no one pays for those subscriptions, the underlying thing it is mining for this information,

like, this could be the next comment. Services like this could wipe us out. And it really scared me. I had the same response. Casey Newton, I think, had the exact right word in his platformer newsletter. I know a past guest on the show where he said that he used this with revulsion. Yes. Like the level of irresponsibility in this.

And this was a cool little company that I know they're just trying things out, right? Casey interviewed the head of arc and he was like, yeah, we'd have to figure, you know, what. There's no, I think, ethical way to do this, actually. And so I really find the question of how to ethically use the end. internet right now, how to ethically be a person-consuming media, difficult. And I really wish you would have me on some time for something fun and like I could seem like a likable person. But you can't just retreat from it. This is what it is, right? I don't believe in turning away from what the world actually is. But even things that you think are going to be a good option,

Over time, I mean, you know, Corey Doctor calls us the inshittification cycle where something begins by giving a lot of value to you the user. Like think of early Google. And then eventually it's trying to extract a lot of value from you the user. So the other thing about things like perplexity is right now they're funded by venture capital. They don't need to make money when they do need to make money. Like God knows what they're going to do to do that. Yeah. And so it is very hard.

I find this really tough. Like I look around and I see it getting worse and worse. And I see what's coming. the kind of AI era, it feels rapacious to me. Yeah. It feels like these companies, and I know people at these companies, and I like people at these companies, and I believe that they are there because they are trying to create a super intelligence that if it doesn't, you know, 7% odds, like, destroy the entire world, it's

going to really solve a lot of important problems, ideally. So I get it. I know what they're doing. Like, they're idealists. But in the meantime, what they're doing is they're taking, like, the sum total of human cognitive labor available to them. They are feeding it into a machine. They are training the machine on it.

And then they're going to turn around and monetize the output of all that human labor for themselves. And all the people who did the graphic design that led to Dolly and all the people who are doing like the news gathering that are informing, you know, GPD3 and Gemini, they have no fucking idea what's going to happen to these people. I don't want to say they don't care, but they don't think it is their responsibility. And maybe it's not, right? I mean, in some ways,

it's easier to imagine ethical consumption under capitalism than it is to imagine ethical production under capitalism. You are just trying to compete with the other guys over there, and if you don't, they're going to win. No, and, like, I mean, right now, it's like, there's two moods

I see happening on the internet, and one is like, whoa, look at this, it's amazing. Like, Open AI released their SORA demo where they do the image generation thing, but with video, and you're like, oh, my God, six months from now, I'll probably be able to make a Pixar movie. I never thought I could do that. And that's really cool.

It's really cool. And then I have friends, people I know on the internet, people I don't know on the internet, who are like, if you input a prompt into one of these services, you're essentially like inviting the devil into our home. And I get why they feel that way. And I also feel like asking people to not participate in a useful and exciting piece of technology feels like probably not how we're going to solve it. So this is where I do think at some point you get into this question of policy.

I think for things that capitalism is not going to fund, if we think they are important, we are going to have to fund them some other way. Philanthropy is one way, and I think there's certain things philanthropists will fund. But I don't know. I mean, at some point, and you see this in other countries, like, do you want to have publicly supported media? much more of it. What would it even mean to do that?

Like, who gets it? Like, how do you think about that, the politicization of that? It raises very difficult questions. Yeah. But so does all the rest of this stuff. And we're just letting it barrel forward without thinking about the answers to any of them.

And so I think we're going to lose a lot very quickly. And not a lot of everything. Again, I think people have access to say better foreign news. and they've ever had in the entire sum total of human existence, which is great. But like a healthy informational and communication ecosystem requires a lot. I always try to get people to think in terms of the commons.

Are we polluting the informational commons? Are we enriching the informational commons? Like, we have to think about this in some broad-based way as something we all are part of. And we haven't had to think about it that way because just very weird things supported it. And that worked because, We don't want to pay much and also, like, we're financially stressed.

And so the fact that news seemed almost free was great. Like, why would you pay for news if it's free? Until it's not great, that was like a deal with the advertisers. But the advertisers weren't there to support the news. The advertisers were there to sell you stuff. Yeah. And when they can sell you stuff somewhere else, they will. And capitalism is great.

Like, I am a capitalist. Not everybody likes that about me, but I am in the places where capitalism should work. but not everything should be capitalism, not everything is a market, not everything is a well-structured market, right? Some things will not be supported by this. So to me, like, all this is a little bit radicalizing requires very different kinds of thoughts.

Like, it's just, it's very, you've got to do something as a collective, too. And in some ways, the reason I actually often focus on individual action is I think it's easier to act collectively when you're acting individually. What do you mean? I don't think people typically

vote in ways that don't align how they act. It is a lot easier to believe in strong protections for animals in slaughterhouses when you don't eat much meat. When you do eat a lot of meat, particularly cheap factory farmed meat, it's actually harder to believe that, like, you should have strong protections. It could lead to that meat becoming costlier. Like, recognizing that you don't need that all the time helps you get to the point where you can imagine, like, something else because, like, you've already kind of made, like, the internal shift. People don't. tend to vote for radical new worlds that are not the one that they are willing to live in if it's going to change their life. They tend to change their life and then vote for the radical new world.

Right. It's like a friend of mine used to say about exercise. She was like, um, action proceeds motivation. Yes. It's like habit change proceeds like wanting a different world in which those habits would make sense. Yes. So I think this idea that policy will save us, we have to do nothing. It's just like not really how things ultimately work. Both things have to happen. things have to happen. We're going to take one more quick break. And then if we, the people who read things on the internet and listen to things on the internet, have to change some of our habits to preserve what we love, uh, what exactly do we have to do? That's after some ads. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.ms slash college PC. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsor jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast.

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That some of this is about as much as we don't want to it as much as it feels like being told to become like an internet vegan. We have responsibility here. Like what we consume matters, what we pay for matters, what we ignore maybe more than anything matters. The identity, the personal identity of a consumer is the identity of a kind of cattle. Right. It's a passive identity. Like, be whatever you want. Don't be an internet vegan. As a long time vegan for like a lot of my life, nobody likes a vegan. It's very unfortunate. But don't be passive, right? don't act.

Like, a lot of this is happening to us, but it's going to keep happening to us if everybody just keeps acting like it is happening to us. Yeah. And like, if you're willing to be treated as cattle, you will be treated as cattle. Yeah.

Like, that's the end result here. If you're not willing to do something else, then, like, I hope everybody likes where it's going. So what does it look like for you? In this world you're trying to model in which we don't think of ourselves as news consumers, we think of ourselves as kind of like attention generators,

and we are somewhat ethical in what we pay attention to and what we ignore and what we pay for. Like, what do you subscribe to? Are you spending like $400 a month on local news subscriptions? Like, what are you doing? I mean, I subscribe to, now it's funny because I live in New York and I work for the New York Times, so I both get a subscription to the thing I work for

and it's a local news source. You don't pay for the New York Times that you work at. No. When I worked at WOC, there were people who were sustaining members of WOMIC, And I was, like, both impressed and confused. I was like, they're just, they're giving you money that you're giving back to them. You just take a slight pay cut, probably. I still subscribe, and my household still subscribe to a bunch of local California things

and also some local New York things. But in some ways, like, I don't want to, like, I'm a media professional, and I'm just going to have a different information habit on this than other people do. I honestly think, like, one just good place to start is not, like, trying to mimic, like, anybody else's pattern. Just, like, in your mix, there should be local news. if you're a news consumer, local news should exist somewhere in that. Even if you're not subscribing to it, you're just actually just reading it.

You get the email newsletter and open it of your local paper. That's at least something, right? Then you know a little bit more about it, and they can get the advertising off of that. I get a bunch of music newsletters that I love, like Futurism Restated, Dada Strange, FlowState, and I read these, and that takes up a bunch of my time, and it's great. I have a Kindle app. I read a lot of books. I like books.

I actually like carrying around magazines. I still kind of magazines are my favorite single format for consuming media, and I feel healthier when I do it. So if we're losing the middle and we're entering a new era where, like, things are grim, but different things might become possible, what do you think the next wave of experimental, successful, possible media organizations or even media individuals might look like? So it's really important to me to not make this sound too,

like we'll replace everything we've lost. I think we're in like a kind of decline, but that's going to have ups and downs. And I do think, I very strangely think this is a great time to start media organizations. Why? One, I think that one of the things

that went wrong the last time is we just believed in a business model that wasn't real. And so we built for a business model that wasn't real. And then when the business model became not real, the things built on top of it began to collapse. I think people actually have a more realistic view

Right now, it's like there are a few real business models. You get people to pay for something. Right? I mean, the great innovation is substack. Is it turned out that you could get people to pay more for an individual writer than anybody thought? Yeah. Right. People would pay $60, $80, $100 a year just for somebody they liked.

And then you didn't need that many of those people. Right. If you have 5,000 of them, 10,000 of them, that's, you know, that's not going to support a newsroom of 20, but it does support something real. One thing about the social media scale plays is that they pushed towards generality. You were trying to compete with everything

in these viral waves, watching what was popping online. I think this era of the media is going to push towards specificity. You want to create very specific things that 10 or 15 or 20 or 25,000 people will find of immense value to them and pay money for.

And that's how a lot of media traditionally worked. I mean, there are a lot of really important magazines that always had like low tens of thousand subscribers, the new republic, the Washington Monthy, the American prospect, the National Review, but we're incredibly important in American life, in many cases still are. I think there's a lot of philanthropic interest right now in local news, and I think you could create a lot of really amazing local news products. I think that we now know how to do subscriptions much better than we did 10 years ago. I think we have more distribution possibilities. I think we've learned more about how to write for people online.

Right. I think there's a lot of room for things that do not. need to attain scale. Like, I think you're going to have a lot of things that are five, 10, 20 people and are not trying to get bigger than that. And because they're not trying to get bigger than that, they can do what they're doing well at a reasonable cost. And, like, people can get a tremendous amount of value from those products, 50 people. Like, you can do a lot with that. Most of the new things I love look like that. Like 4-4 media, which is doing, like, really amazing tech coverage. That's four people. There's also stuff I read right now. Like, I really like Blackbird Spyplane, which is like a substack that's about men's fashion.

I don't know how to wear clothes or what clothes to wear. I've never bought an article of clothing because I read about it in Blackbird's spy plane. I picked it up because I was thinking, one day I'll dress better. It hasn't happened, but like I just enjoy a voicy, specific thing about a world that I'm enjoying being a voyeur. You know? Yeah, the difficult thing that I think is unsolved for this period is distribution at the beginning. So the part of this that I think is going to be once we figure it out, the click that makes a lot of this. flower is, okay, you started this specific thing. How do you get it out there? Because that's what

search engine optimization and social media were the answers to for a while. They told you how to go from nowhere to an audience. Like, you were hooking on to these distribution platforms that already existed, as they've all just gotten worse. Yeah. It's much harder to do that, right? I mean, many people made the point that Substack was very fundamental way for people to monetize Twitter audiences. Yeah. As Twitter breaks down, you can't do it. that as effectively. So right now, I think how you have a financial relationship with an audience is fairly solved. I think that the editorial opportunities are really there. I think there is going to be at least some money in terms of like subscription and philanthropic and to some degree advertising,

which can support quite a lot more, at least in it is supporting currently. And the hard question of this era is distribution. Like how do you go from nobody reads this thing or knows about it to 50,000, which is like not very much for the internet, but like, but is enough maybe to get a thousand subscribers if you're doing a great job. How do you get there? Once we figure that out, I think you're going to see a lot of things build. Ezra Klein, media goth, internet vegan, host of the podcast at the Ezra Klein Show. Also, a columnist at the New York Times. Ezra, thank you. Thank you. This was troubling. Unpleasant.

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