Platforms need the news — but they’re killing it

We’ve been talking a lot this year about the changing internet, and what it’s doing to the media ecosystem — particularly journalism, which has taken a backseat to creator and influencer media across virtually every platform. But the platforms themselves have a lot of influence over what those creators and influencers make as well.

If you’re a regular Decoder listener, you’ll recognize this as a theme we come back to a lot — the idea that the way we distribute media directly influences the media we make. Media scholar Marshall McLuhan famously summed this up as, “the medium is the message” — a big idea that shapes the entire world around us.

Without question, our medium — and our messages — are dominated by big platforms, which distribute the vast majority of information to the public. Over the past decade, publishers of journalism have mostly ceded all of their distribution to Facebook, Google Search, and now, short-form video platforms like TikTok.

That means a lot of our media ecosystem is driven algorithmic recommendation systems which tend to favor quantity over quality — and that’s created a news ecosystem that allows influencers and aggregators to take the value created by original journalism and maximize it for an algorithmic audience that doesn’t really know where that information first came from and probably doesn’t care. 

Last month, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, media critic and union president Matt Pearce, who represents the Media Guild of the West, wrote a particularly good blog post on the subject. It’s aptly called, “Lessons on media policy at the slaughter-bench of history.” In that post, Matt laid out rather succinctly why, in his words, “America’s information economy is rotten from top to bottom, starting with the digital infrastructure that stands between quality journalism and the public.” I read that, and I thought, “Yeah, we’ve gotta get Matt on the show.”

So I invited Matt on the show to talk about that piece, about the evolution of journalism in the digital age, and about what — if anything — can be done in the future to ensure news outlets can still inform the public and, importantly, survive financially. We get into what mechanisms can and should be used to fund independent journalism, and how building a direct audience and exercising control over distribution is more important today than it’s ever been.

If you’d like to do some more reading on the topics we talked about, check out these links: